The Inviolabilis

Aleksandr felt himself return to consciousness slowly, his eyes remaining closed for a moment. Then his eyes flashed open and he threw himself to his feet quickly, his eyes darting around the room. Had what had happened been a dream? Was he in some kind of German prison?

His thoughts were cut off as he felt a wave of nausea and dizziness overcome him, and he dove towards the sink, bowing his head towards it. The vomit did not come, however, and he merely spit into the sink a few times, waiting for the nausea to pass; eventually, it left him, and he sighed. Suddenly, water began pouring from the faucet, and he gratefully splashed the water on his face, still somewhat gritty from the battle at the checkpoint. It had been some time before he had a chance to feel cold water on his face.

Then, suddenly, a voice seemed to emanate into the room from nowhere. Aleksandr looked around for the mode of communication, but he could find no intercom of any sort. It instructed him to enter a briefing room--for a moment, Aleksandr hesitated, still deliberating whether or not he had fallen into some kind of German trap. It took only a second before Aleksandr resigned himself to his fate. Whatever awaited him in the briefing room, he could see he was not getting out of here.

A panel on the wall slid back almost silently, surprising Aleksandr, who had expected a loud, grating noise like the machinery of his time. Then, still somewhat reluctantly, he walked down the corridor that had been revealed by the panel. After a moment, he entered what he assumed was the briefing room. Only one person, a woman in clothes Aleksandr would expect only in old paintings, sat in any of the chairs. The thought of her clothes reminded Aleksandr that, as he looked down at himself, he still wore his scarred, gritty uniform. The rifle was still strapped to his back, and a pistol was still at his side. That was it: the Germans would not in their right mind allow a prisoner to keep his gun, even they were not so foolish.

Pausing for a moment, he decided not to speak to the woman, who looked rather anxious, and sat a few chairs away from her, staring straight forward with the rigidity and strictness of a soldier.

Aurélie's eyes snapped open and she threw herself off of the bed, ready to punch the man who had- … Where was he? She looked around her for the man Demochev. For that matter, where was she? She had barely enough time to glance at the strange room she found herself in before a wave of nausea the likes of which she had never experienced overcame her, and she stumbled to the small metal sink.

Once relieved of the contents of her stomach- half a rabbit and some old cheese- she knelt at the sink a little while longer, trying to piece things together in her mind. If she remembered correctly- and her memory had never failed her- then the Germans had been nearly on top of them when the man Demochev had grabbed her arm and withdrawn a small metal device-
She yelped as the cold water hit her face, and immediately jumped away, accidentally bashing her nose against the metal lip of the sink. She sank back against the wall, closing her eyes to keep the dizziness at bay, when she realised her nose was bleeding. Swearing under her breath, she held her sleeve to her nose to stem the flow.

“Greetings Recruits” Her head snapped up at the sound of the recording. She then watched, in wide-eyed apprehension, when the grating slid away to reveal the long hallway. She scrambled to her feet and stumbled down it, rather disoriented. How in the world had she got here, when she had only just been hiding behind a stack of hay bales in a barn?- She felt her stomach grow cold when she remembered, glancing down at her other arm and pushing up the sleeve. Her skin crawled at the sight of it- that was disgusting...

She peered around the door frame when she came to it, jumping at the sight of the two people already seated at the long table. A man and woman. The man was obviously a soldier- was that a Russian uniform?- but the woman was dressed so strangely Aurélie didn't quite know what to make of her. They sat apart from each other, not speaking. Aurélie's curiosity finally overcame her, and she stepped through the doorway.

“Qui êtes-vous?” she demanded of them, her voice muffled by the sleeve which she still held to her nose.

Baygell elated in the tug that he felt in his upper arm, regardless of the sudden and annoying sting as the chip drove itself into a sensitive nerve. That tug was the same feeling that he had felt multiple times in the not-so-distant past, the sense that he was being yanked out of the here and the now into the everywhere and everywhen - Baygell's pet name for the space-time continuum. It meant adventure, new discoveries, and the potential for experimentation. It also meant a sudden, jarring stop at the end of the line, but one must take the goods with the bads.

Speaking of jarring stops, Baygell found himself having appeared in what legitimate Chronologists referred to as a "reacclimation chamber", but to Baygell was just a glorified bathroom. Having travelled through time numerous times, Baygell; long since having become immune to the effects of re-entering "normal time", stood still for a moment, taking in his surroundings. The room he was in was just as stark and bland as his cell, if not moreso, but to the rogue chronologist, being anywhere but that prison was an improvement. He took a moment longer to take in his surroundings, then stepped out into the hallway; his bare feet padding along the cool tile floors, his blaze orange prison jumpsuit - still emblazoned with the words IRON HILL MAXIMUM SECURITY PENITENTIARY PRISONER CR01529 - seeming painfully obvious in the sterile environment the Chonologists were now gathered in.

He quietly acknowledged the fact that times had, in fact, changed quite a bit during his time in Iron Hill, watching the door silently slip shut on its invisible tracks as he continued walking towards what appeared to be the world's most needlessly drab conference room - the walls were smoked glass instead of panelled wood; the desk a simple lacquer and all of the chairs composed of brushed steel. From this room, however, issued a sudden and unpredicted burst of French. The rogue Chronologist briefly inclined his head to one side, then walked barefoot into the conference room.

He found himself in the company of three others - two women, one other man - presumably pulled from different eras, like himself. The first woman, Baygell guessed, was from Victorian England, judging by her posture and style of dress. She seemed well-composed for someone who had just been plucked out of her familiar time and sucked three hundred-plus years into the future. Likewise was the other man in the room; although, Baygell noted, it seemed perfectly reasonable for this other man to not be doing or saying anything. He was dressed in a scuffed and battle-scarred Red Army uniform, and carrying a World War II-era rifle and pistol (if Baygell's limited military knowledge was anything to go on, he could guess they were a Mosin-Nagant and a Tokarev, respectively). The third was a slim, feminine-looking French boy -

Mild shock and intrigue sent a jolt up through Baygell's spine. He could recall seeing someone who looked remarkably like this girl - he now realised that this was a woman, after surmising her face briefly from his position, behind her and off to the right - in a past that was now far gone; a much darker time. Her name escaped him, but he remembered her face. His heart fluttered for a second, but Baygell mentally forced it into submission. Still moving quietly, not on purpose but because his shoeless feet never fell hard enough to make an extremely audible sound, the rogue chronologist stepped up next to the French girl. He noted that, by her face, she didn't look much younger than himself.

((A/N: Assume the next bit is in passable French; I don't actually speak french and Google Translate is crap.))

"Time travelers, like you and myself, I would assume," Evan said softly, examining the pair with his eagle-like yellow eyes. "That would explain why the man is dressed like a Russian soldier and the lady appears to be from Victorian-era England." He smiled softly. "Just when are you from, anyhow?" He asked this question casually, almost in passing, as if he were asking a question as simple as "What day is today?". And to Baygell, it may well have been that casual.

The sudden sound of another voice in the otherwise silent room surprised Aleksandr Zhukovsky, whose soldier instincts, conditioned by years of warfighting, led him to nearly leap to his feet; his hand was already to the handle of the Tokarev TT-30 at his side when he came to his senses. Understandably embarrassed but determined not to show it, Aleksandr turned to see a young...his first thought was a rather feminine young man, but a second look quickly corrected the Russian soldier's analysis; a young woman, French, if Aleksandr knew anything about that country and its people. When he thought of French people, his mind immediately leapt to the Vichy Regime--the traitors who had supported Germany's Operation Barbarossa, the great invasion that had so badly damaged the Soviet Union in the first year of the war. But if whatever the man Demochev--wherever he was now--had said was correct, then she was not necessarily of the Vichy Regime, or even if the period of the Great Patriotic War.

"Frantsuzskie?" he muttered. He recognised the language, but was unable to understand it--the only language he held a fluent knowledge of was Russian, and, as could be expected given the time and place from which he had been torn from just minute ago, he had a firm grasp of German as well. He looked from Aurelie Benoit to Evan Baygell, his hardened, grim eyes moving from one to the other, wishing he could convey his desire to understand what was going on.

After jumping back in alarm at the soldier's rather violent reaction, Aurélie turned to face the source of the new voice; a tall man in... bright orange... Utterly thrown off-balance, she could only gape at him for a moment or two, as he spoke to her in flawless French and with a charming smile, asking her where- no, when she was from.

“I... um...” his eyes were such an odd shade of yellow, she was transfixed by them for a moment. Until, of course, she realised her nose was still bleeding and held her sleeve up to it once again, cheeks red with embarrassment. “France... Vassieux-en-Vercors... ” she finally said, still ever so slightly shaken. On his orange suit was something written in English. Most of it she didn't understand, except one word that made her only a little wary of him: Prisoner. She had grown relatively familiar with the word during an attempt to help a pair of English airmen escape from behind enemy lines. The operation had been half-successful...

“1944... It was April. And then I-” and then she met the man, Demochev... She glanced around the room, in case he had suddenly appeared while they had been talking. “Where is that son-of-a-bitch?” she muttered.

Getting up didn't seem at all a good idea to Theodore. Even just lying down, he had a nasty feeling in his chest and head, as if he was rotating backwards, and was now upside-down. Naturally, reality would snap back into place as soon as he opened his eyes, but snapping through at least a quarter of a circle was unlikely to do his sense of balance any good.

Once the circle completed and he once again felt as if he was lying on his back, facing up, he carefully opened one eye, looking at some red light in the ceiling. He carefully pulled himself up, feeling somewhat nauseous, but not all too bad. Had that man, who had called himself a scientist, offered him a drink? He couldn't remember it. He was excited to make things look like a demon had stolen him, and then the man had gotten some device, and that was pretty much it. The thing that most interested Higgs was that he didn't need to do anything for it to work; he hadn't even believed it would have any effect, and still, it did exactly what the scientist had expected it to do.

Deciding that trying to find out the mystery of a magic that worked without one believing in it, he stood up and walked to the sink. The water turned on almost immediately and the alchemist drank a few handfuls. The taste seemed off; as if someone had got rid of most impurities, and yet had added calcium. The red light on the ceiling seemed to be following him, but that was probably just another optical illusion. Perhaps, it was surrounded by glass that only passed light perpendicular to the surface?

The voice, on the other hand, was much harder to dismiss as an illusion. He couldn't quite figure out which language it was, but it sounded closest to Latin. The mysterious nature of this place was almost like an itch to him: he had to know how it all worked, and with a little luck, he would find someone who could explain at least the basics. The man had said five hundred years, which was a lot, but Theodore had a good grasp of the teachings of Aristotle -- even if they had learned as much in those five hundred years as humanity had since Aristotle's time, he'd be done with it within a month.

Busy looking at the light, the alchemist didn't immediately notice the panel slide open. He stepped through carefully, looking around for the person who had pulled it open, and concluded that it must have been some kind of pulley mechanism. Theodore walked further, noting the various materials used in construction, and soon found himself in the large room. He sat down, and looked the other four over.

Choosing who looked most interesting wasn't at all easy. It was probably the man in the green clothes, who was holding some kind of strange device, not unlike the pistols Theodore had seen demonstrations of. However, it looked smaller and somehow more elegant: it could hardly hold against the kind of explosion that was used to fire a bullet! The larger apparatus also seemed in the form of a pistol or rifle, but it seemed far more complex, as if cogs and springs had been added to the design for whatever bizarre reason.

When Demochev finally appeared in the doorway Aurélie shut up; only looked at him with wide, confused (and slightly sheepish) eyes. She found it comforting to see a familiar face in any case.
He gestured for them to sit, speaking in English, she thought, like how the blonde woman- Elizabeth- had spoken to the golden eyed man before. She sat down and tried to make herself as small as possible, next to the English woman who seemed the least threatening of all the people in the room.

Then another figure appeared at the door, a portly man with an eyebrow missing, and an awestruck expression on his face as he stared at the Russian's gun. Demochev called out to him in another language Aurélie didn't know but that she knew was definitely not English. He continued to speak, and her eyes were fixed on him as he stood and moved to a panel on the wall, pressing some buttons.

She felt an explosion of pain somewhere behind her eyes and her hands flew to her temples. She let loose a string of rather loud profanities. Which proved to be a little bit awkward later on when she realised they were now able to understand each others' languages. Furious with herself, she felt her cheeks burn, yet again, and she tried not to look anyone in the eye. She just listened in silence as Demochev spoke to them; something about a tour, and sleeping quarters, and then clothing. Her nose had stopped bleeding, at least...

At the sound of the metal panels her eyes snapped up once again, and catching on to what she was supposed to do, she shuffled into the room a couple paces behind the English woman. There were pale blue overalls lining one wall, and she ran her hand over one in curiosity, before glancing around for Demochev. They could just take these? There wasn't any catch?

Suddenly the English woman was speaking to her. The fascinated way she looked at Aurélie made her feel ever so self-conscious (was there still blood on her face?) and this wasn't helped by the fine dress that she wore. Even the regal way she carried herself... Next to this woman- this lady- Aurélie felt positively... crude. She looked down to avoid having to look the other woman in the eye; intimidated. She felt she might blush again. “Benoit.” She mumbled awkwardly. “I mean- Aurélie ... Benoit... and, um... Yours is, um- Elizabeth, yes?”

Baygell stood with a placid expression on his face as Demochev ran down his list of statements, then cut in once Demochev made his obligatory "nettle Baygell" statement. He steepled his fingers on the desk before him and half-smiled.

"Demochev, my old friend, you overestimate my knowledge," the rogue chronologist said - once again, in English. "As I've been in 'gaol', as our compatriot so kindly pointed out, for the better portion of time in which nanotech has come to the forefront, I've been unable to find out as much about it as you would think I have." His smug visage held that sly grin for a moment longer, then it faded back to a neutral expression, his fingers remaining steepled on the desk.

These fingers suddenly clenched at eachother in a spasmodic outburst of pain. A double thunderbolt of pure anguish pierced Baygell's skull and upper arm at the same time; his whole nervous system tingling. For a few seconds, his mind went black - the last thought it fully registered being 'Dammit, Demochev' - and then, just like that, that jolting shroud of pain ascended and he was left with a dull, throbbing ache in his forehead and around the lump where the chip had pierced his skin. He opened his clenched eyebrows, and the room swam for a moment before his mind managed to fully recover, and then everything came back to him in perfect 20/20 acuity. He looked to his left and saw Aurelie recovering from a similar circumstance, and inspected everyone else at the table coming back to normal in similar manners. He smiled slightly, seeing that this first "test" had been passed - at least everyone could stand some physical pain.

"Well, at least I could tell you that nanobots don't work painlessly," Evan said, but his rather weak attempt at sarcasm fell on deaf ears. Eventually, the new team was dismissed to pick up a uniform. The rogue chronologist looked on these new jumpsuits with mild disdain - he was glad to be giving up his prison slops after all this time, but these periwinkle atrocities were hardly an improvement. But the chronologist's mild annoyance was lifted after a moment when he discovered that there was a spare pair of shoes and socks laying on the floor in front of a spare jumpsuit, just as untouched as anyone would have pleased. Baygell greatfully shrugged into these new clothes, pulling on the socks and shoes and taking a few steps to get acclimated to them. They were a bit tight, but they would do until he had an opportunity to get a new pair.

It was at this point that he looked up and saw what appeared to be an ancient Chinese philosopher. By the style of his clothes, Baygell ballparked that he had been brought into the world at some point between 500 and 1000 AD. He inquired into whether or not they were going to fix time from the Inviolabilis. Baygell shrugged. "I would think this is wear we do it from, friend. It's either that or we end up thrown directly into the space time continuum, which is bad for both your own health and casuality itself."

“Nice to meet you.” Aurélie gave the other woman a timid smile.

Though at first alarmed at the door closing and trapping them inside, Aurélie eventually figured it was to provide them with some form of modesty as they changed into the overalls. Never particularly bothered with things like modesty, Aurélie quickly stripped down to her own underwear and stepped into her own set of overalls. They hung shapelessly off her petite frame like most clothes did, and the pants were far too long for her, so she bent to roll them up, eventually stuffing them inside her battered old boots.

At Eliza's anxious question she glanced up, a frown of confusion on her face. Upon understanding, however, she gave a bitter little laugh; one with no humour in it. “Where I come from,” she began darkly, going back to lacing up her boots, “no one has the right to vote... So I suppose there is some 'equality' in that sense...”
She found she had to pull out the hunting knife that was concealed in her boot in order to make room for all the new fabric. She held it, sheathed, between her teeth while she yanked hard on the laces. “Still, one finds other ways to be... politically active...” she added, half to herself and with a devilish smile as she replaced the knife inside her boot.

She frowned as her hair fell into her eyes, without her old hat to keep it at bay. She glanced around the room and her eyes lit upon one of the pairs of shoes that sat beneath the blue overalls. She liberated one of it's laces and used that to tie back her hair.

Finished, she turned to face Eliza, a little less intimidated now that they wore the same thing, and feeling a little bad for speaking so shortly before. Now she actually thought about it, she recalled a conversation she'd had with the old Jewish woman when she was only a girl. “In England.” she finally said, a little uncertainly. “In England, I think, they have it... ”

Baygell turned towards the sufragette and Aurelie, his head cocked slightly to one side as he thought. Having been pulled from the most recent part of the timeline, Evan had the foreknowledge that everyone else in the group lacked at that point regarding womens' rights. So he decided to step in and completely ruin the dramatic tension between the two of them by tapping that nigh-on endless well of historical factoids he stored in his brain.

"Yep, women have the vote in England, and in America too, so far as I know. As of 1944, at least." Baygell smiled disarmingly, then nodded and moved away from the two, back towards his corner of the room. His mind was already trying to take in the possibilities for this mission. Chronology as they knew it would be changed forever, history books would be filled with their names... But all that paled in comparison to the experiments, the actual tasks he would have to perform. He was the consultant, the expert, but even he didn't really know what he could do to fix the timestream. He had a vague understanding of how to fix the rifts, yes, but the real fun would be in the execution - his finding of a method to actually fix it. In many ways, this was part of what he had worked towards as a rogue chronologist himself - to cause the instabilities, then see how others reacted to them. But he didn't expect to actually be called in to fix them himself, no - that was just the icing on the cake.

Having examined the other recruits, Theodore returned to thinking about the advancements in science that could be made. When initially thinking about the matter, he hadn't taken into account what he had seen so far: the lights, the materials, and most importantly, the time travel. He had been injected with something that could tell what was and wasn't his body, and transfer that what was through time. The alchemist wasn't familiar with general relativity, which explained his lack of amazement by that little fact, but he knew that whatever technology was at work here, it was most impressive.

Although Demochev's speech was interesting, Theodore couldn't take his mind off all the things he knew and didn't know. A particular piece of Arabic text that he had recently read was stuck in his mind: he hadn't been able to translate it properly, but the Arabs were a great nation, and if they had written it, it was surely worth reading. He had even read the Qur'an some years ago: it wasn't quite as intellectual as he had hoped, but it was a good read none the less. This time it was a very short piece, and it seemed to somehow fit the situation...

A pain went through his head, making the man bend over. It lasted less than he expected, and left a sort of clarity in his mind, as if every term he had ever thought about and many he hadn't was now defined, easily in his grasp and on the tip of his tongue. His thoughts turned back to where they had been before the sudden attack, and...

``That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons even death may die.''

The words echoed through his mind, each one hammering into its place in his skull not unlike a crossbow bolt. By the time Theodore had recovered from the translations, the others had already headed to the changing rooms, and the alchemist followed quickly, not wanting his little fit to be noticed.

He found the suit to fit him almost perfectly, as if someone had told the creators his size beforehand. He didn't take long putting it on, quite used to wearing rather strange clothes for various experiments. He looked curiously at the clothes of the others once they had taken them off, but said nothing, deciding to investigate these materials later, once they were given some free time.

Aurélie barely managed to hold in a yelp of alarm when the man- Evan, was it? - appeared at her elbow to put in his two cents. She hadn't noticed the door opening again. As he sauntered off looking rather pleased with himself, she stared after him, still rather unsettled. There was just something about him that wasn't quite right...

“Does that man bother you like he bothers me?” Aurélie muttered, half to the other woman and half to herself. It seemed she had looked out at just the right moment, for another woman soon swept into the room, looking rather important in an even more elaborate dress -this time of red velvet- and with gold in her hair. Aurélie found the egalitarian part of herself mildly disgusted in the face of such opulence, not to mention disgusted at the little pang of jealousy it also evoked in her.

She turned away from this woman to notice the Russian man had also finished changing. When she caught his eye, she gave him a timid little smile of greeting. He was from the roughly same time as her, she figured, from the uniform he had been wearing and the weapons he had been carrying...