"Save the World" is a bit vague

" I see you shiver, with antici"

Janet leaned forward, waiting for the word to end and then--

"Why did you pause it?" I asked.

Bella hadn't come through the door, she hadn't come through the window.  She'd somehow just appeared in the house.  Bella was like that.  She hadn't paused it with her sonic pressure gauge, I noted, but instead with the remote that I'd lost a year and a half ago.

"We need to save the world," she said.

"I'm in the middle of a movie."

"That's why I paused it," she could be infuriating when she was calm and pseudo-rational.

"Which world is in need of saving?" I asked.

"This one."

Earth.  Earth was always in need of saving.  It hardly seemed worth stopping the movie for.

"When?" I asked.

"Twenty years from now."

"Then why can't I finish watching the movie first?"

"There's a temporal thingamajig that's caused that part of the future and this part of the ... well this is still the future from my frame of reference.  Anyway, they're temporally phase locked."

I finally got up off the couch.  "I hate phase locks!  Except for the moon, the fact that the same side always faces the earth is actually pretty cool, but apart from that and various other examples I'm not going to currently elaborate on, I hate phase locks."

"So, you in?"

"Yeah, I'm in, where's the truck?"

"It's currently in a helocentric orbit with a radius of about a hundred and seventeen million miles trying to catch a dropped teapot," she said as if that were a perfectly normal place for a '53 Chevy to be.

"So how do we get there?"

"Transmat,"

"Damn."

"We transmat to the truck, pick up the teapot, and then make the rest of our trip the usual way."

I sighed.  "Ok, let's go."

"You don't need to grab anything first?" She asked, looking specifically at my bare feet.

"You're better stocked than I am," I said, "plus the wardrobe wing is actually sorted so I know where to find socks and shoes, unlike here--"

"Your own home," she said.

"-- where I just look around the likely spots and hope some of the socks are clean," I finished.  "Let's go."

And so we did.