In a Rewind Zone. Calais was designation Chanticleer One. It was funny to him that he could walk around in one of these causally screwed up regions and barely any of the denizens had a clue that time was rolling in the wrong direction.
Who set it going that way? Well, he was swimming against the tide to rebuild a collapsed wave. It was interesting, to have time there like a scattered jigsaw, strung on so many causal strings, and he could trace them all. He had an amazing ability to visualise the chaos as nothing but order reorganised by many random motions.
Some people were threaded more conspicuously, and others you had to pause and dig and interrogate, swim in their flow for a little while. He’d been dropped here because they had spotted an atrophied forward line. Children standing on their parent’s shoulders reaching for the stars – that was what Chanticleers, at their core, wanted to preserve, and that was not what they saw when they looked in this direction.
Days went by on his straight-line, and god knows how many went by on his jump-line as he navigated through the story seas of time. And what did he find sat there, an explosion of energy rippling out from it? His own body. Why was he here? What had he been doing? The clock at his waist suddenly exploded, and he knew – knew he had been trapped into something he was not getting out of.