5: Up, Up, and Back Down

May 12, 2024

Previously on 2.17 Seconds into Never, Meg Atomic has gone from the Late Cretaceous to medieval England! Having discovered how to fly, she now rushes to Camelot, hoping to intercept Guinevere and the visiting Lancelot and change history…

Flying, as a person rather than in a plane or with a jetpack, is harder than it looks. In the films one often sees flyers just kick off from the ground and fly away into the skies as easy as you please, which is all very well, but the difficulty with exercising the superpower of flight is this: you’re not alone up there. You have to share the friendly skies with every kind of bird and insect from pigeon to hawk to a bee out for a morning buzz, and then there’s the manmade traffic. Passenger jets, private charter flights, news helicopters, police helicopters, drones of all shapes and sizes, the odd balloon floating up from the birthday party it just escaped from: it’s a wonder one doesn’t read about superhero crashes every day. Indeed, the Federal Aviation Administration was nearly overwhelmed with alarm when the first publicly-known capes took to the skies. There was even a government hearing about it. Everyone was deeply concerned.

Meg, back in Arthurian England, didn’t have to worry about any of that. She assumed so, at any rate, as she blasted her way across the sky through sheer gravitonic power. Sure some birds got their feathers ruffled, but otherwise she had worked out that the only thing anyone on the ground would notice was some exceptionally loud thunder, and they might attribute this to a possibility of bad weather. It wasn’t as if they could pull up the weather app on their iPhones to check the radar see for sure. Meg almost laughed as she flew on.

She scanned the ground for any sort of castle or palace that looked like Camelot, trying not to think exactly of what would happen when she found it and swooped in. She’d thought about it last time, back with the dinosaurs and the meteor. Meg knew that strictly speaking, she couldn’t intervene. Well, she shouldn’t, anyway. It would change the timeline. The course of history. The butterfly effect. If saving the dinosaurs wasn’t allowed, she could only imagine what would happen if she stepped in and stopped the inevitable chain of events that led to the death of King Arthur and the end of Camelot.

And yet…there was something Meg hadn’t told anyone, not even the Malevolent Med-Student. When she was younger, so young in fact that her only sibling at that point had been Aaron and her powers were only just beginning to manifest, she had first stumbled across the story of Guinevere and Lancelot, and at first she’d fallen in love with it. Then she’d thought it over, analyzed it, and got mad. Why Guinevere had chosen to run off with that swaggering moron Meg couldn’t understand, especially when she already had Arthur! The story had stayed with her, burrowed into her subconscious, and lay there like a brooding worm, festering in the dark, and now here she was in the actual story. Timeline or no timeline, Meg Atomic was going to do something about it.

Just then she saw the castle, Camelot itself, coming into view just past a wide silver river, its strong towers and high walls ablaze with banners. Meg dived down, slammed into an earth-shaking landing outside the main gate. Several men with swords nearly fell over, but they quickly regained their balance and ran towards her, yelling something about her being “a witch! A witch!”

Meg almost ignored them, but then she had an idea. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “I’m a witch, you bet! And I’m here to challenge ol’ whatsisname, Lancelot du Lac! So come on out, Lancy! Bring it on!”

The men with swords looked at each other and backed swiftly away. Talk notwithstanding, if she wanted to fight Lancelot and not them, she was welcome to it. Meg heard a commotion inside the castle, and then the doors opened and they emerged.

It was Guinevere and Lancelot, naturally. Guinevere was as beautiful as the stories said, even though she was clearly distraught. “Lancelot,” she begged, “Go not forth to this challenge, for thou art too brave and handsome to meet death this day, and this lady in foul shape is clearly-”

“But yea, I must!” Lancelot said, swinging his sword dramatically. Meg gave him a point in the handsome department, though she’d seen better. Also, she had a distinct impression he hadn’t bathed recently at all. “For verily, I am indeed thine own sworn champion, and there wouldst be a lasting blot upon my honour were I to forgo this challenge to thy beauty and-”

“Oh, get a room,” Meg said.

'“I beg your pardon?” quoth Lancelot.

“Sorry, let me rephrase,” Meg replied. “Getteth thou a room. Preferably far from here, and with someone else. Guinevere’s taken.”

Guinevere gasped. Lancelot reddened. “How darest thou? I challenge thee to-”

Meg hit him with a blast wave that sent him clear across the fields and into the winding river beyond. There was a faint splash.

“Wasn’t he raised by the Lady of the Lake?” she commented to the stunned Guinevere. “I hope she taught him how to swim.”

Before she or Guinevere could say anything else, a sudden blast of thunder resounded around Camelot, and now it was Meg herself who was nearly knocked off her feet. “What in the-”

“Cease thy foul language,” rumbled a deep voice. Meg’s mouth fell open. Standing there beside Guinevere, where definitely no one had been standing before, stood a tall sturdily-built man in deep blue robes, his white beard nearly descending to his waist. He held a long staff of wood, which he now brandished at Meg. “Or else I shall smite thee.”

“Okay, who-” Then she realized. “Merlin. Of course you are. Lovely.” Meg set herself for battle, wondering as she did how graviton waves measured against magic. She couldn’t exactly work the probabilities on that. Only one way to find out.

Read the Next Chapter.