The New Year’s party carried on downstairs while the four of them sat around the hearth, safe from both the cold outside and the undesirables downstairs. A few drops clung to the bottom of their champagne glasses, and except for the muffled chatter from down below, the group remained silent. It was easy to grow tired of the same thing, even if these parties were renowned for being elaborate and raucous affairs. The host in particular, the young Charles Waltham, had a devious gleam in his eye that night.

“We should do something,” Charles smiled.

The girl sitting across from him with the untamed, auburn curls glanced up from her phone. “What kind of something?”

“A game,” proposed Charles as he rose from his chair and ambled over to the cabinet to refill his drink.

The young lady brightened and straightened her posture, setting aside the phone. “Oh, finally!”

Another guest, Benoit, curled his lip from behind his thick copy of Great Expectations. “It’s too late in the night for something like that,” he said in a sour tone.

Charles scoffed and toted his bottle of champagne to the desk where Benoit sat. “It’s only eleven; the fun’s hardly begun, my friend.” With a smirk, he turned to the other two guests, taking a slow turn about the room. “I have a game in mind. It’s a little game of hide-and-seek. A scavenger hunt, if you will. Does that pose interest to anyone?”

No one spoke, except for the girl who nodded her head eagerly with a bounce of her auburn curls.

“Thank you for your vote of confidence, Julianne,” Charles acknowledged in a dry tone, lifting his glass in her direction.

“What kind of a scavenger hunt?” asked Benoit, not sparing even a moment to glance up from his novel.

“Don’t sound so bored, Ben. There’s a twist to it; that’s what will make this worthwhile,” Charles said with an increasingly snide look.

At this point, Julianne was all but leaping up and down in her chair. “What twist?”

“My father keeps all of his failed experiments in the attic,” Charles told the group as he pointed above for clarification, “and there is one in particular he is utterly ashamed of.” He raised his eyebrows after a moment of dramatic silence. “A time machine.”

The other woman in the study, who had until this point had said nothing, sat taller in her chair, pursing her lips and turning her dark eyes to the young man in the middle of the room. “No.”

“No what? I haven’t said anything yet!” he protested sourly.

“Besides the errors in logic and physics, morally, you cannot have some little scavenger hunt through the span of time and space,” the lady said in a cold, condescending voice.

Charles’ face crumpled in despair. “Mida, you’re no fun.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a great plan!” burst Julianne. “What’re we hunting for?”

“Loads of stuff… priceless treasures lost in time… fabulous riches–imagine taking some of the jewels from the greatest pharaohs, or meeting some of the great men of our time–”

“Only to steal from them?” insisted Mida as she rose from her chair. “This is all this is. A heist. In time–even if it is possible, can you not imagine the implications?”

Charles held up his hand to halt her. “Let’s not think about that,” he said smoothly. “How much of a difference will it make, anyway, just taking one or two things from the rich from long ago? No one will miss this or that little knick-knack–”

“What kind of knick-knack?” Benoit set aside his book, an eyebrow quirked at the young man at the center of the room.

He hesitated, intimidated by the older man and his painfully skeptical look. After a moment of fumbling over his thoughts, he strode to the desk and procured a piece of paper and a pen. He fleetingly scribbled across the top of the page and then turned to the others proudly. “THE LIST,” read the paper in bold, hasty handwriting.

“Think of something you’ve always wanted to see,” he said. “Someone you’ve always wanted to meet–just think of it; you can accomplish the impossible… for example–” He turned back to the desk to set down the paper and scribble on it once more. “I want Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.”

Julianne giggled at the idea. “No way!”

“Come on, come on–what have you always wanted to see in real life?” Charles urged, striding across the room to place the pen in Julianne’s hand.

She contemplated this for a moment, and then with a clever smile, she added an item to the list. “A shoe from Marie Antoinette,” she said gleefully.

Charles snatched back the paper, thrilled to have someone joining along in his game. “Excellent!” He turned to Benoit and forced the paper and pen into his hands.

“Alright,” the man relented, adjusting his glasses thoughtfully. He stared down at the paper for a moment, scrawled a simple phrase upon it, and then passed it coolly back to Charles. “I think you’ll enjoy this addition, Mr. Waltham.”

The young host raised his eyebrows upon seeing the list. “You are going to hunt after the Mona Lisa?”

He shrugged. “If you are serious about this hunt of yours, we may as well seek some treasures that are worthwhile.”

Mida’s brown eyes widened. “You’re horrible. You can’t possibly justify taking a priceless artifact–”

“We’ll put them all back later,” Charles assured her with a light wave of his hand. He then held out the paper for her as well–it seemed innocent enough, the page and the ballpoint pen–but Mida did not move. “Think of what an opportunity this is. You could meet your heroes. You could go to a time you’ve only dreamed about–and for a little time, you can take a souvenir along with you. We will reconvene here, and whoever has the most items on the list wins. Then I promise we’ll put them all back.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, her face paling as she thought over his promises to her, and at the prospect of this odd and impossible scavenger hunt. “We must return everything we take,” Mida insisted firmly. Charles bobbed his head, the paper and pen still held out before her. She considered getting to meet the people she had only learned about, getting to experience that which she had only read about….

“I’ve always wanted to see a real copy of Mozart’s music,” said Mida carefully, and with that, Charles penned it down enthusiastically.

The list was formulated by each of the four, items being added and altered as new desires came to mind. An hour passed, and the old clock struck midnight, ringing in the New Year.

Minutes later, the four reconvened in the Walthams’ attic, filled with broken gadgets, dusty mementos, and stray cardboard boxes. Nothing struck the group members as particularly noteworthy or eye-catching, although Julianne flitted about here and there, peeking and poking at a chest of old toys.

“I don’t see any time machines,” Benoit said with a sneer, but Charles navigated through the mess with determination.

“They’re small, that’s why,” the young man replied. He hopped over a rolled-up carpet and shoved aside a moth-eaten footstool, finding a fine-looking chest of drawers on the far end of the room. Charles coolly approached the antique, tugging open the top drawer and reaching within. He dug around for a bit and then pulled out his hands, now full of old, silver chains and bands, like ugly, utilitarian bracelets. “These are the prototypes I mentioned.”

Mida grimaced. “Prototypes? We are going to rip a hole in the fabric of space and time with machines that could be faulty?”

Charles nodded, a perplexed look on his youthful face. “My father didn’t die from any of these–we’ll be alright, surely.”

“I don’t want to be a part of anything remotely dangerous,” Mida insisted, but Julianne rolled her eyes as she stood at Charles’ side, delicately choosing a thin, silver band and wrapping it around her wrist.

“Danger is part of the fun,” she clarified. “Clearly you’ve never been base-jumping.”

Mida threw her a horrified look, but Charles, nonplussed, passed around the other small, silver machines. “There’s a touch screen on the top, you’ll find,” he told the others as he handed them their devices. “We enter the date and place we’d like to travel to, point the face of the watch towards the ground, and draw a circle with our wrists. Then we wait for a little bit for the wormhole to generate, but the next moment, voila–we’re back in time!”

The older woman muttered “Wormhole!” under her breath while Benoit raised a dark eyebrow at the leader of their time-travelling  crusade. “I assume you have done this before, Charles.”

“Oh, yes, I practiced yesterday. I went back to the twenties, just for a couple of minutes. Just for the thrill of it,” he said proudly. “I had a roaring good time with Josephine Baker.”

“Ooh, I wanna go!” Julianne burst, but Mida placed a firm hand on the girl’s wrist.

“We are looking for the items on the list only. No excursions,” she scolded. Julianne sighed and glanced down at her copy of the list to familiarize herself with the treasures she would be seeking.

They would find as many of the items on the list as they could, and they would return to this very day and this very place once they had retrieved what they were able to.

“Let’s have Girls against Guys,” Julianne chirped. She beamed playfully at Charles, saying, “I can’t wait to beat you at your own game.”

He smirked back at her. “Can’t wait to see you lose, Jules. Catch you on the flip side.”

“There is no flip side. We will appear in this exact place in this exact time in the end,” Mida disparaged, but Julianne did not let her ruin her joke for long, and within moments, the four partygoers moved their wrists in careful circles, drawing a circle of blue light about them. In the next moment, in just a fleeting moment, they were gone.