Helen
All characters belong to Impossible Pictures.
1.
The good – no, the best thing about having a non-linear life was that after you die once upon a time, you can then weather the fall-back, looking at all of your chronological clones and decide:
"I need a vacation."
And that was what Helen Cutter was doing – having a vacation, not too far from the edge of the great northern glacier, watching daily the hunts of the short-faced bears and American scimitar-toothed cats on the herds of the great mastodons that wandered past through the coniferous woods and the prehistoric – well, currently contemporary – giant beavers that built huts in the local lakes and rivers. The weather was cool and crisp, the gnats and other biting flies were easily chased away by the bonfire smoke and liberal applications of red ochre, and the winter was months away – a time period long enough for Helen not even undertake her specialized tricks to improve her lot in life, for it was currently that nice indeed!
And yet, despite all the peace, and quiet, and serenity, Helen felt that something was missing from her life, a hole that she had desperately tried to dam-up with her let's-get-rid-of-humanity project – a project that had failed spectacularly over three million years ago in the past when she died and had been forced to admit that she...
...that she would gladly give up almost everything that she had created in order to bring Stephen back – but she couldn't, she wouldn't dare, for Stephen was a bright young man while she was a woman who had hit the line of her menopause a long while ago, and that time was moving ever further into the past still, thus it wouldn't be fair to have Stephen to be tied to her-
As unwanted and unwelcomed thoughts rushed through Helen's head and the meteor shower from the Orion's cluster rushed before her line of sight, filling her heart even further with loneliness, she reckoned that she ought to move – but when and where?
The late Triassic time period? No, what was she thinking? She hated that time even more than she had hated the late Permian time period, in no small part because she had almost died there. This, naturally, had put late Triassic into her 'least favourite time period' category, beaten only by the late Eocene...
No, she wasn't going to go to the late Triassic. Maybe she should actually go forwards, not backwards – say, just a few thousand years to New Zealand of the Maori: she and Kurangaituku had never really finished their 'interaction'...
As Helen was leaning more and more towards going to New Zealand and acquire some new company for herself, a new sound resonated in the silence of the early dawn – the sound of the alarm at the other end of one of her chronological tunnels, the one leading to the late Cretaceous sea coast.
Helen's frown deepened – she never cared much for the late Cretaceous: you get some of the finer details wrong, and you end right under the meteorite... yet the alarm was worth checking out, for should something like a tyrannosaur hatchling come up the tunnel, she'd have another mess on her hands...
And so, Helen Cutter went through the time to the late Cretaceous.
2.
Throughout her long travels across various lands and times, Helen had hit on the idea of leaving supply caches close to her usual time anomaly sites, not counting the human era (there she would just usually crash at her former apartment with Nick, the latter being blissfully unaware of her doing that) and thus as soon as she was able to achieve it, that was what she did.
Consequently, as soon as Helen had arrived in the late Cretaceous, she ended up in a small coastal cave, albeit one far enough from the high tide line, stocked with a small food supply (mostly energy bars and the like) as well as a medical supply and a couple of spare clothes sets. In short, it was neat, and orderly, and no representative of the contemporary fauna was mucking around, messing it up – but then, what had set off the alarm?
A loud commotion from outside clearly provided a clue to Helen's musings. Still tentative – one never knew when one will run into a tyrannosaur when one is in the late Cretaceous – Helen ventured outside...
...and found herself almost on top of a starting feeding frenzy. As usual when it came to feeding frenzies on the Cretaceous coastal territories, the hesperornis were the main driving force there. Black, flightless seabirds as long as a man was tall, their long beaks still had quite developed teeth, and their small brains still had knowledge of how to use them. In short, as far as birds go, the hesperornis are nasty and should be kept as far away as possible.
On top of the hesperornis, there were several pterosaurs flying above the flightless birds. Their beaks were toothless, but sharp, and the muscles powering their jaws and necks were strong enough to tear away strips of meat, especially one that was slightly decomposing long enough to sate their appetites.
Flightless birds and flying pterosaurs... for now, actually, that was that. The feeding frenzy had yet started, so the bigger predators – the dinosaurs and the marine reptiles – hadn't yet had a chance to catch a whiff of whatever the smaller carnivores were eating...
Just what were those smaller carnivores eating – or preparing to eat anyways? Feeling now more idly curious rather than concerned, Helen carefully edged closer and took a look.
And stared, her eyes actually opening wide. Lying on the prehistoric shore, in the middle of the rapidly encroaching hesperornis and descending pterosaurs, was a human.
A human that was very well familiar to Helen.
A human that was badly bleeding below the waist – and not because of beaks, whether toothed or not.
A human that was going to die unless Helen stepped in and did something.
For a few long heartbeats Helen was very tempted to just turn around and leave – that certainly counted as 'something'... but then she realized that she could not, and so she opted for a different choice of action instead:
Picking up a rock, Helen lashed out and hit one of the pterosaurs on the delicate wing bones, causing it to fall down on top of several flightless seabirds. Immediately, they attacked the downed flier, and the rest of their cohorts followed, with the pterosaurs attacking them instead.
But Helen ignored their squawks and squabbles as well as the developing battle. Instead, she walked over to the still badly bleeding Jenny Lewis and carried her back to her local supply cache...