"So, how exactly do you lot plan on getting home?" asked Lilian. The woman copper looked far too awake for only six a.m., already dressed and alert whilst the rest of her temporary houseguests looked like death warmed over, all of them still groggy.

Leaning against the counter, Cutter had to clear the cottonballs from his brain before he remembered how to answer. "Dunno yet. We'll have to find an anomaly, but...it's not going to be easy to do," he replied, rubbing at his eyes with one hand in an effort to wake himself up a little more. 'Not easy' was an understatement. In almost two years of working with the anomalies, he'd only seen one purple anomaly, and even if they did find it, there was no way of knowing whether or not it'd take them back to the proper timeline.

He felt a warm brush against his arm and opened his eyes to see Jenny shuffling past him. For an instant, thoughts of going home were erased from his mind. Thomas's words had stayed with him the entire night, and now he was at sixes and sevens. Where exactly did they go from here? He'd never been good with women—his track record was proof of that. He felt as if he was standing in the midst of a live minefield with no clue where the mines were and was being asked to cross to the other side. One wrong step, and any relationship they could possibly have would be over before it even had a chance to begin.

"We might head back to the Forest of Dean," suggested Stephen, pulling Cutter from his thoughts. "There's a possibility that it could still be there."

"Even if it was, how d'you suggest we find it again?" Cutter queried in return. "It might have moved since then, or closed."

A slurred, drowsy voice emanated from the lump of blankets on the couch. "I could bodge together a handheld detector if I get the parts to it," mumbled Connor groggily. The young man struggled to sit up, grasping the back of the couch for support; Abby was almost instantly at his side, her hand on his back to keep him upright. He looked positively terrible, his voice hoarse from coughing all night, flags of fever-colour still staining his cheeks, hair matted down and sweaty.

"Conn, you're still sick, I really don't think—" the petite blond started to protest.

"M'fine. I just need the right parts for it. I can make it out of some simple stuff," Connor said, overriding her, but he still leant back into her arms, tilting his head back onto her shoulder. His tired eyes shifted back to Stephen and Cutter. "I'll put together a handheld. We can go back to the Forest and see if the anomaly's still there. If not, I…I could probably piece together a temporary ADD."

"ADD?" echoed Lilian with eyebrows lifted.

"Anomaly Detection Device. I put it together. It's kind of like a big satnav," said Connor with a glance towards Jenny, who blushed and looked to her feet, "but I have it fine-tuned to track anomalies as and when they appear, pinpointing their location."

Lilian looked impressed. "And you built it? Well, Tom-Tom's in technology and robotics classes at Uni, so he should be able to help you. And speaking of Uni, you two need to get a move on before you're late," she said, turning to Thomas and Jamie. The two teens skulked, looking dejected to be left out of the plan-making, but then the blond took Thomas by the hand, pulling him towards the door. With a final sullen look, the teens left the house. Lilian smiled once they were gone. "What a cute couple," she said, making the others all smile and chortle. Her mobile began to go off, an eerie ringtone filling the air. "Ah, I hear dead people," she remarked. "Tom-Tom set that ringtone just for when the morgue calls me." She took out the small mobile, checked her texts, then snapped it shut again. "Right, I've got work. Criminals to catch, cases to solve. You lot stay out of trouble, see if you can't build that…detector thing, whatever it is."

They all bid their goodbyes as she left, leaving them alone in the house. "Right, Connor, what kind of parts do you think that you'll need to make a handheld?" asked Cutter, turning to look at the weary student. Though he wanted to let Connor rest for a while, give him a chance to feel better, but the sooner that they got home, the better it'd be for everyone. Cutter himself felt like something scraped from the bottom of a shoe, sore from sleeping in a chair and weary from a lack of proper sleep. He wanted to go home, more than he ever could have thought. He wanted to see the ARC again, sleep in his own bed. Hell, he wouldn't even mind seeing Lester again. Well…that might've been pushing it. "Connor?" he repeated, glancing over at the young man.

Connor nodded and sat up wearily. "Yeah. Let's go."


"We always miss out on the fun stuff, don't we?" asked Jamie as they made their way across campus towards the building. She hooked her arm through Thomas's, the cool wind blowing at their hair and tugging on their clothes. Seeing the group of strange lookalikes was certainly a novel way to start the week, and she was still reeling a little at how eerily identical they all were. Abby was a bit different from Jamie herself, a little older, but still made the short pixie cut look good as well as the whole punk rockette getup. Connor, like Thomas, was definitely adorkable. Professor Cutter did look just like Uncle Alex, just with slightly longer hair and a more bitter, wounded air about him. She wondered if he would end up with Jenny, the woman that looked like Aunt Claudia.

Suddenly, Thomas came to an abrupt halt, pulling Jamie to a stop as well. "What? What is it?" she asked.

"Dinosaurs," he replied softly.

"What?"

Thomas pointed towards the university gardens, a set of flowerbeds and carefully tended-to shrubs, ferns, and small saplings, along with herbs for the culinary art class and the vegetables for the agriculture classes. And right in the middle of the garden was a dinosaur. It was about five metres long, snout to tail, standing only about a metre high at the hip, with a long arched neck, a whiplike tail, small head, bulky barrel body, and four trunk-like legs. It was browsing through the gardens, grazing on the decorative ferns that ringed the flowerbed.

Jamie clutched his arm tighter, eyes wide. "Oh…my…God…"