Carabas

I'm on a ship in a storm, approaching a whirlpool, almost certainly about to sink. None of this affects me, I'm only passing through, but I know one of the men on this ship. I talk to him, asking if he's familiar with a certain infamous pirate - I name a name. He doesn't recognize it. That's a pity - in actuality he's quite close with the woman I named, I was just trying to find out where I am in the timeline. If he doesn't recognize that name for her, that means we're so early in the timeline that she hasn't gone to sea yet. If this had just happened a little later, I could have brought her here to save him. But there's nothing I can do for him here and now. I step up onto the railing at the edge of the deck, looking for the portal in the storm.

As Rumpelstiltskin (in name and appearance at least - mentally, I'm still halfway the version of me from that storm scene), there's a small group of men who've retrieved the witch bottle in which I was trapped for a very long time. They've retrieved it from a point in the timeline when I was still inside it, so as I'm watching them from hiding, I catch sight of that past version of me inside the bottle. He looks so incredibly young to me, though I haven't physically aged since then. It's all the emotion on his face, the fear. I focus on the pebbled skin, new to him - I realize they've taken the bottle from almost immediately after I first lost human form.

When I realize that, I become agitated, anxious, a sort of coldness around my heart (such a strong emotion that it lasted a minute after I woke up - that hasn't happened in a while, I enjoyed that). The emotion is partially from forcibly remembering how it had felt when I'd been in that bottle myself, a sort of flashback feeling. There was something I'd been desperate to avert, but I'd been unable to do anything about it from inside that trap. But remembering isn't the only reason I'm so worked up - if I take that bottle now, there's a chance I could change how things unfold in his timeline, save his version of the person I'd wanted to save. Nothing that's happened since that time has mattered to me as much as this. But I hesitate to act - I'm terrified of how it could go wrong, of wasting this miraculous chance.

As I follow the men with the witch bottle - I'm walking on rooftops or listening from behind stone walls, out of sight - one of them is talking. He's not the leader of their little group, but he's the one who was able to retrieve the bottle from the past. They hadn't been aiming for the bottle specifically, they'd just been trying to capture me, and time can get a bit fuzzy when you're reaching between worlds. You have to be specific. He's saying, "It's the wrong time. He has little power now." It's the present me they wanted, or at least a version of me with a few more centuries behind him than that frightened thing in the bottle.