Lin was glad she had spent the evening looking up the entries for temperate rainforests in pre-fall times. Of course by the time of the fall, there had been a lot of rain and not much forest, but in this pristine version of the past, the primeval rainforest was standing tall. The trees were largely sessile oaks, ashes and spindly birch, however identification was largely based on the leaves as their bark was nearly entirely covered in lush moss. Behind her, the soft cooing sounds of Adili surrounded by pure nature came to her. "You're not actually an elf you know? And real elves are as technomagically advanced as we are, they live in cities, not some fantasy giant tree thing."

"Elves might not care, but I did my undergraduate degree in botany, so shut up."

"OK, fair point. I forgot you were a nature fan before you got into this line of work." She glanced back, Adili presented a picture of contrasts. He was dressed in camouflage, black boots, helmet and gloves, on his back was the heavy machine gun that was his signature weapon, and in his hands was a small sprig of a plant. It was a straight green stem with a cluster of blue bell-shaped flowers at the top, and he was giggling as he saw it. "This is a bluebell, they're extinct in our world, there was a magically enhanced virus. I'm getting seeds of this when they finish blooming. I'll be the toast of the botanical world. I wonder what else I can find. I bet there's dandelions."

"Yeah he's back at camp, probably conditioning his mane again." Lin quipped. "So there's a chance of dangerous fauna here, and they've never had a chance to get scared of bipeds. So be alert and put down the flowers, just in case."

"Oh? I thought the British isles were basically one big garden? They sent children to camp on this mountain when the little dragon was an even littler dragon." Adili said, as he put the plant into his pouch. "Why does he go by his English name anyway? There's a lot of prejudice against that kind of name, even though it's been hundreds of years."

"He says that there's got to be someone left who remembers the good parts of the North. Anyway there's plenty of English names used down in Australia and New Zealand. We're speaking English right now. Not much of a prejudice when everyone uses the language if you ask me. Time to stop gossiping and keep looking out."

"What even is there here now? So there's some animals, so what? I think we can take a deer without much issue."

"Well for a start there's a chance of the brown bear, polar bear, cave lion, grey wolf, scimitar toothed cats, narrow nosed rhinoceros, Irish Elk..."

"I thought we were in Wales, not the jungle."

"This is technically a temperate rainforest, as any botanist should know."

"Temperate rainforests in our world are exclusively southern hemisphere and are in America and Australasia. Nothing with a Northern European biome. I know the plants, not the animals. Anyway, we're fifty degrees North, how is it so mild here?"

"We're in the gulf stream. The UK basically didn't move much for like fifty million years. The estimate that we've got from the stars is about a million years, plus or minus a couple of hundred thousand. Anyway, stop distracting me, we've got a long hike to get to the first pass. Why didn't the attendants unpack the drones first? We could be drinking a beer and waiting for the drone to finish mapping this place." She stabbed a finger into her extra large, extra tough tablet, marking their location and taking a few photos. The tablet's inertial navigation system was doing the hard work of mapping, but she had to do the photos and try to get as much of the lay of the land as possible into each shot. "I bet Chris is completely dead to the world right now. He's always the same when he gets his teeth into a problem."

"You need to tell him how you feel." Adili's joking tone was gone now, "I won't do it, don't worry, but you've been pining for him for as long as I've known the two of you. Make him happy for a few years."

"And leave him with an eternity of regret? No. He's a wonderful person, and he doesn't deserve to be tortured like that. We're like pets for him, we live such a short time, I won't be a beloved dog." Those last words were tight and Lin stomped ahead into the forest, leaving crater-like footprints in the moss covering the ground.

"Guess she really doesn't want to talk about it."

The rest of the day was spent in silence, broken only by their first report to the camp. They happened on a river just before dark and decided to make camp slightly uphill of it. The campsite was a lush plateau, a few tens of metres across covered in a thick moss. The trees were tall and thick behind it, and the view over the river was breathtaking. Adili refilled his pack with more sensors from the larger load that Lin carried. He'd only put down about ten that day, the going being slower and rougher than expected.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The ground under the trees was punctuated by erratic boulders and never level. The fact that this plateau existed was a minor miracle in his mind. It was gorgeous, no doubt about it, and the air smelt so alive that it was hard to remember that once upon a time, a lot of the Earth he was born on had been like this.

As they sat around a fire that night, he idly mentioned that he was enjoying this world. "Honestly, if I had to spend the rest of my life here, I couldn't get back home, I'd be happy. This world is... fresh. It feels kinder. I don't know how to put it, there's no pressure. It's like the whole world just is, there's no feeling of change. I don't know why I feel that way, but my lifetime here would be a blink in the history of this forest."

"When you put it like that," Lin said, "I can almost believe that you're an absolute moron. Think about it, we're currently bagging our waste, and we've got a contained waste reclaimer in the camp. But if we were to live here for more than a year or so? Your gut microbes would escape, with a million years of evolution and magical enhancement in them. Your turds would destroy this ecosystem in short order. Just having us walk about is bad enough, there's probably proto-hominids out there with no resistance to any of the bacteria and viruses in your breath. We can only hope that the species specificity of your internal biome mean they don't spread to anything else."

"Oh gods above, you're right." Adili lay down and looked at the sky, "The only way we could stay here would be if we killed off our internal flora and started again with local ones. That could end extremely badly. I kinda miss normal dungeons now. No one cares what happens to those, we're deliberately looking to kill them anyway."

"Same here, just we've got to find the dungeon. That's why we're out and about."

The next day followed the same pattern, with the difference that Adili was climbing a lot of trees to take photos, extending the coverage of their mapping and increasing its accuracy. At times like that, he left his heavy gun at the base of the tree, only to grab it as soon as he got down. Most of the time there was little of note to see, but at least twice, the photographs showed a distant bear, or elk. When they could follow a river, or stream, they did. After last night's little pep talk, Adili was almost obsessive in his desire to leave as little trace as possible, every time he climbed a tree he wore gloves that he magically cleaned.

It was shortly after noon when Lin mentioned something that had been bothering her. "Have you noticed that I'm still a rock?" she asked, rhetorically.

"Yes, because I'm an elf, what of it. We're always like this in a dungeon."

"We're not in a dungeon. As we get farther from the Gate, the magic level should be dropping. Or as we get closer to the other Gate, it should be rising. It's doing neither. I've taken about two hundred readings over the past thirty-six hours and every one of them has been exactly the same. This doesn't make sense. I'll pass it back to Chris next time we make contact."

"Won't he know? I mean he has the whole sensor network to read, he's probably got tens of thousands of readings now... Oh I see, you want him to know you know. Fair enough." Adili smiled, "Let him know that there's distant megafauna too, if I can see Elk, I'm not seeing their predators."

Another day passed, and the two of them were still out and about, they were perhaps two thirds of the way round the perimeter they were establishing about their camp now. At about mid-morning on the third day out, they saw the sea for the first time. The sea was a deep, dark blue, with a lighter hue by the shore. It was a strange thing to see, an actual sea through a gate, and it caused Lin some consternation. "That should not be here. A million years ago, the oceans were lower and the British Isles were a peninsula sticking out of the Netherlands. We should be able to walk from West Ireland to New York. This sea should not be here. This is very strange."

They made a brief report and decided to go and investigate the sea that should not be a sea, this was important enough that they would add a day to their excursion, but they needed to know when they were. If they had been wrong about their time, they could well soon meet humans, though they'd seen no signs of habitation. Not wasting any time, Adili left a chain of sensors as a spur from the perimeter to the sea. It also had the handy side effect of extending their mesh network to keep them in touch with camp.

The ground here began to fall away and the trees thinned as they got closer to the sea, a ridge of trees shielded what, on their world, would have become Caenarfon in the fullness of time. On the far side of that ridge, they found their second anomaly. The ground had clearly been burnt, and the trees had been completely destroyed, the ash was old, decades if their sample kits were to be believed, but there was no regrowth. The whole area was a barren wasteland, and the shore was a jumble of rocks and debris. The third anomaly was the kicker. The shape of the rocks, cracked and blackened, had sheltered a patch of ash from the wind and rain, a larger boulder having fallen over it in the past. The boulder was moved by Lin and tossed aside, and the patch of ash was exposed. In the centre of the patch was a footprint. It was definitely not an elk or a bear or a cat. It looked like the print of a large bird, perhaps two meters long, and on the ground near the footprint was a shiny red spot. Lin and Adili took a lot of photographs of the print and measured it carefully before inspecting the red spot. It turned out to be a buried object, a scale like that of a lizard, if the lizard was twenty metres long.

"Dragon. We've got to let them know."

Lin and Adili rushed for the shelter of the treeline, one eye on the sky. There was nothing but small seabirds that they could see, but even Lin's stone heart was beating faster with this revelation.

Once they were safely under thick growth, they pulled out their radio and sent the message. The response came, abandon the permieter, and get back as fast as possible. This was a hunt now, and they were not going to be the prey.