IN WHICH BILLIONS OF MILLENNIA OF FUTURE HISTORY ARE REVEALED: ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES ARE DOOMED TO IMMEASURABLE TORMENT, MARMOTS ARE EVERYWHERE, AND AYAVAIL STANDS TRIUMPHANT AT THE END OF TIME, ETC. ETC.
Meanwhile at the beach, Hannet searches for Dakiya and Ayavail, and finally discovers them singing opera inside a seashell on the back of a moving crab. "Dakiya!" he admonishes, "Your antheral progenitor is in the process of extirpation!"
"Oh yeah!" Dakiya says, springing to full size with shattered seashell in her hair. "I need a buccaneer's lockpick!"
"Disconcurred!" Hannet says, "incarceration is by no means his predicament!"
"That's not why I need it!" she says. "It's for our escape!" She rummages in her pocket, brings out a tiny pirate ship, and casts it into the surf. It lands with a boom, towering, full-sized, hitting the ocean with such force that a wave of warm saltwater rolls over the three. "See?" Dakiya sputters. "It's a junker! If we sail away in that, the admiral will catch us right away!"
(It is the admiral's special power to be the fastest sailor on the seven seas).
"We have to get back to town!" Dakiya shouts. "Fast!" She turns and zips back along the beach in a storm of kicked-up sand, and Ayavail and Hannet can only keep up by riding on the wind of her wildly flapping arms, like geese in wedge formation.
Hannet shouts, "Why do we need a lockpick?" but Dakiya cannot hear him as she yells, "We need to go faster!" She pulls out her four-hundred-ton cannon, points it backward as she runs, and fires it, propelling herself forward at an even higher velocity, speeding her friends along by shouting, "Do it, do it, do it!"
They rocket past the city, tear across the hinterlands, blaze through the jungles, and flash over the streets of other towns, the houses empty and the shops vacant, because the entire population (all executioners) have journeyed to the capital to kill the pirate king.
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"Faster!" Dakiya howls, firing all her guns.
At last, they end up near the entrance to a mine on a frozen continent of ice and shrieking winds, and Dakiya screeches to a halt before a bearded prospector, asking him, "Got a buccaneer's lockpick?"
"Xu Mierzue opu gwi?" the miner asks, threatening them with a mysterious baton.
"What? Oh, you do have one! I knew a miner would!" She wrestles the weapon from his fist and then steals a crate overflowing with similar batons.
Ayavail shouts over the wind, "But what are they for?"
"Opening locked stuff!" Dakiya says, "and the first thing they need is a hiding place! Now I'll go rustle up our friends to crew the ship. Ayavail, you buy up some rum so we won't starve on the voyage. Hannet, try to learn how to become an owl. Okay? Meet back by the apple tree in five. Go!"
She zooms off, becomes a speck on the horizon, and vanishes.
Ayavail and Hannet look at each other in alarm. In every direction, as far as the eye can see, the snow is shoulder-deep.
"Ayavail," Hannet asks, his teeth beginning to chatter. "Do you know any way to travel faster than a walk?"
"I do not."
They stare grimly at the view. The dim sun casts its shadows over black-rock crags, and mountains made impassable with snow.
It was this mistake that sent the multiverse awry. For millions of eons, the people of Dakiya's universe, and all other universes, suffered as oar-slaves beneath the tyranny of the Imperial Admiral (who had become the Emperor of All That Is). Dakiya survived as a desperate rebel who ate raw clams at the bottom of the sea, and Ayavail and Hannet were turned into marmots because the admiral likes marmots. But eventually, Ayavail mastered the power of time travel and returned to the hour of the execution.
Riding on her marmot-shaped rocketship (In the future, even oar-slaves ride on rocketships), the marmotized Ayavail rescued Hannet and her past self from the frozen continent, and dutifully supplied the junker pirate ship with rum. After that, Marmot-vail, Hannet, and Ayavail went to the apple tree and found Dakiya napping on a branch, a book lying open on her stomach.
Marmotvail had intended to bite Dakiya to get revenge for the millions of lifetimes of slavery and torment that she had endured, but actually seeing her long-lost friend sent her into raptures of rodential joy.