YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT...
Carrying the fatally injured Lazlo, and with other wounded team members they stagger back into 1942, where they hope to stealthily replace the diamond. They manage to get the cannister back, but before they can get into ECHO section the All Clear sounds, followed by Devlin opening his door and someone hitting the Lockdown alarm. Major Simpson and Captain MacNab hold them at gunpoint, demanding to know what the hell is going on. Devlin, having wiped his own memory, is no help whatsoever. Frantically they stall for time until their clicker works and they are finally able to thrust the diamond back into Devlin's surprised hands, get the hall door open and run back into CHRONOS, aiming for their own 1969 timeline.
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Each trip seems be more violent, and the wails and growls of something chases them through the ether, causing some to lose a hold on their sanity. To their huge relief they arrive in familiar blue IMF 1969, but find the HQ has been half packed away into cardboard boxes as they have been gone for over 24 hours – the Support Team lost their signal and had rather given up on them, deciding that the Diamond was lost, Stepanov had succeeded and the Mission was over.
An emotional reunion between the dying Lazlo and Mr Jacobs occurs as the team desperately explain what has been happening and share the additional information they have on the nature of the diamond and the urgency of the mission. The medical team are anxious about the wear and tear that some of the frailer characters are starting to experience, while colour testing suggests the psychological toll is building, but they now have the powerful Thule drugs to take and hopefully make it through one more mission.
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But where to go? Using CHRONOS once again they find no traces of the anomaly in the past, but by activating Lazlo's hidden circuits they find they can see it in the future. At Buckland House in 1993. In a sense they no longer know what they are chasing, but the diamond moving around is clearly doing terrible things to time and space and they feel they have no choice but to continue to seek it and bring it home.
Mr Jacobs is panicking about the dangers, how the machine might blow up, how they could damage space-time, how the collapse of a future bubble could ripple back and destroy their present. As they activate CHRONOS he wrings his hands and reminds them once more that they are travelling blind, have no documentation and the only thing CHRONOS can tell them is that there are a lot of people there....
FUTURE FASHIONS
The Coalman is beside himself at the exciting possibility of future travel and the Tailor rushes to pull together what she has extrapolated people will be wearing in the 1990s. Apparently she's given it a lot of thought and has been waiting for this day as she gleefully produces a lot of rather skin tight silver options, swimming caps and shiny capes...
SOUND ON >
It turns out 1993 is basically a massive rave happening in the grounds of Buckland Park. The side effects of a future jump are intense, but surrounded by clubbers who are are appreciative of their outfits and offering them what look like sweets, the team find themselves dancing to the house beats of DJ Carcosa...
Working their way through the crowded room into the even louder main hall, a clubber stumbles out of the snooker room shouting something about a 'massive f*cking dog!' and three terrifying creatures burst out and run towards the players, all made of angles and lines, somehow they have no colour, phasing in and out of the timestream, scanning their heads from side to side and then attacking with a warped and stuttering howl.
Fighting a rearguard action back to CHRONOS, the team are being rapidly overwhelmed until a clubber in a yellow t-shirt blows a neon rave whistle, somehow holding the creatures at bay for a few minutes while signalling the team to, ‘Call me, yeah?’
Then she's gone and they are falling into CHRONOS and screaming their way home, pursued by the baying howl of the hounds.
Liao is a mind-altering substance distilled from the black lotus. The drug allows the user to perceive the past, usually from the viewpoint of his ancestors. This may extend far back along the evolutionary chain with a higher dosage, but the user should be careful that they avoid certain beings that can travel to the future and exact their vengeance.