The sun hung low in the sky, a red swollen disk. It’s rays stabbed their way through the smog filled air, elbowing the clouds aside. All was quiet within the dilapidated and empty manor that squatted within an expansive but overgrown lawn. The soot covered brickwork was streaked with moisture, and the roof sagged in places where nagging rot ate away at the thick timber beams. It was set far back from the bustle of London behind towering hedges and ornate ironwork. A London in the grips of the biggest human revolution in history, no less. The Industrial Revolution.

Within the house light streamed through the cracked window, illuminating the dustmotes like dancing sprites. Suddenly, the peace was shattered by a whine so high pitched it was almost inaudible. Spiders across the room retreated to the corners of the intricate webs that were draped from the roofbeams, and the glass began to vibrate in the panes. The outline of a strange machine began to appear, shimmering like a desert mirage. Dust began to stream outwards away from the outline, blown by an ethereal wind. With a quiet whoosh, the outline became solid, in the flicker of an eyelid. The light still streamed through the windows, now casting light on the swirls and eddies of dust the disturbance caused by the machine had created. Light glinted from polished brass, and was captured by iridescent crystals, only to be thrown out again in a thousand scintillating fragments of colour. Upon the high-backed leather seats in the centre of the contraption sat two men, dressed in suit and tails. They looked as if they could have simply stepped in from the hurrying street outside. Except, they clearly had not.

The first utterance of the figure on the left, adorned with a towering charcoal stovepipe, was ‘Dang and blast, it broke!”

In confusion, the figure next to him, sporting a crystalline monocle returned:

“What do you mean, ‘It broke’?!”

“Exactly what I said, it’s broken. It must be, we’ve stopped far too soon”

“How?”

“I don’t know. That’s not important, we need to fix it, and quickly!”

In desperation, both figures fiddled with the array of buttons, levers and dials spread before them. A twist of a red knob produced a small bang, causing a nearby mouse to keel over from shock. The throwing of a knife switch created a shower of sparks, which ignited the tails of one of the men. Swiftly beating it out, he cried once more,

“Dratted thing is totally bust.”

“At least we seem to be in the right time period, give or take a few tens of years.”

“That’s all well and good, but how are we going to get back?”

“Perhaps we can fix it now”

That said, both figures gingerly climbed down from the seats, and began to inspect the machine.

Some time later, relative peace had returned to the house, broken only by occasional clangs of dropped parts, or muttered curses from one of the two men. The machine lay mostly dismantled on the floor. With a sudden exclamation, the monocled man grasped a shiny silver tube inset into which was a window that blazed with blue light. Twisting the cap, which emitted a pneumatic hiss, he drew the casing away, revealing the source of the radiant light. As he did this, the whole room was bathed in a clinical blue glow that burned the shadows from even the darkest corners of the room, and caused the numerous spiders to once more retreat to the furthest corners of their sticky, stringy castles. Shielding his eyes to look at the crystal itself, difficult due to the intensity of the light it emitted, he uttered an oath of dismay.

“It’s cracked! The cursed thing has cracked”

A gossamer line of jet black did indeed run through the very heart of the crystal. The man cast it away in disgust. It rolled to the corner of the room, making an almost wistful tinkling sound as it went. Then it trundled behind a half brick that had been cast aside long ago, and came to a stop. The brightness of the blue glow lessened considerably, and both men blinked repeatedly in the sudden twilight.

After a moment of silence which stretched out for a considerable slice of time, the hat-wearing man exclaimed to the other,

“Just how do you expect us to find a new quantum flux inversion crystal in the middle of Victorian London?”

“Uhm, Harrods?”

“Maybe if we wait another thousand years!”

“Bugger…”

Originally published on /r/WritingPrompts