Part 1, if you missed it. And Part 2.
Stumpy waddled as quickly as she could toward the egg within an egg, which rattled and shook as the orange shot sharp tendrils in all directions, like a mini sunrise in the middle of a bright Jurassic day.
She felt it again, that pull of the light, but this time it wasn’t cool like the blue, it was busy and warm and prickly. Her leg was still aching where she cut it, and it felt like it pulsed in time with the light, which was now all around her, intensely orange, until it went black.
“Oh, you’re awake.”
Stumpy blinked, everything slightly green after all the orange. She was somewhat reclined in a complicated chair much too large for her. Everything in the room gleamed a dull metallic.
In front of her was a tall figure, much taller than she was, her back to her, wearing a white lab coat. Her hair was in a bun of sorts, wild, untamed. She turned.
“I see you found my egg.” She gestured to one of the lab benches, where the egg within an egg within an egg sat suspended in a tube, unaffected, roughly the same size, and once again white.
“Your egg?” said Stumpy.
“First things first,” said the woman, holding a long metal stick with what looked like a lightbulb at the end, “let’s fix this up for you.” She waved the light along the cut on Stumpy’s leg, and as she went, the cut vanished. “That’s better.”
She leaned against one of the benches. “It seems you’ve caused a tiny bit of a bother,” she said, arms crossed, the metal stick waggling back and forth between her fingers. “With my egg.”
“I don’t understand,” Stumpy said, “where am I? Who are you? And what bother?”
“You have a lot of questions for a penguin,” the woman said, and she tapped the lab bench twice. “Dot, could you come in here for a moment?”
A few seconds later, the door opened, and in came a person, presumably Dot. She was not terribly tall for a person, though still much taller than Stumpy, and there was something about her walk. Her strawberry-blond bob hid her face as she came in.
“You needed me, Ida?”
“Dot, this is–“
“Stumpy,” said Stumpy.
“Hi, I’m Dot.” She turned to look at Stumpy, and Stumpy’s beak fell open. She wasn’t human, but she wasn’t a penguin, either, just like a person isn’t all ape but you could see the family resemblance.
She had a beak, but it was the color of her skin, and her body was rounded like Stumpy’s. At the end of flat arm wings, she had hands with sharp nails, and her legs, though completely apart at the bottom, still seemed to have a bit of a join at the top.
“So you see the problem,” said Ida. “It seems your little frolic through time has had some…effects.”
“What do you mean my ‘frolic through time?’ How did I do this?”
Ida raised an eyebrow and pointedly looked at Stumpy’s leg. “You’ve never heard of the butterfly effect?”
“I didn’t see any butterflies.”
Ida sighed heavily.
“In short, one small change can change everything. And that’s what you did.”
“Not this again, Ida,” said Dot, heading for the door. “You and your primate theory. I have things to do, someone’s checking in later.”
“Checking in? Is this a hotel? A very weird hotel?” Stumpy looked at the frosted glass cabinets and scientific equipment. “A very, very weird hotel?”
“Not exactly, and let’s not get sidetracked here.”
“Does everyone look like that? Besides you? And why not you?”
“Yes, yes, you are the grandmother of all Penguinaty, and why not me is not important. What’s important is you have to fix it.”
“Why? What’s wrong with a penguin planet?” Stumpy was warming to the idea. “It’s not like the monkeys ever did anyone any good.”
“Apes,” said Ida, “and you’re not wrong there.” She sat down on a stool, now at Stumpy’s eye level. “A lot of penguins make better people than people. But unfortunately…”
“Unfortunately?”
“It’s The Icening.”
TO BE CONTINUED
A Bit to Read 
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