An accident occurs during the trip.

As you were traveling through time, you suddenly heard an alarm going off. You’d installed the alarm on the machine, but had never heard it going off during a trip.

“What's going on? Did something break?” you asked yourself as you tried to get the controls to respond. You desperately looked around the machine trying to see what the problem was. All the wondering was put to an end when you heard the telltale explosion of the engine failing..

Had you not constructed the machine from scratch, you may have been worried about having your atoms splattered about the timestream, but you weren’t afraid. At least, not afraid about that possibility. See, you had installed a failsafe in the machine.

“I just hope it works…” you muttered as you braced yourself.

The fail safe was a simple device. All it really did was turn off all the machine’s functions, causing the time machine to stop in whatever part of the timeline it was currently passing through. Unfortunately the machine crashed harder than you'd anticipated, as you landed somewhere in the United States of America in the year 1954.

Your target had been the Old West. But that’s not where the machine landed. Unfortunately, the location coordinates had gotten corrupted during the crash. See, the machine had the ability to travel through both time and space, but just like how you were halfway between the modern day and the Old West, so was you stuck between your location in the future and the Old West, ending up somewhere in the Midwest, aka the Heartland.

The machine had chosen to re-materialize inside of a house. You crawled to the door and vented the machine, collapsing in the middle of an empty bedroom.