Disclaimer:
All characters portrayed engaging in sexual activity are 18 years of age or older. Actual historical figures or living people represented are done strictly for context and humour, I lay no claim to them. If you had trouble following the plots of Pulp Fiction or Four Rooms because of the back-and-forth timelines, just turn around and leave now, as this fic will make you angry. As always, critiques and reviews all welcome, illiterate flames will be snickered at. Enjoy!
*****
Chapter 3- Ain't Nobody Got Time For That Shit!
Mark and Becky sat in the small cottage, looking around in wonder. They were still in Seventeenth Century France, but found themselves surrounded by technologies that they hadn't even heard of. The walls were lined with clocks, some of which were mechanical, some seemed to be digital or binary, while others told time in ways they couldn't fathom. Sitting across from them at the stout, round oaken table, Chester Edgerton smoked a pipe and observed them casually.
"How... how can you have this all out on display?" Mark asked, still gaping. "I mean, isn't it against the rules to have this sort of tech from the future lying around where the locals might bump into it?"
"That's the beauty of it, m'boy," he said cheerfully, exhaling a cloud of smoke. "They can't see it."
"Well, I get it if you try to restrict entry to your house," Mark pressed, wanting to understand. "But what if you're gone and bandits break in? Becks and I can account for banditry in this day and age, for sure."
"Mayhap," the man replied. "But I brought you through the door that leads to my actual house. The front door, the one the local peasantry sees, leads into a simple cottage, typical of the period, and owned by a pudgy man of indeterminate nationality."
"Your... house is in two places at once?" Mark asked, trying to understand.
"No, it's the same place," Chester answered simply. "Two different times, however. We're sitting in my actual abode, Twenty-First Century."
Mark shook his head. "That's some weird Tardis shit right there."
"Only at first." Chester allowed.
"I notice you have all your windows shut," Becky remarked. "You said we're in the Twenty-First Century, but I take from further ahead than Mark and I are from, so you're not showing us?"
"Clever girl," mused the man, smiling. "While I won't absolutely stop you from looking or even going outside, I would warn you that if you do and see something you don't like, you're committing yourself to that future, no matter how hard you try to undo it."
"We'll stay put then," she said readily. "You were kind enough to bring us here and sort of explain how we might acquire goods in the timestream?"
He nodded. "I know it might seem counter-intuitive, but the simple fact of the matter is that if people are going to insist on time travelling, the least they can do is be well-prepared for it so they don't hurt themselves or others."
He leaned forward. "The first question you need to ask yourself is, why are you so intent on time-travelling to begin with? Is it simple curiosity? Are you planning to make a living somehow? Are you just trying to get laid?"
He looked at Mark during this last question and the young man blushed, while Becky giggled and patted his hand. "Mark was a dud in Physics in his last year of high school," she explained. "Come to think of it, he was in little or no danger of getting into any post-secondary education facility."
"Thanks." Mark muttered.
"But, then he found his time machine, something called a Holmes Field Device, and he resolve to go back in time a few months and convince me to give him an A in Physics with the promise of earth-shaking sex."
"This story sounds worse every time I hear it." Mark complained.
"Fortunately, I acquiesced, rather than disemboweling him for breaking into my home, and not only did we become lovers, but now we're adventuring the timestream together."
"Hmmm, a teacher and a student, eh?" mused the man, smiling at them as he smoked. "Teachers and students are plentiful, of course, but they're usually from the far, far future and on very strictly-controlled excursions into the past. Hands-on history classes, if you will."
"That makes history sound kinda fun." Mark said.
"Oh, I daresay it is," agreed Chester. "Nothing quite as exciting as going back to the Cretaceous Period and taking a ride on the back of a trained Styracosaurus. Or watching Dromer races."
"Isn't that screwing with the timeline?" Becky inquired. "I mean, humans weren't around for another sixty-three million years following the demise of the dinosaurs."
"It's all very carefully regulated on remote islands," Chester explained. "It does nothing to mess with the ecosystem and the specimens are trained to interact with humans, for the most part."
"Riding one of those big horned dinosaurs would be a kick." Mark mused, grinning.
"You've already got a perfectly good horn I like to ride," Becky giggled, squeezing his hand again. "Besides, this is where our host tells us that it won't be possible for us any time soon."
"You're a very perceptive young lady," he allowed. "We can't have just anyone mucking up the timestream, you know. It's especially difficult when people who lived before time travel was commonly accepted try to get involved. They inevitably get exposed to technologies they shouldn't be aware of, or events that weren't known during their own time..."
"I'll give you a tiny example," he said, leaning forward now, as if he was confiding a secret. "Have you heard of the Tunguska Incident?"
"Sure, the Tunguska region in Siberia, 1908," Becky answered, nodding. "A large meteor slammed into the ground, creating a blast equal to sixty megatons and flattening everything for nearly a hundred miles around."
"No, that's what you
need
to think," he corrected, pointing the stem of his pipe toward them. "It was, in fact, an advanced weapon that was stolen from a future date, and before temporal agents could recover it, the thieves blew it up to cover their escape. Granted, there are people in your time who have conspiracy theories about nuclear blast, nearly forty years before the first atomic tests, but they're wrong as well. It wasn't a nuclear device, simply a weapon with an incredibly high conventional yield by your age's standards."
"So... why can you tell us this now?" Becky asked.
He grinned and spread out his arms in a gesture of farce. "Who would believe you?"
***
"So how did you know that we were time travellers?" Mark asked as they followed their host and guide through the woods.
"Well, I heard snippets of your conversation," Chester said as he led the way. "But to be honest, even though your outfits might pass with locals for 'reasonably authentic', you couldn't possibly hide your origins from a fellow time-traveller. Mark claimed to be Spanish, he doesn't look at all Spanish, certainly not from this era. Miss Rebecca is remarkably tall for a woman."
"Well there's something I don't hear very often back home!" she giggled.
"And you're both in strangely good health, with unblemished skin and full heads of hair," Chester added. "I was relatively certain, and then I heard you discussing your relative inexperience, so I sought to introduce myself."
