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A Strange Land

By Andrea Camoriano

Chapter 01

          The Time Teens were in big trouble.

          Andwan Wingsweep looked around worriedly.  She, her draconic brother Sanosuke, human sister Nina, and Time Teens were stranded in a strange forest that none of them recognized.  Granted, there were plenty of forests worldwide none of them knew – especially in the past, where Andwan’s Differential lay, but still . . .

          It left a chilly, gaping pit where her stomach ought to have been that even Sano had no idea where they were.  All he could give her was a general sense of “Eurasian, with a large touch of all-points ‘Abroad’ thrown in for good measure.”

          It made her feel worse to know that none of those around her had any kind of a clue how they’d arrived in their current predicament.

          All any of them knew was what they’d been doing when it started.

          It had been a pretty rotten day out, really – rain, snow, sleet, severe temperature drops – in other words, the kind of weather typical of Minstrel’s Haven in mid-November that Andwan called “fit only for penguins and polar bears.”

          It was also the day their friend Dr. Flock at ChronoGate Labs had set aside to test, recalibrate and readjust the gate from which ChronoGate Labs took its name.  Since Andwan, two of her three siblings and all of her Time Teens had been transported back and forth through time via the Gate many times before, they had been asked to be there, since they were the only ones who had ever dared to cross the Gate and would know better than anyone else if something was happening that shouldn’t be.  When Andwan had asked why that should be, she was told that the theory was that after so many trips through the Gate, the Time Teens would have some kind of . . . bond, for lack of a better term, with the energies it put out and would therefore be in a better position to give forewarning in case of a possible malfunction.

          Of necessity, Scooter, the baby dragon brother of Andwan, Sanosuke, and Nina Wingsweep, had been brought along to the test fire – their parents hadn’t been able to baby-sit due to a doctor’s appointment, their dragon-Uncle Orlando had the dragon’s flu, all their other relatives lived too far out of town to fill in, and leaving Scooter with almost anyone else, no matter how good a friend they were, was unacceptable – he put up too much of a fuss when separated from his family.  So Dr. Flock, who adored baby dragons in general and Scooter in particular, had arranged to have one of the safe rooms for children opened, aired, staffed, and stocked with durable toys that could stand up to a dragon’s abuses.  Mr. and Mrs. Wingsweep had dropped their children off at the labs with their teammates on their way to the doctor; they would pick them up again on their way home.

          Something had, indeed, gone wrong with the test – something none of them had been privy to know about through instinctual foreknowledge.  Equally unfortunately, none of the Time Teens were scientist enough to tell exactly what that something had been, apart from a bright flash of white light shot through with weird, dancing lightning sparks that had built up over a course of perhaps ten seconds, if that much, that somehow felt like an eternity.  The entire thing had a strange, surreal, almost creepy sort of feel to it that had put them all on edge . . .

          And then . . .

          Flash!

          The whole thing had taken less time than a heartbeat.

          And now they were in very deep trouble indeed.

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