The Time Traveler's Odyssey

Falling Through Time

Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Grey light, like that one would see only on cloudy, rain filled days, meandered quietly into the detective's apartment from the floor to ceiling window to the east, and stopped halfway up the length of the bed.  There, just before the edge of the dreary lighting, with crossed legs and an expression of concentration sat Emma Vyncent, breathing as steadily as she could muster while she meditated.  She had been in that position for almost an hour, merely collecting her thoughts in preparation for the first journey through time she has had for almost twenty five years.  It was essential that when she took the leap through the thread of time that not a single thought strayed away from her desired date in time, or the consequences would be extremely severe.  If such a thing were to happen, where she did not completely transport, she wouldn't lose a limb, or any extremity for that matter, but instead, her mentality would be altered to a shocking extreme, and the only way to reverse it would be to commit an act that her original self would never do.  Ergo meditation.

As if plucking stray apples off of a fall tree, Emma caught the stray thoughts running through her mind, and pulled them in to the safety of her subconscious.  A memory of her childhood here, an irrelevant  thought there, she slowly stored them all away, until what remained was the sole thought and drive of traveling to the date March 15th, 2011--exactly a year before Lucy Bennett's murder.

It's time, she thought.  With a definitive nod, she slowly stood up on her bed, and looked down to where she had just been sitting not a minute before.  Taking one last deep breath, Emma turned on her heel, and leaned backwards so that she fell in the direction that she had just been looking.  However, instead of hitting the cushioning of the bed in the peace of her room, she landed on the cold, wet ground just outside of the bar Slow Note.   Thankfully, she landed by an unlit storefront of an old run down pharmacy, where she just walked away as if nothing had happened.  Conveniently, she had been at that storefront in her past at the very same date and time, so she didn't have to take a subway all the way down to the bar from god knows where she had previously been.

She knew from experience that her past self would now be nowhere to be found, and that she did not have to risk running into herself because she was herself. That was another tricky thing about time travel--she could not be in more than one place at a time.  Instead, the past version of herself would merely cease to exist, and in her past self's place, she would appear-so subtly in fact, that no one would know the difference were it not for the split second when the past Emma seemed to doze off.  When Emma first tried to explain it to her husband, it took her over three hours to get him to understand the concept that no, she wasn't going to interrupt the space time continuum, and no, she could not do it whenever she felt like it.  Time travel, despite being a natural instinct for Emma, was extremely taxing, and at the moment she felt queasy and a tad weak at the knees.

I need a drink, she thought to herself.  I wonder if I had thought the very same thing not a year ago when I stood in this very same place...She laughed to herself.  Seeing as she wasn't much of a drinker, and due to the fact that this bar was quite out of her way, she assumed that indeed she had been in need of a drink when her original self occupied this spot. Well I might as well go in,  she mused.  Maybe she's in there...maybe we once glanced across the room at each other...maybe she knew she was going to die...Now, after having to militantly restrain her thoughts, they flew free of their prison, and ran every which way, having Emma struggle to keep up.  She shook her head in dizziness and confusion, and then straightened up and walked over to the double glass doors of the bar, where a large burly bouncer of around 45 stood militantly guarding the red velvet rope that held the key to a drinker's paradise.  Confidently, Emma skipped past the line of slutty, but expensively dressed women and rugged, yet classy men, to address the bouncer.