It had been five full days since anyone had seen Santa.

Not a sleigh trace in the sky. Not a note from the lab. Not even a cheerful hum drifting up from the Rootbeer River. Just… gone.

And everyone knew exactly when.

The last anyone had seen him, Santa had stepped confidently into the Lab of Ticking Wonders, a room that hummed with a thousand timepieces, gear-driven scroll counters, hourglass meters, and the soft swirl of suspended Blue Fairy Dust. The goal was simple: compress a five-minute sleigh flight down to just two seconds of real-world time. It was the next critical experiment in his quest to deliver gifts across all of Earth in a single night.

He had waved merrily to Bernard and activated the dust with a flourish.

And then—silence. For five days.

In those first few hours, Bernard kept a stiff upper lip. “He’s running a time experiment, not lost in the Rootbeer Rapids,” he reassured Rudy Winters, who had paused sleigh practice mid-loop. “He planned this.”

But by the end of the first day, elves were whispering. By the second, entire teams from Peppermint and Reindeer Villages had shown up offering help. On day three, Mayor Dal from Dromstad sent a polite inquiry via reindeer courier. And by the start of day four, even the fairies had noticed.

“Something’s wrong,” murmured Forlot the Fairy Sage, hovering above the workshop roof. “Blue Dust doesn’t hide people. It displaces them in time.”

Back inside the Lab, the ticking had long stopped.

A faint glimmer pulsed where the Blue Dust had last swirled—tiny, almost imperceptible. Then, precisely at the same moment as the fifth sunrise crested the Snowbell Ridge, a pop, a flash, and a very startled Santa staggered into view—beard windblown, sleigh goggles askew, clutching a melted peppermint ration bar.