What's all this time travel guff?

1 - In the middle of nowhere

You are somewhere in time. You should have been pushed to the future, but you find yourself in a place of dense vegetation an the place has the appearance of something out of the far far past rather than the future…

You are stuck. You have no idea how long you have traveled in time, or when in time you have arrived. All you have is the clothes you are wearing, a backpack consisting of 7 items including your journal. What are the other 7 items?

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I am scared, I am lonely, I don't know where I am, or even when I am ...

Deep breath...

I am huddled up on a wide ledge in a large sandstone cliff. The stone is warm, and feels reassuring against my back. Climbing up here from the forest floor was a good idea, I think. At least, I feel safer for being off the ground. I stand a good chance of seeing or hearing anything coming towards me up here.

The past few hours have been the strangest I've ever gone through.

This morning I woke up in my flat in Stanbridge, late as usual. I had promised to meet my colleagues Anne and Luis early so we could go to the midsummer fair together before the weekend rush. By the time I had got myself out of bed, into a pair of jeans, had grabbed my back-pack and had made it to the bus, I was already half an hour late... pretty typical.

Neither Anne nor Luis were waiting for me when I got off the bus, so I trundled over to the fairground alone. I've never been one for fairs, really. Lots of silly activities whose only object is to get money out of you in exchange for silly stuffed toys. I thought I'd just try to find my friends, hang around for an hour or so, then trundle back home to sleep of the stress of the past week.

There were a few interesting exhibits in amongst the usual spread of pot-luck, shoot-the-teddy, fish-for-treasure stands. The village school had set up a bunch of science exhibits run by the students themselves. I saw a cool ramp which made a ball run uphill, a fun demonstration with levitating magnets, and a wierd black box which was supposed to be a time machine. A kid was placing a large pocket watch into the box, closing it, turning on a switch, opening the box again, and taking out the watch. After each time, he would show us the time on the watch, and it was getting further and further ahead. The boy told us that the box made the watch go into the future, which was why it kept getting faster.

I was pretty skeptical about this claim, so started hanging around the exhibit, trying to get a good look at the box. I saw one of the school-teachers come round to talk to the boy, and took my chance. The outside of the box was uninspiring, so I opened it up . It was very black, and surprisingly deep. I stuck my head inside to get a better look at the bottom, and ... errr... ended up flat on my face in a huge puddle in the middle of a forest.

The smell was overpowering: earthy, like mulch and compost, yet also rich with the scent of crushed petals. The air here is heavy, as if a storm were about to break, and full of moisture. It's very warm too, so even though my jeans took a long time drying out, I was not cold. When I managed to get myself up from the ground, I saw it was not so much a puddle that I had fallen into, but more of a shallow pond, which was in a clearing.

It took me a little while to squelch my way out of the quagmire and to reach the tree line. I am no botanist, but I am pretty sure I have never seen those kind of trees before, not even in TV documentaries. They are very tall, with spiraling trunks, and branches that reach both down to the ground and up to the sky. I've been thinking. If that box did somehow transport me into the future, it's pretty odd that there are all these trees about. What with deforestation and global warming, I'd have thought the world would be covered by one big desert in the future, not this dense forest.

I don't know how much time I spent drifting about from tree to tree. I felt very much in a daze, as if this was all a dream, and I would wake up soon... I walked, or clambered, for a time, then sat down for a rest, then pushed on again. I wasn't going anywhere in particular, I just felt I ought to keep moving. This forest gives me the creeps. I am sure it's full of nasty animals for whom I'd be no more than a tasty snack. When I finally found this cliff, I very quickly decided I'd be better off up here than down there, so here I am.

Here I am, on a ledge, on a cliff, above a never-ending forest... with no more than my jeans, t-shirt and trainers... and by back pack. A fat lot of use that will be to me: apart from my journal with its pencil tied on a piece of string, I have the keys to my flat, my bus fare, a tube of chap-stick for my lips, a scrunched up head-scarf, a pack of tissues, the latest issue of Belle, and small bottle of aspirin. Not really your standard survival kit...