The old man looks at him, then a—green forcefield of sorts expands from around him and touches Scott—

He wakes up.

He calls Sadde.

"Old man, didn't do anything until I got close, made a green forcefield that rewinded me when it touched me. You think of a plan, I have to wrangle my mom again."

"Okay. Memorize Alistair's number—" Here it goes. "I'll call him to tell him about it."

She calls Alistair.

"What did he do? You were fine, right?"

"Yeah, apparently he just got close enough to the card and then there was that weird green forcefield we saw and that was it."

"Okay. I suppose we'll end up needing a spell or two to coordinate this. Maybe calling on the Shield could protect us from the Time, too?"

"Yeah we could try that, but Cards are supposed to always be stronger than spells..."

"I'm not sure anything we have can defend us from it, though. We could try the Jump and the Fly cards, one person approaching from one side, one from the other...that assumes the forcefield doesn't just spread in all directions, though, which it probably does. The Maze could stop it from sensing us, maybe."

"Yeah. Let's try the Shield spell first, I guess, if it works it'll be a very simple solution." Pause. "And we might need to worry about the Erase if it also remembers yesterday."

"We can't go after it the same way each time...but we can't just leave it. We should brainstorm some possible approaches for that, too."

"Yeah. We should perhaps not go after the Erase until we have a surefire plan for the Time, though."

"I suppose. When we do succeed with the Time, we probably won't be able to use it to undo anything. Cerberus said it was very powerful." 

"Yeah, exactly." Sigh. "Are you going to school at all today?"

"No, my parents know what's going on, they know cards are more important. If you have to, I'll find something to do."

"No, my mom trusts me, I'll just explain it and she'll be cool with it."

"Alright. Can we meet at the library? It seems better than schools if we're cutting class."

"Sure, we'll meet there."

She texts Scott about this.

Sure, I'll meet you there.

"We should probably get going." 

She gets going.

They arrive at the library without an unreasonable amount of makeouts.

Scott waves from behind a wall of books.

"What are all these books?" she asks.

"Um, mostly because the librarian was glaring at me for loitering. I got here too early."

The books are mostly theoretical physics and psychology.

"Dabbling in some self-awareness? That should help."