And things progress from bad to worse – part 1
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.
The park stood quiet, abandoned by the people. Out of all the sounds, there was only the tinkling of water from the ruined, moss-covered fountain and the chirping of the few songbirds that nestled in the branches of the conifer trees that grew there.
Then, abruptly, the silence was shattered in a flare of chromatically white light and the incredibly loud honking of the hadrosaur dinosaur that had burst from it…
"Aaargh!" the half-shout half-snarled emitted by Connor Temple resonated loudly through the ARC's lower floors. "This just blows!"
"What blows?" captain Becker, the chief of the ARC Special Forces, turned to explanation to Connor's better half, Abby Maitland. "What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing – just one of his more favorite websites undergoing some renovations that Connor does not like at all," Abby explained casually, then took a second look at her interlocutor. "And what about you? What's with the heavy clothing? It's plus seventeen degrees Celsius, and the wind's not that strong either."
"It's not about that," Becker shook his head. "I just- it's just- I had flashbacks of my life before the ARC and since last night I am not feeling quite right."
"And dressing more heavily than the usual helps you deal with that?"
"Yes," Becker's curt reply and his tone of voice indicated that he now considered that topic closed, without any hope of reviving it.
"Okay then," Abby said carefully and slowly, "now about-"
"Aaargh! Warblers and wrens are all very fine, but it's that interconnectivity with the rest of the 'Net that made it so great! Now all that's left is the online encyclopedia, and that is just not the same!" Connor's voice floated back up the corridor, followed by sounds of kicked doors.
Abby and Becker exchanged looks. "Aren't you going to stop him?" Becker finally spoke.
"After he almost got us caught in one of the bigger car crashes of London? No way. I mean, when we drove off, he was mellow enough, but after that streetlight mishap, it just went downhill, I suppose – if there won't be a manifested time anomaly today, I don't think my nerves will last that long-"
"Sounds like plenty of this is going around the Center today," Becker admitted. "Earlier, I overheard Lorraine explain that Lester was in a foul mood because of a rotten watermelon or something – weird, eh?"
"Lester got a rotten melon?" Abby giggled slightly. "That's a first – maybe he could use a reality check to remember that he was one of the people-"
The time anomaly alarm rang unexpectedly, startling everybody throughout the ARC. "Well, guess we got my wish," Abby said quietly.
With Connor Temple not in the driver's seat, any car ride with him didn't get any better: he just sat in the back of the van, unusually quiet and taciturn for him, and muttered softly under his breath something or other, none of it particularly good, most likely.
Normally, Abby would try to do something about this, but after experiencing this for an entire morning (coupled with a near miss of a car accident) made her more reluctant than usual to try and actually do something about it…so she didn't.
To conclude the trio, Becker was rather quiet himself, though his behavior was more similar to Connor's than Abby's: he too was muttering something or other under his breath, but he was also doing that almost silently, if at all, against just like Connor.
Finally, Abby gave way first. "So where are we going?" she asked Connor, simply for the sake of conversation.
"I have no concise idea – I promptly gave the coordinates to one of his men," Connor shrugged. "Hey, action man, where are we going?"
"To one of the abandoned estates located in London's suburbs," Becker admitted reluctantly. "Judging from the absence of news from there via the radio station, I'm guessing that it's nothing big-" he trailed off as the estate's ground actually came into the view and so did the dinosaur that was browsing there. "Temple, what is this?"
"A barn owl on steroids," Connor said flatly, "or, if you want to be more precise, it's a duck-billed or a hadrosaur dinosaur."
"And how do we capture it?"
"Either drive it back through the time anomaly from which it came, or tranquilize it and use a forklift to do the same thing. Just be warned – that animal weighs around 400 kilograms, and it will take a lot of effort to get it home, a lot more than it would take for a skylark."
"Well, aren't you helpful today?" Becker said crossly.
"Well, what's the point of waxing poetic if you won't listen anyways? Bad enough that Quinn took the day off for today to settle some personal business of some sort or another, bad enough that-"
At this moment the dinosaur nipped Connor's beginning rant in the bud by deposing a big, steaming pile of dung right in the juniper bushes. The stench that arose from that pile, mixing with the smell emitted by the crushed juniper branches, hit the noses of the assembled humans like a sledgehammer.
"God," Abby muttered, grasping her nose, "to think that my mom's complaining that I don't write to her anymore! I can just imagine me writing to her about this, today!"
"Yeah, yeah," Becker half-turned away from the offending smell. "Hey, I see the time anomaly-" he trailed away, as the chromatically-white tear in the fabric of the world, parted slightly to reveal the head of a very definitely not another herbivorous duckbill dinosaur, but of a definite carnivore – the T-Rex.
Panicked, and somewhat mentally unbalanced by the events that gone wrong since last night, Becker pulled out a flash grenade and threw it at the time anomaly. There was a flash, and-
To be continued…