Roy looked down the stairwell into the light of the basement of his best friend's house. Not that Sam owned the house. They had known each other since elementary school, and while Roy knew Sam wasn't a bad guy, he always seemed more concerned with his experiments than getting out of his mom's house. Even now that they were in college, he hadn't even bothered trying to get a dorm. True, the college was like twenty minutes away by car, but still.

Knowing Sam, one of those ridiculous experiments is exactly why he asked Roy over this day. Roy couldn't help but sigh when he thought back on all of the shenanigans Sam had forced him to get involved in over the years. Like that time they tried to build a helium dirigible in the backyard, and Roy got to be the test pilot. Or the time Sam made a robot that did nothing but shoot a laser pointer into your eyes, and Roy got to help calibrate it. Or the time Sam coded a virus to change all the text in a word document into lines from trashy romance novels, and Roy only found out he was the test subject when his thesis was overwritten.

If it wasn't for Sam's utter inability to create anything useful, Roy would be impressed at the breadth of his academic endeavors.

In any case, Roy bravely made his way down the staircase into The Lab, which Sam had always insisted be capitalized, and into the brightly lit expanse of Sam's subterranean realm. Although it wasn't as expansive as Roy remembered. About half of The Lab's floor space was currently being taken up by some gigantic object, covered by a large white sheet (with Snoopy printed all over it, which Roy immediately recognized as Sam's old bed sheet). And stood in front on it, with his back turned to his one man audience, was Sam, fully decked out in his lab coat as though he were an actual scientist. He turned dramatically to regard Roy, his coat whipping behind him, with a smirk and a pair of glasses framing his freckled face, and his obviously unwashed bright red hair slightly matted to his head.

"Oh hello, Roy," Sam remarked as though he hadn't been standing in a basement waiting to dramatically turn around. "Good timing, you being here," he continued as though he hadn't texted Roy to come over half an hour ago, "as I was about to conduct the first test run of my newest, and greatest, invention. Join me, won't you Roy, as I show you the experiment of a lifetime!" he finished, as though normal people spoke in italics all the time.

"Oh, yeah. Sure, I guess," Roy replied. "I mean, it's certainly... uh... big?"

Sam smiled widely. "It is, isn't it? I imagine the Mark Two will be smaller, but for now, I just had to get it out into the world." He whipped the sheet off of the object revealing... an old phone booth. Well, it was a little bit more impressive than that; Around the back and on both sides of the booth were massive computer banks, looking like something out of the sixties, and all the glass of the phone booth had been replaced with sheet metal. Rough cut and slightly singed sheet metal, to be specific. It looked like touching the booth door wrong could easily give you tetanus, which is probably why there was a handle glued onto the door, recycled from what Roy assumed was the handset of the phone.

"Well, Sam, if you're planning on getting into junk art I think it's a good start."

"Aha," replied Sam, "it's not the aesthetics that are the wonder of this device. This, my friend, is the Retroactive Timeline Manipulation Device! With this magnificent creation, I can easily control the fabric of time itself!"

Roy sighed. "So it's a time machine?"

"No, not at all!" Sam shouted. "Well, not exactly. I mean yes, in a sense? It's very simple, I even wrote a layman's explanation for this very occasion." He grabbed a sheet of lined paper that was sitting on his desk nearby, straightening it out in the process. "The RTMD, as I've come to call it," he began to read, "is a device for rewriting the past. Your regrets, obliterated in an instant, as you take control of your own destiny. Quite simply, a living creature is placed inside the device, you enter what specific genetic details you need changed about the subject into the touchscreen I've installed on the left side there, and when you hit enter, the CHANGES begin. Anybody within about five feet of the RTMD will be protected from the memory alteration of the timeline convergence, but to anyone else, they will perceive any CHANGES as having always been present; to them, no CHANGE had been MADE at ALL!"

Roy had to rub his temples. Italics were bad enough, but as soon as Sam started putting bold into his voice, you knew you were in for trouble.

"How in the world does that make any sense?" Roy asked. "Is it a genetic manipulation thing or a time machine?"

"Both, and neither," Sam replied cryptically, still reading from his script.

"So, you want me to get into the machine now, or whatever? And you futz with that touchscreen I guess?" Roy was just about ready to get the whole mess over with. There's only one thing that could stop Sam in this mode, and that's seeing his hypothesis to its conclusion, no matter how boned over Roy got in the aftermath.