The once and future Helen...
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures instead...
Late Jurassic – 152 MYA
It was in the early hours of the morning that the storm had stopped at long last. The mighty redwoods were appearing to gently steam in the morning rays, and the early chorus was striking the first notes. Still, there were no birds as such, for they haven't evolved yet and instead various tree-dwelling insects and small pterosaurs were filling the air with their cries.
"I suppose this is an improvement over the thunderbolts last night," Helen Cutter muttered to herself, as she emerged from the impromptu shelter of a cavern in a smallish hillock, "but still, where am I?"
The last question was not asked in idleness – ever since Helen went through her first time anomaly in the Forest of Dean, she'd been in several time periods, from Triassic, to Jurassic, to Eocene, to Carboniferous, and by now she realized that each time anomaly took her to a completely random time period of the world, without any sensible pattern at all, although each and everyone tried to have her killed in a very painful manner. In particular, her right foot was still in pain from the bite of the giant Carboniferous spider, and last night's thunderstorm didn't do it any wonders either.
And yet... Helen knew that she couldn't stop moving. If she stopped moving, the next time anomaly would come and go without her, and she'd be stuck here forever, most likely. That was something that she thought to avoid, naturally, and so she had to keep going, no matter what!
As the anthropologist turned time traveller looked around, she noted a herd of small (that is, human-sized) dinosaurs race through the plains around her retreat. The dinosaurs were bipedal and didn't look like the long-necked sauropods at all, but Helen noticed the definite absence of any flowering plants around her as well, and decided that she was in the Jurassic time period, rather than the Cretaceous.
"On one hand, this is good," she mused to herself, "the last thing I need to worry about is the misbegotten asteroid annihilating me alongside the T-Rex, but on the other..."
Abruptly, Helen froze and listened in. All seemed relatively quiet (as compared to the forest that grew some distance away from her retreat), but she was sure that she was hearing a quiet buzzing some distance to her right. The buzzing was very quiet and innocent-sounding, but by now Helen knew never to truth anything or anyone – the brontothere calves too had been relatively harmless on their own, but their parents most definitely were not, and if this was something similar...
It wasn't. As Helen walked down the slope, the buzzing gently but steadily increased in volume, even if it remained soft and non-threatening. But it also sounded unnatural, mechanic, and that was not an adjective that Helen had expected to use to describe a sound in Jurassic.
Very gently, she slowed down her descent, even as she shifted to her right and began to look-out for the source of the sound, until she had stopped altogether and began to look up and out at the sky, keeping it in mid that the latter was still cloudy and not very sunlit – and that was the main reason why she noticed her follower at all.
It wasn't a pterosaur, or an archaeopteryx, or even some sort of a primeval flying insect – no, it was a sphere, looking like some sort of a glassy disco-ball that was flying of its own volition and coloured in some sort of a bluish shade, perfect against a clear blue sky, not so perfect against other backgrounds, like the current one.
Thoughtfully, Helen picked up a pebble and flicked it at the flying sphere. It was a long shot, but Helen had grown to be quite accurate with her missiles due to various food-catching undertakings, and so her missile had hit true.
But what happened next was entirely unexpected: the sphere's quiet buzzing became louder and angrier, and one of its faceted sides released a genuine energy bolt. Only Helen's faster than usual reflexes prevented her from being struck with the discharge, and as she went down the hillock's slope in a roll, she heard the now-angry buzzing, as well as some different grunting sounds from her other side.
Being now in a fully cautious mode, Helen abruptly stopped her descent, and crawled down a different side of the hillock, keeping a low profile. Her intuition was right – a fully grown male stegosaurus had come up onto the scene, currently busy munching on the leafy ferns and small scrubs with its beak-like jaws, but the appearance of the sphere had disturbed it.
The sphere, if it did have some sort of intellect didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that instead of a lightly-built human it now confronted a multi-ton dinosaur. It discharged another bolt, this one almost hitting the dinosaur.
Now, the stegosaurus was angry, as its huffs rose in volume and blood rushed into the diamond-shaped plates on its back, making them colourful and intimidating. The sphere was not impressed and released another energy discharge, this one hitting the stegosaurus right in the head. Possibly, the sphere sought to stun it, rather than kill, but unfortunately for it, the stegosaurus' nervous system didn't exactly need its brain to launch a counterattack: the dinosaur's tail armed with the huge spikes swung in an almost complete upward arc, stabbing one of the spikes straight through the sphere, smashing it against the hillside, and then everything exploded in a flash of pale metallically-blue flame.
From her low vantage point, Helen just stared, stupefied, as the world around her turned monochrome, and her hands were beginning... to turn into an australopithecine's forelimbs?
'No, no, I am a human, I human, this is a trick,' the anthropologist ground to herself. 'Manual devolution is impossible!'
The transformations continued, as Helen felt her body shrink and grow a tail of a monkey, a lemur, a Purgatorius of the Cretaceous time period.
'No, no, I am a human, a human, this is a trick of my mind, I'm going mad!' Helen dug in her definitely shoed heels. 'And besides, I'm in Jurassic, not even Purgatorius had evolved at this time yet! You're wrong!'
Now Helen felt becoming a Jurassic Megazostrodon, a Permian-Triassic cynodont, a smallish Carboniferous reptile, a Devonian amphibian or even a lungfish, a Silurian, or even Cambrian jawless agnath – she was devolving all the way into obscurity of the earliest times!
'No, I do not,' Helen ground her very definite teeth in her very definite mouth. 'I am a human. I am Helen Cutter. I survived Triassic drought and Messel gas explosions, sea monsters of Jurassic and Eocene, sea storms, leeches, parasites and giant acidic spiders of the Carboniferous. I've been to Jurassic before – and left on my own two legs, alive and superior, for I am a human, the best existing life form that there ever could be – and I will leave the Jurassic again for precisely because of that! No fancy toy, chronologically misplaced to boot, will stop me! Be gone!'
Something burst behind her eyes; Helen saw the evolution of jawless agnaths, jawed fishes, first amphibians, first reptiles, first mammal-like reptiles and first mammals, first primates, first apes, first human ancestors and first humans – and then she saw the future of human evolution as well, and if it wasn't for her death's-grip on the Jurassic soil, and the equally tight clench of her teeth, she would've broken down at last.
Instead, the visions... ended, and she suddenly found herself back where she had started – at the foot of a hillock in the Jurassic time period, next to a stegosaurus...
...next to already fossilized stegosaurus, that is, its' bones lying in a steaming skeleton in the scrubland right where it had stood moments before. Shocked, Helen followed the skeleton's outline to the end of the tail, where the spikes had pierced the sphere...
...only to see it burnt down to black ashes as well, destroyed practically as fully as the dinosaur. Clearly, not everything that Helen went through may have been an illusion.
Sharply, Helen released a breath that she was unconsciously withholding. Dinosaurs were one thing, but futuristic robots? This was something else. Shivering, she tried to reach out with what she called 'time anomaly sense', something that she'd been developing since the late Triassic, and her eyes opened wide and almost jumped from the sockets as a bunch of completely new mental signals threatened to overload her mind.
"Oh boy," Helen sighed, as she tried to ignore the fact that apparently that several dinosaur species – most prominently the smaller, quicker ornithopods were dead within a 269 square kilometre radius and she was aware of them by means she knew not. "I think that dinosaurs and other beasts will be the least of my problems, at least for a while..." Suddenly a mocking, semi-crazy smile graced her lips, as Helen remembered that currently her lifestyle included jumping back and forth over millions, if not tens of millions, years in a blink. "But then again, time is all I have. Might as well spend it constructively on something else other than mere survival!"
Late Eocene – 3.2 MYA
With a groan, Helen pushed the corpse of the raptor – she had stabbed it straight through the lungs with her kukri – and looked around. Danny Quinn, of course, has been long gone, and he even left her keep her pack!
Helen smiled, and as it was usual lately, that smile was more than just a little wicked. "So kind of Mr. Quinn, so generous of him from refraining from grave robbing," she muttered to herself – another long-ingrained habit that she had stopped fighting since Stephen had died before her eyes. "Still, my gain is his loss and now I need to find something new to occupy my time – my alkaloid supply is smashed, and frankly, it's just not fun!"
Helen cocked her head, aware of Danny heading back to the time anomaly. She was also aware that he would not make it on time either – he didn't have the right mental senses, unlike her or Claudia Brown, to speak loosely.
"I think I just discovered my new project," she said calmly and time-shifted.
TBC...