Take Time Back — a boy, a brass penguin watch, and the first things ever made: fire, wheel, boat, house.
By Miguel Medina · Medina Comics
Eli fixes broken things for free. Then a brass penguin statue in Riggs' Pawn Shop — a clock in its belly, frozen at 7:00 for forty years — opens its eyes. Now Eli falls back to the Beginning, again and again, and learns each First Thing the true way: hands first.
4 books · 10 character sheets · 5 chibis · every book with its story read aloud
🏠 Enter the World 📚 Read the BooksDusk in Eli's two worlds. The windows are warm and lit, and everybody is home. Tap a building to step inside and see who lives there.
All 4 books, in order. Listen to each one read aloud right here — or tap Read to open the whole book. Every book is its own book, just like at the print shop.
Eighty-seven cents buys a statue that has waited forty years. Six lessons, one fall out of the sky — and the First Fire, made the true way, by bow drill.
🔊 Listen — read aloud
📖 Read Book 1
A sliced log wheel splits and fails. The true wheel is built from planks — and Eli finally asks Tock the question: why me?
🔊 Listen — read aloud
📖 Read Book 2
The river is up and the grove is cut off. Burn a little, scrape the char — a dugout is born, and Aya teaches Eli to sit like a stone.
🔊 Listen — read aloud
📖 Read Book 3
Rain through the roof, night after night. Wattle, daub and a steep thatched roof — the storm comes, the baby sleeps dry, and a tribe becomes a village.
🔊 Listen — read aloud
📖 Read Book 4In the books, every voice has its own colour — so you always know who is talking. The same colours run through this whole page.
All 10 official sheets — the source of truth for how everyone looks. Tap any sheet to see it big.
5 little chibis — the same figures who live in the houses above, walking their rooms, happy to see you.
Every world has its own door — all on Miguel's own site.
Come in — this is how everybody is living. The lights are warm, the rooms are dressed with what they love, and nobody stands still for long.
Mr. Riggs walks his counter the way he has for longer than anyone remembers — among the clocks, the gears and the old treasures, polishing as he goes. On the top shelf sits the brass penguin statue, right where it waited forty years: a clock in its belly, frozen at 7:00, and a tiny lightning scratch on the brass that nobody has explained. Yet. The shop is dressed the way Riggs keeps it: his hand-painted sign over the counter — “Wind the past, not the clock” — the gear wall of every size he ever pulled out of a broken clock, the smallest gear of all polished bright (the one Eli's hand finds first, every visit), pocket watches gleaming under their glass case, the ledger open on the counter, and his polishing cloth and brass polish set out right where his hand expects them.
The first real house Eli ever built — wattle walls, daub with a backbone, and a roof steep as a hill. Aya, Elder Orra and little Nilo live here now: the fire burns in the centre hearth — its thread of smoke rising straight to the peak and slipping out through the roof grass — Orra's two clay pots sit safe by the wall, the woven mats are down, and by the door, pressed into the daub while it was still wet, is Nilo's handprint. Orra's word on it: a house should remember whose hands raised it. Her carved staff rests by the wall and her shell-and-bead necklaces hang by her mat; the food baskets hang full overhead; Aya's fish trap and her reed basket wait by the door — she wove half this house with her own hands — and down by the doorstep, in a neat little row, sit Nilo's smooth stones: his stone road, carried here one by one.
This is where Eli lands — well, falls — every time he crosses: the soft spot on the landing ground, where the village now stands. His tool belt hangs by the fix-it bench, and Tock is right where Tock always is in the Beginning: the brass penguin watch on Eli's left wrist, over the lightning mark he was born with. Never standing beside him. On his wrist, teaching. The hut keeps the Fixer's own things: blueprint sketches of the four First Things pinned over the bench — fire, wheel, boat, house — his signature screwdriver laid on the bench where his hand left it, a pouch of glowing time sand waiting by the bench, and his green hoodie — his other self, the boy from the street — folded on its peg. Through the hut window is the whole landing ground: the plank-wheel cart resting by the path and the dugout boat down by the bank.
Tock — the penguin watch. Its dial reads 7:00 — the hour the First Fire was lit, on every page, every cover, always. One blueprint at a time, and only after Eli's hands learn the materials first.
Tap another place above to walk over — or head back outside to the books, sheets and chibis.
