Machines hummed and whined as sparks flew as the generator exploded and steam filled the air. The atrium glass shattered and the building shook. As it rained down on Trudy as she tried to keep her feet and instead bounced across the floor. A fog descended as bright orange and yellow flashes lit the air, simulating the lightening Uncle Waldorf had tried to harness. A series of static electric arcs crackled and swirled in the mist near the center of the room. A weak sound, reminiscent of a death rattle, came from the area in which the Prime Machine had been with Uncle Waldorf at the controls. A final explosion was followed by a hollow boom, and Trudy was thrown backwards, head over petticoat, landing beyond the outer ring of machines.
Murky forms crept from the epicenter of the explosion, crawling and lurching away from the light that surrounded the wreckage. Leathery and hunched, skittering and crawling, they sought darkness. Low and close to the ground, four legged beasts left a trail of moisture as evidence of their passing. Lumbering, humanoid forms bemoaned their freedom as they covered their misshapen heads from the unaccustomed brightness.
The workshop was devastated. Many of the windows in the hangar-sized building had been shattered. It was large enough to house a dirigible, but had felt cramped once Ol’ Uncle Waldorf had piled his equipment inside. Spencer stood up, coughing and squinting through the yellow dust that hung in the acrid air. Glass crunched underfoot as he worked his way to where he had last seen his twin sister. He wandered past the twisted wreckage that had taken almost four years to build and calibrate, and was stunned by the extent of the destruction. The haze inside the building was clearing, being drawn up through the broken windows, and a cloud rose into the dawning sky. It would be seen for kilometers away.
Unseen, other things withdrew into the dark shadows at the edge of the room. Rats scurried out of their path, or their lives were ended with the snap of a hungry maw. The strange energy which had opened the doorway for these creatures had waited for an opportunity such as this. Plans of millennia had come to a head, and as the dust settled, dark strategies went into action.
Spencer stepped over the debris and called for his sister, not noticing a fleshy appendage slither away at his approach. Hearing her sputtered reply, he rushed forward. She was partially hidden by a fallen boiler. It was wedged against a copper plated workbench which was covered with scoring from acetylene torches and marks from the electricity. Splinters of wood littered her yellow skirts and her bonnet still smoked where an acidic mixture had landed. Spencer helped her up and they looked each other over, her with a critical eye and he with a worried look.
“What happened?” he asked. “Did Uncle mess up?”
“Spencer Theodore Matthew Tridington! You know perfectly well that Uncle Waldorf double and triple checked every machine, gear, cog, pulley, wire, whozit, whazzit, thingamabob, whirligig, and screw in this building! This was not an error on his part,” she huffed in a single breath. “This was something else entirely. The laboratory is in shambles and the time machine is destroyed. This was sabotage!”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t contradict me, young man,” she said, even though he was only minutes younger than her, and even that was contested. Trudy chose to believe their Great-Aunt Gertie had the right of it. Trudy had been named after her, and followed in her footsteps as a strong and opinionated woman. Great-Aunt Gertie was Uncle Waldorf’s mother, and a twin herself, though her brother had disappeared a decade before Trudy and Spencer were born, lost to the exploration of the wilds of the Dark Land. “It makes perfect sense. Uncle Waldorf is a genius, and methodical in every aspect of his work, barring his enthusiasm and not taking notes and not remembering where he put things,” she muttered under her breath, “but that is what he has us for!”
She spun towards her brother, her face flushed. “Spence! We must think, think hard. You are perspicacious and you will be the key to this!”
“Trudy, I don’t even know what that means,” he replied with a droll tone. His attention was attracted by movement out of the corner of his eye and he turned to stare into the shadows.
“Don’t be querulous, it doesn’t matter. What is important now is that you put those skills to use,” she continued as he returned his attention to her, rolled his eyes, and sighed. “I expostulate this was an act of malicious intent and a heinous deed with, with, with, very mean objectives. Maybe even criminal. Yes! I shant be magnanimous in this; I shall be assiduous in my endeavor to discover the varlet who would dare to bring an aubergine shade of despair to our house!”
“Trudy, stop it! You have tongue enough for two sets of teeth,” Spencer interrupted her tirade. “You will call down the ghost of the great bard himself to smite you if you keep using all your big words.”
“You are just upset because I am smarter, and older, than you.”
“Not at all, you were being grandiloquent and sententious, and it was superfluous,” he responded, mimicking her lofty tone as she glared at him, with hands on her hips and lips pursed in a moue. “Remember, my dear sister, we attended the same school. You just feel the need to use words people don’t understand to make them uncomfortable. And before you go on about women’s suffrage, let us focus on the task on hand,” Spencer gestured to the spectacle in front of them, “and discern what precisely took place here, if it were not a grievous error on our crazy uncle’s part. Now, we should start at the beginning, and as I recall that was almost four years ago when Uncle’s friend visited …”