Abydos: Save your pearl clutching to the end. I travelled with Lancaster Pennyworth, mostly — that’s him in there. The one who looks like the Dean’s taller, better-looking brother.
Zephyr: I thought all humans look the same to you.
Abydos: Shhh, even a tree would notice how attractive Lancaster is. Anyway, we’d been working in pairs — Aesop with Florence, Lancaster with me. This was not long after Banksia and Burbage huffed off into the sunset. About twelve years ago. We’d been travelling for a while, we were starting to figure out the rules…
Tunbridge: Rules for time travel, you say?
Ptolemy: Shhh.
Abydos: We knew you couldn’t transport anything important out of its own time.
Bellerophon: 40,000 Australian marsupials beg to differ.
Zephyr: Don’t be smug, Bello, we all know you’re dashing and heroic.
Tunbridge: Your face really is familiar, are you sure we haven’t met?
Bellerophon: Zeph told you. You used to be roommates with my twin sister.
Tunbridge: No, that’s not it…
Abydos: Anyway. We were working on the theory that you could reclaim important or significant artefacts if you grabbed them in the moment before they were about to be destroyed, and Aesop had made this whole wishlist of suggestions, mostly from the Tudors. She’s always been a bit funny about Anne Boleyn. I’m more of an Anne of Cleves cat myself…”
Zephyr: Catherine Parr.
Tunbridge: Katherine of freaking Aragon, thank you very much.
Abydos: It wasn’t exactly a rule, but Celeste and Melusine — this was before they divorced, and how messy did that get! Anyway, they kept trying to add rules to time travel. Everyone else voted them down. But they were trying an experimental guideline along the lines of — not sending travellers into time periods they were obsessively, outrageously fannish about.
Tunbridge: That’s such a mean rule.
Ptolemy: Makes sense to me, after seeing your emotional meltdown when you saw Jane Austen at a distance.
Tunbridge: You promised never to mention that! Clearly that particular rule didn’t stick.
Abydos: It did not.
Zephyr: Turns out time travellers are capable of getting absurdly fannish about any time period they visit.
Abydos: Because Aesop was so dizzy about Anne Boleyn, she and Florence were sent off to rescue church artefacts from the Blitz, while Lancaster and I got the Anne Boleyn caper. We were looking for her necklace. The famous one with the ‘B’ on it, from the portraits. No one ever knew what happened to it after her execution. We spent weeks on the project, used up our six hop allotment, bribed Control to let us have some extra off the books…
Bellerophon: That’s how Anachronauts are born.
Zephyr: Yeah, yeah. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Anachronauts throw the best parties.
Bellerophon: Don’t mind us, we’re just saving the world over at Banksia…
Abydos: Lancaster theorised that she must have worn it to her execution, or at least shortly before. We went along to see for ourselves. Not a fun day out. The necklace fell into the damned basket with her severed head. No way we were going to fish around in that. We went around again…
Tunbridge: But that’s so completely against… recommended behaviour when time travelling.
Abydos: Early days, my dear. This was before the Anachronauts. Before we knew about Events. We told Nero we couldn’t find a way to grab the necklace without being seen by dozens of Tudor witnesses, and he suggested we use the Violet Sunflower.
Zephyr: So you stole it from my dad.
Abydos: It wasn’t his! If it belonged to any of us, it was Nero. But, ah, yes. As it happened, the Violet Sunflower was at the time in the custody of Soames Kincaid, Dean of Banksia College.
Tunbridge: You mentioned this sunflower before. Along with a pineapple and… a sphinx? What are they?
Abydos: They are the High Artefacts. The secrets of time travel.
Tunbridge: And you stole one!
Abydos: Borrowed. With Nero’s endorsement! It was the only way to adjust the memories of the witnesses to Anne Boleyn’s death. Then it occurred to Lancaster in the moment that if we were erasing their memories anyway… we might as well, you know.
Zephyr: Rescue Anne Boleyn from her own execution.
Bellerophon: Scooped her up like a koala from a bushfire. Nice.
Abydos: It caused an Event, of course. We didn’t know that at the time — we got out ahead of it. And there we were, standing in the middle of the quad with Anne Boleyn alive and well.
Zephyr: That was the beginning. The Anachronauts. All of it. Split the Founders, split the colleges. Everyone was arguing over it for weeks. Months. Bello and I overheard all sorts of things — you do, with a Founder for a parent.
Tunbridge: I don’t understand, Abydos. Were you expelled from Chronos College?
Zephyr: (Laughs indistinctly) Of course not. The Founders were delighted with the results of Abydos’ experiment. They sent Anne Boleyn to Aleister College to teach history — Celeste Oxford was the Dean at the time, and she welcomed it all with open arms. Nero talked Celeste into providing more resources to replicate the experiment. They rescued more people from history — and the Events started racking up. Some of us thought it was all far more interesting than being here under the eye of Melusine and her schedule. So Abydos and I crossed over, to Aleister College. To the Anachronauts. We weren’t the only ones who made that choice.
Abydos: They might be pure chaos over there, but at least they’re honest about it. Plus, you get to hang out with Kit Marlowe.
