I am an inventor that has been attempting to create a machine that allows a mortal being to travel through time. I have been attempting this ever since I was a freshman in high school. I am now twenty two years old so it has been a rough five or six years without any success at all. I have made tiny wormholes that scientists have already created but nothing that is big enough to even affect the space around it. What I am trying to do is create a time vortex large enough to bring an entire person along with the machine that controls the time vortex.
I have tweaked the form of the machine along with the calculations that I have had so far and am about to try my final test. Everybody that I know has told me that I need to move on, if I haven't had any luck in the past six years, then I probably won't have any luck at all. Of course I had been hearing this since the end of the first year working on this but it was finally starting to sound accurate. After this final test, if there was no sign that I was on the verge of a breakthrough, or had succeeded, then I would quit focusing on time travel (although if I learned anything I would write it down to test at a later point).
My machine, I called it the Final Test, was a large metal box with a metal door on it. Once you entered the Final Test there was a seat inside, along with a metal control panel. The control panel had a knob to control how many years you wanted to travel (0-100 year range), a switch to control if you traveled to the past or the future, and a lever to activate the machine. The chair, crafted to keep the pilot safe, not comfortable, had some minor padding and a full body harness as well as a roll cage in case something caused the chair to disconnect from the ceiling and floor.
I turned the knob to thirty years and the switch to the past so that I would go to the past before I was born so I wouldn't accidentally meet myself. I sat in my seat and attached all of the belts and buckles before reaching over and pulling the lever, which was difficult from this position, so note to move the chair closer for next time. I waited for a moment but still didn't hear anything.
Right as I was about to unbuckle and leave I heard a loud WHOOSH! and felt the whole Final Test shake. There was a slight sensation of weightlessness before we slammed into the ground and started rolling down a hill like a cube down a staircase. The control panel flew off it's base and slammed into the wall folding like a piece of paper, the belts held me in place on the chair but the chair itself got ripped off of the floor by the sudden opposing force when we hit something solid. The roll cage hit the wall so hard that the titanium bars bent to the point where they were almost touching me.
After everything inside the 'Final Test' had settled I unbuckled myself and promptly walked to the corner and puked up my breakfast. After I felt like I was stable enough to walk around I opened the door and saw a large skeleton outside that seemed to be the cause of the abrupt downhill stop.
"What in all that is holy..." I whisper to myself. I like to think that I have a basic knowledge of what creatures had lived on earth, and how big they were. This skeleton ribcage was roughly eight hundred feet long and a good one or two hundred feet wide with what seemed to be wings attached to the back with four long legs and a tail that would add another one hundred fifty feet to the total body, not counting that the neck and head added another one hundred feet. This skeleton was HUGE. There was no way that this creature lived on Earth at any point, but if that was the case, where am I?
I wanted to smile at this newer, cleaner world but there is also the fact that something as big as this skeleton next to the Final Test was killed. If something could do that, maybe that is the reason why I don't see any human civilization. Worried I looked all around from the side of this giant hill that I found myself on, and yet I still saw nothing. The hill we were on was actually not as large as I thought, although it was bigger than most where I lived on Earth, where most land is flat. This hill was just a little taller than the skeleton was long.
I think that this hill, due to its steepness and its height, would take about thirty minutes for me to climb from the base, forty five if I was tired. Considering that I am about a quarter of the way up it should take me a little less than the full thirty minutes, but it might be close because I don't even know what to look out for. About twenty five minutes later I cleared the peak. I stood there gaping at what was there.
What I am gaping at is an absolutely massive City. I say massive because it is built in medieval style but it is about the size of three or four "massive" medieval cities. This city is about the size as the main part of a modern city, which, for the style of this city, is massive. I mean you don't see ancient civilizations built at the size of modern cities, yet somehow this one has managed to do so.
I was just standing there gazing at the city when I felt a burning feeling in my throat and lungs. It felt almost like I had just gone on a long and difficult run but I was fine just a moment ago. As I tried to catch my breath to see if that was the issue the burning sensation got worse and worse. Right as I thought that I wouldn't be able to handle it anymore the pain just... disappeared.
When I say disappeared, I mean that as the pain came for seemingly no reason, and left for seemingly no reason. Some people might mistake what I said by just getting used to the pain to the point where it was ignorable, but that is not the case. Here, the pain simply ceased to exist. I could use my phone and the A.I. within to run some diagnostics on the air quality here but I would need to let it run for an hour or two with the limited tech that I have with me at the moment.
I started the air check on my phone and just sat on the top of the hill to see if I would see any wild animals. After about two hours a small group of short green... humanoids ran across the field towards the city, 10-15 of them at most. I couldn't believe my eyes. I had read my fair share of fantasy novels, and played my fair share of RPGs so to see goblins in person was a large shock. But this couldn't be! Time travel couldn't bring you across space, just time... right?