Fair.

The truck choked and spat before the engine cut out and it rolled to a stop on the flats, illuminated by the shimmering green sky above.

“The truck’s broken?” Verity asked?

“yep” Udo climbed out and started to look around.

“That means we’re close right?”

Udo smiled, she really caught on fast, it was almost a waste she was a reporter and not a scientist he thought to himself.

“Over there!” Verity got Udo’s attention and pointed a small treeline on the horizon.

“That’s it!” Udo climbed around to the back of the truck and pulled out their packs, “Let’s get going then.”

the two set off on foot towards the site, beneath a sky that looked like a green ocean.

–

“Is there anything I should know before going in there?” Verity asked as they approached the trees, it seemed to her to be just a small wood, perhaps some kind of oasis.

“Watch your step, the satellite shots suggested tha-aaaAAH!” As the two stepped on the grass between the trees it gave way, sending them down a dry nook where a steam had flowed at one point, but now it was just a dusty slide, sending them winding down into a huge dip in the flats.

Fortunately the stream had never become a waterfall and they made it to the bottom of the dip relatively unharmed, with just a few scratches.

Dusting themselves off the pair looked around, it was almost like a crater, lined with trees and the bright green ocean above.

“Oh my god.” Udo turned to see what Verity was looking at, he saw the other members of his team, as if caught in the freeze frame. They appeared to be walking towards a mound in the center of the dip, but they weren’t moving.

Udo walked over to them and examined them further.

“Are they dead?”

“It doesn’t look like it, by my guess their time streams and our are not in sync.”

“What does that mean?”

“well, they are moving, but so slowly we cant see it, and to them, we are moving very very fast, too fast to see also. To experience a temporal disturbance like this first hand is amazing, and at this scale too.”

“so why are we out of sync?”

“My guess is they arrived during the day when there wasn’t the aurora, the entry point must determine the rate of temporal flow.” Udo turned to the mound “Come on, I’m sure they wont object to us going on ahead of them.”

“Are they going to be ok?”

“they are ok now, its us who are passing through time too quickly.”

“what?”

“well I’m just saying, there is every possibility you could spend the rest of your life in this very hour.”

“What, I’d die of old age tonight?”

“Maybe.” Udo climbed to the top of the mound where there appeared to be a hatch. “Anyway if time is a problem for you then you shouldn’t waste it so, come on.”

opening the hatch Udo saw rungs to climb down with. “Now that’s weird.”

“You can just plainly say your team is in a temporal mess and so are we, if you say something is weird we must be totally screwed, what is it?”

“it looks like this site, this… artefact, is man made.”

“How could something man made do all this?”

“Well that’s why we are here, but I’m starting to suspect, perhaps it was more… made for man, then by man.”

Udo shook his head, now wasn’t the time to be thinking about stuff like that. He climbed down through the hatch into whatever lied below.