We survey the crater and Simon consults Ser and he says that the engine or whatever it is seems to still be active, and the time pulses are going to continue occurring until we can shut it off.

He lets the others know and they start talking with AJ, who says that he was able to change the past and survive. We are also shocked to see Simon’s dad, Ian’s wife, and Dusty’s brother alive after all of them have been assumed dead for years. They explain that they had to try very hard not to make any changes to the timeline after they were saved.

We hunker down on the other side of a hill so the pulses don’t hit us again. They are occurring every 90 minutes but seem to be increasing by 15 minutes each time. During some of the pulses, animals appear from nowhere.

We call Scotty at the compound and ask him what to do. He says that it will take all of us to shut it down and we run scenarios to figure it out and train. After we feel confident enough we head back after the last pulse and start to work on shutting it down. It takes a very long time and we think we are making a lot of progress, but Simon accidentally hits a switch and things start to power back up. We work on it for another 45 minutes or so and are finally able to turn it off.

We talk with Scotty about what we could scavenge from here but he says not much. We decide to head back. AJ goes back to Milwaukee but leaves us a couple of Sno Cats.

As we return we see a bright star up above. It is apparently the main part of the ship that the Talolans call Rebirth. Simon asks if we can teleport up there, and Scotty says that he’s trying to work on it. We spend several months talking about plans and scenarios as he’s working on it.

April 10th comes around and Scotty gets abnormally excited and calls us down. He was able to connect to the ship with the teleporter. It may be how it is currently oriented in relation to Earth. We worry about getting back but he says that it should be possible.

On April 25th, Meaghan comes in while we are having breakfast and says that she got a pager message from her dad just this morning. She had turned on her pager for the first time since the disaster and messages began popping up, and some of them are quite recent. In the oldest messages, her father advises her to get to a shelter and lists off several places near where she was staying with her brother Blake in Illinois but also in other states. In the most recent messages her father and brother give their location where they are in shelters. Her brother is in Bristol and are surrounded by the cosplay idiots that we dealt with last summer.

Meaghan says that she’s going to go right away to save her father and brother. Ian says that we will come to help her, and recruits a few others to come as extra guns. We pack up supplies and 12 of us go in one of the Sno Cats toward Bristol.

On the way, we ask Meaghan about her family. Her father was an executive at Northrop Grummen and also a survival nut. She went from base to base when she was a kid and wherever he went, he built a survival shelter at each place. She learned survival skills and self defense from him and took many classes, and though she resented it at the time she was able to survive on her own because of it.

We stop the Sno Cats more than a mile away and Ian and Meaghan and a few others get out and look for sentries. They find two and take them out quietly, then come back to tell us in the Sno Cat to come up the drive.

We drive up and Alex creates a barrier in front of the Sno Cat for protection. We start shooting at the cosplayers, and we manage to take them out except for two who start running away.

Alex hears the roar of engines from the house behind us and our hired guns turn around to face them and see what happens next.