This is a story, based on a scenario another author created. You won't understand what's going on here until you've seen the other, since duplicating the entire explanation would be copying too much. I recommend that you see the movie before reading this alternate story line.

"Daddy!!" a girl in a sky-blue stocking cap and scarf called excitedly.

Henry nervously stopped, the stolen black jacket only halfway on. He hoped he hadn't been caught in the act by the jacket owner's daughter. He turned to face her directly. Maybe by seeing his face, she'd think he was someone else in a similar jacket. Or maybe she was calling to some other man. If not, he'd probably have to run, a necessity he was very familiar with. Every time he travelled in time, he lost his clothes and awakened stark naked, somewhere unpredictable and uncontrollable, and had to steal the first clothes he found. Still, this was the first time he'd awakened stark naked in the middle of a museum exhibit with a class of elementary school children staring and pointing at him. Luckily he'd found a guard's uniform quickly.

"Daddy!" she repeated, looking straight at him with a delighted smile. Whoever she was, seeing his face hadn't deterred her in the slightest. She ran to him and threw her arms around his waist in a tight hug.

She checked for her teacher, hoping she hadn't been seen. She didn't want to have to make up an explanation, again. "Come on! Let's go!" she urged the surprised man, pulling him toward the exit as fast as she could get him to go. She didn't let him slow down until they'd rounded the corner on the walkway, out of sight of the museum door.

"Excuse me, but who are you?" he asked her, bewildered even more than usual for his unusually bewildering life.

She laughed merrily. "Daddy! I'm Alba! Your daughter, silly."

"This is the first time we've ever met," he said.

"Not for me it isn't, Daddy. Not even for you. Don't worry, you and Dr. Kendrick explained it all to me a long time ago."

"You're a time traveller too?" he asked.

"Yes, Mommy says I'm just like you, but Dr. Kendrick says I'm a prodigy, because I can sometimes choose where and when to go. I haven't told him everything, though," she winked.

"Alba, you said? Oddly, your mother and I were just discussing possible names for you. I guess that's settled. Suppose you pretend we've just met, though, since I've never seen you before." He suddenly got a feeling he'd done that before. 'Oh, right. With Clare,' he remembered.

"Okay. How do you do?" she imitated a greeting between strangers. "But a better question would be 'When do you do?' instead."

"Good idea. How old are you?" he asked.

"Ten. How about you?"

"Thirty-eight," Henry answered. "I knew I might have a daughter, someday, but I know this is the first time I've met you, because I'm sure I would have remembered seeing you before. Going by the hug, I figure this isn't the first time you've met me."

"Of course not," Alba giggled.

"You can control it?" he asked. "I've never had any control at all, not in when I leave, or where I go, or when I come back. Would you mind if I asked for a demonstration?"

"No problem. Um, except, you know, that problem." She giggled. "Let's go over here." Alba led him toward some thick bushes beside the museum. "I can't come back right away, so don't let my teacher catch you hiding in the bushes holding my panties! See you in a minute." The panties she'd mentioned landed at his feet, in a heap of other girl's clothes, topped with a sky-blue stocking cap and scarf. Hesitantly, he collected them up, and waited.

"That's always fun!" a girl in the bushes behind him laughed. "I'll need those clothes back now."

He handed her clothes back to her, panties first, averting his eyes as best he could as she dressed. "Consider it demonstrated. I'd give anything to have any control over it at all."

"If I knew how I was doing it, Daddy, I'd tell you. Dr. Kendrick says maybe he should call it chronoenhancement instead, in my case."

She finished dressing and they stepped out of the bushes. She stood before him, panting, her cheeks flushed. "But you're wrong about you meeting me, too. You already met me a thousand times! And I mean in your life, not just mine. You told me you wouldn't recognise me, but I didn't believe it until now. Don't tell me you've forgotten your 'invisible friends' no one else ever saw?"

Henry stopped and stared. And stared. "How did you...? How...?" He couldn't finish the question.

All those nights he thought time travelling had driven him insane, yet he welcomed the insanity as the best thing that had ever happened in his life so far. The girls who, in his fertile mind, had visited him almost every night from the time he was six, just after the death of his mother, until he was about fifteen. The girls who had appeared in his bedroom despite the securely locked door (the first had told him to keep it locked), greeted him with whispers in the dark, crawled into his bed naked, spent the night, and disappeared without a trace before the morning light.

He'd never seen any of them face to face. He could tell from their voices, their sizes, their experience or inexperience, that they were all between four and twelve years old. His imagination conjured a different girl each night. Or so he'd thought. He'd concluded they were vivid dreams, he'd accepted the solace his mind had created, and he'd embraced them. Oh how he'd embraced them.

His only disappointment, he'd told his imagination in annoyance, was that none of them were virgins. Only when he was thirteen did his imagination finally relent, and then only once, with a four-year-old, coached by her two twin sisters who were twelve.

But how could Alba, his ten-year-old daughter that he'd never met before, possibly know about those dreams of twenty years past?? He had never told anyone about the invisible friends of his teen years, not even his wife, and he was quite certain that he would never do so.

As he stared at her, a feeling of dread grew inside him. That voice suddenly seemed... familiar.

Alba calmly waited. Then she spoke. "I know what you're thinking, and what you're feeling, because you told me. You're shocked, and even worse, you're feeling guilty, about the time you spent with me, that we both liked. You're thinking of telling me not to do what I obviously already did. Or of telling me not to do it anymore, which I obviously ignored, because of all the times you said you liked me better than the older girl who was there the night before. You're surprised to learn I was real, as real as I am now, and it disturbs you, because you still believe all the trash you've been taught by other people who don't know any better." She frowned.

"That trash you learned to believe is the reason you disappointed Clare. She said you never even kissed her until she was eighteen, you jerk! All those years she wished and hoped that you'd like her enough to kiss her. You never did, until you decided she was 'old enough' to kiss. How dumb can you get!" Alba huffed in sympathy with her mother's twelve long years of unnecessary frustration.

"But after you come to your senses," Alba continued, "when you're older, we'll talk about it when I'm younger, and you'll tell me I'll see you here, and you'll tell me to tell you to come to your senses. 'Don't feel bad about making someone happy, no matter how old they are, no matter how you do it' I'm supposed to say." Alba grinned. "And no matter how many times, too," she added. "I hope I got all that right, Daddy. I've had to remember it for three years. You said you would need the advice from your wiser self so I had to get it just right."

She looked away, off toward some sculptures. "You wanted a demonstration. Three... two... one... uh, zero? Zero? Come on!"

"What?" he began to ask. Suddenly he heard a commotion across the lawn, and saw a naked ten-year-old girl running among the sculptures, through a crowd of amazed visitors. She looked his way and waved. Alba waved back. After a minute of teasing dashes from cover to cover, just as suddenly, the girl vanished. No one could find her. He turned to Alba, who hadn't moved from his side the entire time. "Don't do that again."

"Don't be a killjoy!" she huffed. "Didn't someone once say 'there are a lot of downsides to our condition, but this isn't one of them'? If not, he will! So there!"

"But that's illegal."

"And cheating on a lottery isn't?" Alba countered. "I just surprised some people, and most of them liked it, even if they're too afraid to admit it. But you stole millions of dollars from people who played fair and would have won a bigger prize."

"She told you about that, did she? Alright, truce," he conceded.

"Actually, I told me about it," Alba laughed. She put her arms around him and hugged him again. He resisted at first, but finally stopped trying to push her away.

He stood still in shock, but began to rethink his assumptions. Hesitantly he leaned down to kiss her... the way he used to do.

A few seconds later, Alba dropped an empty black jacket. "See you tonight, Henry," she whispered to no one.