Welcome to the Galaxy

Losing Touch

Time sped by, three months had passed. Helga’s dresses sold quickly. Her belly was beginning to show. It was not ideal to be a single pregnant woman in this time. She started looking into orphanages to drop off the child. Time traveling was difficult under normal circumstances. Trying to drag a child with you seemed wrong.

Helion was beginning to lose control to Helga’s motherly instincts. He still needed to move forward in time. Between her desires for s*x and her hormones going haywire, he found himself barely able to keep things running normal. Thankfully the morning sickness had ended. It was one less issue to deal with everyday. He was having to pee all the time now though. He longed for the morning sickness. Sure it was unpleasant but, after a couple minutes it had ended. Peeing all the time was more disruptive

His projects had become large enough to be difficult to move. There was also the hole into and out of the cave. It was getting to be too small to get in and out of with the belly. Helion locked the projects into the secret hiding spaces. 

Choosing the correct path forward was becoming impossible. Five months was not a long time. The orphanages were not the best place to leave a child in this era. Moving through time in the sanctum was getting dangerous too. A collapse could easily become fatal. Helion decided to start shifting quickly. If the tunnel collapsed he could keep going. He had spare parts for his device now. His transmitter was working too. If he could jump forward his father’s family might be able to assist him with resources. In this time they were still relatively poor.

Helion shifted forward a hundred years. He remembered to close his eyes his time. He counted to twenty and opened his eyes. He reached down to reload the temporal shifting device. A large explosion went off above and shook the sanctuary. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. He continued loading the device after he got his footing again. He heard more explosions in the area too. They were as big or maybe just weren’t as near at that one had been. Either way, this wasn’t a time to try stopping in.

He finished loading the fuel and pushed the button once again. He gritted himself against the light that was about to begin. The strobe like flashing was as intense as he had remembered. The sanctum stayed intact throughout the flashing. His worry had been it would collapse and he would find himself trapped in dirt and debris. 

When everything stopped he breathed a sigh of relief. Then prepared a meal with the stores of dry goods he kept on his person. As the meal cooked he set about the work of repairing the device. The food was finished before he completed his task. He removed it from the heat and completed his work on the device. His meal was cold before he ate.

He was ready for another jump though. It was quite above. He had almost expected the city to have overgrown this area and his hideaway to have been found. His shift was two hundred years and a grand total of six hundred and twenty one years from the year he was born. He was curious to see what happened outside his safe zone.

Helion opened the door. It took a couple minutes for him to adjust to the dark. He saw a strange looking metal shell with symbols on it. It was bigger than Helga in height. The shell was cone shaped and green with a yellow band that wrapped around it. Much of it was buried in the dirt hat was he opening of his escape tunnel.

Helion saw free resources. He could see small areas of light along the cave roof. They were off to the side of it. He moved up close to it and looked over the body of the item closely. The word bomb stood out on the side. He hadn’t heard the word in this language but he knew what it meant. It didn’t look like any from his planets history. They were dangerous and had been outlawed. Learning how to make them had been outlawed too. Pictures were all that were in his history books in school.

Helion still saw materials but Helga saw danger. Helion couldn’t force himself to get any closer. Helga was fighting him, she wanted to dig out and get away. Her fear was winning, it was the fear of a mother trying to protect her child and was irresistible. She started digging rolling rocks down the mound of dirt. Helion convinced her strong will to get one of the remaining bayonets to use as a digging too. Tunneling out went much faster with a tool.

Helga had a tunnel out dug in a few hours. The air was strange outside. The forests had reclaimed it lands. There were no sounds of human activity and the city that had been so close before was not even visible from where she was standing. She got sick and threw up. It wasn’t morning sickness, it was something in the air. She covered her mouth and dove back underground. Time could race by quickly. Hat might allow the air to heal itself. It was the only hope she had for survival.

Helga rushed into the sanctum and closed the door again. As soon as the door was closed she hit the button on the temporal shifter. Time raced by once more. It was quickly over. She loaded he device again. She used it three times before it broke down again. Three hundred more years had flashed by in less Han five minutes. The air inside the sanctuary was still clean. It might have been stale but she didn’t care. 

The spare parts came out again. The damaged components were replaced and another three cycles were run through he temporal shifter. He didn’t have enough spare parts to run another series and Helga relented. Helion was allowed to move back into control. He would’ve liked to have transmuted between jumps so more materials would’ve be ready when he arrived again. The panicked behavior of her survival instincts made food more of an issue now.

He was now some twelve hundred years from when he started. He put the transmuting chamber back to work. Silanium was on the menu. This was the last one he could make without a new supply of stomach acid. He had four batches of old Silanium rods he could reforge. It would be enough for two or maybe three new sets of spare rods.

The primary focus right now was just getting the temporal shifter finished again. Helion had it fixed the next day. The new rods from the recycled material ended up stretching into three more batches. It could get him nine hundred more years.

Helion climbed out of the tunnel again. Nothing had changed with the status of the bomb and exit hole. The air outside was clear. The woods had become thick and old. They were strange looking ivy vines covered their branches hanging low to the grow. There was no signs of human activity in the area. Craft flew over the region high in the sky. They were far apart and few. Helion could see trails for others too.

Helion knew he could find better materials now. He could make his transmission and break down his Stelernum. He had enough black powder to make a small amount of rocket fuel. A speed suit could help him find a new town. He would be about the only way he could move all his materials.

Helion drug out all his resources. Then made the transmission. He didn’t receive a reply. It wasn’t expected. He began working on twisting the Stelernum into a suit that ran around her legs, arms and torso. It was forty pounds of material that wouldn’t effect his movement and the fuel would actually make his travel faster. Stelernum was a wonderfully versatile material but it couldn’t use Electurnum fuel. It was used in transmuting the metal, added more to it destabilized the new material.

He made rocket fuel for it next. He made enough to go around two or three hundred miles. It wasn’t much and he couldn’t make any more. He poured it into the tanks then tested his loaded resources. He was not able to take everything he wanted. He dumped all the bayonets and had to return them with some of his coins. He opted to take his gemstones with him. They were harder to come by and he would need them for other projects.

He was getting worried. Helga was becoming more and more protective and aggressive. He wasn’t sure if he would survive the pregnancy. Less and less of the time he felt in full control. Helion made clothing to cover up the speed suit. That was the last step he took before leaving. It had taken here weeks of hard work to get ready but, they were moving again. 

With limited fuel he went back towards the direction of his birth town. Looking for a new town would be easier on lands he had already passed through.