I opted for the wrong side of the storm idea, clinging to my last bit of hope that the entire plan hadn't been completely botched.
So I carefully made my way around the storm; closer than I was entirely comfortable with, trying to keep an eye out for Jack. 10 minutes later I took my eyes off the storm, my heart skipping a beat as hope flared up again. I searched the horizon and...there it was! At least what I thought was it. It was definitely a house and not too far off from where we landed.
I took off at the easy lope I'd trained myself to keep up for hours, and hoped it wasn't any farther away than it looked. At this point the adrenaline had faded out of my system and my mouth was uncomfortably dry, and I was ravenous. We were told Jumps tended to do that to you, and the storm just heightened the effects with a nice dose of shock.
Along the way, I tried to think through what might of caused that storm, and right over our landing spot too. Back home they told us the jump would be easy, a few minor side effects and that was it. The only thing you had to be careful of was not going off to find yourself. But since they didn't allow jumps to times any closer than 50 years to the present as of yet, that wasn't much of an issue. But never once had they ever said anything about massive hail storms trying to brain you as you landed. It didn't make sense next to what I'd been learning for the past 8 years.
See, I was this sort of...soldier I guess. That's not the best word for it but it's the closest approximation I can make for what I was. Or rather what I was trained to be, it was my first real jump after all. We went back in pairs to 'critical points' in the time stream, where something could be slightly changed to maybe help keep earth from destabilizing like it had in my present.
We had partners, except the very best of us, and we'd be trained for months, oftentimes years on the one period of time we'd be going back to. When we'd learned as much as possible, we'd be Jumped back and we'd rendezvous with The Professor. The Professor was an icon, the founder of the whole idea to go back and fix the muddled past.
So I carefully made my way around the storm; closer than I was entirely comfortable with, trying to keep an eye out for Jack. 10 minutes later I took my eyes off the storm, my heart skipping a beat as hope flared up again. I searched the horizon and...there it was! At least what I thought was it. It was definitely a house and not too far off from where we landed.
I took off at the easy lope I'd trained myself to keep up for hours, and hoped it wasn't any farther away than it looked. At this point the adrenaline had faded out of my system and my mouth was uncomfortably dry, and I was ravenous. We were told Jumps tended to do that to you, and the storm just heightened the effects with a nice dose of shock.
Along the way, I tried to think through what might of caused that storm, and right over our landing spot too. Back home they told us the jump would be easy, a few minor side effects and that was it. The only thing you had to be careful of was not going off to find yourself. But since they didn't allow jumps to times any closer than 50 years to the present as of yet, that wasn't much of an issue. But never once had they ever said anything about massive hail storms trying to brain you as you landed. It didn't make sense next to what I'd been learning for the past 8 years.
See, I was this sort of...soldier I guess. That's not the best word for it but it's the closest approximation I can make for what I was. Or rather what I was trained to be, it was my first real jump after all. We went back in pairs to 'critical points' in the time stream, where something could be slightly changed to maybe help keep earth from destabilizing like it had in my present.
We had partners, except the very best of us, and we'd be trained for months, oftentimes years on the one period of time we'd be going back to. When we'd learned as much as possible, we'd be Jumped back and we'd rendezvous with The Professor. The Professor was an icon, the founder of the whole idea to go back and fix the muddled past.
