Time Trouble – 1
Disclaimer: Helen Cutter belongs to Impossible Pictures™. The rest of the characters are mine.
The First Meeting
"So, this is-" grunted a chocolate-skinned Maori giantess also known as Kuro (among other things), as she and Helen stood in the courtyard of the Temple of Artemis (one of the wonders of the ancient world), watching how a pair of eustreptospondyluses ravaged the Roman legionnaires of Marc Anthony.
Helen carefully talked to the girl. Having lived in the Roman Empire later up the time line gave her a rather decent Latin dictionary, but between the chronological differences and regional accents communication was still hard. Still, Helen understood the gist of it – and she didn't like it.
"Kuro? Our new 'friend' claims that she's Arsinoe, the rightful pharaoh of Egypt-"
"Is this good or bad?"
"It has potential."
Exploring the New World
"So where are we going?" Kuro asks the much shorter woman as the dawning sun breaks through the morning's mists, colouring the walls and roofs of the city houses in a pleasant colour.
"Don't look at me," Helen shrugs, obviously just as unimpressed and calm as her occasional partner and friend. "If this was Jerusalem, then maybe I would've been able to give you a tour, despite the chronological difference of several centuries. This, however, is Edessa, and it differs from Jerusalem as much as," she searches for an appropriate avian metaphor to better explain things to Kuro, "as, say, a seagull would differ from a sand plover."
"Wow, that's some serious difference!" Kuro notes, "and speaking of them, what will we do with the princess?" she jabs her finger at the much younger woman who is following them at a distance.
"Historically, I think Cleopatra and Anthony had her killed – but the dinosaurs came and ate their assassins as well. Want to resolve the paradox or let the multiverse take its due?"
"I don't know. The flock of pterosaurs seems to have settled at one spot, by the way, so I guess that the dinosaurs that they were following have stopped as well. Want to feed the princess to them?"
"Why don't we wait and see?"
The Second Meeting
As far as carnivorous dinosaurs go, a eustreptospondylus is not overly impressive: roughly six meters long on average (bigger carnivores such as allosaurus or T-Rex can be twice as long), barely higher than a man is tall, drab in colour and not too brave by dinosaur standards. Yet they are meat-eaters that come from the Jurassic, as opposed to the Cretaceous, and that is why they have a very important quality:
They can hunt in co-operation, including setting-up ambushes that are about as effective as those set-up by lion prides or wolf packs. And since they're quite a bit larger than wolves, hyenas or even lions, their sheer body power and endurance quite makes up for the lack of finesse.
"Dinosaurs two, Romans zero," Kuro says cheerfully, observing the black and gull-sized pterosaurs squabbling over the remains of the natives.
"No," Helen says, more thoughtful. "These aren't Romans; they were a local militia of sorts. They're natives." Behind them, Arsinoe is retching her innards into the Mesopotamian sands, once more.
"We really got to do something about the girl," Kuro sighs, as she looks over the dinosaurs' bird-like tracks in the same sands. "Any ideas?"
"The pterosaurs hadn't left."
"So? There's plenty of bodies-" Kuro trails off and she readies, instead, her monstrous "elephant gun", as the Jurassic carnivores, who had been waiting for them in an ambush, decide to charge them instead.
Taking Charge
A successful ambush involves an attack on an unsuspecting opponent from several sides, at least two, to be successful. The eustreptospondyluses did exactly that: two came from the front and two from the back. Though they couldn't see each other, they could smell each other well enough and their instincts – and experiences – to co-operate if not perfectly, then well enough to form a classic pincer manoeuvre.
And then Arsinoe opened her mouth just as the dinosaurs prepared to charge:
"I am the rightful Ruler of the Twin Kingdoms! I demand that you protect me!"
Something snapped inside Kuro, something that had once, and twice, and thrice, and even more times, made English colonialists flee from her. She half turned around, even as Helen was readying her time anomaly manifestation device to deal with the other half of the dinosaur pack, and pulled the trigger on her firearm.
Thunder struck.
First (Proper) Introduction
"I am Arsinoe, sister of the late Ptolemy XIII, the deposited true Pharaoh of the Twin Kingdoms. And you are?"
"I am... well, the Greeks and the Romans call me a lamia, for reasons of their own, and my friend here... even I don't know what she is."
"Oh yes you do," Kuro said a teasing gleam in her eye, even as she cleaned the barrel of her favourite weapon. "You're just embarrassed to admit it."
"I am aware that you are monsters of Set, but so is my sister," Arsinoe says with a lot of bitterness, but little of fear. "Therefore, can we not make a deal for you to dispose of her and erect me in her place? I-"
"We're sorry, but we're on a mission of our own, and are forbidden to temper with you-" Helen speaks even as the time anomaly through which the dinosaurs had escaped (again) begins to close...and Arsinoe jumps through it, managing to land unharmed.
"I haven't dismissed you-" she snarls, before Kuro shushes her, and not very gently.
"Helen," the ex-anthropologist's partner turns serious. "We have another problem..."
To be continued...
