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The explosion at the house he rented in Cascade would keep the cops off his back long enough for him to hike up Palisade Rim Trail. He told the locals he wanted to study the Ute petroglyphs when there weren’t any tourists around. It was an easy trail and just about anyone who wanted to see them could. That was the beauty of it all. No one suspected the secret.
Wasn’t dawn yet and damned cold but he made it. Large number of petroglyphs probably meant this was a frequent camping area. The real reason the Utes visited here often didn’t survive into the modern age. He’d failed this time. The Sun Lords weren’t in this version of reality. Richard Hunter activated the time gate using the Moreira device and stepped back into 1959 to try again. He and the Forgotten Heroes had to find them before they conquered the multiverse.
I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw writing challenge. The idea is to take a Google maps location and image and use them to inspire the creation of a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is 150.
Today the Pegman takes us to Palisade Rim/Ute Petroglyph Trail, Colorado. I had a tough time with this one. Seems like a nice place to visit, but where’s the action?
The trailhead is just a few miles away from Cascade, Colorado but while the area has a few interesting stories, none of them grabbed me. I tried looking up current news articles for Cascade, but the closest thing I found was a house explosion in Colorado Springs.
I looked up the trail itself and found a couple of reviews including one from GJHikes.com and another from Colorado West Outdoors. Finally, I tried to find out how old the petroglyphs were.
I had some sort of time travel story in mind and at first, I was just going to use one of the character names from the original Rip Hunter, Time Master comic book which first appeared in issue 20 of Showcase in May 1959. Then while reading the history of the character, I decided to adopt some of the elements from the mid-1980s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” story arc.
The “Moreira” device is named for Ruben Moreira, the original “Rip Hunter” artist in 1959.
I know it’s ridiculous but it’s the best I could come up with, especially when I haven’t had breakfast yet (as I write this).
Since I read the trail ends at a high cliff, my only other idea was a suicide, but that seemed pretty grim.
To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.
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What fun! So many intriguing ideas woven into this. Very compelling story!
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Thanks. I was afraid it was too “comic booky”.
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And this is a bad thing, how? Your biggest problem, here, is that you had only enough words to write the introductory “hook” to a much longer adventure story.
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True, PL. Thanks.
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Great way to tie in the time-travel sci-fi stuff to the prompt. I wonder what the actual cause of the house explosion was.
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My guess would be to leave a candle burning at some distance from the kitchen while leaving open a stove or oven gas supply. Time to explosion dependent upon time to develop sufficient gas concentration in the rooms between them. A somewhat more technologically updated trigger would be to set a timer on a microwave oven with a wad of metal brillo cleaning pad inside, timed to start after sufficient time had elapsed for gas to accumulate. However, the candle might be more likely to be destroyed in the explosion and fire, leaving less evidence of arson. [I think I may have watched too much mayhem in films and on television.]
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News article didn’t say. I just used the incident as a story item to move things along. Thanks.
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WEll, this is a cliff-hanger! What secret? Explosion?
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The secret is that the petroglyphs conceal a time portal. Richard had to disappear out of 2018 and so arranged for his rented house to explode and put a cadaver inside so everyone would think he was dead. Then he goes back to 1959 and tries a different quantum universe so he can find the Sun Lords. I know. I only had 150 words to play with.
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Transmutation! You’ve taken your frustration with the prompt and turned it into gold!
Lovely imaginative take, with some great ideas.
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Ha!
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This story is one of your best, James. There is real feeling in the telling as if you really got into your character. I like the hook at the end. I want to read more.
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That would be interesting since it’s all derived from a comic book story arc from the mid-1980s, Kelvin. Thanks.
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I loved those cmic book in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
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I loved the Silver Age Marvel and DC comic books during the 1960s but fell away from them until the 80s and 90s. Now comic books are incomprehensible and terribly expensive.
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Absolutely. Ridiculously. And its all eye candy now. Story has taken back seat to story.
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