The affair of the train
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.
Early Triassic, 242 MYA
The morning dawned loud and clear, and the local dicynodonts were already busy rooting in the soil for mosses, tubers and roots.
"Ah, the prehistoric at its near finest," Helen told her gorgonopsid companion even as the latter chased away some of the local therocephalians away from their camp. "I wonder what shall we do today?"
The question was rhetorical, but train that came thundering and sparking through a time anomaly that manifested halfway between Helen's camp and local ravine was not.
"...I guess that answers my question," Helen said after a brief pause.
Modern times
Claudia Brown woke as usual – alone and to the sound of doves cooing outside her window. One may assume that these birds were fine companions to be awakened by, but after a while they get tedious, even annoying – and the fact that they were also loud enough to wake up the dead played no small part in that annoyance as well.
This time, though, Claudia had been awakened no so much by the doves, as by the telephone, which was ringing way too loudly for her liking. "Yes?" she spoke into the receiver. "Who is it?"
"Brown," came the all-too-familiar voice of her supervisor. "I need you to go and sort it out: there appears to be some sort of an incident in the metro..."
Early Triassic, 242 MYA
Inside the train there was absolute chaos, but so far Helen didn't smell any blood. There was smoke, though, and that was to be expected: passing through the time anomaly had fried the train's electronic systems and its wiring, reducing the train to a pile of scrap parts, essentially, albeit very large and compact ones, in this case.
"Who's in charge of here? Where's the driver?" Helen yelled loudly, as her animal companion sat on its haunches and emitted a loud, stretched-out howl. "Well?"
There was a moment of silence, some rather frenzied and disorganized movement, and out came a young man, looking rather worse for wear and therefore thinking slower than the majority of the train's riders. He was also about as likely being charge of them, as a fox being in charge of a hedgehog army – more of a scapegoat than anything else.
Fortunately for the young man in question, Helen never cared much for scapegoats, but always preferred to go for the real case – not the young man on this occasion. Instead, she sighed and looked him straight in eye.
"All right, here's what we're going to do."
"Yes?" the young man didn't appear to be too scared, actually, more like curious – very much more.
"We're going to sort your companions into an orderly queue, starting with those who are immediately with, you," Helen said calmly. "Incidentally, what time it was on your side?"
"Early morning," came the reply. "The rush hour hasn't started yet."
"Hurray for small mercies, then," Helen muttered, and was surprised, when the young man suddenly turned around and yelled loudly:
"All right, everybody! Form a line now, or else things will be very bad! Move it, people!"
Next to Helen, the gorgonopsid snarled.
Quickly, the people began to form a line.
Modern times
Murphy's Law, when you think about it, is always there, hovering around your shoulder, thought Claudia Brown. When you really need to get somewhere, and it is too early for traffic jams, up come road construction works. There were a lot of them lately, to be sure, but still, it took her almost an extra half an hour to get there – to wherever the blood-awful scene might be.
Only it wasn't. Certainly, it was awful with plenty of emergency and first aid vehicles hovering around the scene, but there were a lot less hurt people than Claudia had expected, and that was good. That was very good, for no matter how callous Claudia felt lately, she still wasn't far down enough to disregard other peoples' lives as unimportant, and... why the majority's attention was attracted to a mismatched couple that was followed... what were these things?
Feeling more empowered than ever before, Claudia made her way towards the two strangers.
/
"Explain to me, why you wanted me to come?" Helen asked nonchalantly, carefully observing the sights and sounds of London at its most chaotic at the same time. "You had the situation well in hand."
"Yes, well," her interlocutor shrugged, slightly guiltily, "you're the best thing that has happened to me in a while-"
"Pardon?"
"Not like that!" was the hurried reply. "It's just that I've flunked my thesis, may be about to flunk my university career as well, and to see you and your, um, companions, was the most exciting thing that has happened to me in a long while."
"My condolences about the thesis," Helen nodded, remembering her own misadventures in the university. "What was it about?"
"Life on Earth and aliens," the latter admitted guiltily. "Not the best idea, in hindsight..."
"Excuse me," a blonde of roughly Helen's age came over them. "Claudia Brown of the Home Office."
"Connor Temple. University student," the young man replied. "Soon to be an ex-student, probably..."
"Helen. Just Helen," Helen began to speak when a terrible groan came from the deep within the now closed off subway, and her gorgonopsid emitted a howl. "That's not good."
"You can say that again," Claudia echoed her to Helen's surprise. "What has happened down there, anyways?"
"I think," Helen sounded rather sympathetic, to her surprise, "that it is something you need to see for yourself, I think."
/
Claudia most certainly did – but if she could've helped, she'd rather not. The subway was never a particularly savoury place (unless you're riding the train), but a broken down train and train tracks covered with copious amounts of rust – too copious for a well-run subway...
"Where's the glowing portal that started all of this?" Connor sounded even more confused than what Claudia felt.
"It sheared the train in two and vanished," Helen added dryly, "see?"
Stumbling (the other two had to steady her), Claudia made her way to the train's front – and it had vanished into thin air, leaving not even a trace of rust behind it.
"A glowing portal did all this?" she asked incredulously.
"Yes," Helen nodded, thoughtfully. "It must've – of course, I'm no specialist..."
"But you lived on the other side-" Connor said, startled.
"And I still wasn't able to make heads or tails of these time anomalies," Helen shook her head. "I certainly hadn't encountered one that had caught a train, either."
"But you expected that something like this would happen?" Connor sounded slightly accusing.
"No. But I was expecting something bad to happen – just on the general principles," Helen shot back, sounding more bemused than insulted.
As the other two bantered, Claudia became aware of some movement in one of the darkened sides – and as she shone her flashlight there, she saw that it was one of Helen's animals, harassing something else all the same.
"Um, Helen, what is this?" she asked the other woman.
"A dicynodont," the latter replied after a brief pause. "They're plant-eaters, and about as dangerous as domestic pigs are. One must've followed as here – are we going to keep it?"
The pig-like lizard creature approached Claudia and rubbed against her legs in a very cute way. "We're definitely keeping it," Claudia said firmly – she had been thinking about getting a pet for a while now – "and speaking of us, how would you two like to potentially gain employment at the home office?"
Connor and Helen just exchanged thoughtful looks. "I think," Helen said slowly, "that we're living in interesting times. And you?"
Connor nodded. "We're in."
End