Lucy didn't think it could get worse. She was wrong.
It started with a coffee spill. Not her own this time—Cole's. He knocked over his entire mug, a ceramic beacon of morning hope, onto her backup hard drive. The device, usually a stoic repository of her digital life, hissed and sizzled like a dying snake. Lucy stared at it, wide-eyed, as the data—her meticulously crafted pitch deck, the elusive app recovery code, her painstakingly color-coded financial spreadsheet—vanished in a literal puff of caffeinated steam. It was a digital cremation, instantaneous and brutal.
"Okay," she said, her voice unnervingly slow, "this is fine. Everything's fine. I only spent 46 hours compiling that data." The sarcasm dripped, thick and bitter, like old coffee grounds.
Cole froze, holding the now-empty mug like it had personally betrayed him. "We can fix this," he offered, a desperate plea.
"Can you fix... time travel?" Lucy shot back, her gaze fixed on the smoking remains of her productivity.
