Chapter 25

Guest from the future

Disclaimer: All characters belong to Impossible Pictures, unless they're OC.
Note: This chapter contains some spoilers for the official series.

Chapter twenty-five

The past, three million years ago...

"Good-bye, Danny!" the woman calmly tells the man standing underneath a stony bluff, just before an adult deinonychus, displaced from its' proper time, ambushes her and knocks both her and itself off the bluff, thus making her words more appropriate than she had ever intended – and the man just stares at the two corpses, as well as at the corpses of the australopithecines, killed earlier by some industrial-strength toxins.

The man just stares at her, says something under his nose, and leaves – and he never notices another pair of eyes, another pair of human eyes, stare at him from some acacia shrubs a short distance away, watching the original man leave, never betraying their presence by a call, until the older man leaves. Then the other leaves as well, still silent, still thoughtful, still rather bloody from his own fight...

The past, less than 190 000 years ago...

The fire is burning bright, real bright, though the fuel is kind of rancid, but the young man who is warming himself in the heat, and basking in the fire light, is ignoring that downside... in fact, he appears to ignore everything else in his surroundings, at least until someone else approaches him, somebody whom he doesn't know very well – but well enough.

"You," he says as his interlocutrix approaches him from the right, "I don't know you, but I saw you – I saw you die."

"You did, did you?" the woman echoes him calmly, seemingly more interesting in his fire than in him. "How did it happen?"

"A dinosaur came from behind you, and you fell, and you lie there, I know not where, alongside some mutant chimps or whenever, and that, that guy he just left you there, go and haunt him instead."

"Another man? Interesting – I already took care of Nick, and Stephen himself is long gone and done..." the woman's voice trails away, "it must be someone new, someone who arose once Nick was gone..." her face grows thoughtful and she falls silent.

For a while, there are only some more crackling of the flames, and the two people, looking at them with a similar lack of passion, just with a varying degree. "So," the woman finally speaks, "what's your poison?"

"Excuse me?"

"You don't have to be mad to venture through the time anomalies, but it shortens the process immensely, and something tells me, anyways, that that applies precisely to you – this burning of several bodies is a likely candidate. So, confess – I, for example, have megalomania, most likely. And you?"

The young man turns to himself, his face finally animated by an insecure smile – and it is quite nasty! "Homicidal, I believe, and yes, you're right, I was so before I came here – I blame my family."

"Yes, I suppose that you do," the woman sighs. "Young man, want some advice? You want to work out your murderous urges, go to the Oligocene."

"How do I get there?"

The woman points her time anomaly remote control at the bonfire, and a time anomaly opens, albeit of a different tint due to the light interference of the flames. "You can go that way," she says firmly.

"Fair enough, and if you want to find your corpse, you should go diagonally to my left, and then go straight, once you came to the mammoth's corpse – it is a mammoth, for that's the name of the furry elephants, right?"

"You're a very thoughtful young man."

"No, I am not – I want you to go to the Polar star as fast as possible, which is the proper place of all the restless dead," the young man replies and fearlessly walks through the time anomaly, as it snaps shut behind him. The woman just smiles a smile of her own – as enigmatic as her former interlocutor's was nasty – and walks off in the indicated direction, leaving the fire burning among the snow, attracting something nasty and powerful in the darkened forest of an Ice Age night...

The past, three million years ago

The woman is emerging from the time anomaly, and is walking over to her corpse, still lying underneath the corpse of a raptor, noticing, with a slight frown, the fact that her supply bag had been looted. And then she touches her own corpse – their outlines begin to blur – and a shrill, inhuman cry begins to race through time, as the woman, originally walking or being engaged in some other business in some other time, stops whatever she was doing whenever, stiffens, and screams:

"I still live!"

Her face gets sweat-drenched, her eyes become as wide as saucers, metaphorically speaking, her body trembles and is drenched in sweat.

"I still live!"

Her body flickers in and out, like a TV picture with a bad static attack, as if something powerful is trying to erase all of the woman and her 'versions' from all over Earth's chronological history; in fact, all of her chronological clones experience the death of one of theirs, and live through it for it is not their death specifically, and theus they all grow stronger - and as they do that, 'the sum of their parts' grows stronger too.

"I died and yet I still live!"

Silvery flames begin to lick the outline of the 'original' woman, eventually spreading onto the raptor's corpse – and it shrivels, as around 62 million years of Earth's chronological history reduce it from dead flesh and bone into fossilized dust, blown away by the Pliocene wind.

"I am dead and yet I lived through it and thus I am a paradox!"

Silvery flames begin lick through the woman's body all over the chronological history of Earth, and then her body stiffens, and tenses, and the flames dissipate, leaving her as she was.

"I lived, I died, I returned to live, I have reached apotheosis, I am a paradox!"

All throughout Earth chronological history, the woman smiles – and it's a rather wicked, triumphant smile, a smile of a person who has survived despite all odds.

"...and now," the woman says, climbing down a tree in the Late Jurassic time period, "it's time for me to attend to my wake."

The past, three million years ago

There is nothing left of the woman's corpse, or of the raptor's corpse, but something catches the woman's eye all the same – the tracks of a dinofelis, a "false sabre-tooth cat", who had feasted on the corpses of australopithecines – and on one other corpse: in reaching apotheosis, the woman had changed history in several time lines where her presence had been especially prominent.

"Ah," the woman says, as she observes a human skull with the clear markings of the dinofelis' canines scouring its' surface, "that's one way to end it all, but... where the honour in that?" She smiles and vanishes in a chromatically white flash of a time anomaly. As she does, the surround-ing scenery changes slightly: the rest of the human skeleton, ravaged by the dinofelis, vanishes as well, but the backpack, equally out of time and equally ravaged by the Cainozoic predator, remains...

The past, sixty-five million years ago

The woman is now walking over a world, ravaged by the massive meteorite that had slammed into the Earth, creating global cataclysms – earthquakes and volcano eruptions, tsunamis and strongly acidic rain. All over the world the rule of the dinosaurs laid in ruins, and their successors – the small, furry mammals that lived in trees or in subterranean burrows – were slowly beginning to recover from the latest Armageddon and regain control of their lives...onto a new level.

The woman noticed several specimens of Purgatorius race past her up a fallen tree, and gave them a warm smile, which they promptly ignored. Leaving a mental note to herself to return to this day in the time stream later, the woman walked over to another section of the ravaged world, and began to chip away at section of cooled-down lava, the igneous rock, using a smallish, futuristic-looking shovel, designed and bought for just such occasions. Very soon her goal emerged – a pair of skeletons, human skeletons, locked together by magma in a final embrace, limbs intertwined, jaws pressed together in a final kiss.

For several long minutes the woman just stared at the deceased lovers, together to the end, and then she firmly removed the skulls from the rest of the skeletons, and vanished in the flash of a time anomaly – and as the aftermaths of the flash faded away, so did the rest of the skeletons.

...Meanwhile, around sixty-two million years in the future of the post-Mesozoic world, a man wandering alone in the highlands of the Great Rift, brought to almost desperate despair by his loneliness, received two 'handfuls' of his close friends who fell through a time anomaly from a certain doom to uncertain salvation...

The past, several days before the death of Stephen Harper...

"Ms. Johnson – are you willing to live up to your reputation, namely that you're willing to sell your soul for power? Hmm? Are you?"

The future, five to ten millions after the Holocene (the Age of Humans)...

The woman was walking down the highlands towards a building located in a valley, her face grim, yet her eyes were smiling. A slithering, semi-transparent, amorphous thing had partially emerged from a darkened crevasse behind and to the side of the human, with two tentacles almost three meters long tasting the air. As it sensed the passer-by, it withdrew back into its hide-out even quicker than it had emerged – but the woman didn't notice:

A storm was coming, and she was going to be a part of it.

To be continued...