1: Yeets Into the Past
Everything happened in a blink. One moment Meg was standing on a pale blue carpet at her friend Liz Flask’s place trying to apologize about the whole supervillain boyfriend fiasco1; the next, she was staring down the spiraling vortices of Time. Exactly 2.17 seconds after that, she found herself plummeting through the air right into a muddy swamp. There was a tremendous splash.
“Well,” Meg said, struggling to climb out of the muck, “This is just lovely. Where the heck am I?”
Nobody answered her. She struggled to shore, which wasn’t much as it was a wild patch of grass and brush dominated by massive trees running away as far as she could see. Far above the trees, the sun blazed over her head in a cloudless sky.
That was what really struck her, so much so that she stopped right there in the tangle of grass. The sky was truly cloudless: no jet trails, no planes passing overhead, just the gaping void of blue. Now that she noticed, she couldn’t hear the usual city sounds either, no rush of traffic, no sirens, no occasional thunderclap from Captain Happily Married cracking the sound barrier in supersonic flight. All she could hear were insects buzzing and birds going about their buzzing, and even their noises seemed different somehow, unfamiliar. She began to have a very bad feeling.
Regardless, she couldn’t do anything about it standing still. So she pressed on, breaking out of the grass and into the trees. Hours passed as she walked, struggling over tree roots and splashing through muddy creeks, and as she labored on the day grew hotter and the air thick and moist, until she felt like she was doing the whole thing in a giant tree-filled sauna.
Finally Meg saw an open space beyond the trees and she made for it, gasping with relief. She tripped over a last root and nearly crashed into a tree headlong but she just managed to push around it and stagger out, more winded than she had ever been before in her life, into the full open air with the sun and the sky overhead.
All at once she realized that this was a mistake. For as she looked out at the wide plain rolling away before her, the most immediate thing she saw was an extremely large creature towering up on its two mighty legs and waving its two absurdly small arms, bellowing in triumph and swiveling its great head towards her. For an instant her brain refused to accept what her eyes were frantically relaying to it. Then finally it registered. “You…you’re…you’re a dinosaur!” gasped Meg Atomic.
It wasn’t just a dinosaur, though (Meg was very good on physics, but not as good in the natural sciences). This was the king of the dinosaurs, the mightiest of them all, known to future generations in a name hardly adequate to convey its terror as king of the tyrant lizards, the one, the only, Tyrannosaurus rex. And of course, it was hungry.
It split the air with its roar and charged.
See Quarks of the Heart.
Poor Meg can’t catch a break! 😅