It was really too bad about Jen.
We were on a temporal field trip to fourteenth century Romania for our graduate class in medieval architectural innovations when Jen’s multiphasic cloaking device
unexpectedly failed. You can imagine the reaction of the castle guards when a strangely dressed young woman suddenly materialized out of thin air before their
startled eyes, witchcraft.
Before she could react the guards seized Jen and dragged her down into the darkened depths of the castle’s dungeons for some excruciatingly painful questioning. Unfortunately
for Jen, she didn’t speak fourteenth century Romanian and her torturers had never heard fourteenth century English let alone its late twenty third century equivalent. Two days
later, enraged by their inability to communicate with their victim, Jen’s torturers ceased their futile attempts to force her confession. No longer concerned with forcing Jen
to confess to witchcraft, they simply decided to torture her to death. Sadly for Jen, she still managed to survive three more brutally agonizing days of unrelenting torture before she finally died.
Everyone on that field trip desperately wanted to rescue Jen but the rules against temporal interference are draconian, after all who wants to visit the past only to come back
to the present to discover you’d accidently erased yourself from the timeline? It wasn’t until the development of multiphasic cloaking in the late twenty second century that
temporal tourism became popular. A person concealed by a multiphasic cloaking device isn’t just invisible, the cloaked person is actually out of phase with the real world, almost
as if they were a ghost, making interactions with the past impossible.
Anyway, after the locals captured Jen, the rest of the group left to tour some of the classic fortresses and castles in fourteenth century Spain. But a few of us stayed to watch
Jen’s final torturous days in that medieval Romanian dungeon and as luck would have it, we’d brought full sensory recording equipment.
Many would consider Jen’s death as an unfortunate tragedy, but for the truly discriminating collector of the macabre, well, name your price...