The Time Portal 2: Escape in Time by Joe Corso [time travel]

said. “Awfully glad we got back in one piece after all the shooting and fighting. It was sad and revolting, but oddly, the adventure of it all made me feel like a young lad again.”
    “Fighting? Shooting? What the hell is he talking about, Lucky?” Mickey asked in a concerned voice.
    “Well, to tell you the truth,” Lucky answered, “we ran into a little trouble and we had to take this young lady with us or she would have been killed. I’ve never seen so many crazy people in one place, at one time, in my life. Today was, well, it was up there. It’ll be hard to beat what we saw. Hard to talk about it.” But they did.
    Lucky started off and he and Charlie took turns filling in the blanks for each other, relaying it all, even some of the gory details of the killings. Sam sat quietly for a while and finally asked Lucky about the girl.
    “Her mother, father, and sisters were there and were some of those murdered in the basement of this building,” Lucky said. “The only things that saved us were our guns and the fact that the portal was close by, those things and the grace of God. We should not be here right now, telling this story. Thank God for modern-day fire power,” Lucky said.
    “Sam, perhaps you can understand her. I know you’re trained in more languages than I am,” Lucky said. “I was stationed in Russia for two years and picked up a little Russian, just enough to make myself understood and I actually understand it better than I speak it, but this young lady is speaking a dialect that I cannot pinpoint or understand.”
    “Sure thing,” Sam said.
    Sam asked the girl her name, but the young lady couldn’t understand what she was saying, so Sam used sign language.
    Sam pointed to herself and said, “My name is Samantha. Samantha. I am Samantha.” She then pointed to the girl. There was no response. She repeated this exercise several times until finally the girl, replied, “Anastasia.”
    “Anastasia? Anastasia?” Sam asked, pointing to the girl.
    “Yes,” replied the girl. “Anastasia Nikolayevna.“
    At this point, Sam began to ask more and more questions and with much effort and hand movements, working together with Mickey, Lucky, Charlie, they all pieced together bits of her story. It seemed that the palace was destroyed and the royal family had moved to another palace in Siberia. The mob, upon discovering their new location, marched there to destroy them and every one of its occupants.
    Charlie interjected, “We stepped out of the portal right smack dab into the Siberian Palace, into the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution. Crikey!” he exclaimed. I’ve read about that! We arrived at the palace just in time to save this young lady right as her family all around her, was being murdered. Crikey, mate, do you realize this? This is carzy,” he said looking toward Lucky.
    “Crazy,” Lucky corrected.
    “No mate, carzy – our version of crazy. I shudder to think what would have happened if we had gone up those stairs instead of down into the cellar.”
    The room was quiet. It was powerful and all consuming. Lucky stood silently, taking it all in. Charlie was right about the revolution. He knew his history.
    Finally, Charlie broke the silence. “Now that we have her, what do we do with her?” he asked.
    As they began discussing their options, Anastasia calmly removed a cigarette from her pocket, pulled out a pack of matches, lit the cigarette, and began puffing on it. It surprised everyone in the room.
     
    Later, by virtue of the Internet, it wasn’t long before a few interesting facts began to emerge about Anastasia. For example, at the age of sixteen, right around the time that war broke out, she began to smoke, secretly. With Russia's hard times and revolts becoming a constant and the tsar's popularity decreasing, her anti-stress ritual was to walk in the garden and smoke without her parents’ knowledge. Sometimes, Olga, her sister, would join her.
     
    Anastasia enjoyed the