Counterclockwise

As it turns out, Simon's tasks are widely varied. Miss Mina said they would be, and told him to tell her if he struggled or if there was anything he couldn't handle, but Simon was motivated for reasons he could not explain to her to do anything and everything he could to keep everything running smoothly. He assumes there must've been a real personal assistant he replaced, but there's also that historical fascination with her, the fact she's kind of his hero, that he can't really explain to her even if he knew how.

Honestly, this exact time is Simon's real answer to Lee's question, now that he thinks about it. It's just not as much fun as it might've been to think about when Simon's painfully aware that one wrong step leads to a paradox.

The presentation will be clear. Tests have shown that small amounts of changes to the past are safe, it will say; it does not matter which butterfly flaps their wings, as long as there is a hurricane in Asia. However, this does not mean changing history will be safe. It went through a variety of possible nightmareish scenarios, the last bad of which was simply that a new timeline split and Simon could never return to the old one. Or maybe he'd cross universes. The best case scenario for a paradox was that nothing helpful happened and Simon could never return home to the home he knew.

The worst case scenario was implosion of the timeline itself, somehow. Simon will have nightmares before ever leaving that he's the real cause of the Rift. He'll raise this concern to his supervisors, who promise him that there's evidence that Noel's power must have been the cause, that they have to take the risk because the other option is just letting the world end, laying down and dying. Simon will swallow and accept his fate, then, although when he touched down in a one-abandoned building he still remembered that rising fear and vomited it up onto the pavement alongside a little- well, he supposed, jet lag. Temporal sickness would be the fun phrase for it.

Still, looking up the various potential separate apocalypses he could cause if he isn't careful wasn't one of the tasks Miss Mina gave him, although that's what he's found himself compulsively doing. Those tasks were, in fact, to move a doctor's appointment so she has room to meet with some party members, to call Noel's school and determine if he can resit one of his last tests for his A levels, to sort through her emails and determine which ones are important and which ones can be put off, et cetera- he's now sitting with his laptop in her study, on one of those old-fashioned chairs, as she sits at the desk and types with the clickiest, clackiest keyboard imaginable. She told him it's fine to talk, especially to make calls, but he doesn't want to interrupt her silence, her focus. And it's not just because maybe that's the thing that interrupts timelines and destroys the world.

Looking up and seeing Wilhelmina Spencer in front of him, typing casually at her desk like she isn't going to die in two months, is still a shock to his system.

Especially when, without looking up, she waves her hand in his general direction and says, "can you please go get me a liquid cope? Ask one of the boys what that is." And then the hand she was waving at him goes back to typing.

Simon is silently glad to have postponed making any calls, and he wordlessly nods and gets up to leave. He looks at the time- it's around nine PM. Miss Mina already ate a late dinner, one-handed shoving pasta in her face while she continued to type with the other hand. He's only a little bit surprised that this is how she functions. She's efficient, getting some of the fastest changes in English history off the ground in her six-month term before her death. How much could she do if she gets the years she was meant to have?

He heads to the kitchen first, just in case he happens to catch Lee by chance. He sees someone with their head in the fridge, but it's clear from his hair that it's Noel, and Simon tries to justify not speaking to him. He didn't expect the hardest part of this being how little he wants to speak to Noel, but it's clearly something he's going to have to figure out- because giving away that he knows Noel's responsible for the apocalypse is arguably history-changing.