I knew the time thief was going to steal a single precious hour from me tonight. He wouldn’t even give me a chance to kill it, standing around doing nothing. He was just going to straight-up rob it from me when the clock reached 1:00 a.m.
The front door rattled, and I pretended I was asleep, keeping my eyes just barely opened. A bald, skinny man with a long trench coat walked in. He wore an orange vest and shirt with a black striped tie. His eyes blazed like fire opals.
I didn’t move as he walked up to me and began to suck green light out of my chest. Just as I lunged, he disappeared.
The clock now read 12:00 a.m. and 1 second. The bastard had taken my hour.
He was almost out the door, so I jumped up and ran. The strange being was just stepping through a dimensional portal, and I dove after him.
Then I followed the orange-clad figure down a cobblestone street. It intersected with a much larger street filled with other time thieves. They were all walking towards a massive golden castle.
If I were to follow them, I needed a disguise, so I knocked one of them over the back of the head and stole his clothes. I joined the stream of mendicants and we wandered into the unearthly fortress. Its spires crumbled and rebuilt themselves. Guards blurred, shuddered and vibrated before disappearing and reappearing. The apparition was shifting through time.
I made my way in with everybody else, my hood pulled over my head. The line of devotees wound into a room that seemed to stretch into infinity. Looking down at my hand I noticed it flickered old, then young then back to normal. There was some serious time distortion in here.
A large, sign hung over thousands of bizarre furnaces. Each glowed a green gold. A massive sign read “Hours Deposited”. It was over five billion and climbing fast.
There was a rack of brochures and picked one up. “First Bank of Temporal Deposits.”
This wasn’t a castle. It was a bank! And those weren’t furnaces. They were tellers.
Each devotee was depositing their stolen time so that they could earn interest on the time, and maintain their immortality.
The interest they collected as sold to Fae royalty and otherworldly big shots. They were even trading with earthly politicians who had sold their souls, and needed to buy more time to extend their contracts with hell.
“Stop Thief!”
I bolted towards one of the tellers, determined to steal back my time, but the guards were too fast and I had nowhere to go.
Ironically, I had run out of time.
Bolting upright in my chair, I looked at the clock. It read 1:45 a.m. Disappointed that I had failed, yet relieved I had survived, I went back to sleep.
Oh well. Looks like I would have to wait till fall to get my hour back. At least I knew what they did with it now, I thought, as I began to formulate my plans for a time heist.
