Welcome one and all to my new story! I had this crazy idea floating around in my head for a long while and I figured I should finally make use of it. After all, it's never a good idea to hold back one's insanity for too long.

To go more in-depth as to what was in the summary, the basic setup is that the future versions of each of the CPU Candidates mysteriously end up in the same time period in the past. However, all four of them are from different futures which means that they're all technically strangers with one another. To make matters worse, all of them will end up having differing opinions on what to do with their unique situation once they finally meet up. As you can imagine, this will result in some pretty wacky interactions that may or may not end up destroying all of Gamindustri in the process.

To keep things a bit grounded throughout all this mayhem though, I decided to keep Rom as the 'normal' one of the four. She'll be from a future that most closely follows canon compared to the rest of the other Candidates. While she won't exactly be the meek little girl everyone knows (she is a fully grown woman in her timeline after all), she will definitely be a lot less crazy than the other Candidates. As for what exactly the other Candidates will be like... well, you'll just have to wait and find out. :P

Anyways, this will mostly be a side project with my main focus still being Greenlit Trouble. Depending on the reception though, I could shift some more attention to this story if enough people are interested in it. Don't worry though, I'll make sure that both stories have a proper ending... sometime within the next century or so.

Okay, enough about that. Let's get started with this bizarre journey back to the past!

Ch 1: Tripping Down Memory Lane

"...You have got to be kidding me."

It took Rom less than ten seconds upon waking up in the moonlit room to figure out that she was in the past. This was mostly due to three very important things:

1) She was inside her old childhood bedroom. The very same bedroom that had been completely atomized during her teenage years when Ram had come up with the brilliant idea of fusing a Blue Shell with a Power Star.

2) Her current share reserves felt pitifully low compared to what she had as a fully fledged CPU. In fact, she thought she could even faintly feel the presence of Blanc connected to the Lowee share crystal – something she had not felt since her older sister had retired from her position several decades ago.

3) She was back in her child body. Her utterly flat child body.

The last point stuck out to Rom the most as she felt a massive tinge of annoyance and disappointment. While she was not as obsessed about her figure as Vert was, she had still been rather proud of the fact that she had managed to break the Lowee status quo and develop a rather modest bust size. Unfortunately for her, fate apparently wanted to troll her as she found herself resembling a human washboard once again.

"Well... at least Ram isn't here to make fun of me about it."

Right as she said this, a loud grating sound suddenly came from next to her.

Reacting on instinct, Rom immediately turned towards the disturbance with an incineration spell forming up in her raised hand.

"Who's there?!"

To her surprise, all she found was the child version of Ram sleeping next to her on the bed. As she watched, the source of the earth-shaking sound from before became apparent as the younger twin let out another massive snore.

Sweatdropping at this revelation, Rom allowed the tension to leave her body. As she did so, however, she noticed a rather peculiar smell.

"...smoke? Why would there be- HOLY ELECTRIC MOUSE!"

As it turned out, some of the stray embers from her oddly unstable incineration spell had ended up setting her side of the bed on fire. Acting out in a panic, Rom quickly dispelled the fireball in her hand and charged up a water spell to put out the blaze. Unfortunately, it seemed that her finely-honed control over the elements had not been carried over to her younger body as she accidentally ended up summoning a large gust of wind instead.

"GYAAAA! NO NO NO NO NO! THAT'S NOT WHAT I WANTED!"

As the fire roared to life thanks to the sudden gale, Rom desperately blasted out the first low-level ice spell she could think of.

"E-Force Blizzard!"

The good news was that the concentrated blast of snow and ice managed to put out all the flames. The bad news was that Rom now resembled a miniature snowman with all the frost covering her.

Coughing up the large amount of snow that had gotten into her mouth, she glared out into the darkened room with an expression that nearly matched the flatness of her current chest.

"...I hate my life."

The only response she got was Ram giving another oblivious snore in her sleep.

"Ugh. How did I manage to get anywhere with these stubby little legs?!"

Rom shouted this out in a muffled voice as she found herself lying face-flat on the hallway floor for the fifteenth time that night.

After magically clearing up all the snow and properly tucking in her sister with the partially singed blanket, Rom had decided to head out to grab a drink. While she would have loved nothing more than to grab a bottle of sake at the moment, she knew her current body would not be able to handle it and had decided to get some tea instead. The only problem, however, was that her mind and body were completely out of sync with each other thanks to her unexpected time leap. As a result, she kept unconsciously overextending her legs and tripping herself up in the process.

Picking herself off the floor once again, Rom dusted off her pajamas with a grumble.

"Fighting that planet-sized turtle on top of a galaxy reactor was easier than this..."

Shaking her head with a sigh, the chronologically displaced CPU resumed walking forward...

…only to find herself lying on the floor three steps later.

"Screw it. It's time for Plan B."

While she could have simply activated her HDD to fly to the kitchens, the low amount of shares she felt in this timeline made her hesitant to use it. Instead, she decided to come up with a different mode of transportation.

Propping herself up to a sitting position, Rom took a deep breath and raised her right hand.

Projection magic had never been her forte but the object she had in mind did not require too much effort to create. Even with her low share reserves, heavily imbalanced mental and physical energies, child-like control, and various other time travel-related issues, her magical genius still shone through as she managed to construct a simple wooden trolley before her.

"Eh... I guess it'll do."

All in all, the wooden construct seemed fairly decent considering her limitations. It was essentially just a large, rectangular plank with a wheel on the bottom of each of its four corners but it seemed sturdy enough to fulfill her purpose.

Moving carefully, she got on top of the trolley so that she was now sitting on top of it. After fumbling through her inventory for a bit, she managed to find her old pencil-staff before holding it down towards the floor. With a rather adorable blush on her face, Rom used her childhood weapon as a make-shift oar to push off against the carpeted floor.

"I am so glad Ram and Uni aren't here to see this..."

With that, Rom - the famed CPU of Lowee, the master of a trillion spells, and the widely-accredited Professor of the Arcane - slowly paddled her way down the hallway in her makeshift land boat.

"Well, it's certainly no chamomile but tea is tea I suppose."

It had taken Rom nearly half an hour to get all the way over to the kitchens but she had finally managed to get her hands on a drink.

Not trusting her clumsy child body with any sort of preparations involving hot water, she had been forced to search the refrigerator for some iced tea instead. Vert would have probably had an aneurysm if she ever found out that her fellow tea enthusiast had chosen to drink a bottle of cheap artificial green tea but Rom was too tired from her journey to be picky.

Now sitting at the small side table in the kitchen while sipping her drink, Rom decided to finally think over her current situation.

Funnily enough, the fact that she had traveled to the past was not her primary concern. Having been involved in countless time-related shenanigans in her past (or would it be considered future?) Rom knew that the chances of her creating a paradox or destroying the space-time continuum was fairly low since the multiverse theory seemed to hold true. Heck, she had even ended up as the CPU of Tari during one of her earlier time travel adventures (long story) and her own timeline had remained as normal/insane as ever when she had returned home.

The one major difference that grabbed her attention though was the fact that only her mind – or potentially just her memories – had been transported to the past this time. As it was, all of her past time-travel experiences had been with her being physically sent to the past, boobs and all.

Scowling a bit at the reminder of her complete flatness again, Rom took a long swig of her tea before continuing her train of thought.

While this difference in time travel method did make her very curious, she decided to leave this matter for later and focus on the main source of concern for her at the moment: the fact that she had absolutely no idea who or what had caused her sudden trip back in time. All of her previous incidents had had a clear instigator or major clue as to what had happened (usually Ram pulling a prank, MAGES. messing around with a microwave, or Nepgear 'upgrading' a DeLorean) but this instance had none of those things. The most noteworthy thing that had happened before she had gone to sleep and woken up in her child body was Uni gifting her some new coffee beans the morning before.

'Maybe those coffee beans had some kind of hallucinogen and I'm simply imagining all of this?'

Ram quickly shook her head as she remembered how real her impromptu blizzard and all her face-planting felt. And asides from that, she knew Uni was not the type to do such a thing.

The Lastation CPU was the type to blast people with a surprise, nuclear-powered air cannon as a 'prank' instead.

Wincing a bit at the memory of being blasted all the way from Lowee to Leanbox, Rom refocused on the main problem at hand.

Without knowing the cause or reason for her predicament, she had no idea how to proceed in order to return back to her future. While there was always the option of using a time manipulation spell on herself, she knew this was more or less a last-resort type of plan. Even for one as well-studied as her, using magic to manipulate abstract concepts such as time or reality was a foolhardy endeavor at best and downright apocalyptic at worst. Her former attempts at trying to emulate Uzume's reality-bending powers proved this to her quite clearly when she had accidentally transformed the entire planet into a giant Blanc Manju (she had been rather hungry at the time).

Letting out a large sigh, Rom leaned back in her chair before taking another sip of her drink.

While it was far from her preferred course of action, it seemed her best bet at the moment was to utilize the tried-and-true 'Neptune Method'. In other words, lazing around until the plot progressed to the point of automatically providing her with some answers.

"Well, maybe this isn't too bad," she muttered aloud, trying her best to remain optimistic. "I can just think of this as a little vacation."

Considering all the paperwork that had been stacking up lately, the prospect of her taking some off-time (even if it was in the past) began to seem rather enticing. If she was lucky, she could have even ended up in a time just before a big festival. While getting used to and moving around in her child body would be annoying, the prospect of relaxing, playing games, eating as much yakitori as she wanted, and watching fireworks with her family and friends did seem-

"Rom? What are you doing here at this hour?"

It was a good thing Rom had not been drinking her tea at the moment or she probably would have spit it out in surprise the moment she recognized the person who had just walked into the kitchen.

"M... Mina?!"

All thoughts of having a relaxing vacation in the past went completely out the window at the sight of her old nanny/mentor. Or more specifically, the sight of the Oracle's red scholar's garb and hat.

Though her childhood memory was a bit fuzzy, Rom distinctly recalled that Mina had only worn that outfit before she had left on her extensive training trip to who-knows-where. This heavily narrowed down the possibilities of what time period she was currently in. Add in the fact that Lowee's shares seemed to be critically low and that Blanc's presence in the share crystal felt extremely weak and-

"Rom, are you feeling okay?" Mina interrupted, walking over towards her with a look of concern. "Did you have another nightmare?"

Suppressing the rising feeling of dread within her, Rom shook her head and reluctantly decided to confirm whether or not her worst fears were true.

"Mina," Rom called out, her serious tone causing the already worried Oracle to frown even further. "Where's Blanc?"

Seeing Mina's expression fall into one of sadness was enough of an answer on its own.

"Oh, Rom," the Oracle said, crouching down to give her a comforting hug. "I know you miss your sister but please try to stay strong. If we continue to have faith in her, she'll definitely return to us."

Well, it was official. She had clearly pissed off the True Goddess somehow. After all, why else would she have ended up right at the start of the Deity of Sin incident AKA one of the most chaotic and turbulent moments of her life? The only way this could have been worse was if she ended up in the time period where an evil wizard had erased every single pudding from existence (witnessing Neptune go through pudding withdrawal was not an experience anyone should have to go through twice).

Regardless, Rom now realized that she was stuck reliving one of the worst moments of her history with an unwieldy child body as well as limited magical capabilities to boot. Faced with all this, she could only come up with one fitting response to say.

"Well fuck."