Chapter 1 – June 28, 2011

Disclaimer: except for Kurangaituku, none of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.

Note: contains spoilers for the official series.

The "New Dawn" project was coming apart. Its first and only child, the second artificially generated time anomaly, was tearing it apart, as steel and concrete, electric circuitry and glass seemed to be literally disintegrating, as time anomaly just grew and grew, gathering width and mass.

And among all this chaos flew a flock of small, but flesh-eating pterosaurs, their jaws snapped with razor-sharp teeth, and they were flying towards them.

"It's ironic, I know it, but I have been dreaming about this for a long time," April was telling the shorter blonde as she prepared to shoot Abby where the latter was standing. "It's nothing personal, it's business-"

And then the swarm of the tiny flying reptiles struck, almost literally, carrying April with them over the breaking-down staircase with the force of their collision.

Abby exhaled in relief, but it was clearly premature: a surprisingly, large and strong hand grasped her ankle and took her down with April.

The two blondes whirled through the air, and Abby, though dizzy, could see that something was off about April, her facial expression appeared too inhuman and her teeth too sharp to be normal, but-

But then April slammed something into her, growled something ineligible in low, inhuman tone, and flung Abby away towards the artificial time anomaly with a far greater display of strength and acrobatics that Abby had intended from her.

And then, there was just darkness.

\\\

"Well! This is something that I didn't foresee!" were the first words that Abby heard as the darkness began to recede, and the voice that spoke was extremely unwelcome.

"Helen!" Abby opened her eyes and winced as the light from the lamps above all but blinded her for a few moments. "You're dead! Danny had sworn that that was so!"

"Ah," the teeth that Helen revealed in her smile were human, but that was the only good thing about them. "I was. By all things proper, I still should be, but," Helen's voice turned sickeningly sweet, "some young people were messing with technology that they didn't fully understand, and milliards worth years, from the Big Bang until the universe's end, were shaken up, the closer to the 20th century, the more so. In particular, one crucial moment of time was erased: the time of my death."

"Impossible!" Abby spat. "Time cannot be erased!"

"Neither can it be rewound or put on a fast forward setting, but the time anomalies do exactly that!" Helen replied calmly. "What has your boyfriend been teaching you about the mechanics of time, young lady?"

Abby saw red. "Connor hasn't been teaching me anything, old woman!" she growled as she grabbed Helen by the collar. "He's been too busy with his new friends in Prospero™ and "New Dawn" – your friends!"

"My friends?" Helen asked quietly not making any effort to remove Abby's hands from her collar.

"Yes, yours!" Abby growled, "Connor saw your video in Philip's archives, you were telling him-"

"And did any of you ever think that anyone with a passing knowledge of programming could've cooked something like that in CGI using my old photos?" Helen continued to ask.

Abby blinked, releasing Helen and taking a step back. "Well... I'll have to talk to Connor..." and then she walked into something, or rather into someone, because they were relatively warm, and breathing, even if also hard and unyielding in a non-sexual sort of way.

Silence fell, as Helen waited for Abby to speak and Abby's adrenaline rush had worn off and the blonde was finally looking around their whereabouts. They were standing in a building that vaguely resembled the old, pre-Prospero™ ARC, but mostly hollowed and replaced with some research tables, some pieces of equipment in the distance, several rooms (mostly closed-off), a large number of clones (one or two of whom were standing next to her and Helen with light machine guns of some sort), Helen, and-

Slowly, Abby turned around, and a tattooed giantess of a woman, armed with some sort of a spear, grinned down on her, far too literally for comfort.

"Hi!" the giantess said, revealing teeth that had been filed. "I'm Kurangaituku, the Fairy of the Mist, and you are?"

Slowly, Abby turned back to face Helen – even she was better than this giantess with a carnivorous grin and an eagle's eyes. "What happens to me now?" she asked quietly.

Helen looked genuinely thoughtful and not mocking for once. "Tell me, young lady, what are the last things that you remember?" she asked, also quietly.

"The last thing? April and me were fighting, she slammed something into me, and sent me towards the manifested time anomaly," Abby muttered, as she rubbed the place that April had hit last, and something fell from that spot of her blouse with a clink. "What's that?"

'That' proved to be a locket of some sort, vaguely similar to the crystal pyramid Helen had used to infiltrate the ARC for the last time as 'Eve'...only it was round, and opaquely black, like a piece of obsidian instead.

"Well now!" the giantess' hand shot out and grabbed the locket very, very carefully. "Helen, now how would a cur like April get her hands on one of Geraldine's treasures?"

"One answer comes to mind – bloody, stupid, Johnson!" Helen exhaled. "Apparently, stealing the map hadn't been enough for her; she had to plunder an entire cache! Kuro, can you please go to her and imply that it is time to come clean? Feel free to use your special little touches – but only as a last resort and only if she does not co-operate. I, meanwhile, will handle things in the 20th century."

"Roger," the giantess – Kuro – nodded, all humour completely gone from her and vanished in a flash of a time anomaly.

Abby blinked. With Kuro gone, odds had improved in her favour just a tiny, little bit. "What's going to happen to me?" she asked quietly.

"I don't know," Helen admitted. "You shouldn't even be here, actually. Thanks to Johnson, April got some very dangerous futuristic technology, and she used it on you to send you to death in her stead."

"To death?"

"Yes, to die by being drawn into a time anomaly and I would rather not talk about it," Helen continued, almost ignoring the younger woman. "Anyways, April should've been here instead, and that would've been a totally different situation, and it will be – yet. As for you, I honestly do not know. I will just put you into a biological stasis chamber-"

"What? No!" Abby shouted, as she had learned from Connor's Star Wars trivia that stasis chambers were nothing good. "Please!"

"Well, in that case... look. We have no reason to trust each other, but if you swear not to double-cross me, backstab, or use me as Leek did, I will take you with me to the 20th century to help me fix your mess, as well as deal with Iymrith's half-breed. Do we have a deal?"

Abby had no idea who or what was Iymrith, but... "Only if you promise to do the same to me," she replied firmly.

For a moment that was both brief and long the two women looked into each other's eyes... and then they shook their hands.

\\\

"Is everybody out?" Matt busily asked everybody else.

"No!" Connor yelled, desperately. "Abby is still gone! We need to go back!"

"We can't!" Matt yelled back, almost as desperately, "Philip's time anomaly is tearing it all apart! We must stop it!"

A loud, almost despondent hiss of pain cut their argument short, as April Leonard crawled out of the "New Dawn" building, her legs trailing brokenly behind her, leaving a pair of bloody trails, followed eagerly by several pterosaurs, which opted to follow her on foot rather than on wing.

"Please," April looked at the two men and Emily. "H-Help me..."

And then she fainted.

End Chapter 1