Yesterday Can Only Get Better...

[Hu]

Shanghai, 2030

Hu tried to avert the disaster so many times she had lost count. Each attempt gave Shanghai a few more days. She had pushed back disaster from June to August. A sizeable improvement.

“Dr McEnroe…,” she sighed.

She was lead to believe the explosion was a terrorist act. Though she knew nothing of the people who put her here, torn between worlds, her mission was set in stone. She had to save Chengdu.

“Okay,” she said, suddenly alert again and free of her negative thoughts. “So if it’s the Dr’s research that caused the explosion, how can I convince her to delay the principle test?”

She opened a new tab, her eyes shining with the flicker for the screen as much as her nerves. Her mind wondered to coffee. A quick search revealed the current testing window to be two weeks at the end of July. She had just short of three weeks to try to change McEnroe’s mind. No easy task given she had been preparing the Hadron Collider for its initialisation for four years.

Shanghai’s future depended on the energy the Hadron Collider was going to provide and without it, the future of the city was a bad one. She had seen chronograph reflections of the projected future, courtesy of John, and that had only focussed her efforts more keenly. Even if John was not to be trusted, they seemed to want the same thing. They still wanted Shanghai to stand tall a century from now.

[Hu]

It took Hu less than thirty minutes to work out a plan of action. Satisfied, and the plan committed to memory, she closed the tabs and opened her e-mail. Absent minded clicking deleted a stream of junk e-mails or cursory yes no’s in response to questions she had asked days ago.

“Argh!” she cried, mid reading an invitation to another tedious seminar in the university.

She looked down, tense as anything, and immediately relaxed when she clocked her cat.

“Anderson, you oath.”

Sliding the chair back, the investigator scooped up the ball of ginger fur and tucked him under the desk on her lap. He began to purr and settled immediately, curling up into a content ball of tuna filled fluff.

“What are we going to do?” She asked rhetorically.

She began to stroke him, the purring intensifying, and stared at the final e-mail. She had unconsciously avoided opening it until last. The sender alone scared her. It sent a shiver down her spine. She ruffled Anderson’s fur to try and distract her, to pretend it wasn’t there, waiting for her. It invited a series of events she knew would end with her likely death.

She clicked.

“Your plan. It won’t work,” she said. There was no sign-off, no further hint. Just a statement. She considered it to be a warning, and when such warnings came from time-travellers; it meant she was once again a step behind John McEnroe.

“I’m really starting to hate him,” she sighed. She clicked reply.

[Lye]

EXP & GP Added!