Part 1, if you missed it. And Part 2. And Part 3. And Part 4. And Part 5. And Part 6.
Edgar double tapped the cube into the desk with his beak, the click loud and echoey each time. The light of the cube blinked and then brightened, the walls and rounded ceiling and most of the hall covered in a huge image.
Of Stumpy. In the hall. In front of the desk. And within it contained the image off Stumpy. In a hall. In front of the desk.
And onward. Not, come to think of it, unlike the egg.
Momentarily dizzy, Stumpy closed her eyes.
“It takes a little getting used to,” said the Edgar who didn’t know Stumpy, “I’m calibrating right now.”
Eyes still firmly shut, Stumpy heard another series of clicks of different intervals.
“You can open your eyes,” Edward the Seagull said, and when Stumpy did, she was surrounded by huge, vivid images of her first stop in all its Jurassic glory.
“Are we there again?”
“Oh, penguins,” said Edward. “No, it’s a projection. You’ll be along any second.”
Then, like the end of a magic trick, Stumpy appeared on the wall to her right, seemingly out of thin air, the original egg within an egg rolling blithely across the floor and to the other wall.
“Oohhkay…” said Stumpy. “Now what? We watch it?”
“We isolate the problem and you go back and fix it.”
“We isolate the problem…you don’t sound like the Edward I know.” If Stumpy could have bitten her tongue, she would have. “I know, I know, respect individual time order.”
It was strange seeing her visit to the past from a distance, she seemed so tiny among everything around her, aside from some much smaller creatures she couldn’t get a good look at, scurrying as they were among the giant leaves.
And there, as she lumbered after the egg, arrived Terry. Ah Terry. Only now could she appreciate Terry’s full size, bigger than an iceberg.
As she watched and Edgar pushed and clicked and dialed, her short adventure moved forward and backward and forward again. The egg next to her popped perfect, tiny circles from its shell, blue and orange and red and yellow light polka-dotting through.
Edgar slowed the replay and sped it up, slowed it, sped it up, and around and an around again. Stumpy wondered if he had any fish.
Leaning against one wall, the projection flowing over her white belly and lost in the black of of her body, she gazed impassively at the other wall, the same bit playing over and over again.
“You know I can’t see the part where you are.” Edgar also sounded peckish, Stumpy thought.
“Maybe we should take a little break, maybe get some herring, you love herr–“
Edgar’s clearing of his throat stopped her cold.
“How much seagulls love herring.” She paused. “What are you looking for, anyway?”
“The precise moment of temporal cross-contamination.”
“Huh?”
“When you messed up and completely altered the timeline.”
“I didn’t do anything, I followed the egg, and then I got a ride and…oh I even cut my leg.” She stuck out her leg, where Aunty Ida vanished the evidence with that metal rod.
Back and forth went the images.
“Wait, right there!” She pointed her wing at the other wall. “That plant right there got me.” She saw herself pause as the leaf sliced her, the blood welling then dripping. “Ouch,” she heard herself say. “Is that what I sound like?”
“Ah,” Edward said, “here we go.”
“So my blood there became a new human penguin species? Lying on the ground like that? Maybe some amber or something was involved?”
Edgar stopped what he was doing to stare at Stumpy. “How would that have worked?”
“How should I know,” she said, “I’m not the science person.”
“Penguins are riddled with viruses,” he said, back to clicking and dialing.
“Hey, I’m sure seagulls aren’t all health and rainbows either, you know,” she said. She decided she liked her Edward the Seagull way better.
“No, no, it’s it not that. Watch.”
Edward zoomed in, the image of Stumpy now nearly the size of the wall. Next to her was one of those small animals she couldn’t quite make out under the leaves, much smaller than she was, with a sharp face and a long tail.
The animal snuffled around, emerging from next to the stalk of a big plant, nosing into the tiny trail of blood Stumpy left.
“Bingo,” he said as it lifted its head, a faint stamp of blood on its snout. “Bingo. That’s what you have to undo.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Stumpy.
As her words evaporated into the air, the entire scene was replaced by Aunty Ida’s face, which ran up the wall, to the ceiling and down the other wall, enormous and oddly distorted.
“I’ll take over,” she said. “How are you, Edward?”
“A little frustrated but otherwise fine,” he said. He snuck a glance at Stumpy. “Aunty Ida.”
“You need to remove that blood, Stumpy,” she said. “That humble creature you saw, that’s the beginning of primates, generally, and, more importantly, people.”
“Not that important to me,” Stumpy mumbled. “So did my blood mutate it into a penguin?”
“Honestly, Stumpy, I don’t know what they teach you in penguin schools but this is very disappointing. No, your blood doesn’t mutate them. Your blood carries viruses that will insert themselves into the DNA of that creature, encouraging different traits than the ones that will occur naturally, discouraging different traits as well through natural selection that will eventually lead to them evolving in a completely different way.”
“So my blood mutated it into a penguin?”
The enormous face of Aunty Ida raised an eyebrow, cocked itself, and then gave a quick nod. “I suppose you could put it that way if you really must. But no point in quibbling, you’ve got to go back and put it all to rights.”
“What if I can’t fix it? Will everyone I know just…vanish?”
“No, of course not, don’t be silly. That’s ridiculous science fiction stuff. People who exist don’t vanish.”
“Oh,” Stumpy said, her naturally hunched shoulders unhunching almost imperceivably. “That’s a relief.”
“They’d be in another timeline completely inaccessible to you because if you went near it you’d rip a hole in space-time so severe everything would turn in on itself and cease to exist, so you’d just never see them again.”
“Oh,” said Stumpy, this time decidedly less relaxed.
“Now,” Aunty Ida said as the dotted egg rolled itself down the hall, “back into the elevator and off you go.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
A Bit to Read 
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