Elias Varner had always been a man out of place. Not in the poetic sense, but quite literally. He was a traveler of time, though not by choice. A malfunctioning wrist device, a relic from a future he barely understood, had thrown him into an endless cycle of displacement.
One moment, he would be strolling through 19th-century London, marveling at the clatter of horse-drawn carriages, and in the next, he was dodging neon-lit hovercrafts in the sprawling skyline of 2142. There was no pattern, no logic. Just an endless, jarring leap from one era to another.
The device had been locked onto his wrist ever since an unfortunate encounter with a scientist in 2087 who had mistakenly taken him for a test subject. Before Elias could even ask what the experiment entailed, a button was pressed, and reality twisted around him like a whirlpool. Ever since, he had been drifting through history like a ghost.
His only anchor was a small notebook he carried, filled with dates, names, and the occasional cryptic note from a future version of himself. “Find the woman in the red dress.” That message had appeared more times than he could count, scribbled in his own shaky handwriting.
It was in 1926, inside a dimly lit Parisian café, that he finally saw her. She sat alone, her red dress standing out like a beacon in the sepia-toned world around her. Her eyes locked onto his the moment he entered.
“You’re late,” she said.
Elias hesitated. “You know me?”
She smiled, pulling out a notebook identical to his. “Better than you know yourself.”
A surge of memories flooded him—fragments of conversations, glimmers of past encounters, all leading to this moment. She was the key. But to what? And more importantly, would she be the one to finally stop the jumps?
As he took a seat across from her, Elias had the strange feeling that, for the first time in years, he was exactly where he was meant to be.
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