#quantumunstableman

And then Kink and G'fon came stumbling over after me. "Oh great a whole gang of drunk cosplayers," the man said as he walked away, shaking his head.

"Are we back?" G'fon asked. 

"It looks like it," I replied. "Or at least close enough. This certainly looks like our home dimension. And if that's true, then I can say pretty confidently that we're awfully close to the time we left.”

All that was left was to verify it. As three weirdos it was surprisingly easy to get someone to lend us a cell phone. I called up my home line because it was the only number I knew. "Jamal? It's Frank. I need you come pick us up. We may look surprising." 

"Oh, hey, Frank," he replied. "I didn't even realize you were out. Sure, I'll come get you.”

Jamal did not look at all surprised when he picked us up in his van. "Having fun without me?" He said as the side door swing open.

"Trust me you wouldn't have wanted to be there. Besides, you were there for more of it than you think." 

"Huh?" 

"Time travel." 

"Ah. Gotcha."

We piled in the can and Jamal took off. "So now what are you two going to do since your time is not looking so good?" I asked. 

"We are seeing," I told her. "We're waiting for her to finish scanning the area for anomalies. As soon as she finds one, she'll open her eyes and tell us what's blocking, but if don't want to wait for her you can just fly off. No one is stopping you."

"Geez, Frank, " she said, "You're so impatient.  How many times do I have to tell you to just sit down and relax. We're going to just sit here and see what this weird lady can find. I mean, seriously, give the poor lady some time."

I let it go at that. There was no more need to pile it on. I think, I hope, Kink got the point. And so we waited for another twenty minutes when Akaal finally reopened her eyes.  "I didn't find anything," she said. "At least nothing that could be this temporal blockers. Are we sure they exist?" 

"Well we can't leave this time period," G'Fon replied, "so, yeah, we're pretty sure."

"Do they have to be in this time period?" she asked. "As they work temporally can they just be in fixed points along the timestream?" 

"I have no idea," I replied. "Could that be possible that they left in a few specific points in time to make them harder to remove?"

"How should I know?" Kink asked. "Do I look like a temporal mechanic?" "

How could that be true?" G'Fon said. "They can't do that. How could we get out of here if they did that? We'd be stuck here!"

"That's probably the point," I told him "they didn't want time travelers. Without someone to regulate the system, to make sure it wasn't abused, everything must enter gotten out of control. So this was the only way they could take it back ."

to be continued here next week

"The key is for us to get somewhere where we can regain our footing," G'Fon continued. "Somewhere we're not all worried about what horrible thing is going to happen. Once we get somewhere safe then we can worry about what we'll do with the rest of our lives."

"Well, you're safe here," Akaal said. "Or at least as safe as you could be anywhere else in this dimension. For the time being, that is." 

"Very reassuring, " I told her.

"So how are we going to find the temporal blockers?" Kink asked. "Because that's priority one." 

"What do we know about them?" Akaal asked. 

 "Nothing," I told her. "Except they're blocking us from leaving. We jumped here from my past and now we can't leave. That's about all we know.  We're not picking up any kind of transmission from them, right?" 

"Yes," Kink said. "There's no telltale sign from them which makes me think there may be many of them."

"I can search for any unnatural blockages in the dimensional pathways," Akaal said.  "But I don't know if that will also include temporal ones. I've never tried. As far as I was aware transport between the eras was impossible.”

"Well, we've got to do something," I said. "We cant just stay here forever. We don't belong here. We have lives to live." 

"All right. I'll see what I can do."

Akaal folded her legs underneath her and began floating in the air. She seemed to go into a trance and began to hum.

 "What is she doing?" Kink asked.

 "She's looking for a disturbance in the force," G'fon replied. "What do you think she's doing."

to be continued here next week

"Or we monitor the authority's activities so that we can respond in the way we will need to," the letters now read. "If we are to defeat them, we have no other choice but to do so."

"I don't trust them," Kink said. 

 "Clearly," G'fon replied. 

 "Who do you trust, Kink?" I asked. "You don't trust anybody." 

"It's kept me alive this long, hasn't it?"

"We've broken the timeline multiple time, who knows what's kept anyone alive. But trusting nobody is unlikely to be it. We're stuck in this era and we need to find out somehow why. So far this is our only option."  

"Fine, Frank, you want to go bumbling into the Lion's den? " Kink replied. "Then we'll go, but don't start whining to me when it turns out they're horrible people who want to do bad things to us because I already know."

We followed the drone back toward the habitat, but it did not stop when we entered the structure, it continued onward. It did not stop when we reached an empty elevator shaft, it continued downward. It did not stop when we reached the bottom of the shaft, it continued forward. We followed the drone to a group of grimy looking people. 

"Hello," one of them said. "I am Deseree. We are the Counter Party. We work in opposition to the ruling class. You said you are not from here and need help returning home. We want to help you."

"Great," Kink said. "How do you plan on doing that?" 

"You could try to me a little more courteous," I told her. 

"They say they want to help us, let them help us, Frank." 

to be continued here next week

"Frank, you can't blame me for everything that goes wrong," Kink said. "Everyone’s been in a bad situation and just because not everyone is still with us doesn't mean it's all my fault. We can move on. We should move on. We have to move on or we're never getting out of here."

"Fine," I agreed. "Let's get out of here. Now do we have a strategy outside of shooting the place up?" 

"Why don't we have this elevator take us to the bottom?" G'Fon asked. 

"Because that's where they'll be waiting for us.”

"So then what do we do? If we get out anywhere inside the building, it won't matter that they're not there because we'll still be inside the building. If we want to get out, we have to actually get out."

"Yes," Kink said. "But all we have to do is get outside the building. We don't have to touch the ground. We just have to get outside their temporal travel blockers. Once we're outside, we're home free. Problem solved!"

"So your plan, let me understand this," I said, "is to bust through one of those jump out into the open air and hope we can hop back in time before we splatter on the ground? Is that correct?"

"Do you have a better plan?"

"Find an actual exit seems like a pretty solid plan to me. Besides can you even bust through one of these walls?" 

"Maybe not in the elevator, but once we get back outside just you watch him me."

"We have to figure out where we're going. They're going to take control of this elevator sooner or later," G'fon said. "We're lucky they haven't already." 

"He's right," Kink said, stopping the elevator. "We've been on this thing too long. We need to switch it up."

The elevator door opened and I was relieved to see that there was no one waiting for us. "Ok," I said. "Now what?" 

"We keep moving," Kink replied. "Don't let them catch up to us. Look for weaknesses. There has to be way someway to get out of this building."

We started moving, looking for a way out. There were no windows, but plenty of doors. Unfortunately, we couldn't get any of the doors to open. Either they were all locked or the technology to open them was beyond our ability to crack. Kink tried shooting them, but that didn't work either. "There has to be a way out of here," I said. 

 "I'm open to more options, Frank," she replied. "Because the only two I see left are keep wandering these halls or turning ourselves in."

"Turn ourselves in?" I repeated. "They wanted to kill us. How is that a solution?" 

"Would you rather just wander these halls forever?"

"Then die? Yes, let's wander for more than ten minutes before we line up in front of the guillotine."

to be continued here next week

Time police came streaming into what remained of the room. "Temporal anatomy detected! Attempted Paradox in progress!" They shouted as they swarmed around the cloaked figures. The figures continued strike out everything around them, but the time police kept coming. Particle by Particle they began to systematically eliminate the cloaked figures from the timestream.  

"We need to act quickly," Kink said. "When they're done with them, they'll come for us and then they'll be nothing standing in their way."  She fled toward the far wall. It was shredded to pieces with a final blast, Kink tore the vault door off its hinges. "We got it," she said and flew inside. I had been expecting some kind of scroll or disclosure drive, but instead we found a fissure in time.

Kink rushed forward without any hesitation. I was prepared to start counseling caution, but I was too slow, we were already inside, falling down the tunnel of space/time. It seemed to last forever, time stretching itself, wrapping itself into knots. 

 And them we were somewhere else, somewhen else. We were in a coffee shop. Judging by the music and the attire, we were in the mid 1990s. Is this where it all began? Here? There was flannel and there was incredibly baggy jean shorts and there was long hair that covered everyone's faces. I could hear the sound of "alternative" music coming over the store speakers.

"This is where the temporal police force began?" I asked. 

"Tyranny starts in all manner of strange places," Kink replied. "The key is to shut it down as soon as you spotted it, don't let it grow. It will only get worse. It will always get worse."

to be continued here next week

"So, what's only been a couple of days for us," I said, finally catching on. For my defense I had just been caught in an underwater explosion while caught in a war between two different fish people civilizations and had just woken up. "How long had it been for these people?"

"Oh, not long," Tam replied. "Just a few generations."

"Generations!" I exclaimed loudly. "Are you kidding me? Is this a joke? Are you honestly telling me that these people have been trapped here long enough to have grandkids?"

"Maybe. I haven't done a census of them. I don't know how many of them have had grandkids, or great-grandkids, or great-great..."

"Great,-great?" I asked.

"I don't know, Frank," Tam replied. "That's what I'm telling you. I don't know and it doesn't really matter. We need to keep moving because we have a job to do."

"It doesn't matter!" I snapped back. "Of course it matters! These people have been stuck here for generations! They were waiting for us to take them home and its been forever! We owe them to fix this! We have to!"

"How, Frank? You want to travel back in time?"

"Yes! Maybe we should. We could save these people the hardships that we brought for no other crime than being in a place that I happen to have gotten transported to."

"I was kidding, Frank. We're not going to do that."

"No? Why not?" 

"Because A) it's never a good idea to screw around with your own timeline, B) we're in another dimension and we have no idea how time travel works here, and C) we came to this dimension to get away from the Time Police, now you want to alert them?"

"But we could help these people," I argued. "Is bringing their existence to the Time Police really helping them?" Tam posed. I had to admit. They weren't wrong. "Then what are we supposed to do? Just leave them here?" "Sure. They've been doing fine without us. Why disrupt them?"

to be continued next week

"A couple of days? Really, Frank," Tam laughed. "Is that what you think?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked, feeling very confused at that moment. "Pem said I had only been out for about a day. Was he lying?"

"No, Frank, that's..."

"And where's the Sheriff? Where's Toleuk? They came in seconds before we did and I see no sign of them."

"I imagine they're in the town."

"No way. They wouldn't have just run into town. They would have waited for us. And even if they did we would have seen them head in, it's only been a few moments. And who even are these people? This area was completely empty. There were no people anywhere near this area. There was no water, no food. There was completely no sign of life! How did an entire city appear in a matter of days? Where did these people come from?"

"Where did they come from, Frank? They came here with you. You brought them."

"What are you talking about?"

"These are trolls who came from their village with you. The ones you left behind."

"These...?" I looked at the village. "Are...what?"

"Apparently," Tam began, "when you came to this place on your way to find me, you came with more than just that sheriff and his deputies..."

"There was a hole," I explained. "Sucking people in."

"And then you left many of them here."

"We didn't want to put them in danger."

"Well, these are those people," Tam concluded.

"These are...?" My mind was having trouble catching up. Maybe because none of this made any sense. "But we were only gone for a couple of days. How'd they manage all of this."

"Because it was more than a couple of days for them."

"I don't understand, how can it...?"

"You've been traveling through time and across dimensions for years of your life," Tam said, "and you're still not used to this sort of thing. Time is not a constant, Frank. It flows differently in different dimensions."

to be continued next week