The Time Ray (2025) (Patreon)

The story is written by the incredible author Mysterion1800. This is our final part of a whole Father's Day week worth of stories. If you'd like to reach out, his socials are below:X: https://x.com/Mysterion1800?s=20Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mysterion1800/

Leo had finally done it. His greatest ambition was complete. He had already accomplished so much in the world of science for a man of his age, but there would likely be no topping this achievement. 

Leo, a prodigy since childhood and now only nineteen, had created a time machine. Or, to be more pedantic, a raygun, which, when fired upon any object, would send it to any time period of the user’s choosing based on coordinates fed into the raygun’s interface. 

The raygun, or Time Ray as Leo preferred to call it, had previously been Leo’s botched attempt at a shrink ray. However, unable to work out most of the kinks, he eventually binned the project. 

That being said, though he was one of the smartest men alive, Leo did not have a budget to rival that of Tony Stark’s, so when time travel became Leo’s latest obsession, the outer shell of the shrink ray and some of its inner circuitry were repurposed for the Time Ray. 

Practically trembling with excitement, Leo left his bedroom and scrambled into the living room, eager to test the Time Ray’s capabilities. As the Time Ray only allowed objects to move through time and not space, Leo had to choose something that wouldn’t be anachronistic should it be seen by a person in the past. Not that it would matter too much anyway, as one of the intended features of the Time Ray was that objects sent back in time would return to the present after ten minutes had passed, a hypothetical safeguard from the creation of paradoxes. In the end, Leo settled for one of his father Nicholas’s novelty coffee mugs. Leo’s father had several, so if something had gone amiss, its absence wouldn’t be felt too much.

Leo set the mug on the coffee table and turned on the Time Ray, which hummed in his dominant hand as it powered to life. He then set the date on the interface to the same day as the present, but roughly twenty years ago, when his father first bought the condo. Leo then took aim at the mug, licking his lips in anticipation before pulling the trigger. 

A concentrated purple beam of light shot from the Time Ray, hitting its intended target. The mug glowed the same shade of purple for a quarter of a second before a loud cracking noise cut through the air, the mug disappearing without a trace.

Leo smiled. He really had done it. Or, at least, he had done half of it. He then stood there, staring intently at the spot the mug had been, waiting for it to return. The only time he broke his concentration was to look at the wall clock to see how many minutes had passed.

After an agonizing infinity, the ten minutes had finally passed, and there was another loud crack. However, the mug did not return. 

Leo instantly deflated. He did not understand. Why had the mug not returned? It had been ten minutes. He heard the crack. Frustrated, Leo began examining the Time Ray from grip to barrel, his anger and confusion multiplying by the second. He honestly thought he had done it.

In his annoyance, Leo shook the Time Ray violently. This was a mistake. The Time Ray suddenly fired again, its beam hitting the mirror beneath the wall clock. However, instead of the mirror being the Time Ray’s next victim, the beam bounced off of the glass and hit Leo straight on. Leo didn’t even have time to utter a swear as the purple hue of the beam enveloped him, and the same loud crack filled his ears.

After another bright flash of purple, Leo suddenly found himself inside his father’s condo almost twenty years earlier. However, Leo had very little time to take in how the living room twenty years ago differed from the present, because something was wrong. Very wrong. Everything around him didn’t just look younger. It looked bigger. Much bigger. The familiar coffee table and couch, both two decades fresher, looked as if they were skyscrapers. The carpet beneath the table, which his father must have gotten rid of at one point, dwarfed Leo by at least five feet when it should have been barely a quarter of an inch higher than the hardwood floor. 

As Leo was as clever as he was naive, he knew immediately what had happened. The Time Ray did, in fact, work. However, whether it was because of bad coding or faulty wiring on his part, it also shrank whatever it had sent into the past. The mug must have returned after all, which explained the crack he had heard earlier. It just came back the size of a crumb.

This revelation brought no comfort to Leo whatsoever. While he was thankful he wasn’t marooned in the past, he was, nevertheless, in grave danger no matter what time period, because part of the reason why he had abandoned the shrink ray project to begin with was because even his brilliant mind hadn’t been able to figure out how to grow objects he shrunk back to normal sized. That fear was also nothing compared to what could happen to him should he encounter his father at this size.

His mind racing, Leo knew he only had to survive the past for ten minutes, and then he would return home to his proper time. At least in the present, Leo would have access to technology better suited to sorting out his predicament. Not to mention, his father would be older, wiser, and gentler if their paths crossed, because Leo had heard more than his fair share of his father’s “back in my day” spiels to know that his father did not possess any of those characteristics at the age of thirty.

However, Leo didn’t even have time to take more than ten steps towards the shelter beneath the couch when a loud scraping noise suddenly echoed throughout the condo. The front door had just been unlocked. It then swung open to reveal a sweaty shirtless Adonis fresh from the gym who gave Leo a major pause.

Whether thirty or fifty, Leo’s father, Nicholas, had always possessed an amazing body that he took great effort to take care of, a stark contrast to his always thin and meek son, whom he nevertheless felt extremely protective of. 

Nicholas stepped into the apartment casually, the shirt from his workout hanging over the side of his muscular right arm, and kicked the door closed with a giant sneaker-clad foot. The sneakers did not stay on for long, however, as Nicholas immediately kicked off both of his sneakers by the door before toeing off his socks to reveal his damp and pungent post-work bare feet.

The sight of his colossus of a father, younger, more handsome, and graceful in his movements despite his size, left Leo temporarily dumbstruck. He had to remind himself repeatedly that this magnificent titan around his age was the same man who would end up siring him, if he hadn’t done so already by this time. 

However, even through his awe, Leo noticed that his father looked troubled. He did not resemble the carefree loose cannon persona his father had implied himself to be countless times, let alone a thirty-year-old who just came back from the gym, presumably pumped. Instead, after casting aside his shoes and socks, Nicholas pulled his smartphone out of his gym shorts pocket and stared at it intently, nervousness etched across his attractive face.

Leo was confused. What kind of call or text was his father expecting that had him so nervous? But then he remembered the date he had accidentally traveled back to, and how many months away it was from his birthday. 

Before Leo could dwell on this further, however, Nicholas, his gaze still glued to his phone screen, turned and began to walk straight towards his diminutive son from the future, not even thinking twice about the world his feet trounced across.

Leo’s mind went into overdrive, and for once in his life, he had absolutely no idea what to do. Should he run? Should he stay in place? Should he shout? Should he stay quiet? And how much time did he have left until he returned to the present?

As his father’s bare feet closed in, generating short but devastating earthquakes as well as leaving behind moist footprints on the hardwood floor with each step, Leo let his adrenaline take hold of his senses and screamed at the top of his lungs.

“Dad! Stop!”

To Leo’s utter amazement, his father actually stopped, his bare feet mere inches away from where Leo stood. To Leo’s further astonishment, Nicholas actually looked away from his phone, his large eyes curiously staring down at the floor and locking onto the small creature dwarfed by his toes.

At first, Leo breathed a sigh of relief, completely bewildered that his act of desperation had actually worked. However, when Leo gazed back up at his giant father, he was frightened to see that his father’s face had contorted in disgust, almost bordering on deepest loathing.

“FUCKING BUGS.”

Horror washed over Leo as he suddenly saw his father raise his left foot into the air, his bare sole, specifically the ball of his foot, poised to snuff out the puny insect that had the nerve to enter his condo. 

Leo threw up his hands in pure terror, hoping to generate the smallest sign of recognition from his father before he committed the unthinkable.

“Dad, don’t! It’s me, Leo! Your son! Don’t crush me, Dad!”

But Leo had forgotten that his father wasn’t a father yet. It wouldn’t even cross Nicholas’s mind that this pathetic gnat he was going to eradicate from existence was the son he was eventually going to have. An intelligent son, who, despite his superior intellect, had clearly not thought everything through with one of his experiments.

As Nicholas finally brought his sole down, Leo screamed one last time, praying that, at a minimum, his ten-minute time limit would be up before his father completely destroyed him.

“Daddy, n-.”

Thirty-year-old Nicholas felt the insect’s body cave in beneath the ball of his foot, followed by a small amount of wetness beginning to pool beneath his sole. A small crunch provided further indication that the little shit was dead, but Nicholas still wasn’t satisfied enough. He then ground the insect’s body into the hardwood floor, much like he would a cigarette, until he was confident that the bug was nothing but a stain on his bare sole. All the anxiety Nicholas had been feeling all day had finally left him for the time being. It always felt good to let off some steam.

With less weight on his shoulders, Nicholas sat down on his couch, swinging his legs onto it to stretch out his tired leg muscles, the remains of the bug still splattered across the ball of his foot. 

Nicholas’s relaxation was short-lived, however, as his phone suddenly rang. It had been the news he had been anticipating all day. He really wasn’t sure what answer he wanted to hear, but he knew he had to face the music regardless. As he answered the call, he quickly thought to himself that if the answer was yes, he really hoped that it would be a boy.

As Nicholas heard his girlfriend skip pleasantries altogether and tell him the cold, hard facts with zero coddling, all that remained of that boy vanished with a crack that Nicholas had not noticed as his ten minutes were finally up.

At some point in the last ten minutes, fifty-year-old Nicholas had returned home from work and had already stripped down to his boxers, his bare feet propped on the coffee table. He had been hoping to see his son all day, as Leo had been talking nonstop for the last few weeks about how close he was to perfecting his Time Ray. It was all Greek to Nicholas, but knowing his son for as long as he had, he knew Leo had to have been onto at least some kind of breakthrough. 

As a result, Nicholas was disappointed to learn that Leo was, strangely, not home as he normally would have been. He was also equally puzzled to find the Time Ray discarded on the floor. However, Leo had never been good at putting his toys away when he was nine years old, so he supposed he shouldn’t expect anything less from Leo at nineteen. The Time Ray was now on the coffee table near Nicholas’s bare feet, awaiting the return of its creator.

As Nicholas watched TV, he suddenly heard a loud crack, though he quickly dismissed it as a car backfiring outside. The neighbor’s jalopy had done that several times in the last few months. However, what Nicholas could not ignore was the sudden wetness on the ball of his left foot.

Crossing his left foot over his right knee, Nicholas examined his sole in the blue light of the TV and found what looked like the crushed remains of a bug. He frowned. He didn’t remember crushing a bug tonight.