Been to the year 2200 (for guesswho)

[justmedk]

Deena Jameson were taking a walk in her neighborhood on a sunny Sunday afternoon, in order to get a little bit away from home. It wasn't that she didn't like her siblings or parents, but with 4 younger siblings it was difficult to find moments to spend alone, and she very much needed some alone-time. Even her own room was not guaranteed, as there was always at least one of her siblings who barged in like they owned the place.
When mom or dad did, she couldn't complain because they, in fact, DID own the place. But Deena, though she loved her family very much, was more than a little tired of having absolutely zero privacy, and to be honest it stressed her out more than a little.



She'd just lit a cigarette when she noticed a strange-looking man looking around as if everything was the most interesting thing in the world. She frowned. She didn't know what was so amazing about the local Confederate statue that it warranted this kind of attention. And the guy genuinely looked amazed about the smallest possible things. She paused for a moment to size him up. He didn't seem like the type who were euphemistically called "special", quite the contrary. His body language and facial expression shone with intelligence and purpose, but why, then, was he so amazed by ordinary things?

Deena headed over to him and asked in a tone that made her sound older and more mature than she really was. There was quite a bit of child left in her still:

"What's so interesting, mister?", she said with mixed confusion and jocularity. "It's just a statue and some squirrel's, I mean...", she finished as she took a drag of her cig and looked at him, eager to know what was going on, and more than a little intrigued by this guy. Even his clothes looked strange - somewhat out of place.

[guesswho]

It was totally worth it. The bribes. The time and money he put into the experiment. It was middle of the night when he left the future behind and was thrown here. Afternoon, it looks like. Harlan looks around, as if he never seen anything like this before - and while he has seen things locals would consider at least magic on daily basis, he certainly never saw anything like this. And the best thing is, he will return merely seconds later, no matter how long he stays here. He might even return a bit early to see himself enter the time machine, maybe have a word, even.

His examination of a statue is disturbed by some young girl. And...is that...Harlan leans closer to her and inhales deeply. A cigarette. It smells awful. The drugs where he comes from are so much more sophisticated.

"Wow...you really..." Harlan laughs. "I always thought it's just a myth." His knowledge of history is not great. Could be the reason he doesn't give a damn about altering it. Causality, as far as he's concerned, can go bother someone else. "May I try one of those?" He feels happy like a little kid. What he did, if it ever gets discovered, would land him on terraforming facility on Venus, but he made plans and covered his tracks.

"Tell you what. Give me a...a...a cigarette, right? And I'll tell you how to win a lottery. Every lottery. Deal?" He speaks fast and keeps looking around all the time - but not like someone expecting an attack, rather like someone who wants to see, hear and try everything.

[justmedk]

Deena tilted her head, as if trying to ascertain if this guy was crazy, and therefore dangerous. But even though she obviously didn't think that he could tell her the winning lottery numbers, she gave him the cigarette he asked for, and let him borrow her lighter. Or...well...her mom's lighter which she'd "borrowed" herself.



"Are you okay?", she asked. "I mean...you look a little....on edge, I guess?", Deena went on. "What's so interesting around here anyway", she gestured around her. "It's nothing but that fucking statue and some squirrels. And if you've seen one squirrel, you've seen them all, right?", she finished as she put the lighter back in her pocket after he'd used it.



At least she hoped that the cigarette would calm him down a little.

"Are you lost?", she asked. "Is...is there someone you want me to call?", she went on. He didn't look like someone who'd walked away from a nursing home, but she had to admit that he was acting like it. And then she remembered one of her classmates telling her in confidence how her mom had sometimes started to forget obvious things, times, dates, schedules, etc. And Deena thought that this guy might be one of those unfortunate people who develop dementia much earlier than normal.

[guesswho]

Harlan lights up the cigarette, returns the lighter and finally inhales deeply. And immediately starts coughing painfully. "What...the...fuck..." It takes him a while to get through the initial onset of cough. "It's horrible! How can you smoke it, just like that? Here, try this. But keep it until you're alone. Or at a party." He pulls out a dermal patch labeled BLISS. And also has another pull of the cigarette. This time, he manages not to start coughing.

"Oh yes...it's not very interesting. I just never seen it before. It won't be here for much longer, you know. No loss, if you ask me." He draws another puff of the cigarette and throws it away. He's had enough. It feels like swallowing nails. Then he pulls out a small device, one that locals could mistake for a phone. "Yeah, so, my part of the deal. Next year, pick these numbers. 7, 81, 63, 15, 94, 44, 67." He reads the numbers out loud.

"No need to call anyone, although I wouldn't be opposed to seeing a policeman. They're really funny, when they get angry." His knowledge of police consists of comedy movies depicting them as stupid people with guns, quick to get angry at any remark. He'd like to see it for himself. "Do you know where we could find such a person? You do have them here, right? I've seen the movies, they're so funny."

[justmedk]

By now, Deena was quite content to play along with this guy. She'd decided that while he did not look the part, he certainly acted the part of the village idiot, and she had nothing better to do.
She wasn't able to stifle a chuckle at his reaction to the cigarette. This was the same reaction she'd seen from many of her friends, but it was the first time she'd seen it in an adult, which amused her for some reason. But when he handed her something he called "BLISS", her guard instantly went up


"Uhhh....I dunno what you think, mister", she said, "But I am not going to be caught with drugs. Not only would my parents like literally kill me, it'd kill my chances of getting into a decent college", she said, and handed him the thing back.
When he started rattling off numbers, though, she picked out her own phone out of her pocket and opened the note-app, writing the numbers down as well as committing them to memory. Of course she didn't really think he knew next year's lottery numbers, but hey...at least it couldn't hurt.

"When, next year, though?", she asked him. "I mean...there are, like, a million lotteries every year, so which one is this, and when, exactly?", she played his game, thinking that at least it was one way to amuse herself.


Her eyes widened, however, when he mentioned wanting to see a policeman.


"You...wanna see a cop?", she asked incredulously, eyebrow raised, then decided that while this guy was amusing in his own way, he just crossed the threshold from amusing to creepy, and she should get away. Come to think of it, he'd crossed the threshold from amusing to suspect when he'd offered her that "BLISS"

"Uh....whatever", she said, then gestured down the street where she knew the police station was. "If you wanna see a cop - go down that way. There's like a gigantic sign that says "Police". You can't miss it", she meant to finish there, but suddenly heard a strange sound and froze, tilting her head trying to hear it better.


"Hey....what's that strange swooshing sound? You hear it too?", she asked him looking at him as the strange sound got louder.

[guesswho]

"What? What do you mean? It's just Bliss...oh, I see! Well whatever, your loss." Harlan laughs. They actually banned drugs. He heard about it, but it always was completely unthinkable for him. They still have a long way to go. Sometimes, he needs to remind himself he's two hundred years ahead.

"Oh fime, I'll go see a...a cop...by myself. Do you know how to make them angry fast?" But then she draws his attention to the sound. He had a strange feeling before, but now the feeling is strong enough to be audible. Turns out, it's not a feeling at all. As it gets louder, Harlan pulls out his device once again and starts frantically moving his fingers along the screen. To no avail. In a second or two, the small computer starts vibrating.

"Oooh shit! Run! Run away!" He shouts and starts running away from the girl, but after only a few steps he is stopped by a wall of something that looks like electricity. He has seen this one before, when he started the travel protocol that got him here. The wall, or more precisely, globe starts to get smaller slowly. In about thirty seconds, he's going home.

Harlan turns out to wave at the girl, just to realize she's still inside the globe.

"Ah shit." He sits down at the ground and sighs. "Seems like you're going for a ride with me. Well, that college you were so worried about? You can stop worrying. Sit down and breathe, yeah? It'll be better that way." Seconds after he finishes the sentence, the globe collapses upon itself and they both disappear.

And just like that, they appear on a cold ground in a laboratory. A large machine, or to be precise, what's left of a large machine smokes near them. Hopefully, they'll be able to fix it. Harlan turns on his back.

"Welcome...fuck...I hate this...to year 2254." He says with greY difficulty, as he tries to catch his breath. Time travel is very uncomfortable.

[justmedk]

When he pulled out a device unlike any she'd seen before now that she got a second look at it, Deena frowned and raised another eyebrow. But before she could say anything, she saw the look in his eyes as he told her to run away, but froze solid in surprise and shock. She had not seen that coming, nor had she seen a sort of spherical shape surrounding them on all sides, getting smaller and smaller closing in on them. She lets out a scream and moves over towards him in an instinctive move to get away from the edges of whatever it is which seems to be squeezing in on them.


"What do you mean?!", she asks, now clearly agitated when he says that she won't need to worry about college. She's scared now. Does he mean to kidnap her? And what is this globe of energy surrounding them.


"What is this? THis is some David Blaine-shit, but cut it out right now!", she yells, now obviously very frightened before the globe collapses, and the last thing she felt in the life she had known, was the way reality itself seemed to collapse in on her, and the reverberation of her final scream as the globe vanished.

When she appeared in the laboratory, Deena was crying, and freaking out.

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN THE YEAR IS 2254?" she screamed at him as she looked around and found herself in a strange place. If it hadn't been for her adrenaline kicking in, she would have been very much uncomfortable and nauseous, but at the moment her survival instincts were telling her that now wasn't the time to feel sick.



She looked over at the smoking machine and stared at it. It was clear to her that she was indoors now, and hadn't been 30 seconds ago. Everything else, however, was hazy.


"Where have you taken me?!", she screamed as she headed over to the machine trying to make heads or tails of it. "And more importantly: Take me back! Now!"

[guesswho]

The expected reaction. Harlan rests for a while, letting the girl shout and scream. It's empty here, his bribes made sure of that, so they're in no immediate danger. Slowly, hed lifts his head and when he decides he's not going to puke, he sits up.


"Not really where, more like when. You know, like werewolf, whenwolf, whywolf..." Harlan shakes his head. It doesn't make much sense even to him. "Apparently, something triggered emergency return. Um...I'm a time traveler." It counts, right? Even if it got fucked up for some reason.


"Now please stop shouting." With a lot of trouble, Harlan gets back on his feet and hobbles over to the nearest screen. It shows a log full of errors, but as he reads through it, understanding dawns and Harlan starts laughing. "Heh...sooo, you know what happened?" He can't stop laughing. The irony of it all.


"The monitoring system noticed dangerous chemical entering my lungs. So it decided to start emergency return. The cigarette." There can't really be much stupider thing to ruin greatest experiment humanity ever did. Harlan wipes his fingerprints from everywhere he touched and stretches.


"Come along, kid. We can't stay here. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be happy about this." He isn't exactly happy about it. Now he's stuck with some young person from two hundred years ago. He can't send her back. He can't own up either. So they're stuck. Harlan starts walking towards exit. He knows the facility well. His money helped build. It helped build the time machine. Also, it helped break it.

[justmedk]

(nice twist )

Deena did NOT appreciate this guy's joke in the middle of the worst nightmare of her life, and she spun around to give him another piece of her mind when she heard him start to explain. She paused, but fumed - pun very much intended - when she heard him laugh about the whole thing as if it was hilarious. It wasn't to her.



"Listen here, you fucking psychopath!!", she yelled, "I don't care what did this, I just want it like undone, got it!?!?", she screamed at him, but when he told her to come along because "they" wouldn't be very happy, she paused immediately. She didn't know who "they" were. For all she knew "they" could be like Big Brother or some shit like that, and she did not want to fall into those guys' hands. This guy was crazier than an entire asylum, but at least he wasn't malevolent. Or, he didn't appear as such to her.

But "they", whoever they were? She did not know.
She sobbed, but nodded, as she started to follow him towards the exit.

"Can't you...like...beam us out or some shit?", she scoffed as they headed for the door with the exit-sign, drawing upon her only experience with the future: Sci-fi. And Star Trek especially.

[guesswho]

She is entitled to a few insults right now, so he doesn't complain. Harlan is pretty sure he would be in about the same mindset about the whole thing, if he was in her boots. And soon enough, he's laughing again. Beam them out. "Nah. But I've got a car just outside. I kinda own this place, you know. It's just...I'm pretty sure government had different plans with the thing." He shrugs and leads the way through the empty building. Lamps light their way and turn off, when they're not needed anymore. They're passing by many laboratories and offices. A lot of technology and not a human in sight.



"Once we get out of here, we're safe. We should have some more time, I bribed a lot of people to make this building empty tonight." A little while later, they get to the entrance hall. From here, a city is visible, but it doesn't look like anything from 21st century. The scifi movies come a bit closer to reality.



"This is Starport." He waves a hand around. "Back in the day, this is were Sleeper ships were built and they were so huge, they needed a whole city around them. And then ships left, but the city remained. This is where progress happens." He says, with a lot of pride for his city. And then he hurries to his car, no longer wasting time on explaining hundred and hundreds of tall, glittering skyscrapers with lights floating around them. There is no visible border to the city, and despite the facility is located on a hill, they still look at the buildings from the bottom.


There is only one hole in the scenery - the center, which looks like a crater from here. That's were Sleeper ships took off. Now, there's monument with a park built around it.


"Move it. You'll understand everything in a month or two. Get in." He says and leaves a door open. There is no wheel or other controls, just seats opposite each other.