Stuck in The Past

You are Eric, a thirty-three year old time traveler. It was your life’s work up to that point. Sure, inventing a time machine was an incredible feat, but what was even more incredible, were the possibilities that the machine gave you. While you could appreciate the greater good of helping humanity, you also had no qualms about lining your own pockets while doing so. Plus, you had pretty much exhausted your current funding building the prototype. So if you wanted to patent it, you’d need capital.

Which led you to hitting upon the idea of tapping into history to gain funding. After all, who’d miss a few diamonds or some silver out of some random mine? you had tested the machine within your own time period several times. A few jumps backwards to plant items that you’d then retrieve when you returned home proved your theories correct.

So, all you needed to do was to grab a history book, locate a famous gold prospecting site, travel back to before it was found, steal some gold, and bring it back to the future, with no one ever being the wiser.

“All right…” you said to yourself as you booted up the control panel on your time machine, a small, almost shower stall-like device with a door to keep a single passenger, and a panel on the side to allow you to manipulate the controls.

you heard the telltale whir of the engine starting up once again. You’d picked out your target perfectly. You were heading to 1865, and the gold deposits wouldn’t be formally located until another five years had passed.

“Okay, location vectors are set for the Black Hills of Wyoming, and the temporal vector is set for 1865.” you said.

You walked into the chamber and shut the door. You hit the activation button inside the chamber and felt the machine begin to shake and shudder, the expected reaction that the machine had to the stresses of surfing the chronal ocean. Everything went black as the machine hurtled backwards through time. But little did you know, however, that soon you’d end up in a completely different time and place than you had ever expected to land. And little did you realize that you'd soon become a '50s housewife.