Hey there, if you read chapter one when I first posted it I suggest you read it again because I've mutilated it :P Anyway, thanks for reading and don't forget to vote!
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Dammit.
Here I am stuck in an old Spanish prison cell because Headquarters couldn’t get me an accurate map of the city as it was in 1492. I popped up right during the start of the famous witch hunts. Thank you, crappy management. Now how the hell was I going to talk to Isabella and Ferdinand?
A door slams somewhere down the damp corridor. Heavy footsteps and the clattering of weapons echo towards me as a guard begins his rounds.
“Excuse me! Sir? Can you tell me when my trial will be? I have an appointment with some very important people.”
“Quiet you filthy spawn of Satan! Your trial will be whenever the Lord wills it to be.”
Damn, I’d hoped civility would warm them up to me. I guess I’ll just have to perform a little shock and awe improvisation while they burn me at the stake.
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“This man, Mr. Quincy Time, is guilty of the following transgressions: witchcraft, devil worshiping, performing black magic.”
Man, this sucks. I finally get a more serious gig and I have to go and get stuck screwing with the witch trials when I should be establishing myself in the royal court. I have three days to find a good identity and start talking with the royalty.
“For these crimes he has been sentenced to be burned at the stake. Light the fire!”
Men in dark robes shuffle towards the unlit bonfire beneath me with blazing torches. One by one they light the dehydrated logs. Almost as if they’d been soaked in gasoline, the wood bursts into bright, angry flame, singing my leg hair. The temperature of the surrounding air rises to an uncomfortable level. Show time.
Closing my eyes I concentrate on the air around me. Slowly, the heat dissipates as I bend it outward, toward the onlookers. Not noticing anything wrong, they all start slowly backing away from the fire as the heat becomes too much for comfort.
Finally, the flames have reached a height and intensity through which my audience can’t see me. Keeping my eyes shut to avoid damaging them by staring at the bright light, I manage to blink myself from the post, to my bedroom, then, back to the same square but off to the side and slightly down an abandoned ally. No one has noticed anything. Score!
Now, off to find the royal courts.
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Groaning, I rolled over to look at my alarm clock. 9:17 AM. Great, I’ve missed the bus, now I’ll be late. Rolling out of bed, I stumble toward the bathroom.
Convincing the King and Queen to accept Columbus’s wild ideas was an interesting and exhausting ordeal. They never tell you in the history books just how crazy the guy sounded. He reminded me of Captain Ahab from Moby Dick; an older guy that was starting to lose it.
The King kept laughing Christopher off saying, “He could probably do it if he weren’t losing his mind.” Queen Isabella wanted the, “loon thrown in a jail cell to gather his wits about himself.” It took every debate class I’ve ever taken to finally convince Ferdinand to give the guy a shot. Isabella eventually consented, but grudgingly.
Dressed and groomed for a day at the office I made my way downstairs and out to the street to catch the next bus. What I find is enough to wake me up from a coma.
Everything is frozen. Taxis parked in the middle of the street, people stopped in mid step, a bicyclist paused an inch above the ground as they rode off the sidewalk. There is no life and yet no death in the odd sight before me. Seattle is silent.
No. Someone is breathing. I can hear someone breathing.
“Hello? Who are you? What’s going on here? If you are the one that did this then you should know I wasn’t informed of this freeze zone. You are in violation of code 10.5.2. Name yourself, agent!”
Laughter bounces off the solemn sky scrapers. “You think I’m an agent? That’s a good one. No agent I know of, besides of course your egotistical leader can produce a freeze zone this large. Besides, look to your left, there’s a man there you might recognize,” the mysterious man’s voice echoes down the street. Carefully, I turn my head in the indicated direction.
“Oh my god. Dad?! Dad!” Panicked, I run to my father who is frozen in the process of checking his phone. This is wrong. Dad is an experienced, senior agent. How could he be caught in a time freeze? From what I’ve been taught, we are incapable of being caught in them. If an agent lives, or works in an area that is going to be frozen for some sort of project or training that agent must be notified so they don’t go ape-shit thinking they’re being attacked by rogue jumpers and so they don’t accidentally change anything while the normal peoples’ time is stopped.
Well shit, of course I have to deal with a rogue right after a long jump with no time to recover. That’s just fantastic.
“You little piece of shit, who the hell do you think you are? Show yourself, you spineless offspring of an invertebrate!”
“Ha, a little redundant don’t you think? You never were good at insulting people, little brother.”
You know that phrase you read in a lot of drama stories, “it felt like time stopped”? Well, I was having that feeling but since time was already stopped I don’t really know how to explain it. My heart slowed, my stomach felt like it was coated in ice, and the hair on the nape of my neck began to prickle, as the one man I’d never hoped to see again stepped out of the immobile crowd.
“Trey?”
