Dusty, the Green Shoyru who owned the shop, was cleaning up and getting ready to close when the sound of the floorboards alerted him to a new customer entering the shop.

“Good evening,” Dusty said over his shoulder as he leaned his broom against the wall before turning to greet the newcomer.

A Starry Grundo stood in the doorway, looking around the store with curiosity. She was wearing a postal worker uniform, with a brown satchel slung over her shoulder and a small parcel under her arm. “Hello,” she said. “Are you Dusty, the owner of this shop?”

“That’s me,” Dusty said. “How may I help you?”

“I’m here to deliver a package,” the Grundo said.

“It’s a little late in the evening for that, isn’t it?” Dusty asked.

“I was actually heading home when someone asked me to deliver this as a favour. I live nearby, so I said I would.” The Grundo handed Dusty the parcel she was carrying.

“Well, that’s kind of you.” Dusty turned the package over in his hands a couple of times looking for any indicator of its origin. “Did they happen to say who they were?”

“He said his name was Spencer and that he was a friend of your family.”

Dusty shook his head. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

The Grundo shrugged. “I just did what I was asked. I’ll be off now. Have a good night.”

“You too,” Dusty said, still focused on the package. He hardly noticed when the front door opened and the Grundo left the shop.

The Shoyru suddenly felt a little nervous, alone in his shop at night with an unusual package from a stranger. He tried to reassure himself, “What harm could someone wish on me? I’m nobody. I’m just the shopkeeper of a place tucked in a tiny corner among a hundred other shops.”

He carefully unwrapped the brown paper around the parcel to reveal a small box. Opening the box revealed something that had been securely wrapped in packing material to keep it safe. On top of this mysterious item was an envelope with a letter inside...

Dear Dusty,

I know you don’t know me by name, but our families were connected long ago. The item in the box now belongs to you. It got lost in time and fell into the wrong hands. Through my various adventures, I managed to retrieve it.

I felt it only right to return it to its rightful owner.

Take care, Spencer.

His curiosity piqued, and Dusty reached into the box and gently removed the packing material. What lay beneath was a finely crafted pendant on a delicate silver chain. The pendant was shaped like a Shoyru’s wing, embedded with gems that shimmered in various shades of green, much like Dusty's own colour.

For a moment, Dusty was mesmerized by the pendant’s beauty. As he touched the gem-studded wing, a rush of memories and emotions flooded his mind. Memories that weren't his, snippets of someone else's life, their joys, and sorrows.

Shaken by the sudden rush of emotions, Dusty placed the pendant back into the box and took a deep breath. "What on Neopia have I just experienced?" he murmured to himself.

For now, Dusty decided it wise to lock the pendant safely away in the shop’s back room. He had many questions. Who was this Spencer? Why had he gone through the trouble of returning such a strange item?...

There would still be a few shops open, even this late in the evening, which meant Dusty knew exactly where to go first. He followed the main street straight to the heart of the marketplace, where a large star-patterned tent in the shape of a pointed hat rose among the buildings.

"Excuse me, Mr. Wizard! Are you still in?"

The Shop Wizard, a Yellow Jubjub in a pointed hat plus a matching cape that looked very much like his own home, looked up at him from his chair, seated by a small round table, where it seemed he had been reading an issue of the Neopian Times.

"Every day I am! So long as even one shop in the marketplace still welcomes customers, I am here to help Neopets find it! What can I do for you?"

"Well..." Dusty ducked into the tent and walked forward. As a shopkeeper himself, he wasn't very used to consulting the Wizard, but he knew in a general sense how this was supposed to go.

"I'm looking for a pendant. I don't know what it's called, exactly, but it's shaped like a Shoyru wing, coloured green, and studded with small gemstones of a similar colour."

The Jubjub Wizard folded his newspaper and tucked it away as Dusty did his best to describe the pendant. Perhaps he should have simply brought it along to show the Wizard, but he was still unsteady after just briefly touching it and had felt more comfortable leaving it locked up.

After Dusty finished his description, the Wizard was silent for a long moment. Then, he murmured thoughtfully.

"A challenge, you've brought me... I normally don't work with descriptions alone, but there's magic involved here, I can feel it all over. So let me see what I can do."

From beneath the table, the wizard brought out a clear crystal ball. He set it atop the table, waved a hand over it, and murmured a few arcane words that Dusty couldn't quite make out.

"Aha! You're in luck it seems." The Shop Wizard declared after a brief, but intense stare into the crystal.

"One shop in the marketplace has what you seek. Its name is The Creaking House."

A wave of elation had briefly surged when the Wizard had said he was in luck, but now Dusty's heart sank. The Wizard had found the pendant in the back room of his own shop! He'd learn nothing from that.

"It seems The Creaking House has two such pendants."

"What?!"

"That's odd." The Wizard scratched his head. "They have the same individual pendant twice. How did that happen?"

Dusty was running back towards his store before the Jubjub could wonder any more, forgetting, in his haste, to even thank the Wizard for his help.

There were two of the same pendants in his shop but how could that be?

He recalled the letter from Spencer. It had said the pendant had been lost in time. Dusty had, at first, assumed that had meant it was lost a long time ago, but could it have meant that the pendant had somehow travelled through time?

From what the Wizard had said, it sounded like another version of the pendant, maybe the one that was meant to be in this time period had been in his shop all along! Perhaps in a box somewhere, waiting to be catalogued and gathering dust.

Dusty rounded the final corner in the road at full speed, but skidded to an abrupt stop as the sight of The Creaking House's shattered front door brought terrifying new thoughts to mind:

His store was being robbed! And somehow he knew that whoever it was must be here for the pendant...

It was even darker than it had been when he set out to find the Shop Wizard, and there was no one wandering the pathways between the closed shops.

“Think, think, think,” he muttered quietly to himself.

Before he could come up with any ideas, he heard sounds of movement inside his shop. He ducked behind a nearby shrub, grateful that he could blend in among the green leaves, and watched his storefront.

A hooded figure peeked outside before running away from the shop. It was difficult to tell at a distance, but Dusty was pretty sure they were carrying something.

Dusty felt as though he should try to stop them and get the item back, but fear held him in place. A small part of him thought maybe this was for the best. He had not yet discovered any reason for him to have the pendant, and if they wanted it so badly that they were willing to steal it then maybe Dusty should just let it go and wash his hands of the whole situation.

The figure slipped into the darkness of the night, unaware of Dusty’s presence nearby.

Dusty waited a little longer to make sure they were gone and that there was no more movement in his shop before he came out from his hiding spot and made his way inside. He flapped his wings and leapt quietly over the creaky floorboards, just in case.

The inside of the shop was a mess, the intruder had carelessly shoved Dusty’s belongings around searching for the pendant. He resisted the urge to tidy up, focusing on the more urgent matter. Supposedly there were two pendants in his shop, but he only knew where one had been, so he went directly to the back room.

The door was ajar. It was dark and still inside, but Dusty kept his movements slow and quiet as he went in. Just like the front of the shop, the contents of the back room had been tossed around and every corner searched. Dusty went to the shelf where he had left the box with the pendant in it and was unsurprised to find it was missing.

“If I didn’t know there was a second one here, maybe the intruder didn’t either,” Dusty said to himself.

He searched the overturned storeroom, reorganizing and assessing for damaged items as he went, but couldn’t find anything that looked like the pendant that had been stolen. By the time he had finished cleaning up the front of the shop and putting up a cover over the doorway, he had just about given up on this search. He was faced with the possibility that the intruder had found both pendants and taken them.

There were only a few hours left until morning came, so Dusty dragged himself up the stairs to his living quarters and tried to get some sleep. He noticed that his belongings upstairs were seemingly untouched by the intruder, probably because they had found the pendant in his storeroom.

As he was rummaging in his closet for his nightgown, Dusty tripped and hit his head on the back wall of the closet. Thunk!

“Yowch!” he cried out and rubbed his head. Just when he thought the night couldn’t get any worse.

Then he paused as the sound of his head hitting the wall echoed in his memory. He reached out and knocked on the back wall of the closet. Knock knock. It sounded hollow.

“There’s a space behind this wall,” Dusty said in surprise. He shifted his clothing and boxes out of the way and ran his hands along the wall. As he pressed against the seam where the back wall met the side wall of the closet, there was a distinct click!

A panel of the wall slid open, revealing a cavity roughly the size of Dusty’s head. Inside the cavity, covered in a layer of dust, was a box. He removed it carefully, coughing as the dust stirred into his face, and opened it.

Inside the box was a pendant of a Shoyru wing, embedded with glittering, green gems. It looked like a mirror image of the one that had been delivered to Dusty’s shop that night as if they were a matching set – a pair of wings belonging to the same being.

Dusty gathered all the bravery he had in him and touched the pendant. His mind swam with visions just as it had when he touched the other one. But this time he saw...

Gone were the meticulously arranged displays of mysterious old curios; instead, rough-hewn tools lined the walls. In the corner was an enormous forge, beside which a dark figure moved in the shadows.

At first, Dusty believed it was his own image. He could make out Shoyru wings with the same narrow wingspan, the same slightly blunted wing-tips. As the figure emerged, however, Dusty gasped. He recognized the face, all right, but it wasn't his.

"Grandpa Yu?" Dusty asked aloud.

The figure moved past him, appearing not to have heard his words. He stood before the forge, where the glowing flames illuminated the same features that Dusty had seen so many times as a child, though never quite this young. As Grandpa Yu gritted his teeth over a vat of bubbling gold, Dusty saw that he didn't have his chipped tooth, nor the scar that sliced across his left eye. Stunned into silence, Dusty watched his grandfather pour molten gold into two wing-shaped moulds that he immediately recognized.

"You created the pendants?" Dusty asked, even though he was beginning to realize that he would not be able to actually communicate with his grandfather. He wondered if he even existed in this vision. Was this a hallucination, or — dare he imagine it — the past?

Grandpa Yu hummed to himself. Dusty recognized it as a song that his grandfather had sung to him when he was trying to coax the belligerent young Dusty to sleep. His heart ached as he remembered the day that his parents had told him that Grandpa Yu was no longer going to be able to babysit him. He had never seen his grandfather again, after that.

But there he was, standing right before him in this flickering memory, soldering tiny gemstones into settling gold. Finally, Grandpa Yu straightened and plunged the two pendants into a nearby tub of water. After gingerly withdrawing them with a pair of rusted fire tweezers, his grandfather examined the metal closely and then, satisfied, stood back.

"If I've done this correctly," Grandpa Yu said, staring straight ahead at the wall, "You will be able to hear these words. I do not know if you are my child, or my child's child, or my descendant hundreds of years into the future — but I pray to Fyora that you, wherever you may be in time and space, will heed this message."

"Grandpa, I can hear you!" Dusty shouted, leaping to his feet. "I'm here, I can —"

"There will come a time," Grandpa Yu said, not looking away from the wall, "of great peril. Neopia Central — perhaps even the entirety of Neopia — will be in danger. This is what I know. Unfortunately for me and you, my magic is weakening, and so is my ability to foresee exactly what sort of danger you will face."

"Fortunately, our family's Shoyru blood contains an ancient magic, one that I hope you will be able to harness through these pendants. Each will grant you a different ability — one to move forward, and one to move backwards. Your enemies will be powerful, but so will your allies. I will entrust one of these pendants to such an ally for safekeeping; the other, I will leave for you to find when the time is nigh. All I can hope is that there is enough —"

Suddenly, a flurry of powerful knocks echoed from The Creaking House's old wooden door.

"Fiddlesticks!" Grandpa Yu hissed, seizing the pendants in his paws and wincing as the still-hot metal burned his fur. "They've found me!"

The knocks turned into bangs, threatening to fling the door off its hinges. The display windows shattered, sending glass flying throughout the workshop. Grandpa Yu turned on his heels and began running up the stairs that led to the living quarters. Dusty tried to follow but found himself stuck in place as the walls of The Creaking House began dissolving around him.

"Be careful with whom you trust!" Grandpa Yu shouted, his voice distant in the commotion. "Remember my words, remember your magic, and, most of all, remember —"

The memory burst into a cacophony of noise and then faded into darkness.

Dusty found himself sweating in his bedroom closet, clutching the pendant to his chest. His heartbeat felt thunderously loud in his ears.

As he caught his breath, however, Dusty realized that the sound was not his heartbeat at all, but a barrage of powerful knocks coming from the entrance to his living quarters. Someone was at the door...

Well, to be frank, the banging was only picking up and growing more frantic as the seconds ticked on. Dusty had no reason to believe it was going to stop at all, and besides… he felt an intense loyalty to Grandpa Yu. Whatever was happening here was far bigger than him, far bigger than The Creaking House. He knew he couldn’t let his family down and so… he made his way to the door.

“Who is it? Wh-who’s there?” he called out as he crept closer, but he got no reply. The incessant knocking did not cease, however, Dusty knew he was simply going to have to open the door.

The figure on the other side stumbled forward slightly as he did, seemingly having been leaning on the door. His wild eyes met Dusty’s for a moment before he straightened and quickly turned to shut the door behind himself, closing the two of them into the quarters together.

“I beg your pardon, truly I never meant to be meeting you like this but desperate times call for desperate… well anyway, pardon me, truly..” the Red Draik that had bursted into Dusty’s space began rambling immediately, pacing the floor and shooting furtive glances up towards the shopkeep. He was very distraught.

“Uh.. Who are..?” Dusty began asking but found he couldn’t quite get a word in edgewise.

“When I wrote you that letter, my friend, I truly believed that the safety of yourself and your late grandfather’s artefacts were completely guaranteed, but I soon after discovered the truth and travelled to you as quickly as I possibly could. When I arrived, however, the front door was already destroyed and the shop in utter disarray. I was sure I had doomed you!”

“...Spencer?”

“Yes, of course. You have to believe that I never would have sent the other pendant to you if I believed there was a chance that I had been followed, but my mistakes were grave and unforgivable. I was, in fact, followed, and now the future-facing pendant is back in that criminal's hands and it’s all my fault. Your grandfather and mine would both be so highly disappointed in me…” Spencer finally stilled in his pacing, breathing deeply and looking forlorn. Dusty had many questions, but after a few moments of confused pause, he had to start somewhere.

“...followed?” he asked, trying desperately to wrap his mind around the onslaught of new information, “Followed from where?”

Spencer blinked up at him, eyes wide and troubled. “Followed through time, of course”...

First, there was a strange package with a curious letter and a really magical pendant – classic hero’s journey kind of stuff – and then a robbery, followed by him accidentally discovering a mysterious nook with yet another mysteriously magical pendant, then a mystical warning by his beloved Grandpa Yu who apparently was being chased by bad guys, and now a strange time-travelling Draik named Spencer was standing in the remains of his shop front and spewing apologies about a bunch of grave scenarios that Spencer didn’t understand. It felt like endless questions were swirling in his head, brewing up a stormy headache.

Still, if there was one lesson he learned from reading and hocking ancient, otherworldly books, it was this: there was no escaping the hero’s journey once it was thrust upon you. Even if he could, he loved his Grandpa Yu. He couldn’t turn his back on his request or Neopia Central.

Dusty took a deep, shuddering inhale. “Through time?” he repeated back. He ducked behind the counter and fumbled around for his first aid kit. “Where through time? Why? Wait, are you from the future or something?”

“Oh, no, no, no!” Spencer corrected, waving off the idea with scarred and weathered hands. He chuckled nervously. “I’m from here. Now. Same time as you! Actually, I love your shop, but I haven’t been back in a while because of, well, time travel stuff. Your grandpa wanted me to keep an eye on you because you never know when they’ll show up and then I started perusing and boy, you have excellent taste, love the magical foods you sell, and…” He paused, worrying his lip. “Oh, Fyora…I can’t believe I let them follow me.”

“Who are they?” Dusty pressed.

“Oh, I’m sorry. They’re the Upenders, and they are...misguided. Terribly misguided. They want to use time-hopping to revolt against…” Spencer trailed off, lost in thought. “Let me just show you. Do you know how to use your pendant?”

Dusty shook his head as he finally found the med kit. Well, at least the burglar left the Magic Goop.

“No matter, I’ll show you. We need to go now, no time like the present!” Spencer asserted. He flittered over and reached out for Dusty’s wrist. “Be strong. The first time is always the most difficult.” He pressed his other hand to the pendant and squeezed, reciting words that sounded ancient and fearsome, oddly powerful coming from the scatter-brained Draik. His eyes began to glow a shimmering, otherworldly green.

Dusty thought to correct him. He wanted to tell Spencer that he’d already time-travelled once when he saw his grandfather, but he couldn’t form the words, couldn’t even utter an unintelligible sound. Dusty felt not quite himself again, swallowed by memories that weren’t his, feelings that weren’t his, sensations that he’d never experienced. His body was smothered by pressure, spinning, as he ocellated from fury to joy to hysterical fear. First, his feelings and bodily sensations took flight, and then his world collapsed into a blinding light. All he could see and feel was dark nothingness, and the only tether to the real world was Spencer’s clawed hand grasping his firmly and the pendant, which felt blistering against his skin.

“Stay with me, Dusty. Stay with me. We’re almost there! I’ll explain everything, but we have to get there first. Stay with me!” Spencer wailed.

Dusty focused hard on the pendant, focused hard on the hand, and mentally savoured the sensations that were his only relief from total darkness.

Then he started to feel relief – a cool breeze teasing his skin, the full weight of his body putting pressure on the ground below, and a mixture of food smells – baked goods, fresh fruit, chocolate, and decadently cooked meats. It smelled like the market, specifically the food stalls.

“We’re here,” Spencer whispered. “And the Upenders are too! We need to hide! Get behind this stall!” Spencer tugged Dusty, still in a daze, down. “You need to wake up!”

Dusty's eyes fluttered open...

“Do you see the Skeith across the way and his Krawk counterpart?” Spencer asked in a whisper as he peered beyond the stall. In the Red Draik’s line of sight was a Grey Skeith in a set of Skeith Tinkerer apparel chatting coyly with a Camouflage Krawk wearing an assemblage of Sinister Krawk Neovian attire.

Dusty nodded, still dazed and confused. He placed his palm on his temple as he felt it pulsate in pain, taking a deep breath.

“Those are two members of the Upenders. Their tent is through that alleyway,” Spencer continued, pointing discreetly.

“I know I just travelled through space and time, but… I don’t think you mentioned exactly who these Upenders are. Care to elaborate?” Dusty said, regaining his composure and dusting off a chartreuse wing.

“Right, right. Now that we’re safely here and undetected, I can tell you,” Spencer began. “As I said before, the Upenders are a group of Neopets who use time travel as a revolt against Zylphia.”

“Who’s Zylphia?” the Green Shoyru asked.

“Zylphia is a shopkeeper that uses a time machine to acquire items for the NC Mall ahead of their release time to allow loyal shoppers a chance to purchase exclusive inventory early.”

“And why would they want to stop her? That seems pretty harmless to me.”

“Well, the Upenders believe she is misusing her time machine, the chronomobile. They think it should be used for domination and to rewrite history according to them. Part of Zylphia’s job is to correct history. She does this as well, but only sparingly… The past shouldn’t be tinkered with.”

“Interesting… How do the Upenders use time hopping to rebel against Zylphia and her chronomobile?”

“By attempting to change history… They try to cause cataclysmic events to alter the course of the past to give Zylphia messes to clean up. Sometimes, they’re small and she handles them swiftly. Other times… It can wreak havoc on our present and the future beyond.”

“That’s terrible,” Dusty said, trailing off. He had lost sight of the Skeith and Krawk during this conversation and searched for them in the crowd to no avail.

“So it’s our responsibility to get the pendant back before anything catastrophic hap—“ Spencer began to explain when there was a commotion to their left.

The pair turned to see…

"They have the pendant!" Spencer gasped.

Dusty's heart sank as he caught a glimmer of green gemstones dangling from the Skeith's meaty fist.

"We have to go after them!" Dusty said, jumping to his feet. His wings fluttered with adrenaline.

Spencer grasped Dusty's arm to stop him. "Wait, we can't risk exposing ourselves. We need to follow them discreetly."

The two slowly made their way through the chaotic scene left behind by the Upenders. Dusty’s mind raced as he tried to think of a way to retrieve the pendant before the villains could use it to alter the past.

As they crept into the dark alley, Dusty could make out the silhouette of a tent at the end. Strange smells and sounds drifted from within. Spencer gestured for them to sneak closer and peek inside.

Crouched outside the tent entrance, they could see the Upenders gathered around a boiling cauldron, arguing loudly.

"The master will be pleased when we bring this to him," the Skeith grunted. "With this pendant, we can finally undo that bothersome Zylphia once and for all!"

Dusty met Spencer's eyes, realizing the Upenders' plans were far more sinister than they realized. They had to act fast. Spencer held up three fingers, preparing to burst into the tent on his signal.

Dusty tensed, ready to fight for his grandfather's pendant and the safety of Neopia's future. This was beyond just his little shop now - the fate of the world might be at stake.

Spencer mouthed "One, two..." and on three they charged into the tent, surprising the villains.

"Give us back that pendant!" Dusty shouted. The battle for Neopia's future had begun...

How will this story end?

Though Dusty had a feeling he and Spencer were outmatched in strength, he knew their aim was not to overtake them in combat but just to retrieve the pendant, which was a much more achievable goal.

The Skeith was knocked off balance during the fight and slammed into the cauldron in the centre of the tent, spilling its contents.

“No!” the Krawk cried out. “You fool!”

Dusty wasn’t sure what had been in the cauldron, but he counted the Upenders’ loss as their gain.

The Skeith looked around nervously and tried to bolt for the tent’s entrance, but Spencer was faster. Spencer launched into the air at the Skeith, grabbing onto him.

Dusty tried to get away from the Krawk and help his friend, but right before Dusty could reach them, the pendant Spencer had hung around his neck on its chain touched the matching pendant being held by the Skeith.

In an instant, it felt as though all noise had been sucked out of the room through the entrance of the tent and sealed out.

Dusty stumbled in confusion at the sudden change in the air. “What--” He looked up at the others and saw Spencer and the Skeith frozen mid-battle.

Time had stopped as soon as the pendants touched, as though the pendants were so torn between sending them into the past or the future that instead time ceased to move entirely.

Dusty approached the two and saw the pendants between them. Light glowed from the point of contact between the gemstones on each pendant. Unsure what else to do, he reached out and grabbed both pendants. The chain around Spencer’s neck snapped as Dusty pulled the pendants away.

Spencer and the Skeith had barely started to move again when Dusty was launched into another vision.

In the vision, Dusty was back in his Grandpa Yu’s workshop, in the same memory as the last time he had been there. The older Shoyru finally finished the message that had been cut off the first time Dusty had seen this point in time.

“--remember your roots!” Grandpa Yu said. “Others may get ahold of these pendants and be able to harness the magic in them, but you are my descendent! Only YOU will be able to use the pendants to their full potential!”

As Grandpa Yu reached the top of the stairs, he stopped and turned to face the general direction of where Dusty was stuck watching while their surroundings continued to melt away. The last thing that Grandpa Yu said before dissolving with the rest of the scene was, “Good luck.”

Dusty came back to himself just in time to see the two Upenders launch towards him. On pure instinct, Dusty aimed the pendants at them and yelled, “Stop!”

The villains froze in place, though this time everything around them kept moving.

Spencer stared in awe. “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Dusty said. Then he shook his head. “I mean, I don’t know everything, but I know enough. I can use these, better than anyone else, because I’m the descendant of my grandfather—the one who created them.”

Spencer smiled, looking exhausted and relieved. “You picked a good time to figure that out, then.” He looked at the Upenders stuck in time. “What do we do now?”

“We fix things,” Dusty said. “We use the pendants to stop the Upenders once and for all, and we may need to have a little talk with Zylphia about balancing her business with maintaining the timestream.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Spencer said. “One that will keep us pretty busy for a long while.”

“That’s okay,” Dusty said with a sly grin. “I have great time management skills.”

The End.