It was cold outside and Detective Stevens was not dressed for this chill weather. Snow covered most of the ground, though it showed signs it was beginning to melt and in some places puddles of slush had gathered. Fortunately, she didn’t think she’d have to be outside for very long. There was a walking path along the side of a lake not far from the apartment building where plenty of people were walking around. All she had to do was find out what day it was and she could get back to her own time.

“Excuse me,” she called over to a couple. “I’m sorry, but what day is it?”

The couple eyed her suspiciously for a moment but eventually one of them said, “It’s Monday.”

Detective Stevens hated these sorts of conversations, coming off as some sort of crazy person, but she didn’t have time to waste worrying about what these strangers would think of her.

“No, I mean, what day, what month?”

Again they gave her curious looks but thankfully they still answered.

“March fifth,” they told her.

“March fifth,” Detective Stevens muttered. That was over a month and a half before her initial investigation into the apartment. “It’s twenty sixty-seven, right?” She asked them as a sudden worry gripped her.

This seemed to be one question too many for them.

“Are you all right?” they asked. “Do you need us to call someone?”

“No, I mean yes I’m fine. Please don’t call anyone. I just need to make sure what day it is.”

“Well, you’ve got it,” they told her, still filled with obvious concern for her. “It’s March fifth, twenty sixty-seven.”

“Thank you,” she replied and pulled out her recorder while she made her way back to the apartment building. She repeated the date into the recorder as she went. She’d go back to the apartment and await extraction.

A day went by and nothing happened. A second day passed with the same results. On the third day she had to go out and find something to drink. She took one of the five gallon buckets that was in the apartment to carry whatever water she could find back with her. Fortunately the walking path terminated in a nearby park with a public restroom that had a floor spigot she could use to fill her bucket. Her stomach was empty and she was hungry but she knew she could go a good deal longer without food and didn’t want to risk a temporal transposition on a full stomach.

It wasn’t until the fourth day that she finally realized why she wasn’t being extracted. Upon closer inspection of her audio recorder she found it was missing some pieces. They were small pieces, which is why she hadn’t noticed it before, but they were crucial to its functionality. Whether they had been lost in the temporal rift or if whoever had sent her here had removed them while she was unconscious she wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter in either case since without those pieces she couldn’t contact her team. The last they probably had heard from her was that she was being shunted. She could be any-when for all they knew.

“Well,” she said to herself, “As soon as they lost contact with me they would have begun searching local records for anything mentioning me.”

It was standard procedure whenever a field detective got lost in time for them to try and find some means of leaving markers for when they are. She had to stay pretty close by since their search would be limited to the immediate area where they lost contact with her. Given her surroundings, how she was going to make any sort of lasting record of her presence here was a  bit daunting but she wasn’t going to give up. She knew plenty of other detectives who had been stranded and found ways to get back. Sometimes it took a while, the longest she knew of was a few years, but regardless of how long it took, she was going to get back. She had to.

It was only now that she had accepted the fact that she was stranded that she remembered the last part of the message that had been left for her on the door.

…say hi to your mom for me.

Why would they say that? She’d been sent to locate a man, Dante Sacco, who had traveled to this time illegally. She’d been sent alone and unarmed because he had no prior history of violence, no other criminal record. His only crime was this instance of illegal time travel. How he had been able to fashion a device in this time that would trigger a temporal shift like that, she had no idea. The technology for such a device wouldn’t be invented for another hundred years or so. Even with the schematics he’d have a difficult time getting the requisite components manufactured. As far as Detective Stevens knew, there was no way for him to have brought the machine with him either since the primary components were too delicate.

As for her mom, Constance Stevens she was the director of the agency and had been the one who assigned her to this mission. How had Dante known that they were related? They didn’t exactly look much alike, and not even very many people within the agency knew they were related. They got along well enough, but their relationship was mostly professional these days.

Maybe Dante didn’t actually know Constance Stevens was her mother. Maybe he’d made a lucky guess, or perhaps he was just being rude, making reference to her mother as a general insult rather than actually knowing that her mother had, in fact, sent her.

Regardless of Dante’s intentions, it was clear they had underestimated him. His ability to build a functioning temporal device so quickly and in such a technologically inferior time was evidence enough of that. As such, she wasn’t going to pursue him any further. She wasn’t equipped to deal with him and she’d likely only get herself killed or shunted once again in time. Her main objective now was to get back to her own time so she could give her report and plan out a more robust response team for capturing Dante Succo.

First things first, though, she needed to get some food. She wasn’t going to be going home any time soon and she needed to get her physical needs taken care of. She might as well use the apartment as her own for now. She knew how to get water now, and even without electricity, the building inside wasn’t terribly cold. If it came to it should could look into finding a generator or something but winter should be ending soon so heat shouldn’t be an issue for much longer.

From what she knew of this time, she should be able to find community food pantries within the city. It might take some time to find it, and require her to speak to more people, but at least these questions would be much easier to pass off as normal.

Once she had her food situation figured out, she’d have to begin working out a plan for getting home. A mention in the newspaper that included a specific place and time would work, as would certain public records like a wedding certificate or citations for breaking the law. Unfortunately, she had no desire to get married here, and any law that she broke, she would have to stay and finish out whatever sentence she was given before she would be extracted. Both options were seen within the agency as last resorts, only to be taken in extreme need.

Most likely, she’d need to find a way to get a job and then pay her taxes. That was easier said than done since she lacked any identification but it was at least somewhere to start. With a heavy sigh she made herself leave the apartment once more and head out into the cold, early March weather in search of a food pantry. This wasn’t how she’d envisioned her first field assignment going, but with any luck she’d be able to get back home sooner rather than later. She was optimistic. After all, her own mother had once been temporally stranded and she’d made her way back after only a few months.