Work Text:
Part 1
…When the feeling of death of one of her chronological clones, Helen Ambroise-Cutter felt, well, she did not know what to call the feeling when she felt both alive and dead. It was an extremely nasty feeling; not exactly pain, but something else, as reality had to deal with her being both alive and dead again, and even after the numerous times, it didn’t get better – but it did pass.
Helen opened her eyes. She was, again, in a state of existence between life and death, mobile and self-aware and many other things, but alive? Not so much. It was annoying, it was irritating in a psychic itch sort of thing, but it was also fixable. All she needed…
Helen looked around. A wasteland spread around her, devoid of life – almost. “Late Permian. Of course it has to be this time,” the time traveller muttered to herself. “Nothing good ever happens in late Permian.” She looked around, and saw a smattering of volcanoes, spew fire and ash into the sky; she paused, pulled out her trusty pocket watch and sighed. “Of course. The hour, the place, and the woman – and I am the woman. Just what I don’t need!”
A pause, a deep breath, and Helen pulled out a different device – this one detected time anomalies. “Now where are you, you little-?” she muttered as she looked at the readings. “I’ve a sealed one – from the early Permian – just for this sort of an occasion. Ah! It’s that a way!” She took a deep breath, and began to move.
She had an inevitable – or not so inevitable – doom to outrun, after all.
/ / /
The small Scutosaurus herd were in trouble – even the reptiles had to admit it. Well, not exactly admit it, but they realized that the plants were dying, the water was dying, the land was dying, and they were running out of spaces to live. This was the last one. If it went, so did them.
Slowly, they moved there, aware – on a certain level – that several gorgonopsians, the large, sabre-toothed, prehistoric animals were following them: the carnivores were also running out of spaces to live. If the Scutosaurus herd went, then so did them.
Slowly, the two groups of prehistoric animals moved forwards. A wind was picking up. It was hot and dry, smelling of smoke and magma and ash. It was blinding. However, something was in front, moving forwards, something that even the Permian animals could perceive – so they went forwards as that was their last hope.
/ / /
The wind was picking up. It was hot and dry, smelling of smoke and magma and ash. It was blinding. It was coming from the back. If Helen was alive, properly, she would be in trouble; since she wasn’t, she… was still being affected, the breath of the distant volcanoes was still hurting her, despite space, and time, and all that was in-between and beyond. She needed to do something, she wanted to do something, she – could do something, in fact.
Helen stopped and pulled out one of the devices from the future. As it unwrapped and set itself up, she quietly re-calibrated it to repel not organics, an-mals or plants or fungi, but inorganics. Helen re-calibrated it, and fired it behind her.
Immediately, the blinding winds stopped – only for a while, but still, repelled by the wall of force. The atmosphere became tolerable, and look, there was Helen’s exit point.
It was located at a water body now, murky and not too deep, but not too shallow either. Moreover, it was underwater, but Helen was out of time. She was also out of time. She was also tired of being neither dead nor alive. It was time to go on before the force field wall collapsed, eventually. Therefore, Helen went on.
///
The blinding winds stopped abruptly, as if swiped away by some giant paw or some other extremity. Immediately, the world felt a bit more tolerable, a bit less deadly, and there was even a body of water, surrounded by a copse of conifer trees. Perhaps, just perhaps, this was a place to outlast and endure the storm?
And there were other animals already – the little Diictodon, who huddled in their burrows as the storm… roared, but still at a distance. A smell was carried in the air, (it was the smell of magma), but there was water too, and it smelled…
It smelled like water. Not the best smell, not the worst smell, and if you are a thirsty animal, you do not care.
Of course, the local Rhinesuchus, crocodile-sized amphibians, do not care either – they began to quietly surface and eye what might be their last meal, (not that they were cognitively aware of it), when something happened.
Helen Ambroise-Cutter, still ignored by the animals, (who were tired, exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and what else have you), jumped into the water.
And unsealed the time anomaly.
///
…The time anomaly sealed or not, was underwater.
Of course, it was underwater. The water was not too deep, but neither was it shallow, and the water was not particularly pristine either. There were animals in it too – big ones, though probably prehistoric amphibians rather than anything else.
Helen did not care. The futuristic device took care of the wind and what was carried on it – but the magma that flowed through the ground and would erase this particular ecosystem – was another matter. Helen was running out of time. She was also running out of personal time. She jumped in and sank like a stone.
The time anomaly was there, and since it was sealed, it did not do anything that time anomalies normally did; it could exist after magma overrode everything else here, but that would not do for Helen – she did not want to exist here after magma overrode everything else, so she unsealed the time anomaly, and it sprung open with a vengeance!
…As the world shook and broke into time shards, Helen realized that she might have miscalculated, or just outright erred.
///
The futuristic device was not really used before, and was almost brand new, maximally charged. Keeping at bay the winds and the smoke and the ash was not draining either, but the magma was another matter, it operated – from a futuristic point of view – on a different frequency. It should have destroyed the machine and flowed on without stopping, but the frequency? It was not different enough, instead, of just destroying the machine, it caused a discharge instead, covering a large area – that of the water body and the surrounding countryside – conifer trees, sand dunes, and various shrubs – almost instantly.
If there had been no time anomaly, all within this area, alive or dead, organic or inorganic, would have been destroyed instantly, the magma would add nothing. However, there was a time anomaly, it was unsealed, and it interacted with the distortion of physics how it was designed to – or rather how it will be designed to, in many, many millions of years to be. Consequently, what followed was thus: a relatively small, but not very, piece of Permian Earth was just shoved through it into an entirely different place.
And time.
The magma, for its part, surged through the affected area, distorting the physics further, creating something of a seal. The futuristic device was destroyed physically, but energy-wise? It was a different story. The time anomaly was not destroyed, but it became sealed again – physically, and not in quite the right way…
///
“No,” Helen said flatly, as she climbed out of the waterbody and looked around. “No, no, no!”
But yes, alas – she was still in the Permian…
No, she was not. She managed, unintentionally, to severe herself – and a relatively big piece of Earth – from the main timeline of the planet, and now she had to re-attach it, before the impetus would fade.
“This should be fairly easy,” she muttered to herself, trying to cheer herself up, as she took several of her time anomaly related devices and used them to examine the time anomaly. “Or it would be, if it weren’t for the plug of the cooled-down magma.” She took a breath – at least she was properly alive by now – and got to work.
End part 1