(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 42

The enormous room was, in a word, intimidating. It had the air of a trophy room, even without walls covered in disembodied heads of once dangerous animals now reduced to decorative heads. Had there been the head of a lion, wolf, rhino or even some long dead breed of dinosaur mounted above the massive fireplace, it would have seemed to fit in with the decor. But there was no such thing. Not a single animal seemed to have been harmed to decorate the place. No bear skin rug, not even lamb skins on any of the large chairs. And none of the chairs were leather.
But the things that were there were far more terrifying. To most people within a day's journey, be it in nearby Nakskov or any of the small hamlets around, the items displayed would be confusing, perhaps a little disconcerting, but likely none of them would really understand the frightening message they were meant to convey. Then again, it seemed highly unlikely that anyone who did not know what these things were would ever be allowed in.
The private guard attached to the huge estate had been surprisingly professional. It had taken a few hours to traverse the forest, but as early dawn broke, the red shine of the sun had revealed the open spaces around the estate. Grassland. Hunting grounds, deer and assorted birds living free and off the land, ready to be shot by the huntsmen no doubt living somewhere in the estate, in one of the dozens of rooms. From the outside, it had as much in common with a medieval castle as with a large farm of its age. Tall walls surrounded a splendid courtyard, the only ways in or out going through the buildings in impressive archways. Three of them, to be exact, denoting north, south and east. The western wing had a different architecture, rougher and more primitive, obviously the older or even original building to which the three new had been attached over time. It would seem like nothing a few centuries down the road, but the four stories of the three newer buildings, and even the three stories of the original one, made the compound a behemoth of wood and stone in its own day and age.
The trophy room was in the north building. The stairs had been a bit labyrinthian to follow, but it seemed to be on the third floor. Having it on the first or even the second floor would have been architectural insanity. The large open space within it seemed barely able to hold up a roof without any extra pillars, let alone several floors. What was on the fourth floor, light enough to not need heavy support from the floor below, was a mystery that would likely never get answered.
"The master will be with you soon," said the tall, elderly gentleman that had stepped into the room a moment earlier. He had exchanged some hushed words with one of the guards that had been left in the room, one of five, which honestly seemed a bit excessive. The old man seemed to expect some kind of response, but there really seemed to be little to say. He stood in his impeccably white shirt and light grey pants, looking like a living hole in the dark wood and brown colors of the guardsmen uniforms, like a contrast to the much darker surroundings. When he got nothing back but a nod of understanding, he left with an odd expression of disappointment on his face.
They had never been threatening. Even when staring down the barrels of their pistols, it was hard to feel poorly treated. That, along with their physical build and the lack of wear and tear on both skin and teeth made them seem very misplaced in this age. Even the best and cleanest people living in Nakskov and other places were inevitably the victims of limited medical and dental care, and a lot of exposure to the sun. These people were very different. They practically screamed time traveler.
Of course, if there was any doubt, those trophies in the room would easily dispel it. Maps of places that would not exist for decades, centuries or even millenia. A plasma bolt rifle from half a millenium in the future, give or take. A miniature model of a starship drive. A beautiful painting of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. To a novice eye, they would seem like excentric decorations, perhaps a bit carelessly flaunting that whoever had collected them knew about the far future. There was nothing careless about it, though. They were a message. "We travel in time. A lot." The message had a definite sinister undertone.
Other than the obvious TT stuff placed in plain view around the room, the intimidation of the place was just as much a more mundane kind. Wealth. The lack of animal hides was entirely compensated for by expensive dark hardwoods, marble coloumns as fake support pillars in the corners and as legs for more than one large table, an unusually dark stone used for the fireplace, and fixtures of copper, bronze and brass on many wooden corners. It was, again, not a castle, nor was it a palace or a mansion of pomp and luxury. It was, in comparison to much other wealth, subdued, some even practical. But it stayed on message. A very alpha male kind of message.
"They say you call yourself Marie," a voice said from somewhere in the room. Rooms of this size had their own little pecularities, often when it came to sound. The acustics of a large room could make one spot a perfect stage or podium, or it could shroud voices. This one chose to spread the voice out. With a few hard clicks of boots on the hardwood floor, however, the source of the sound moved closer, and the sound itself became easier to trace.
"They say you know what these things are."
It was a man. Slightly tall, though easily half a head shorter than either the guards or the elderly man that had announced him. In a similar way, he was broad and sturdy, but not as much as any of the guards, and he had an old look to his eyes, but not nearly as old as the elderly one.
"Tell me what they are," he said, although the commanding words had a polite, pleading tone to them. As he stepped in closer, from a door that had to be somewhere at the back of the room, his clothes came into the early daylight from the windows. There were no candles in the room, no artificial light of any kind, and the low sun cast a lot of shadows. His black vest and marine blue jacket over a simple white shirt looked oddly intense in that lighting. And like the trinkets along the walls, his jeans were unapologetically out of their natural time.
"Sagrada familia, starship drive, plasma weapon."
He listened carefully, standing by the tall chair the guards had been kind enough to provide. It was almost as if they made an effort to not make it feel anything like being a prisoner. When the apparent test was over, he gave a confirming grunt and walked over to a similar chair, on the opposite side of a small wooden table and closer to the smoldering fireplace.
"We don't get a lot of time travelers here," he said, leaning back as far as the chair would let him, his head cocked to a side and his eyes squinting a little. As he sat, the elderly man casually strolled over to him. Again, he had the expression on his face as if expecting to be told something.
"Marius, I will take an English tea, thank you."
He then looked over.
"You must be thirsty after your trek in the woods?" he asked, clearly meaning something else entirely. But all he really needed was a nod and a look at the older man, Marius. "Two tea, Marius," he said, this time never looking at the man.
"So, Marie. Why?"
He let the question hang in the air a bit, as if someone would step in to fill the huge gaps in the way he had phrased it.
"Why what, exactly?"
His smile had vanished without notice, and his face, while still a friendly expression, was a bit more stern. The response didn't help change that.
"Why are you here? Or why do you travel in time? You carry a stench of amateur equipment and poorly calculated leaps around with you, I am almost sure even old Marius could smell it off of you."
The playful tone in his voice had begun to dimish, and fast. It was no surprise that the tone had been insincere, but the fact that he already decided to drop it was a bit foreboding.
"I work for an organization that tries to control some of the damage from the timetravel war that's going on." His eyes never showed any sign of reaction. It was almost like he was a machine himself. "We're trying to get to a situation pretty far back in time, and the usual route isn't safe. So we need a workaround."
He kept quiet, picking absent-mindedly at a wooden statue of a bird that stood by his side, like some kind of petrified pet. The dead look in his eyes seemed unnatural, an act of some kind, pretending to not care the slightest about what was said. In a way, even if it was, realizing that did nothing to help. It was still impossible to say what he was thinking about it all.
"Why me?" he asked as a follow-up, after having stared for an uncomfortable amount of time. "What do you want with me? What do you want in Nakskov?"
"You run this place? It's impressive."
His eyes finally reacted, squinting slightly. He hadn't meant to reveal his position at the estate.
"After a fashion," he said, using his voice to regain a bit of the mental upper hand after his accidental admission of influence. "I still report to..."
"... to the Wenway Group. Yeah, I know."
At the mention of the group, his fingers on the wooden bird, which seemed to be somekind of crane, stopped their minimalistic compulsive motions. His eyes, hacing already shed the annoyed squinting, became cold and stiff, to the point that he barely blinked.
"You track down lost riches and bury it for or give its resting place coordinates to the group, right? So they can dig it up in the future?"
Blinking returned to his eyes, this time actually a bit more severe than normal. He didn't like the situation, this stranger telling him things that he liked to feel were secrets.
"It's perfectly legit," he said in an exaggeratedly soft voice, his fingers again playing with the bird at his side. "I'm not changing the timeline. Anything lost here remains lost."
"Until your emplyers dig it up in, what, 2250-something, right?"
He was getting angry. He had been hard to read, but now, everything bubbling up was written in his face. His frown only paused when he looked over the shoulder of the tall chair to the guards that likely stood behind it somewhere, thinking his quick glances at them werenever noticed.
"Don't worry, we're not here to bust you, or your operation. In fact..."
His eyes grew a bit larger at the last two words, as if he was eyeing a way out of the frustrating conversation.
"... we're not quite on the good side of those who might want to put a stopper to you, either."
He glanced over the chair again, but it bcame clear that it had nothing to do with the guards the moment Marius came into view, carrying a fine teapot and set of cups. There was a tense quiet as the old man set down the cups and filled them with a piping hot tea. The smell was a little like that of flowers, with a hint of vanilla and perhaps some spices. Nothing about it seemed like normal peasant's tea. Like so much else, even the tea was a show of what they, he, had access to.
"So," he said, dragging out the word, "what keeps me from simply cutting your throat and dumping you in a ditch?"
The astoundingly blunt response was a bit startling, but not so much that he got to freely pick which cup of tea he would be drinking. There was no indication that the other cup would be poisoned, deadly or not, but there was nothing to suggest that trusting him was clever, either. Snatching the cup he seemed bent on drinking from felt like a good idea.
"You know all that amateurish time travel you could, if I recall, smell?"
He looked at his cup as he picked it up, stirring it while holding the saucer in his other hand. He never answered or even gave a nod, but the eyes he made suggested that he knew.
"Yeah, I've got some of those annoying people on my heels. They will track it to here, even if they are tracking a corpse."
"I could bury you far away, set up a decoy. Or I could just cut your anchor and watch as you snap back to... When did you say you were from?"
"I didn't."
For once, he actually smiled, a smile that did not seem to be false. That, more than anything, made it frightening.
"And sure, you could bury me far away, and hope they only tracked my body and not my steps. Or send me back and hope that, for some reason, I would decide not to return. But there really is a much easier way to get rid of me, and thus of them."
The tea tasted sour and sweet at the same time, zesty, like a lemon or lime soda, only a little more subdued. He had already sipped his once, and now decided to just hold it in his lap, staring, as if he could pull that last option hinted at out of thin air if he glared at it long enough.
"And that is?" he finally asked.
"Send me on to my next stop, far back."
This time, his smile, or rather, his grin, seemed perfectly sincere again, but for a very different reason. He had to lift the teacup off the saucer as his body shook slightly with the chuckle he let out.
"That's your play?" he asked, leaning forward to place the cup and saucer on the small table between the two chairs. He was still chuckling, perhaps that was why.
"That's my play. The best way to get me out of your hair is to just let me move through." The tea was starting to settle in. It really wasn't all that bad. "And if you're getting clever ideas about sending me somewhere else, remember that at some point I go back, and then this place becomes a target yet again."
He raised the chuckle to arestrained laugh, seeming to actually enjoy the whole conversation. It was hard to tell if that was a good thing or not.
"I like you," he said, wagging his index finger like a tiny whip. "You've got some balls on you. Marie, was it?"
"Yes, it was."
He got up,making a signal to one of the guards. It could have meant anything, from asking them to leave to having them whip up an execution squad. As it turned out, it was much less dramatic.
"This is Tarik," he said, pointing at the guardsman who stepped up. "He'll show you around a bit, while I discuss your... request with some of my advisors."
Tarik, a slender but fit man of a less daunting height than many of the other guardsmen nodded in a subtle bow,  then silently extended a welcoming arm, pointing towards the door some distance behind the chair. It was all very polite and respectful, which made it feel like there was more to it than just a tour of the grounds. Ironically, it suddenly felt like any objection would be, in a word, impolite.

The grounds were, in fact, rather impressive. The early dawn arrival had been less of a tour, everything still shrouded in dimness and the shadows long. Not to mention the fact that the guardsmen back then had never taken that route. The trip to the trophy room, or whatever it was, had been entirely  through the labyrinthian halls of the massive estate itself.
"Tarik. That doesn't sound very local?"
The man smiled a little. Pointing to his name was just an excuse, his darker complexion and sharp cheekbones made it perfectly clear that he was neither Danish, nor any other kind of Scandinavian or North European.
"I am of the Ottoman Empire," he said, showing his strong accent at the same time. "They recruited me in 1911, on a mission in Greece."
"Mission?"
His smile turned blatantly false, hiding whatever he was feeling about the memory.
"I was what you might think of as a spy for my country. But things went wrong and I all but died. They told me later that history had noted me as dead, so I was a candidate for recruitment."
The south of Europe, right before World War I. Not a bad place to look for valuable things that would soon be lost. A perfect hotspot for Wenway activities.
"And they sent you here? Seems like quite a change of pace."
We were walking, or casually strolling, along the one side of the massive courtyard between the buildings. A few people, mostly young men that looked local but were likely entirely bound to the place, for fear that they would see and talk about things, were moving barrels into one of the buildings, through a door big enough that it clearly had to be some form of storage. The small patches of grain spilled here and there on the ground suggested it was some of the local harvest being moved to a better spot for storage.
"It's peaceful," he simply replied.
He wasn't wrong. Even with the men moving barrels and carrying sacks, the sound of birds could be heard from outside the estate grounds, and the bit of wind that got inside the courtyard only made the mild weather feel even more welcoming. It was of course very likely that he was talking about his work, especially considering that he had a past as a spy, which could make most other jobs seem peaceful, to say the least!
As we neared the door that the barrels were rolled into, Tarik turned slowly. He clearly had no idea and no instructions about what to show, simply turning the tour into a stroll around the compound. With his arms folded behind his back, he seemed like a man on a break, taking the time to relax himself a bit, as well. The entire courtyard, in spite its size, was open enough to see from any one corner to any other, making everything visible at a single glance. And yet still, he was following the order to show it.
"How did they get those things in the trophy room, by the way? They were clearly from the... what?"
A little unexpectedly, Tarik was not only smiling, he was grinning, like a child that had just played a prank on his parents. He wasn't entirely young, although it would be wrong to call him old, too, and the fine stubble on his face made the grin look especially devious.
"Did you hold them?" he asked, still grinning.
"No, why?"
"They are replicas," he answered. "The master makes them in wood, entirely from memory. Or he paints, as you no doubt have seen."
"And the blue jeans?"
"Those, however, are real. He has a few luxuries that get sent. The jeans are one of them."
"And what others are there?"
"Toilet paper."
Tarik gave that last answer quick but casually, as if he expected the question, or simply had the answer on his mind. He was slowing his walk, clearly realizing that there was very little point in walking the length of the courtyard many times over, seeing nothing that wasn't there to be seen already.
"Is there a place to eat, Tarik?"
He looked puzzled at the question for a moment, or simply at being asked anything, but quickly nodded. As he looked out over the courtyard, apparently trying to think of the shortest way to a kitchen or the like, he actually looked relieved to have something else to walk to.
The guardsmen cantina turned out to be surprisingly cozy. A single table had five men sitting there, relaxing over what looked like a glass of wine, and about half a dozen other tables stood empty, subtly suggesting that the staff of guards was biggerh than one might at first expect! The Wenway Group had a reputation, and the rumors that there was a fully functional time machine on the ground were clearly correct. With those things in mind, an extended security staff should come as no surprise, but the place had a feel not unlike the military quarters in the fort by the sea back in 1701.
"If you wish, I can have a boy get you a fresh plate of mashed potatoes, and I'm sure there is still some wine left?" said Tarik, sounding like a nervous dinner host.
"Just water. The potatoes sound great, though. All I've had is bread with fat."
"Don't trust the water here," said one of the men by the table. The others laughed, raising their glasses of wine, although the man seemed to not mean it as a joke.
"It's okay," Tarik said quietly. "The water is not that clean in these parts, but I always have the cook boil it." He looked at the men with a sort of tired smile on his face. "Not all of us find that cleaning the water with alcohol is much better for us."
The men, clearly hearing his remarks, laughed and raised their glasses again at him, seeming to not take it as an insult.
Calling through a narrow gap in the wall, looking very much like a corridor meant entirely for children, Tarik got a hold of a young boy that quickly took the request and ran off through the little corridor.
Time passed. Tarik was mostly quiet, exchanging a few words with the men at the other table. They were engaged in a game of dice that he let them explain, and they were a bit skeptical at the prospect of letting a woman in on the game. In the end, they capitulated, and as the food finally arrived, the game was in full swing. Apart from a few small windows, there was no way to know the time of day, and once the food was gone and the men were called back to their posts, it was well into the afternoon.
As the young boy returned to take away the plate that still had half the now cold portion of potatoes on it, Tarik had a slightly more private talk with the other guardsmen, discussing some issues about patrolling the forest better. It seemed like something that could, in some odd situation, be worth knowing, but the food had not gone down entirely without complaint. With mashed potatoes, that was a case for a bit of worry. Tarik either hadn't noticed or hadn't commented on it, so it hadn't shown too much. But something was wrong.
"Well, Marie, you getf the pleasure of seeing us look to the animal traps on the north side," Tarik remarked with an odd, cheerful sigh.
"Lucky me." The fake smile made no impression on him. In fact, his eyes looked a little worried. It turned out, they had a reason to. Without warning, standing up made everything suddenly spin. The floor hit hard.

"When did you last eat, girl?" asked the strange woman by the bed. Everything was out of focus, everything flickered. It took a few seconds to realize that the flickering was from a candle on the wall. The focus was, although only in part, caused by the sky outside being suddenly darker.
"Eat?"
The woman stopped for a moment, looking a bit annoyed, or possibly just confused, by the question, likely because she had wanted an answer.
"Yes, eat," she repeated. "You look to have barely any food in you. Your body fainted from just trying to handle some potatoes."
"Some bread with fat on it."
"When?" she repeated, making sure to put ample emphasis on the word.
"I... I don't... Look, it's kinda hard to say."
Surprisingly, she made a mocking snort, briefly glancing with judgemental eyes.
"You time travelers. One day you will end yourselves with this unhealthy way of life."
This time, she was the one to be surprised. She clearly did not expect to cause a laugh!
"You sound like someone I know. I bet he would..."
There was no time to finish the sentence. Tarik walked through the door rather abruptly, looking strangely bitter about the whole thing, or perhaps about something entirely else. It was still a challenge to think clearly,  and thus to read people.
"Finally, awake," he said, sounding a bit rushed.
"Yeah, finally awake. Why the big emotions all of a sudden?"
His eyes flinched a bit, going over the woman briefly and then just making random jumps, nothing particular to focus on.
"Am I okay now?"
The woman seemed hesitant to answer the question, but after a stern look from Tarik, she finally nodded.
"You're weak you need rest, to let your body deal with the... food," she said, sounding awfully judgemental about that last word. She clearly didn't count a plate of potatoes to be much food to have to deal with. As she left the room, Tarik shut the door rather unceremoneously, then turned with a poorly hidden glare in his eyes, arms crossed across his chest.
"The master said your ways of traveling were... not the best. Poor equipment, poor methods, poor planning," he said in a grim, irritated voice.
"They work."
The snappy answer to his criticism, or his master's, was greatly undercut by a sudden coughing fit and a brief but vicious stomach pain. The look in his eyes revealed that the irony of that had not passed him by unnoticed.
"Why so obsessed with me, anyway?"
Tarik's eyes found the floor rather interesting, all of a sudden.
"You are a time traveler," he said, overenunciating every word as he slowly began pacing the small room.
"The master knows that."
Tarik nodded, slowly, still not making eye contact.
"Not many independent time travelers come through these parts, you know," he said, this time rapid firing the words. "It is my responsibility to make sure the master has his chance to decide what to make of you."
"Ah. Not so much a tour guide as a watchdog, eh?"
He nodded. "Rest now. The master will have his decision in the morning."
With those words, he turned and left the room, looking over his shoulder one last time to make sure everything, and everyone, was in its right place. As he closed the door, it first made the expected thud of the wood hitting the frame. But a moment later, another thud followed, one that sounded wrong for a door just shutting.
"Tarik?!"
A small peephole in the top of the door slid open, and Tarik's eyes peeked through.
"Tarik, are you... shutting me in?"
His eyes were motionless for a moment before he answered.
"For your own sake. Rest."
"There's no bathroom here."
"Chamber pot, under the bed," he remarked far too casually.
"A chamber pot? Are you serious?"
"Trust me, many in this age would envy you. And I would be more worried about what goes in than what goes out." A finger snuck through the small peephole. "A night snack. Get your health up." Then, the peephole shut with a click. It became perfectly obvious that the door was built to keep people in, not out.
On the table in the corner of the room was large, beautifully ornamented pitcher with a large cork lid on it, and in front of it something on a tray, covered by a fine piece of cloth with indiscernable embroiderings on it. It had the shape of a loaf of bread, but a bit flatter, likely some softer, sweeter bread than what one would usually see. Something easy on the stomach, to get more energy into the body quicker.
Getting up was a pain, quite literally. Every joint ached, from ankles and even toes all the way up to the neck. But the worst were the constant brief aches in the stomach. It felt like being pinched hard, but from the inside.
The room was small, but not as small as the one at Ravnhild's tavern. It was also not nearly as bare. A fine mirror stood on a fine wooden table next to a small fireplace, and generic, very bland portraits and landscape paintings hung on the walls. A small lamp in each corner lit the room with their flickering flames. Had the circumstances been much different, it could have all come off as rather lovely. As it was, it was nothing but a pretty prison cell. It was no surprise to find the window permanently shut, only a small bit on top free to open for a bit of circulation. There really seemed to be nothing to do but rest.
Not that it mattered much. They had taken off only the shoes, but that meant the feel of the cold floor hit that much harder. Even this little discomfort was enough to make everything spin again, making the idea of just staying in bed, resting, sound far more enticing. And still, that little bug kept itching. The little bug inside the brain that said to go looking. And if there was nothing to go look for, go looking for something that was worth looking for.
Putting on the leather shoes felt almost like putting on a warm coat on a cold winter's day. The warmth instantly began spreading through the toes and up to the ankles, making both feet seem to come alive once more. There was a small fire, mostly embers, in the fireplace, keeping the night chill at bay, but the walls apparently had not gotten that memo, feeling to the touch as cool as the rocks along a river. The chair in front of the fireplace, a delicately carved rocking chair, lured greatly, but so did the urge to look behind every painting and piece of furniture! The curiousity won out, although not before tasting a bit of the indeed sweet bread and some water.
There was nothing special about the paintings. Tarik's words about the master painting things from memory came flooding back, but it seemed unlikely that he meant pictures like these. They were nothing but unknown people and places that someone might recognize from near the town, but little more than that. The mirror leaned against the wall, but it was easy to look behind it, and even the table it stood on, food and all, was just far enough from the wall to easily peek behind in the soft light of the nearest lamp. There was nothing of interest to be found. It began to look frigteningly as if the room was perfectly simple, nothing more than what met the eyes at first glance.
The bread was good, though! It felt and tasted a bit like poorly made cake, fluffy and buttery. It was a bit dry, but dipping it in the water poured up carefully in a very fine porcelain cup, helped a bit with that. It did resist on the way down, though, causing a few slightly oversized bites to scrape a bit on the way. Although it seemed perhaps a bit pessimistic, it still seemed like the best idea to pull out the dreaded chamber pot. It was, of course, empty, but just the thought of using it was unsettling. Still, if a bit of bread wanted to go up rather than down, it was better than the floor.
While sitting on the bed, cup of water in one hand and piece of torn off bread in the other, staring uncomfortably at the elaborately painted chamber pot, the thought at first seemed a bit insane. But then again, there was nothing much to do in the pretty prison.
The bed was of a very typical design, just four legs holding it above the cold floor. Putting bread and water aside on the table, it was possible to squeeze in under the bed's frame, between its stubby little legs. The light from the candle lamps barely made it under there, and just being there cast a thick shadow over everything, as well. It was possible to see that there were no big items under there, but that was about it.
Prying a lamp from its spot on the wall proved surprisingly easy, though! They were bolted in hard, but the functional piece, the one holding the candle itself, was screwed into the part bolted into the wall, and although it spilled hot wax everywhere, painfully hot wax, it could be screwed loose.
Kneeling by the bed again, the point of the lamps being bolted directly into the wall became clear. The flame almost seemed to look at the thin cloth stuffed with hay that the bed was made of and lick its firey little lips. But placing it on the floor and leaving it there, to illuminate the underside of the bed without getting the flame near it, worked quite well.
It was everywhere. At first, it just looked like some odd shadows cast by the free-standing candle, but they were not. Letters. Letters in many languages, many alphabets, scribbled clumsily on everything under the bed, no doubt the one place that nobody really looked. A few of the languages made sense.
"I'm not the original," the letters said, except the word "not" was crossed out, rather angrily from the looks of it! On all the other languages, pieces were crossed out, too. It was the same sentence, repeated over and over again, in one language after the other. And it appeared to be written in blood.
The lamp quickly went up on the wall again! The sounds, and even the silence between them, suddenly seemed threatening and foreboding, like the audio track of a crappy horror movie. The room seemed smaller and insidious, as if it had a deranged mind of its own. The strange but peaceful place suddenly became more than just a pretty prison. It became a trap.
The windows were still shut solid, the open part far too small to force even a small body through. The door, needless to say, was still bolted. And the walls increasingly felt like they were narrowing in, making the room slowly shrink. It felt suffocating.
With a crackling sound, the water killed most of the embers in the fireplace rather quickly. The smoke had a bitter scent to it, as if rot in the firewood was finally allowed to breathe freely, and the room dimmed more than expected, now that the lamps were truly alone in lighting it. But the heat died out, little by little, and as the smoke disappeared up the opening inside the fireplace, that very opening became safe to reach. Safe to reach, but still not a very safe way out of the room! The metal grids that shielded the fireplace from dust and rain that fell down the chimney shaft were all frustratingly narrow, scraping against shoulders and hips, leaving long, black streaks on clothes and skin alike. And not all of the scrapes were painless.
It was a common bit of old architecture. There likely was a fireplace below, and perhaps even more small ones up above, all sharing the same chimney. A massive estate like this could never have enough fireplaces if each needed its own chimney, and anyone building something this big would know that. So they shared. It made for some smokey experiences when too many were lit at a time, forcing so much smoke through their shared chimney that some came back, but this was no apartment building. It would be a strange day when every fireplace of a certain chimney were lit at once. In fact, the design was likely so that rooms on one chimney were unlikely to be used at the same time. It was the skyscraper of its age, every problem tackled to the best of the architect's ability long before the first stone was set down. Now, that fact became useful in quite a different way!
On the floor below, which should be the first floor, the fireplace was at least three times larger, with nothing lit in it, both of those facts being both lucky and, because of the design of such a place, likely. The metal grid was so wide that it almost felt like exiting a small door, and the kindling in the fireplace itself was cold. The room was likely a spare, rarely used, meant for when another room of its size was in need of repair or, for some reason, too crowded. The estate never gave the impression of being where great parties were hosted, but there could be other reasons.
Of course, the room was not lit. The moonlight helped give an idea of larger furniture in the place, but there was no room for sudden moves. Floorboards complained softly and little trinkets rattled at the faintest touch in the dark, making every step an excersize in not panicking!
It quickly became clear that the room was not watched, though. Through the thick window panes, muffled sounds of guards and the occassional servant could be heard, bustling about in the courtyard. The size of the room alone made it hard to build up a mental blueprint of the building's design, but the room above, the pretty prison, clearly did not take up much space above the ceiling. A single pillar in the middle of the large room suggested that things above were divided up far more, but there was no way of knowing. Laying complex plans for getting back to the small room above seemed futile, but there was nothing wrong with trying.
The door was unlocked and the broad hallway outside unguarded, all facts that supported the idea that it was nothing but a large spare hall. It made sense, placing the pretty prison above something fairly worthless, even if they clearly did not expect an escape by fireplace!
At least, the hallway outside the room was lit, more fancy and brighter lamps lining the walls, silently flickering away. The walls were finely carved wooden panels, a pattern like a flowering rose or large tulip cut and set into every second panel, breaking some of the monotony. Tables with large vases for plants that were not currently in them stood at every half dozen or so panels, each vase with its own variant of a simple pattern, little figures painted on them in what looked like a more modern form of old Greek pottery. The flamboyance and the silence made the hallway seem like an elaborate tomb.
At the end of the hallway, voices finally began to appear, far more clearly and far closer than just in the courtyard outside. The language they spoke was impossible to determine, though. Not Danish, not even a dialect, and definitely not English or something else close by like German. Parts sounded like very crude French, but most just sounded like a made up language for television or the stage. Passing by the mouth of the hallway, far enough away to notice nothing, they seemed to wear thin leather vests, the same kind of very light protection that Tarik and the men in the cantina had worn.
As the light from their carried lamp dimmed, leaving only the faint light in the large room they were wlking through, it seemed safe to approach closer. The room turned out to be a stairwell, of sorts, a large, finely decorated room with heavy, winding stairs going up in several directions. One went up to what seemed to be a hallway running parallel to the previous one, only on the next floor. It took very little to sneak up it without being seen, and along the more narrow hallway's walls, a single door stood out. It was shut with a simlpe wooden bolt on the outside, and a small slit at the top, for looking in. Tarik had been tall enough not to stand on his toes to look in, but it was, indeed, the pretty prison cell. The bolt slid quietly from its place. This was the safe way back.
The other rooms in that hallway were not that different, most of them just small guest rooms with the fittings outside to also hold a bolt, though none of them currently did. There were no other guests, it seemed, at least not ones requiring their own private prison cell.
Downstairs, in the elaborate stairwell, guards were again walking around, talking in some impossible language, quite possibly the same as before. There was a clear pattern to their rounds, a way they patrolled the place, and it was laugably easy to fit into that pattern and remain unseen. But door after door in at least the stair room was locked, not one allowing for snooping around. All that remained were a few other hallways, something that threatened to take too long.
One hallway, luckily, caught some attention. It was on the first floor, nearly perfectly across from the one that had the large spare room in it. The hallway had only two doors, making it the only one that seemed possible to fully examine. And the doors were at an odd spacing, very far from one another. With the guards still following their pattern, it was easy to slip down the hallway. The first door was locked, but the second opened with a gentle click, right in time to avoid a chance of being spotted!
The room was large, much larger than the large spare room or even the trophy room. And it spanned to entire floors! A balcony ran as a second floor along most of the walls, apart from the window side that was little more than a row of glass panes, facing the outside world. It was beautiful, the moonlit forests visible in the distance, as if there was no wall at all. A conservatory, at first glance.
At second glance, however, it became clear that there was more to it. Large objects stood covered in fine cloth, like art waiting to be dramatically revealed. In the pale light, jars could be seen, the faint moonbeams being turned many shades of dark as they went through them. They felt damp to the touch, droplets of water still clinging to the outside of them.
Outside the room, the guards were about to pass by the end of the hallway again. As they did, and as they disappeared into the stair room again, there was ample time to unscrew one of the candle lamps that adorned this hallway, just as others did the other hallways. Inside the room again, the lamp lit up everything a little, but not nearly enough. It was like a single flashlight in the bowels of a hangarship, like a firefly inside a warehouse.
The lamps in the conservatory lit up one by one, easily made to burn with a bright light from the flame of the one lamp from the hallway. As lamp after lamp lit up, the covered objects were stripped of the darkness and suddenly had colors! The damp glass jars swirled with murky shades of dust, long wooden sticks sticking out of them. Brushes. Jars full of brushes. This was not just a conservatory, it was a gallery. Large paintings, covered in delicate cloth tarps, nearly a dozen of them. And amongst them, things built or sculpted in clay and stone. The master made things from memory, Tarik had said. It looked like this was where he made them.
It was perhaps just the allure of essentially picking through someone else's memories, but the impulse to pull away the large tarps was immense. It was clearly a bad idea, the tarps having clearly taken some work to put on in the first place, but the urge was strong. In the still limited light from the few lamps and the pale moonlight, it took a little while to realize that there were drawers along the walls in many places. Not desks or cabinets with drawers in them, but seemingly drawers built into the wooden walls. Dozens of them, discretely blending with the overall look of the place. In full daylight, they would likely be clear to see, but this was not the case at night. Some turned out to be locked, but a few were carelessly left for anyone to just open. Whether that was from indifference or just forgetfulness was impossible to tell.
Paper. Large pieces of thick, rough paper. Drawer after drawer was filled with it, pieces ranging from barely a palm to small posters. Rough sketches were drawn on most of them, using coal or equally rough pencil. Buildings from several ages, castles on one sheet and spaceports on the next. Some were just quick doodles that had clearly been abandoned, while others were complete works, perhaps drafts for future paintings.
And then, there was one that stuck out. Even without color, the fine details of the coal sketch was gory to look at. A mess of bodies, laid on the street of a place that, judging from the background, was a beautiful city, of thin bridges, rooftop parks and open plazas. It looked futuristic. But that was not what made it special. What made it special was a symbol. Two of the bodies had it on their chest, looking like an official insignia. And in the distance, it was on more than one wall, either as a solid decoration or on a long banner. It looked like, but was not, a swaztika. It did not have the same jagged angles, the same stiff, straight arms. It fit perfectly in a circle. Just like the one in the bunker near Benny's farm. The one that had been breeding monsters.
The lamps were much quicker to put out than to light. In minutes, the gallery was dark again, the hallway lamp back in its place. The stair room was even quicker to navigate through, and as before, the hallway leading to the pretty prison was unguarded. Nobody expected someone to be running through the halls in secrecy, the guards likely there to prevent someone from stealing or vandalising the place. Bolting the door from the outside after shutting it took nothing more than the bedsheet as a rope and a bit of precision and patience. The pretty prison was a prison again.

Morning broke just a bit before the knock at the door.
"Miss," said a voice from the hall. Marius, polite as ever. "The master has ordered a bath be readied for you before your journey onward."
The bath went by quickly, apparently offending the three women that had cared for the bathtub, warming water in the adjacent fireplace. It was very soothing and was a welcome cleanse, but it didn't manage to take any thoughts away from what Marius had said. The journey. It sounded, at first glance, like confirmation of being allowed to use the time machine. But a journey could be many things. Going back to the town as a pretty corpse on charges of spying for the Swedish was, in technical terms, a journey.
"Your... jumpsuit... was quite filthy. I had it cleaned while you were."
The master entered the bathing room with absolutely no qualms about privacy, pointing a young woman to put the clean jumpsuit on a dressing partition.
"Yeah, I'm not used to fireplaces."
He didn't seem to understand the connection. Most of all, he didn't seem to leave.
"I tried dousing the fire when it got too warm. I guess I only remembered to wash my face when I got the stuff on me."
He smiled, looking very pleased with himself for some reason.
"Yes, there was some problems around the fireplace, too, I meant to ask. But none of that matters now. Others have cleaned it up." Finally he turned to leave. "I will have Marius take you to the travel room."
Marius did, indeed. The room was below, the entrance on the first floor but much of the room dug into the ground. The soft, Danish soil could be dug far into in most places before hitting any significant kind of rock. They had made use of that.
"How far back are you going, exactly?" asked the master, walking up a stone staircase, clearly built elsewhere and brought in to be assembled. It made sense. Wood might catch fire and most metal might conduct the energies from the machine, or just violently overheat.
The machine looked different. Gone were the demonic fingers that would come apart and balance the flow of rushing energies. Instead, a single ring of some odd material, parts sticking out very dramatically, surrounded a ridiculously large platform. The platform itself looked like white marble, and it was flat, not curved to accomodate a sphere of energy above it.
"How far back can you get me?"
He laughed, a bit too loudly, a bit too forced.
"Well, we can go back about a millenium here. More than that and you would be better off going to the hub in the early 900s."
He kept a slightly arrogant smile on his lips for a few seconds, ignoring the lack of an answer. Then, something in his eyes changed, and the smile became stiff and his eyes hinted at some kind of anger.
"Eight centuries? I'll be ripped apart..."
It was meant to sound as an accusation, calling him out for a lie. But the words simply trailed off, making it sound unintentionally impressed. Very unintentionally.
"No, the gateway is designed to handle it. This is how the big boys play the game."
This time, his smile was clearly meant to look like pride. It did not. There was a strange predatory aura around him, as if he was fighting an urge to do... something. Something very disagreeable.
"It's a state of the art rig," he said, trying perhaps to sound reassuring, but again coming off as arrogant and oddly bitter. "The best that can be built in this place without attracting attention. That's how it reaches so far." The look in his eyes shifted as he crossed his arms. The arrogance disappeared. The bitterness stayed. "This is not your amateur hour, little girl."
"The hub. Send me to the hub and we'll see how far they can send me back, then."
With a nod to one of the many people at the foot of the stone stairs, he stepped away from the stairs themselves.
The stone stairs felt cold, even through the leather shoes. In fact, with every step farther down, the air itself became a little colder, and by the foot of the stairs, it was outright chilly. Closer to the machine, it warmed a bit, as if the machine itself was radiating heat. Several people, all in clothes made from very fine, very white cloth, moved about the thing like doctors in an operating room. One stood by a panel in the large ring of the machine, and when he pressed something on the panel, the ring opened next to it, beckoning someone to step inside it.
"It's an impressive piece of machinery."
The man, his face only half visible through the cloth that covered his face, looked absolutely baffled at being spoken to.
"It... it's a good machine," he said, overcoming a nervous stutter the best he could.
"Sending me back almost a millenium. Must be a very advanced model."
He looked at the machine a bit, as if checking it before answering. He seemed very uncomfortable being pushed into the conversation like that.
"No, not... not really. It's just what could be put together with what..."
"Oh, by the way," the master suddenly yelled from atop the stairs, still standing with his arms crossed, "with such a big jump, no clothes." His grin now reached shit-eating proportions, looking like some frat boy about to make new recruits run naked through a sewer pipe. "We don't want you to go up in smoke."
The man by the panel quickly turned away, pretending that the previous conversation had never happened. Apparently, the little chat itself was not what had made him nervous.
The platform did, in fact, feel a little warm. None of it seemed to come from the marble white floor itself, but rather from the air above it. Closer to the center, that air lost a bit of heat, as if it was the ring itself that emanated it. Standing there, it was still easy to see him up near the entrance, arms still crossed. After a brief moment of locking eyes, the jumpsuit came off, and the shoes with it. The platform still felt just warm enough.
Someone pushed a button.