AN: Okay, so this is my first go at a Primeval fic...its something that i don't think has been done before, and i also realise that it is probably completely improbable and some of the characters may act slightly different to what they normally would, but its an idea, and i'd love to know your thoughts :) Anyways...
As an Anomaly burst open in the middle of a concrete courtyard, Abby, Connor, Becker and Matt were walking up behind Jess' desk of computers and other stuff no one but Connor could understand, after a debrief.
They were happy to at last have a tiny bit of freedom; though they couldn't have as much as they wanted.
Before even crossing half of the room, they could hear Jess' computer beeping.
"We've got an Anomaly!" Jess called behind her, but Matt and Becker were already turning to run out the room.
"Abby, Connor, stay here. Abby, we're going to need you out of the action ready, in case we've got a creature we need moved to the menagerie. Connor, try and get the anomaly reading from here. Jess, try find out where it's come from!" Matt called as he ran out the room after Becker.
"Huh, 'try and work out where it came from' he said. What does he think I am, an amateur?" Jess sniffs turning back to her computer.
"Tell me about it! I know the most about anomalies in this place. Okay, I'll try and get the readings, but he's not gonna blame me if I fail is he? Because if he only expected me to try…" a quick kiss from Abby stopped the end of the sentence in its tracks.
"Leave Matt alone, Connor, remember, we're only just back on the team, and we could get fired like that." She snaps her fingers.
"No way, you two are back on the team for good," Jess says twisting round in her chair, "your abilities are 'too good to be wasted behind a desk' according to Matt."
Abby throws her arm over Connor's shoulders, "there, you go, he gave you a compliment. Leave him alone." Connor just grinned at her.
Abby was peering over Jess' shoulder. "You know, Matt really didn't think the whole 'leaving you here' thing through, Abby; if there is a creature, he's gonna need you." Jess states, her fingers dashing over the keyboard without her eyes even looking at them.
"Oi, I've been left behind too. Isn't there some reason I should be there?" Connor asks just to be ignored by both Jess and Abby.
"Huh, yeah, you're right, Jess. I wonder what it's going to be this time. We haven't seen a spinosaurus for a while!"
As Matt and Becker drove up to the anomaly site, the anomaly was showing no signs of fading.
"Jess, has anything come through yet?" Matt asked Jess through his earpiece, getting a faint "not that I know of" in reply.
"Oh, good, now we're going to have to sit here waiting for hours in case something comes through before it closes. What a joy!" Becker says, slinging his gun over his shoulder, and sitting on the floor of the open trailer, "why can't we just lock it?" Becker asked, not seeing why everyone was just sitting around.
"Because it was opened from the other side, there's either someone there who's trying to get out, or there's someone there who's come across one of the anomaly opening devices Helen developed. Either way, there's someone trying to get through." Connor explained.
"Or something trying to get through." Becker said bitterly, rolling his eyes.
"Wait, wait, wait, something's coming through," Matt says, grasping his gun.
All of the soldiers were ready, their guns pointing in the direction of the anomaly.
As the 'something' Becker had been hoping for burst through, everyone there did a double take.
A raptor, they could have dealt with. A pterodactyl or a G-Rex they could handle, sure. But a teenage girl? Maybe not.
"Okay, okay, wait. Just give me a second to give you three reasons not to shoot me," she said, holding her hands up.
Matt signalled for the soldiers to hold fire, as if they'd shoot her anyway. Becker was still shocked. Anomalies were normally bad things, things that let evil prehistoric or futuristic creatures come through. So how the hell did a teenage girl manage to come out of it?
"One, I'm a fourteen year old girl, I'm not exactly going to stand a chance against all you lot. Two, I'm not armed, all I've got is this," she said, dropping her bag at her feet, "and the stuff in there will only work against prehistoric creatures, or future predators. And three," she smiled slightly, "I'm more clever than the average fourteen year old; I'm not stupid enough to finally get myself back to my own time, then get shot straight away."
"Well, she may not look like the things we normally encounter but at least my job's a bit more interesting now," Becker murmured.
"Becker, are you starting to like this job?" Matt asked, smiling.
"Don't be stupid, Matt, I'm holding a gun." Becker said
"What the hell does a gun have to do with it?" Matt asked.
"Matt, we've kind of got more important things to deal with right now. I can't work out where this thing's come from; it's somewhere we've never encountered before, which means there could be creatures we're not ready for. I think our best bet is to get Connor down there with his dating calculator. I can't do it from here." Jess told him, and Matt rolled his eyes; everyone hated it when Connor was, one, given responsibility, and two, when Connor turned out to be right.
"Okay, get Connor down here, Jess, we're gonna try and lock it."
"Whoa, no, you can't do that, my brother's still in there. He's supposed to be following me through. If you lock it now, I guarantee he won't be able to get back through an anomaly to this time for another seven years." The girl said.
"Matt, do you want Abby down there too? It sounds like you might have a few problems."
"Okay, Jess, if Connor and Abby have decided they're gonna be joined at the hip today, then yeah, get Abby down here too." Matt said.
"Yeah er, hi Matt, we can hear you," Abby said.
Matt rolled his eyes.
"Becker," Matt said, signalling him over.
"I'm not shooting her, no matter how annoying you think she is." Becker murmured as he approached Matt.
"I'm not asking you to, and I don't find her annoying. But we don't know who she is, how she got here, where, or when, she's from, or what she's doing here. Just…talk to her, yeah?" Matt asked him.
Becker sighed but put his gun down in the trailer of the car. As he walked over to her, the girl scraped her sandy-brown hair back into a ponytail and tucked her fringe behind her ear.
"So," he said.
"Wow, has it really got to a time where 'hello' doesn't start a conversation anymore?" she asked smiling. Becker smiled back.
"Hi," he said, "I'm Becker."
"Nice to meet you, Becker," the girl said back. "Let me guess: guy who got you over to him is in charge, and you're like the guy who takes charge, and gets the big gun?"
"Yeah, that sounds about right," Becker says, smiling.
"So, how do you know all about the anomalies and that? I mean, you're fourteen and you've just come out of one that we can't find on any of our databases. That's never happened before." Becker said to her.
"Wow, that makes me feel really special!" she said smiling.
"I bet it does! But seriously, if we don't lock it, then we're gonna have a hell of a lot of problems." Becker tells her.
"Yeah, we don't know what creatures are gonna come out of there." Matt says, joining in.
"You don't have to tell me how much trouble you're gonna get if a creature comes out of there! For a start, don't worry, it's nowhere from the future, so you're not going to be dealing with any kind of future predators.
"But you could get stuck with pterodactyls, raptors, T-Rex, G-Rex, Hyenadons, and pretty much the works of insects, carnivores and herbivores ever in prehistoric existence." She told them.
"And you're trying to persuade us not to lock it?" Matt scoffed.
"You lock that Anomaly and the Pretacious era is one of those few you will never get to investigate." She said. Well. That sure shut everyone up!
"Pretacious?" Matt asked, "There's no such place!"
"Not to your knowledge. But I've been in and out of that era for seven years. I know pretty much everything you need to know about it, and, whatever I don't know isn't worth knowing." She told Matt.
Becker looked between the two of them. No one ever contradicted Matt when it came to places and times. It was like contradicting Abby when it came to a creature. It just didn't happen.
"I'm Matt Anderson," Matt told her, as usual using the most random time in the world to say something random, "I'm the guy who bosses this lot about and gets really miffed when Becker takes charge. And you are not going anywhere...Yet."
"Okay, introductions, I can do them. My brother, through that thing," she said, nodding towards through the Anomaly, "Is Christopher. If you lock that thing, he's going to get stuck there. There's a reason you haven't encountered it before, and if you lock it, that reason is going to keep Christopher there forever."
"So you're telling me there's a whole other time, which we haven't noticed in the whole seven years these guys have been doing this, that you've just come out of, and there's some big, weird, never-before-heard-of reason why we've never come across it before. Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes." She replied bluntly.
"Okay," Matt says, "Now, you can tell us this big scary reason why we've never come across it before."
"I can't," she says, smiling happily, "I'm not really allowed to talk to strangers."
She picked up her bag, walked past Matt, and sat in the back of one of the car trailers, "My name's Zoe by the way."
"Matt," Becker said quietly into Matt's ear, "you just got owned. By a fourteen year old girl."
"So, I was going to say where, but when are you from?" Becker asked Zoe, leaning on the side of the trailer next to her.
"Technically? Right here, in London, right now. But my aunt was a little bit...messed up. Never try living with someone who could throw you through an Anomaly at the first chance they can get." Zoe said.
"Ha," Becker laughed, "I'll keep that in mind next time I'm guarding an Anomaly with Matt!"
Zoe laughed, looking over to where Matt was standing. He seemed normal enough; but there was something different about him. But she didn't have much time to think about Matt; another car pulled up next to a big stone statue of...someone or other.
"Oh good, Connor's here." Becker said, rolling his eyes.
"Is that bad?" Zoe asked him, looking over to the guy who got out of the car.
"That's annoying," Becker said, looking over to the car as Connor walked over to Matt and Abby pushed the door on her side shut.
"So that's Abby, yeah?" Zoe asks.
"You really don't miss anything do you?" Becker asked her, but he was smiling when he said it.
"Nope," she said, smiling too.
"So, okay, what's going on with you then, eh?" Connor said, unpacking the Dating Calculator out of one of the boxes in the car.
"Connor, please don't tell me that you're talking to an Anomaly again!" Abby said, crouching down next to him.
"Hey, one day, something like this could save the world. You talk to Rex all the time!" Connor said, pressing the button on the Dating Calculator.
"There's a difference between talking to a living, breathing prehistoric creature, and talking to a big ball of energy, Connor." Abby said, glancing round to see Matt coming up behind them.
"Hey! My big ball of energy is my living, breathing prehistoric creature!" Connor replied.
"Anything yet?" Matt asked Connor.
"We're nearly there," Connor murmured, as the Calculator beeped, "Well, that's not normal."
"What is it?" Abby asked, glancing down.
"It's a time from either so far back or so far forward, that we can't recognise it. It's an Anomaly with an anomaly!" Connor said.
"Jokes, Connor? Now?" Becker asked, coming over to them, "So, was Zoe right?" Becker asked Matt.
"You know, Becker, I hate it when you get attached to things." Matt said, glancing over to Zoe.
"Zoe?" Abby said, looking over to the car.
"We'll explain later." Matt said dismissively, "Becker, she can't be right, it's impossible, there's no way we could not come across an entire era for seven years. It just wouldn't happen!"
"Connor, could we have not come across an era for seven years?" Becker asked Connor, completely ignoring Matt.
"Well, we definitely haven't come across this one for the time we've been doing this, and I don't have a reason for that, but it could have come along before we started this." Connor told him.
"So, really there's only one person who does know stuff about this Anomaly." Becker said.
"Zoe," Matt told them all, "she's the only one here who's been through this thing."
"So we're relying on a teenager to tell us about the thing we're supposed to be experts in?" Abby asked.
"Apparently so..." Matt said.
"Okay, so why haven't we come across this thing?" Matt asked Zoe, with her sitting at the back of the trailer and him resting on the front of it.
Becker was leaning on the outside of the trailer next to Zoe, with Connor and Abby sitting not far away.
"If I tell you are you still going to consider locking the Anomaly before Christopher comes through?" she asked Matt.
"That depends if it's a good enough reason or not," Matt said.
"Have you ever heard of a time lock?" Zoe asked him.
"No," Matt said, "Connor?"
Connor shook his head.
"Okay, so what is a 'time lock'?" Matt asked Zoe.
"Pretty much exactly what it sounds like," Zoe told them, "It's when the magnetic field of the Anomaly is reversed as its closing from one time into another. It basically acts like a key, except the key is locked away in the boundaries of the Anomaly, which you can't get to because it's locked. My aunt might have been completely nutty, but she was still clever. She worked out that, if she could lock the Pretacious away from people like you, then she could lock people in there as well. Yeah, she held a bit of a grudge against us," Zoe said, smiling.
"So she 'locked' you inside a particular time era?" Connor asked her.
"It was more like she was locking a particular time era away from us," Zoe said, "We were seven when we first went through an Anomaly, and it's taken us another seven years to get back out of one to the right time and place. We've been to loads of other times, but we could never get back here."
"So did you go through another Anomaly, and then get here?"Abby asked her.
"No, we came straight from Pretacious," Zoe said, "Eventually."
"But I thought you said it was locked," Matt said.
"It was," Zoe said, "We just temporarily unlocked it again."
Everyone went quiet.
"So why can't we lock it?" Matt asked, "If you've unlocked it, then why can't we lock it for a bit, then open it again?"
"Because we don't know how to permanently unlock it," she said, "It's like an elastic band. The slightest interruption from this side of the Anomaly and the Anomaly will ping back to the way it was, and Chris is stuck in there for another seven years. By the time you unlock it again on this side, the Anomaly would have moved on."
"Matt, we definitely don't have a Pretacious on our databases. I've looked on the internet, and there's nothing there either. We're going to have to start up a whole new database on limited information."
"Where's this going, Jess?" Matt asked.
"Well, this girl that's come out of the Anomaly, Zoe. She seems to know a lot about it, right?"
"Jess, you realise Lester's going to have a field day when he works out what you're saying, don't you?" Connor asked her.
"It's his idea," Jess said, "he's sinking to all new lows, I know, but he could be on to something."
"He does realise we can't make anyone do anything, right?" Becker asked her.
"He says he's perfectly aware of that but the Minister does insist that our jobs are done properly," Jess replied.
"Oh I bet he does," Matt sighs, "Okay, Jess, I'll try and sort it. And can you try and get hold of Emily please?"
"Why?" Jess asks.
"Because I've got a funny feeling that the ARC team is going to be a few members short today," Matt says.
"Wait, you work for the ARC?" Zoe said.
"Yeah, why?"
"You guys are, like, legends in the future," Zoe said, "Literally. The ARC still exists in two thousand years, and the work they do is in honour of you guys. I mean, the differences are tiny. They've got the same small core team, the equipment has barely changed and the world is still pretty much clueless about the Anomalies."
"Our core team isn't so small anymore," Connor said, "We've, like, doubled since the beginning,"
"But it's still small compared to the military, Connor," Becker says, "The military's got a core team of ninety. We've got a core team of seven."
"Eight if you count Danny," Abby put in.
"So, okay, we're tiny," Connor said.
"Tiny but effective," Zoe said truthfully.
Everyone went quiet. Then, one of the soldiers called Matt over, and he walked away in the direction of the Anomaly.
"What would you say if we asked you to come back with us?" Becker asked Zoe.
"That depends on where you're asking me to go," Zoe said, "If it's back to the ARC, then, yeah, what the hell, I've got nothing to lose. But I'm not going near that Anomaly again unless someone could die if I don't."
Becker smiled. "I'm not going near that thing unless someone could die if I don't!"
Matt came back over to them. "That thing's not showing any sign of closing, so you might as well go back to the ARC; it's more fun than just sitting around here."
"Don't close the Anomaly before Chris comes through," Zoe told him, climbing out the trailer and following Becker towards a car.
"Wow, that was patronising," Matt muttered to himself as he turned around and walked in the opposite direction to Zoe.
So, any thoughts? It's absolutely rubbish, i hate it, it's amazing, please write more, never write anything like this again, i love it...? Please review! I need to know whether or not to carry this on, and if even one person reviews saying they like it i shall carry it on...
Hope you enjoyed, and i will try and get another chapter up soon :)