(Yay! I actually finished rewriting chapter 1 like I planned! I thought chapter 1 needed to be better, so I rewrote it. I also changed a fact or two to make the logic consistant. Enjoy!)
Chapter 1: The wormhole
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Tech’s Lab
It had been a lot of work to do this; extensive hours of research, numerous experiments and tests, countless failures along the way, many of which involved explosions. He was incredibly tired, not just from working on his new machine, but from the frequent missions, and lack of sleep, caused by trading rest for working in the lab. He was exhausted, sore, and could barely think straight by now, but as he screwed the protective casing on his latest invention, the only feeling he was aware of was pride, for creating a device that was truly amazing.
“They are going to love this…” he thought; as he locked the device in its case before leaving the lab to get some well-deserved and desperately needed sleep.
Main Room of Loonatics Tower
The Loonatics were having a late morning, a rare treat for them lately, there were missions every day for the last couple weeks, sometimes they left before breakfast and came back after midnight, missions coming one right after another. They were finally having some downtime during the waking hours of the day. Duck was catching up on his TV shows, with Rev and Slam watching TV as well, Lexi was reading a magazine, and Ace was skimming the morning newsscreen. October 24 was in small type under the masthead. Saturday was always a slow news day, even with the recent increase in disasters. Tech had disappeared to his lab right after breakfast as usual, and normally he would stay there for hours at a time. Today though, he came back out into the living room about 10 minutes after he had left. Ace was the first one to notice.
“Did ya forget yer coffee, Tech?”
“I have a new invention, and I can guarantee that you are gonna love this…” Tech brought what looked like a ray gun out from behind his back.
“Can’t it wait until a commercial?” Duck whined, but everyone ignored him.
“So what does it do?”
“It took me a few weeks to get it right and work out any glitches and side effects, but this machine will actually-“
Just then, the alarm sounded over the speakers, signaling them to report to the holocom room. A few groans were heard, mostly from Duck, as they all headed to the holocom room and took their seats at the meeting table as Zadavia appeared on the holocom.
“Loonatics, I have a mission for you.”
“Well no duh, Boss Lady, what else do you call for? So whata we got today, bank shootout, rampaging monster, maybe an escaped supervillain?” Duck asked, in his typical rude fashion.
“No, Duck, and do not interrupt me! A wormhole has opened above New China Town. I will cause terrible damage as well as endanger thousands of people if it reaches the skyline. You need to diffuse the wormhole before this happens. Good Luck, Loonatics. Zadavia, out.”
Ace stood up as the holocom shut off.
“Tech, d’you have anythin’ that’ll shut down a wormhole?”
“Diffuse a wormhole form the outside? I have some disruptor charge-grenades. Not my best, but they’ll do the job.”
“Great. Grab ‘em and head up to the hangar. Alright guys, let’s jet!”
New China Town
The plan was set as they neared downtown. Tech and Rev flew up to activate the grenades, and the others landed and made sure anyone left in the area got very far away. They weren’t taking any chances; Tech still wasn’t sure how the wormhole would react once the charges went off.
“Are we clear to activate the charges, chief?” Tech spoke through his com link.
“Yup, Downtown is cleared out. Go ahead, guys.” Ace’s voice came through the static of the speaker.
Tech shut off his com link and turned to the roadrunner flying next to him. “Alright Rev, let’s go.” They flew towards the wormhole, finding it was a lot stronger up close. Before they could activate a single charge, Rev was pulled into the wormhole.
“REV!!!” Tech yelled for his best friend. He opened his com link and shouted, “Rev got sucked in, I’m going after him!!” as he flew into the wormhole. Somehow, He caught up to Rev inside, barely keeping hold on him.
The rest of the team wore shocked expressions as they heard Tech through the link. Ace shouted, “Well whata we waitin’ for? We gotta go after ‘em! Lexi and Slam fly in, then me and Duck. GO!” Lexi and Slam flew straight into the wormhole, Duck and Ace behind them, making it inside just as the wormhole began to close.
While hurtling through the wormhole, keeping a vice grip on Rev, Tech dared to open his eyes. A myriad of lights, colors, and sounds were spinning and flashing around them in a blur. Although they were moving incredibly fast, it felt as though they were suspended in a void. Suddenly, a blinding white light filled his vision, the sudden g-forces hit him like a speeding hovercar as they fell-
(So, what do you think? I tried to make it a little more descriptive, and maybe added a little bit of subtext here and later on. Hope you like it. Bye!)
-- Edited by ktgirlawesome on Tuesday 3rd of November 2009 04:24:31 PM
(And here's the second chapter!! I think this one is better than chapter 1. I finally got the muse back!! After 2 months!! Enjoy!!!)
Chapter 2: Wait, we’re WHEN??
Tech and Rev crashed down from about 25 feet in the air, landing, oddly enough, in the middle of a grove of bamboo trees. Tech lifted his head, and tried to look around. He saw tall bamboo stalks, various dead leaves and bits of litter, and Rev, lying on the ground a few feet away. At the back of his mind, his common sense told him to get up and do something besides lay there, but, still nauseous and disoriented from that little trip through the wormhole, he lay back down on the ground, telling himself that a little rest would be perfectly fine, and slowly drifted into unconsciousness.
Kaycee was having a boring day so far. It was Saturday, and she was the only 15-year-old girl who didn’t have any plans, with friends or otherwise. It was a chilly day in October, and the TV was giving her a headache, so she decided to take a walk through the back woods, something she hadn’t done since she was 11. She decided to head east, toward Hobo Creek. After passing her old clubhouse she built with her sister and some neighbor kids, the drain pipe, and the nasty pond with the old tire, she saw the remains of the barbwire fence that had long since rusted into a heap, and right past it, the grove of bamboo trees on the slope of the ditch that formed her path.
As she turned the corner and saw the grove clearly, she knew something was very wrong. There were two men lying on the ground in the middle of the grove, both were unconscious. They were wearing the weirdest outfits, tight-fitting black latex, with neon-bright highlights, green for one of them, and red for the other. She wasn’t even sure they were men at all, they looked to be about 4 and a half feet tall, from what she could tell. Those clothes looked fancy and expensive, and were also pretty clean, so they probably weren’t hoboes, she decided. Against her common sense, she slowly walked towards one of the unconscious figures, the one in green. As she got closer, she could tell he was definitely a man, albeit a very short one. She crouched down by his head and tried to turn him onto his back. There was something odd about this face, and when she turned him over she saw what. He wasn’t human.
He definitely seemed human-like, with a human-like body. There were really only 2 prominent differences: 1. he had fur, and 2. he had a snout, like a dog. “or a coyote…” she mumbled to herself. She laid his head back on the ground and went to look at his companion, who she assumed the man in red was. She carefully turned this man on his back, like with the first. He had a beak, and feathers, so she could tell he was a bird of some sort. He also had a deep, bleeding cut above his eyebrow. That definitely wasn’t good. The man in green was unhurt, or appeared to be, so once again against all common sense, she gently shook him awake.
“Hey. Hey, buddy. Dude. Are you okay?”
Tech woke up, slowly at first, to a teenage girl kneeling over him and shaking his shoulder, apparently trying to wake him up. It took him a minute to make out the only thing on his still-foggy mind at the moment.
“Um...who the hell are you?”
“Kaycee,” she answered quickly. “Hey, is that guy your friend?” She pointed to Rev as she asked this.
“Yes.” Tech decided to give this stranger girl plain, simple answers for the time being. After all, she was asking plain, simple questions.
“Well, he appears to have a small head injury.” That snapped Tech out of any remaining confusion. He sprang up and rushed to his friend, then sighed in relief to see that it was only a cut. Easily fixable, even when, like this one, they were deep into the skin. He looked into the carry compartment of his jetpack, which now had one broken wing. He had the invention he had planned to present this morning, his specially designed wormhole-terminating grenades, which he had yet to use on the wormhole they were called out for, his new, stronger Port-A-Lab that he took everywhere, even if he thought he might not need it, and…no first-aid kit. The one thing he needed right now. Well that was just f*cking great.
The girl, who had been silent while Tech was rooting through his pack, spoke again. “Y’know, my neighbors and I built a clubhouse back here when we were young. You could wait there with your friend, while I go get the first aid kit from my house.”
Well, borrowing some first-aid supplies would probably be quicker than having to call the others and wait for them, Tech thought. After all, who knows where that wormhole dropped them, or if they even followed us into it at all? Besides, she might be a better chance to figure out our location if Rev’s GPS was damaged in the fall. “Alright, Which way is it?”
The girl seemed excited that he had agreed. “It’s this way, but we need to be careful because there’s mud and a lot of sharp pieces of trash you could get tetanus from but it’s not too far. Say, do you need help carrying your friend?”
They must’ve crashed in an incredibly remote, isolated area if they weren’t recognized as heroes even with their supersuits, Tech noticed. The materials in the girl’s clothing appeared to be cotton, a fabric that was outdated by centuries. “No thank you, Miss. I’m fine.” He answered her. He picked up Rev in a fireman’s lift, and turned toward her. “Which way did you say we were going?”
Kaycee was actually a little surprised. Most people couldn’t perform a lift like that, at least not correctly. She knew that military, EMS, and law enforcement were jobs where you might have to be able to carry unconscious people, but why would a cop or a soldier be passed out in the ravine behind her house? And wearing a skintight, black jumpsuit, of all things. Well, she could ask later. “It’s this way,” she said, pointing back to the way she had come. “Make sure you don’t step on the barbed wire.”
As they walked, Kaycee decided to ask a few more questions, just to break the silence.
“So, are you two from around here?” she asked. “I haven’t seen anybody like y’all before, ever. I’d definitely remember if I had.”
“I’d tell you, but I don’t know where we are, I was hoping you could tell me.” It was true. This was one of the rare times in his life when the coyote had no clue to what was going on.
“We’re in Austin, but aside from that, how can you not know where you are? You definitely don’t seem like the type to get drunk and wake up the next day in a park or something.”
Tech didn’t think it was the best idea to tell the whole story to her just yet, he had only known her for about five minutes. He settled on part of it. “We fell out of the sky into that grove of bamboo. Rev got knocked unconscious. I was still conscious, but I decided to wait there for a while, just to get my breath back. I guess I fell asleep, then you woke me up, and here we are.”
Kaycee could tell that wasn’t the whole story. It probably wasn’t any of her business in the first place, but now that she knew part of the story, she wanted to know all of it. “Do you mean skydiving? That still doesn’t seem plausible, because that doesn’t look like a parachute of any sort,” She pointed to Tech’s broken jetpack, “and your friend doesn’t have one at all. If you actually were skydiving, you would have been dead without parachutes, or at least injured much more severely than you appear to be now. Did you actually fall out of the sky?” She looked up at the sky to emphasize her point.
“Well, we didn’t really fall from very high. It was just…” Tech looked up and pointed to the top of the tree line, but he stopped short when he realized, for the first time since he got here, wherever he was, that the sky was a pale blue, instead of its normal reddish-purple. “Wow,” he thought, not realizing he was thinking out loud. “We must have landed really far away from the central city if the sky here wasn’t affected by the meteor.”
Kaycee couldn’t believe her ears. “Wait, WHAT meteor? What affected the sky? What is going on here?” She was incredibly confused, and almost angry for some reason.
Tech was just as confused as she was.”What do you mean? When the meteor hit in 2772, vibrations were recorded throughout the planet! It was all over the news! Acmetropolis was knocked off its axis, for crying out loud! Even the most remote places on the planet knew what happened, so how the hell did the news not reach here at all?!?” Tech didn’t know whether it was the clueless teen asking him all the questions, the fact that he had no idea where he was and what was going on, or if he was just frustrated from having to carry a still-unconscious Rev through a muddy obstacle course of trees, but he was angry. Not angry at anyone specifically, just angry.
The girl spoke quietly this time, in an even tone. “Tech, I have no idea what you’re talking about. No meteors have hit the Earth in millions of years. And today is October 24th, 2009.”
Tech froze. All the evidence was right there. The wormhole, the woods, the blue sky, October24th, 2009? He couldn’t believe it. “Oh…My…God.”
2009!?! How was this even possible?! There had been many attempts to time-travel throughout the course of history, theories of how it could be done, but none of them were ever successful. It required a hundredfold more energy to create a wormhole through time than through space, more energy than had ever been concentrated in one place before It seemed to be a logical explanation for what was happening, but also virtually impossible, as far as he could tell.
He was deep in thought, so he hadn’t really noticed that he had been pacing for about 25 minutes. Kaycee was getting a little impatient, though.
“Hey buddy, you sure you’re ok? You’ve been muttering to yourself for a while.” He heard someone talking, realizing it was the girl.
“uh-hum”, he waved his hand absentmindedly, still absorbed in his own thoughts.
This was getting them nowhere. She snapped her fingers by his ear.
“what!” His head whipped in the direction of the sound, expression flashing to alarm, then to annoyance when he saw that there was nothing immediately wrong.
“Um, I’m not sure if you noticed this, but you’ve been walking in and out of that briar patch for about half an hour now. Whatever you’re doing, I think it might be easier to do in an area without so many thorns. So…can we keep going?”
“Sure, I just have a lot on my mind right now. Let’s go.”
She smiled and started walking. “Well okay then.”
Kaycee’s POV
They were almost at the old clubhouse now. Thank goodness too; the man was probably tired of carrying his friend. He still seemed a little out of it though; he walked through five more thorn bushes and didn’t even notice. Well we’re here now. I helped the man find a spot for his friend to lie down.
“So…I’m gonna run up to my house real quick and get some water and first-aid supplies for you and your friend. Just… wait here, ok?”
I heard him mumble back, “sure,” as he started pacing again. I could tell he was thinking hard about something; I always pace when I’m thinking too.
“I’ll be back in a minute.” I called out as I started walking up the hill of my backyard. ‘Please still be there when I get back…’ I added in my head.
I climbed the hill and the rickety staircase up to the back door and into the kitchen. Jeez, I hate that staircase. Okay…I’ll get the first-aid stuff first. Band-Aids, antiseptic spray, ice-pack. We need cold water to drink. I bet they’re hungry; they might’ve been out there for a while. Now…what do they eat? Eh, I’ll just make sandwiches; you can’t go wrong with sandwiches. I don’t really know what they like…I’ll just make one with each kind of lunchmeat and let them take their pick. These chips look good too; maybe one of them might like that Red Bull in the back of the fridge. Okay, that’s enough.
I headed toward the back door. Grabbing Dad’s sunflower seeds as well. Maybe the other guy will want to eat those instead of the sandwich, you never know.
I dragged the pack of food and supplies down to the clubhouse where the two men were waiting.
“Hey, I brought you two some lunch if you’re hungry.” I handed him the ham sandwich.
“Thanks.” He grabbed it and took a bite.
I motioned toward his friend. “Is he gonna be okay?”
“I think so. This cut above his eyebrow doesn’t look too bad, and I don’t see any other surface injuries. He could still have broken a bone or gotten a concussion, but I won’t know until he regains consciousness.”
“If you need him awake, I can take care of that.” I removed the cap from one of the water bottles and splashed it on his friend’s face.
“COOOOOOOOOLLDDD!!!!!!!!!Cold- cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-cold-COLD!!!!!” Rev yelled as he shot up 30 feet in the air and began zooming around in circles.
“Does that answer your question?” He had that ‘well-I-did-warn-you’ look on his face. Okay, this was pretty embarrassing. I don’t think either of us really noticed when the man’s friend flew straight at him, crashing them both into a tree and spilling the contents of the man’s backpack on the ground. There was a cube of black metal with a small green triangle on the side, multiple fist-sized objects in red hard-plastic shells, each with a short metal antenna. The only other item from the backpack had fallen closer to the two strangers, who were trying to untangle themselves from the tree branches. It was obviously supposed to be some sort of gun, but it looked more like a prop from an old sci-fi movie than a lethal weapon of any sort. It had a large, padded handle, with a trigger button on the back instead of a pull-lever. The barrel was made of metal; a cartridge with a red label was in a slot on the back. The point of the gun had three metal prongs that angled out and back in. As I was about to pick up the device to get a closer look, I heard a loud and distinct CRACK!
I looked up.
Both men fell out of the tree, landing on the device. I jumped out of the way and tripped over a tree root, falling a few feet away from them. Somehow, by accident or freaky coincidence, something hit the trigger. The machine glowed, crackled, and sparked, shooting out a beam of bright red energy. A beam that was headed straight for me. Time seemed to slow down as the beam came toward me. My muscles clenched as the energy surged through my body, spreading pain to every cell. My molecules were tearing themselves apart; my body paralyzed by either the beam or the pain, maybe both.
The agony seemed to last hours before subsiding to a dull buzzing sensation. I try to look around, figure out what’s happening. The man picks up the device, he walks toward me, he stoops down.
“You just had to pour water on his face, didn’t you?” And he says something sarcastic. Great, just what I need while I’m lying here paralyzed in the freaking woods. “It’s alright, you’re fine.” He’s using a calm voice now, the voice nurses use on people who are waking up from surgery. I feel something lightly pressing on the vein in my neck; he seems to be checking my pulse. “You need to stay calm and try not to move too much until any unusual sensations go away, which should only take a few hours. Just try to rest for a while.” He puts his backpack under my head like a pillow. I mumble a ‘thanks’ before my vision starts to fade. I guess getting electrocuted makes you sleepy…
Normal POV
Tech was getting a little worried. He was glad Rev was unharmed and fully conscious, but he had no idea where his other four teammates were, and they were all stranded 764 years in the past, most likely thousands of klicks apart with no way to reach the others. In addition to this, he had one other problem to deal with. This problem was currently taking a short artificially-induced nap next to a tree while the time-delayed secondary reactions took effect. He was glad that the device also had a compartment for holding sedative patches.
Well that’s part of my problem solved, Tech thought.
“So what do we do about her?”
“What-do-you-mean?”
“We can’t just leave her now that she’s been affected by the ray. When she discovers what happened, she might not be able to handle it if she doesn’t know what to do. She’ll most likely end up seriously injuring herself, and possibly many other people, eventually get arrested or killed, all because of my invention. We need to find our teammates, but we need to stay here and keep an eye on her too, so how are we supposed to do both at once?”
“Don’t you think it would seem a little suspicious if we just randomly invited her without a legitimate reason? After all, she’s only known us for about an hour, not including the time she’s been asleep.”
Rev had a thoughtful expression on his face. “Hmmm…You said-that-she-was-pretty-eager-to-help-us-and-she-even-made-us-sandwiches, and-she-doesn’t-seem-to-mind-that-we’re-complete-stangers-and-anthros-as-well. I-bet-that-if-we-asked-her-for-her-help-she-would-be-happy-to-come-with-us.”
“What kind of help would we even have to ask for fro-“
“Your-jet-pack-is-broken-right?”
“Yes, so wha-“
“If-your-jetpack-broke-in-the-fall-then-that-means-the-others’-probably-did-too-so-we’re-going-to-need-some-sort-of-alternative-mode-of-transportation-because-their-jetpacks-are-probably-broken-and-they-can’t-fly-and-Mmbph!” Rev’s next words were muffled, on account of Tech clamping his hand over the roadrunner’s beak.
“Rev, speak a little slower and tell me, what does his have to do with Kaycee helping us?”
“We’re going to need a different mode of transport than our jetpacks when we go find our friends, and Kaycee will probably have one. She’ll think she’s being invited because we’re borrowing something important that she needs to keep track of, so it won’t seem like we asked her to come for no good reason, and she won’t mind coming with us.”
Tech took a second to mentally check over this idea. He smiled. “Rev, you may not be a genius, but you’re pretty damn smart.”
Rev grinned. “I-try.”
“Now here’s what we need to say when she wakes up…”
I totally do. 
This is true also.
