The Crow Bar

“Imagine, if you will:

In as much as it was unwise for any time-traveler to attempt to explain a television screen to a Grand Inquisitor of Medieval times – unless he had either a big gun handy, or a guaranteed running head-start with a fast horse waiting at the end of it – it would be particularly difficult for Johnathan Scrooby, a time agent, to explain the precise workings of the device he was using at that particular moment to someone from the twenty-second century.

It might be less risky perhaps, but just about equally as difficult. As an agent of the Time Saving Agency, a clandestine and inevitably mysterious and generally unknown super-secret organization charged with policing Time, it was his job to observe historical events in a completely different timeline in – er, real time. That way, at least hopefully, Time would turn out the way the curiously yet somehow accurately named Anals of History said it would.

Scrooby skipped back a thousand years, stopped, fine-tuned the time-stream, and zoomed in.

In the blackest veil worn by the night sky, a diamond shone – a solitary tiny sparkle lost in an ocean of faint tiny sparkles, a tiny orb of light in the immeasurably empty blackness of space: a star… but not just any boring old star. This star was special, and its name was Ramalama.” – from Underground Movement (book 7 in the Quantum Series). More