There was a flash and a man appeared. Homeless men and women around him stared in fear as their cardboard homes began to burn in the wake of the flash.
The man eyed the area, noting in his mind the kinds of architecture, the bleakness of the world he had just dropped into and the types of materials it was flooded with. This was the first thing the watcher always did when he landed in a new time. He liked to guess where he was before he checked his time jumper’s chrono-checker.
“twenty-first century… winter… Europe…” his eyes caught sight of a poster, the words were written in English. “Great Britain.” He walked out of the alleyway he had landed in as it began to rain. The water washed away the flames that his arrival had caused. A truck sped past quickly followed by a police car. “England.” He said, smiling to himself. He lifted his wrist to look at his time jumper’s screen.
The screen flickered for a moment, he smacked it and then his time date and location appeared. ‘twelve-thirty-seven, February fifth, twenty-thirty-two, Manchester, England, Great Britain-’ he stopped looking, he knew where Great Britain was in the world, he was an England boy born and bread after all.
Greg reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the end of the world encyclopaedia. He looked around, the streets weren’t packed, but they weren’t empty, and the holographic technology that the encyclopaedia used wouldn’t be invented for another sixty years and it wouldn’t be perfected to the point of the device for another couple of hundred.
The Watcher re-pocketed the holo generator and looked around, he needed a decent home base. Maybe some allies… he wondered for a moment where the Watcher followers of this time were. Closest time to this he had come to was sixteenth of March twenty-twenty. He was in America then, killed the dictator president before he could abolish voting, there wasn’t a watcher follower then, and he didn’t expect to find any now.

Greg Murphey turned his head and looked up and down the street. The rain beating down onto the rubbish coated streets of Manchester seemed almost beautiful, the way they randomly hit, breaking off into a random number of smaller drops that then smashed down themselves, tearing away layers of rubbish- that is where the beauty fizzles away and dies. The moment you remember you’re talking about rubbish and water so radiated and acidic if you left a piece of litmus paper in a bowl of it, it would mutate into a living being and scream as it died. Watcher was lucky to have a 301st century jacket with radiation and acid proof fabrics. The people around though seemed content to hide under things screaming at him that he’s crazy. The time traveller chuckled. “I ask myself the same question every damn day.” He said, stepping forward, into the road and, just before a car had the chance to take him, disappeared down a man hole.
The sewer was dark, it smelled terrible, probably because it was a sewer, but it was quiet. The watcher reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash light. it was from so far in the future that if anyone got a hold of it they’d probably be able to use it’s technology to make one of the most deadly weapons man has ever seen... at least until its invented several centuries from the twenty-first century. He held tight on the torch and looked up and down the sewer. Nothing but rats... and a ghoul, but the second the light hit it, it fled. It didn’t matter if the Ghoul saw this anyway, nobody would talk to it, let alone believe it.