It was a bright and sunny day in Maiduppe City. The streets were bustling, and the birds were singing. James, an intern of a newly assembled police force, was staring out of his window daydreaming. The city may have been bursting with life, but it was a slow day for the Time Corps. There had been very few calls to the main office. That was good, in the sense that there was no crime to be taken care of, but it was also bad, because the members of the force were bored out of their minds. Suddenly, the door to the office that James was using burst open. It was Jak. “Get ready for your first mission.” Jak said. “We leave tonight.”
James was excited. He had been wondering what their missions were like for quite some time now, and tonight, he would finally find out. By the time he was told he could go home, it was 8:00 PM. When he arrived at his house, he quickly unlocked the door, and darted up to his disorganized room where he scurried around looking for his vest and handgun. Having found them, he ran back to his car and sped off to the Time Corps HQ. Upon arriving, it was 8:58. He ran into the office’s lobby, where the other four members of his team were waiting on a platform around a metal pillar. He stood in an empty spot on the platform, and Jak pushed a button which started their descent to their time machine, upon which they had given the nickname “The Traveler”.
“Where are we going?” asked James.
“Ancient Greece,” answered Jak. “We’re going to start a war.”
“Start a war?” inquired James. “Why would we want to do that?”
“I’ll explain everything when we get there.” said Jak.
When they had reached the bottom of their path, Jak opened the door to The Traveler, and one by one, they stepped in, until everyone was inside. It was a lot bigger on the inside than it seemed on the outside. On the outside, it looked to be about as big as an outhouse, but on the inside, it was roughly as big as James’s office. Jak set the time period to 1200 BC and the location to Ancient Greece, and instantly, the inside of the machine morphed into what looked like the inside of an Ancient Greek temple, complete with enormous pillars, statues of various Greek gods, and altars in front of each statue. James marveled at the machine. A few seconds before the transformation, it looked like random pieces of scrap metal that had been haphazardly thrown together by underpaid demoralized construction workers. How it had transformed as quickly as it had, he had no idea, but he was too focused on his the appearance of his surroundings to think about the origin of them. After Jak had set up everything in order to travel, which triggered the transportation of the team members inside the machine to the exact temple that the inside of the machine had looked like.
There was a slight problem. Out of the five people that had entered The Traveler, only two of them made it into the temple. James, and a tall blonde girl in her twenties, Olivia. They had never really talked much, but that was about to change.
“Ugh,” she sighed. “Jak must have forgotten to turn off the new shuffle feature.”
“Shuffle feature?” James said. “What’s that?”
“It transports different people from the machine to different parts of the location that you’re going to. Fortunately, it doesn’t transport them to different time periods.” answered Olivia. “We learned our lesson with that one in Rome.”
“Right.” said James. “Well, what now?”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to get in touch with Jak. The down side to the shuffle feature is that we can’t yet transport people from one return station to another one, so we’ll be without Jak, Hunter, and Emma until we meet up with them without any sort of technology.”
She then fished around in her pocket and pulled out what seemed to be a watch, but instead of telling the time, it had a screen where the numbers and hands would be, and a switch on the side. She handed it to James.
