Fair.

Udo and Verity sprinted with all their might from the mound at the center of the crater in the flats.

“What about your team? Cant we help them?”

The ground shook violently beneath them, Verity stalled, she knew they had to evacuate but the other scientists caught in a different time stream concerned her just as much.

“There’s nothing we can do for them now, it would take us relative years to move them to a safe distance, we don’t have the time and they have even less! Hurry up!”

Udo and Verity continued their dash to escape the crater but didn’t get far, from the center a bright white light beamed up into the sky and turned the green aurora white too, the brightness of it all intensified a thousandfold, and the light was pushed out in all directions, though Udo and verity couldn’t see from where they were in the crater (and even then it would be too bright to see anyway) but the light spread across the sky across the whole planet. For a few minutes, the entire globe bathed in nothing but white light.

As the light started to fade Udo and Verity were brought back to their senses by the ground shaking beneath them. They rushed as fast as they could out of the crater, but all along it’s sides the trees and rocks were crashing down against them.

“I’m not going to let it end here!” Verity shouted, and before they realised it they suddenly found themselves almost 200 meters from the crater.

“how-” Udo’s question was cut short, and Verity was as stunned anyway. But what really demanded their awe happened before them at the site, a tall structure rose high up out of the ground, and the flats around them fell away, leaving them on what appeared to be a bridge that led to this new structure from miles away across the flats. The alien building emitted a bright light which seemed to become a vortex sinning and joining with the first pillar of light, it split off into 26 glowing lights which orbited the tower like structure and then quickly jumped away from it to all corners of the horizon, though two glows went straight to Udo and Verity, they fixed above each of their right wrists and seemed to crystallise, becoming just a glowing glass bead hovering over the skin.

From now where particles seemed to spin around their wrists and formed into solid chunks of some kind of metal and more glass beads, it all expanded and suddenly contracted, to become some kind of bracelet.

“wha-” Udo was cut short, the structure emitted a huge and deafening boom, and suddenly the sky looked like a regular night sky, the structure emitted no more light save for some fires burning at the top of it’s spires, and Udo and Verity were left stood on what used to be the ground of the flats, but what was now a bridge very high up.

“I don’t know if this story is one I wanted.” Verity examined the bracelet, finding she couldn’t take it off.

“I know how you feel.” Udo looked at the structure before him and got a very dark feeling.