After a decent sleep, the team are awoken the next morning by sirens that announce the impending arrival of the Temporal Team. During the night the IMF team have completed their HQ in the dining room and a large plastic tunnel has been set up in the hall – the CHRONOS device.

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Over breakfast Mr Jacobs – the Plumber – arrives with the CHRONOS team and five matching suitcases that open up to become the CHRONOS control modules. The CHRONOS team talk a lot about temporal stability, aetheric fluctuations, temporal ethics, field generators, targets, transfers, encoding, entropy, and if all else fails, the Mortenson Variable Constant. It's hard for them to explain in layman's terms, but essentially CHRONOS ‘spins up’ bubbles of the past from the aether, and allows you to travel to them, interact with the past and then return, which collapses the bubble. Jacobs can send his team in time, but not space and only within limited parameters.  

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The IMF researcher thinks Stepanov has hidden the diamond in the past and the team are now scanning, looking for anomalies that match the signature of last night and waiting on a delivery of files via the ALICE computer that will hopefully tell them more about the history of Buckland House and the Diamond.

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TEMPORAL TEAM INCOMING! Sirens sound and various

lights etc flash inside the tunnel. But when it is opened there is just a horrible pile of fleshy goop that presumably used to be the Temporal Team, only identifiable by having an IMF psychic examine it (and collapse). This throws the whole situation into disarray and further scanning and testing occurs, with the CHRONOS IMF team now much more willing to work with the players (who are still being tested an interviewed by the medical team and now being measured by The Tailor).

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The Head Gardener calls everyone together to announce the analysis is complete. It seems that whatever Stepanov

did in his ritual has affected the timestream and also the players, at some kind of molecular/esoteric level – which means they are no longer properly part of time. This is cool because it means they can time travel without

becoming goop (but bad because not being part of time will kill you)... the Head Gardener thus gives them the new mission of retrieving the diamond so (a) the Russians don’t get it first, as even now Stepanov is probably  working on a way to get it back and (b) every moment it is in a place it shouldn’t be it seems to be damaging space time.

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Our players are given a hasty briefing on time travel and its many risks... Going to the past could affect

the future – which is why they must try and change as little as possible. Simply retrieve the diamond that should not be there, and thus ‘fix’ the timeline. Rules and limitations of travel are laid out, including the Timeshock they will experience on return and a rather confused talk about time travel and sex (basically don't do it) from the Twitcher, an incredibly anxious figure tasked with monitoring continuity....