A really short one shot - I just thought:

Hmm... What if life carried on after the mutants in the first Time Rider book? What if they eventually became like they were before the apocalypse?

I wonder what happened...

A few thousand years after

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Friggor Gripplam sighed. He lowered his mug of tea. It gave him a little energy.

He lived in a grubby archway in Nu Yourk. There were lots of screens - he didn't know what they were, or what they were originally used for, but his mother had told him that they were artefacts from before the cannibal times.

His archway wasn't so much of an archway, now. It was underground, really. According to his family, they had lived there for thousands of years, and originally, it had been ground level, and the brick above was higher up.

He walked up the steps, through the gap in the wall. His family had had thousands of year's worth of restorations, and so this place was okay. A few cracks, but they always had those.

It was sunny outside. The work on making a bridge over the river was almost complete. Before now, people had used boats, to get wood from the forest beyond.

Figgor raised his right hand – a webbed, pale thing with 6 fingers – in greeting to his friend Bob who was working on the bridge, putting wooden planks below, to stabilise it.

What a name… Bob. His family claimed it was a name from before the cannibal times, but he wasn't so sure – it was more likely they'd made it up.

When he became older, Friggor wanted to be a person who worked out how things work. Most of the people believed in the great god Cookie, who would come and save them from becoming mutants again, but Friggor disagreed. There had to be a more simple explanation. After all, it couldn't just be night and day because Cookie willed it.

More recently, Friggor had been studying the body of a human. Their thick, pale yellow rough skins were useful for warmth. The… private areas…, covered by pants, were useful for reproduction. Their nostrils were useful for smelling. In fact, their whole body was useful, from the webbed fingers for swimming short distances, to their cleverness. Frigor thought they must be natures miracle, but everyone disagreed.

Friggor's mother wanted him to get a job, but honestly, he wanted to be self employed, to find out more about the past, and how things worked. A job that was once called scientist.

He went back down the stairs into the archway, and finished his tea.

Life went on, and slowly, they grew less like children, and more like being who knew what had happened in the world. Three thousand years from Friggor's death, people once more drove in cars, and talked into phones. They looked different, yes, but they were still the humans.

Life carried on.