Lost in Time

volume 6 Part 2: Luddite Lords

Part 2: Luddite Lords

A breeze picked up speed in the vicinity, blowing through the wild sprout of tropical grasses. Nia and Walter looked like two fifth dimensional ants made of quarks crawling on a rudimentary 2-D sheet of poorly processed paper. An aerial view of the fifth millennium travelers as they headed upslope revealed the gross mismatch with the raw terrain of this archaic island.

"What do you mean we are here to stop the end of the world?" Walter intoned as he picked his way up the dusty gravel work of the single street of Adamstown, his eyebrow arced, a series of folds furrowing across his forehead.

Three or four conspicuous establishments lined up the sides of the wide street. A humongous stone building with an ancient alcove, polished doors and climbing flowers in heart-shaped vases sat to their left, its arced windows cast with tints of blue-yellow glass. If Nia had to guess, that would be a place of worship.

Well, it had been a while since she visited a place where they still did that.

A wooden pub with a broken sign dangling down the gable over the patio and the smell of mold and age isolated itself a couple of yards down the street, seemingly keeping its distance from the church. There was another structure, smaller than the first two, strong wooden doors with bright green paint across its walls. Nia couldn't place it; there were no labels, no emblems, and no logos. She tore her gaze from it with a curious scoff.

"I think the aliens of the Shadow World in the HII Cloud might have done something to me," She started, meeting Walter's bedazzled gaze, her face taking on a hue of gravitas. "Think about it, they kidnap you for no reason, use you as bait to get me to their planet, allow me to find a planet cloaked from the Federation all this time, and make it a child's play pinging your location. Does that look like a Type V civilization to you? They can't possibly be that dumb. It was a plan, one that was executed meticulously." She breathed into the warm afternoon air, sighing to let her own words sink in.

A guy came by, slender, dressed in something resembling Walter's colorless pants and an old, threadbare shirt. He was walking a goat. Nia had to stare at the relic of an animal for a second. Those had gone extinct on Earth during the Ice Age.

He mumbled some gibberish in an English-like dialect before shuffling off after his bleating goat. Nia wore a blank expression. She had no inkling what he'd mumbled, a shuddering sense of dejavu washing over her as she recalled the weird guy she met when they first entered Tia's Empire in her not-so-dreamy dreamland. She looked to Walter, expecting him to know something. As always he did.

"Pitkern. It is a marriage between English and some dead island language," he replied to the question she had written all over her face.

"So what did he say?" She sought.

"Oh, was there something on my face that gave you the impression I understood anything?" He began; getting Nia's faintly peeled lips curling up slightly in a baby smile. "I have no friggin' idea. I am still at the greetings stage of learning the language. And he used some pretty serious words in there." Nia chuckled at this, hearing the sound of her own voice sail through the simmering air fed with afternoon breezes.

"Let's say these aliens really did all that to get you here, which is a mile-wide stretch mark you, because you could have died a hundred different ways. Why didn't they just abduct you and put you on a ship, open a temporal portal and send you screaming here with an instruction manual?" He supplied, making tons of sense.

"I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle here, Cap. I've still got some holes to plug-well lots of holes. But it just doesn't add up that a highly advanced civilization would be so sloppy. I think they have an inkling of the future, seeing as they can manipulate time with such deftness. If it were a coin toss, I'd wager that us landing here is more planned that accidental." She searched Walter's face for some sort of meeting of the minds. Well, he was pragmatic, Walter, a hard man to convince.