“I’m sure you will,” he agreed. “But before you do that, take another around you. You said you wanted to go somewhere exotic. Can you think of anywhere more exotic than where you are, right now. Is there anything in your world that hasn’t be normalized into what everything else it through your industrial revolution and your globalized world?”

“Disneyworld!” Tina shot back.

The dwarf appeared to consider that.

“Hmm, point taken perhaps,” Devon replied. “My trip there last year was... unsettling. However, remember when I talked about you earning commissions on your work for me should it come to it. Well, this is work, and you are going to earn whatever your take of what I recover here is worth.

“Work?” Tina asked.

“Yes. I am- you are on a very important antiquity recovery mission. And if we secure what I am looking for, you can expect a very fat commission. And that is mostly because you are one of the only people who are capable of earning it.”

Tina narrowed her gaze. All this had to do with, time travel or alternate histories or whatever she was earning her wages for? Had it been somewhere in the fine print she hadn’t read. Tins suddenly suspected it had been.

“How fat?” she wanted to know.

“Could be five figures in your currency,” he told her. “Maybe even six, in Canadian dollars. I’d have to do some calculations of what that would be in Byzantine right now. Electrum is just all over the place with how much gold or silver is in the mix, but both metals are still valuable in your time.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Tina let out a breath. It certainly did feel real by now. Time travel, almost a thousand years. Or some serious hard drugs she’d only ever heard of. What else could she do, but play along until she either came out of it or a blue box or something came to take her back? But she was going to kick Devon’s ass, but maybe after she got paid. Employers, she knew, kind of rarely took being belted well.

“OK…“ Tina took in a breath turned around, looking over at the Hagia Sofia minus the familiar spires across the water that she remembered probably the Turks had put up, or wouldn’t put up for a few hundred years, then back at Devon and let it out in a sigh. “What about getting back to my home time? Once this is done, how much time will have passed for me? I have a life, a home, friends, family, a cat. He’s only got a couple days food and water you know.”

When he didn’t answer, she added, “You said we’d be back the same day. Is that the truth!?”

“Well, between my experience and this, he lifted up the compass again, we will be able to get back within a few hours of the time we left at the most. But it could be either way, so some careful tip-toeing around might be in order so that we don’t run into each other.”

Or what? They could meet themselves? Really, every time it seemed that Devon knew what he was doing, something came out of his mouth that told her maybe he didn’t.

“You sure about that?” she asked, suspicious at the lack of complete confidence in his voice.

“This compass led me to you when I asked it to find me someone who could help me,” Devon told her. “It will certainly lead us back to your Toronto.”

“So… it’s some magical thing that’s always right,” she offered in a tone that he needed know she didn’t believe or trust him.

The Dwarf shrugged, offered one of those weird half-smiles people offer when their confidence is based on what they know is a ludicrous level of faith.

“Has been so far,” he told her.

Tina let out another long breath. She felt the salty breeze from the Hellespont blow through her clothes, her hair, unlike any other breeze she’d felt in her life, exotic that filled her with... dare she allow it... wonder?

“All right,” she told Devon. “What now?”