Lana knew she would regret this. When Dad found out she was running around a wild and dangerous part of the city with a strange boy she had only met mere minutes ago, she would undoubtedly be grounded for the rest of her life. No, more like for the rest of eternity. Still, for some reason, she found herself once again hopping out of the old bus to venture out into an unknown realm.

Kyungsoo seemed to be genuinely enthralled by the opportunity to explore MegaMadrid. He darted back to the sky bridge, stopping only to wait for the less enthusiastic girl to catch up. When Lana finally reached him, he grabbed her hand and pulled her atop the glass flooring, effortlessly weaving through the thick alien crowd.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Lana grumbled. She watched as Kyungsoo’s head darted from side to side, eagerly taking in the many foreign sights and sounds of the so-called future.

“Nope,” he chirped.

He led her into an elevator at the opposite side of the overpass. The lift was made almost entirely of glass, and Lana couldn’t help but gulp warily as she stepped inside, eyes glued to the floor. Her heartbeat quickened relentlessly as she peered at the ground thousands upon thousands of feet below. Kyungsoo jabbed a button, and the elevator doors closed. The lift rocked infinitesimally, and Lana squeezed her eyes shut.

Within seconds, there was a cheery ding! Lana heard the doors slide open and felt Kyungsoo’s hand yank her out of the lift.

“H-h-how,” was all she could stutter as she glanced back and forth between the elevator, which was now safely on solid ground, and the bridge, which was still dangling from the sky. There was no way on Earth the two teenagers could have descended so far so quickly. No way.

“I told you!” Kyungsoo grinned. “Isn’t the future cool?” Lana opened to disagree, but before she could get a single word out, he excitedly threw his arm up to point at something. “Whoa! Look,” he exclaimed, “it’s the iPhone 101 Tower! I read about this!”

Lana followed his line of sight, soon finding herself staring at what appeared to be a giant, black Smartphone. Of course, she knew the phone quite well. Dad had his own iPhone 27GS, but it was nothing compared to this one in size. The iPhone towering before her was at least a thousand feet tall, and it seemed to be an inhabitable building. Lana had never seemed anything like it. It was weird and pointless.

“See! Cool, right?” Kyungsoo repeated excitedly.

Lana frowned in reply. “When do I get to go home?”

Kyungsoo stopped dead in his tracks, staring at the girl in disbelief. “Seriously, Lana? It’s a hundred-story iPhone, and you wanna go home? Why are you so apathetic about life? This is an adventure!” Lana sighed, but he ignored her and tapped a finger against his lips pensively. A moment later, he snapped, “Aha! I know what we should do! Let’s go see the megabulls. According to the terminal I read, they breed them to be fifty feet tall, and they shoot lasers from their eyes!”

He grinned earnestly at Lana, who simply gawped at him in return. Fifty-foot-tall bulls shooting lasers from their eyes? She grimaced at the thought. “Can’t we do something a little safer?”

“You are so unadventurous,” Kyungsoo moped. “I bet you stay home all day reading books or something boring like that. How about Action Park 32? Don’t you wanna check out an amusement park from the future?” He nodded zealously, as if it would make Lana more inclined to agree.

“I guess so,” she sighed.

The boy grinned, grabbing her hand again as he took off running down the city street.

A giant, neon-lit sign loomed overhead, reading “Action Park 32” in bold lettering. Kyungsoo dragged Lana past it, and the two disappeared into a sea of aliens waiting to buy tickets. Despite the long, messy queue, the wait was short, and the two teens soon arrived at a computer booth. Lana watched as a man simply waved a hand in front of the machine, and it dispensed a ticket.

“How did he do that?” Lana mumbled in Kyungsoo’s ear.

“Do what?” He tilted his head curiously. “Oh, you mean pay for his ticket? It’s high-tech, futuristic stuff really. Their bank information is grafted into their skin. So are their cell phones, their house keys, even their GPS...”

Lana eventually tuned him out, wondering how he was planning to pay for their tickets. If he wasn’t from “the future”, surely he didn’t have a computer embedded in his arm or whatever.

She didn’t have to wait long to find out. When Kyungsoo stepped up to the computer, he glanced around cautiously and banged on the machine in a few carefully selected spots. Sure enough, the dispenser spat out two tickets. Lana’s eyebrows furrowed as the boy handed one to her. Paper tickets seemed woefully redundant in such an advanced age.

“It’s vintage,” Kyungsoo shrugged, seemingly reading her mind.

Finally, the two passed through the entrance. With a single glance at the giant amusement park that waited, Lana’s scrutiny and criticism instantly vanished. She gazed in awe at the rides rising high above, marveling at the mere impossibility of them. A colossal Ferris wheel taller than even the iPhone 101 Tower stretched toward the sky, and a trackless roller coaster floating in midair drifted in circles around it.

“Let’s try the space simulator,” Kyungsoo interrupted Lana’s wonderment. She nodded once and followed him toward a white dome.

Lana could hardly believe it, but she was floating in space, and she actually kind of liked it. She could see Earth, the giant, blue marble, suspended in midair by her feet. The grey, featureless Moon hovered somewhere behind her. And then there was Kyungsoo, wading through the empty, black space in-between and waving his arms as if swimming. He gravitated toward her, slowly closing the fifty-something-foot gap between them.

“You might wanna close your legs,” he informed as he neared, grinning innocently. “I can see up your skirt.”

Lana huffed indignantly and snapped her ankles together.

“This is so cool!” Kyungsoo cheered, quickly changing the subject. He floated past her aimlessly. “But I still think we should have chosen the Saturn simulator. I wanted to skate on Saturn’s rings!”

“I already told you: you can’t skate on Saturn’s rings,” Lana dismissed. “They’re big pieces of ice that only look like rings, not continuous circuits. Astronomy is a very important course at my school, you know.”

“You keep forgetting you’re in the future, Lana. I went on a trip out to Saturn during one of my longer stays in 50323. They built a giant skating rink out there by connecting the rings using science!”

When the teens eventually got out of the dome, back into the bright, white sunlight of the real world, Kyungsoo insisted on trying an air-powered tube slide. He loved it—a lot more than Lana did, needless to say. As the two dizzily stumbled out of the ride exit for the third time in a row, the girl decided enough was enough and dragged him toward the first attraction she saw. A sign above the line read “Angry Amusement Park Patrons.”

The next thing Lana knew, she had been stuffed into a big ball and was being launched toward various concrete, glass, and wood structures. Kyungsoo controlled the game via a tiny handheld console, and he made sure to smack her into as many objects as possible. When the capsule finally landed for the last time and its lid popped open, Lana crawled out, cradling her head in her hand.

“Never again,” was all she muttered.

The sun was beginning to set when Kyungsoo and Lana alighted from the larger-than-life Ferris wheel. It had been well over four hours since the teens arrived at the amusement park, and the big wheel was the last ride of the day.

“So, how do you know so much about the future?” Lana inquired, munching on the last piece of cotton candy left on the stick. The two neared the park exit, and she tossed the trash into a rubbish bin, nearly jumping when the garbage immediately burst into flames and subsequently imploded.

“I learned a lot just by traveling around, but most of what I know about MegaMadrid comes from what the time encyclopedia tells me,” Kyungsoo explained with a nonchalant shrug.

“Time encyclopedia?”

“Yeah, I picked it up in 50323. It knows pretty much everything about every time period. It can even tell you exactly where any person who has ever lived was or will be at any given time. It’s like magic! Except, well, it’s science.”

Lana’s head was still reeling at the concept of a time encyclopedia when the two found their way back to the bus. Kyungsoo ushered her inside and customarily took his spot in the driver’s seat.

“Thanks for hanging out with me,” he appreciated. “Anyway, you might wanna take a seat and make yourself comfortable. Time teleportation gets you really woozy the first few times.”

“Trust me,” Lana groaned while slipping into the booth, “I know.”

Kyungsoo smirked. He set to work tinkering away at the console, and the next thing Lana knew, there was an ominous crack of thunder. Outside the window, the entire cityscape melted away. Rainbows, clouds, bolts of lightning flooded the world. There were moments of gold, and there were flashes of light. Lana felt her head spin out of control, but the bus seemed to stand still as the earthy tones of a new environment swirled into place around it.

It was then that Lana truly realized she was standing in an honest-to-God time machine.

Author's Note
I know I said I would update soon if I got a lot of comments. Well, I was disappointed. :( Not only did I receive probably the least amount of comments yet, but I actually woke up the morning after updating to find 6-8 unsubscribers. :\

I put a lot of effort into writing my fanfics, oftentimes just because I love reading comments. To not receive many makes me feel like the effort spent on writing was a waste and not worth my time. It’s also incredibly disheartening to find fics with less than 1/4 the sub count with the same amount of (or even more) comments per chapter. What makes my fic not worthwhile to comment on? Is it not interesting? Am I doing something wrong here? Is it because you guys are more interested in Kris and Yunee, and you don’t really care about D.O and Lana?

I don’t want to sound whiny and especially not ungrateful to the subscribers and comments I do have. I recognize and appreciate that I still have many, many more than most people could dream of, but again, to see such a sharp, sudden decrease in interest is incredibly demoralizing. Honestly, it worries me.

To those of you who did comment on the recent chapters, thank you sincerely. ❤ I wish I could continue to update every day just for you guys, but I can’t find the motivation to update so regularly for such a small crowd. :(

Likewise, I don’t want to make anyone who hasn’t commented feel guilty. I just want you guys to understand that I put a lot of effort into this, and I dedicate much of my free time to providing stories for you. Commenting is really the only reward I get for my efforts. But sadly, it’s come to the point where I dread updating because I only end up disappointed with the amount of comments I receive, hence why I didn’t update at all last week.

If the situation doesn’t change, I’ll probably either update this fic only once a week (and write it mainly for the sake of my two good friends who appreciate it so much ❤) or stop putting so much effort into it (and focus on less-time-consuming endeavors).

Anyway, thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this chapter as much as I did!