Rückstadt and Vorausdorf

For the benefit of The Council, the following is a brief synopsis of Rückstadt and Vorausdorf and a typical inhabitant thereof. Most information has been expunged through lack of interest, but the finer points remain.
- Dr. Clemént

On the morning of the 13th February in the year 1843 Abbie Wrycroft awoke on the outskirts of Bickley wood, Southeast of Bristol, nestled amongst the grasses and hedgerows. As she stood, brushing the dew from her tangled hair and blinking into the terracotta sunrise, she began to wonder what nocturnal escapades may have led her to her current location. The setting was familiar, the landscape recognisable but not enough to pin down the memory. It was not long before confusion had gotten the better of her waking mind. She would have preferred to continue to sleep in the grass, had the alarm on her mobile phone not awoken her.

Hereafter the main points of her story are largely the same as those of the other inhabitants of Vorausdorf. After a brisk trek through the dawn she had re-entered Bristol, now in an unfamiliarly primitive state: gas-lit streets teeming with horse-drawn cabs and shuffling peasantry, inadequate drainage causing stagnation of undesirable liquids. Before too long she had asked a passer-by of her whereabouts and thence leant against a gutter and sobbed for close to an hour. Reactions differ between individuals, they respond to sudden displacement and loss in their own manner. Curiously, time heals this well.

Her unusually colourful, and provocative for the time, attire had garnered a little attention of the industrial town's passing proletariate. Aid came in the guise of one Mrs. Pemberton, mother of four who lived on the outskirts of the town in a newly built, but by no means luxurious, terrace. Inviting her into her home, this is where she stayed for the next two days, her lodgings paid for by the entertainment given to the Pemberton children by the wonderful self-illuminating box in her pocket.

Thankfully Abbie had forethought enough to conserve the battery of her phone, since by the time she had recovered her wits and conjured the courage to approach some voice of authority in the city - a member of the local constabulary - she had used this as proof of her bizarre claim, enough to avoid instant incarceration. One note of interest is the general agreed-upon cut-off point of 1720, before which this method is not advised and, at worst, may lead to unwanted hostility from the natives.

The policeman, thoroughly bemused by what he had been shown, directed her toward the home of Dr. Flint, a local physician and chemist, for want of a more knowledgable reference. The good doctor was welcoming and intrigued by the lady's story and recalled the precautionary advice of some colleagues in London about this very matter. His home was a great deal more comfortable than that of the Pemberton lodgings, but it was not her stead for long. Soonest the doctor arranged for a cab to transport her to London - a tedious journey of not inconsiderable discomfort, although the mental and physical steel which Abbie had stocked over the few days prior had prepared her well for this eventuality.

The journey was long and largely uneventful, aside from the carriage ahead being held up by a highwayman just north of Eton, who was promptly shot by the driver. The cab arrived the following day in London where she was at once escorted through the kerfuffle of the populous and into to a small darkened room in the depths of the Royal Society. A short disconcerting wait was endured before the room became populated by elderly men, mostly bearded, entirely waistcoated. Thence a brief interrogation began as Abbie was questioned on facts and events of the past, current present (a phrase one would assume to be redundant in any other scenario) and future. She knew little of any, but more of the latter. Indeed during the questioning Abbie recalled a passing fact from her school years on a subject which was currently a heated debate of two the society's members. Once the gathering - minus one disgruntled member - had validated answers with existing records, themselves incredibly difficult to procure except by chance, Abbie was afforded lodgings in the society for the time it took to organise her final journey.

[As an aside, the society had elected that any persons found in the history of such a traveller to have aided them without desire for recompense would be afforded a reward. Hereafter the Pemberton family were awarded amounts substantial enough to take their children from their places of work and purchase a house of their own outside of the city. The course of their lives thereafter was largely unchanged, due to the offending disease having already being contracted, but the society would ask this benevolence to be declared.]

The final lengthy, and considerably more uncomfortable, journey took Abbie from London to the Glarus alps in Switzerland and thence to a pair of villages nestled in a valley. These villages were Rückstadt and Vorausdorf and were the collected efforts of the developed world's intellects to understand - and perhaps find use for - the unfortunate members of society who, without warning, have been displaced in time. Set up to seem as an inconspicuous wood-cabin village in the valley bestride the Entschluss lake, one would have considered it idyllic were it not the sole refuge of a population torn from their own time.

The arrivals were all unaware of why they have been victims of this phenomenon, each departing from different dates and locations around the world and throughout the history of man. Rückstadt housed those from an earlier time, Vorausdorf from a later time, with a combined population of roughly 300 at the time. Abbie was rather disheartened upon arrival to discover that only 21 of these came from Britain, and of those fewer than a dozen spoke a dialect she needn't decipher.

It is, of course, unknown precisely how many humans have experienced this phenomenon throughout the history of our species. Indeed it is even unknown what percentage of those sent to the time of the villages' existence were found and relocated, completely apart from how many were sent outside its operation or even beyond the stretches of our own history. It is also curious to note that one inhabitant, 'Mr. Lucky', first (a second time) arrived at the site five years after his death, having been sent back a second time after (before) his arrival.

[It is recommended that if further discussion is planned of the villages that new tenses are developed to avoid grammatical confusion.]

The purpose of these villages was four-fold. The first was to simply isolate these unfortunate victims of chance, to protect both them and outer society. In this direct blinkered sense their establishment had been successful: the logical timeline outside the villages has been unchanged, and the majority of inhabitants adjusted to life therein with great expediency. A certain camaraderie had developed between the inhabitants, a shared bond of isolation and bafflement. Aside from the acute rivalry between the towns - the 'future-people' brazenly considering themselves superior to the 'past-people' - and the implicit hierarchy proportional to date of birth, the general atmosphere was convivial. Unfortunately, had these people been left to their own devices in the wider world, the vast majority would have adjusted to society unimpeded, and so whilst regarding this objective as victorious it was largely without purpose.

The second goal is to verify information of the past. A great deal of historical information is inaccurate for a simple reason - pride. The history of man is often equated to the history of war, since until recently that had been its primary occupation. The more obvious losses of conflict are physical and economic; the less obvious are of a factual nature because the temptation of the victor is to paint your opponent in a less favourable light than oneself at the detriment of factual integrity. The villages' benefactors deemed that any skewed information was best verified or disputed by the population of Rückstadt. This objective had been only partly successful, owing to the high proportion of ignorance of the members of the past. It seems the knowledge of survival had precedence over political intrigue.

The third purpose, a compliment of the second, was to glean as much information as possible about the future, to best suit the needs of the benefactors. This is widely regarded as more of a failure than the second: whilst survival had become no longer an issue of personal importance for the people of the future, man has a habit of trivialising its time amongst trinkets and toys, distractions from notions of importance. The most one can glean from these procrastinators are occasional notes of historical importance: approaching wars, the larger-scale scientific and technological innovations, the encroaching neuroses and prejudices of future societies, and so on. For instance the most valuable information gleaned from Abbie during her first month of residence was the following fact, transcribed directly from conversation:

`I remember, like, flowers and plants and stuff use the sun to get food. We have things like that, big black, like, shiny things called solar panels, which take the sun and make, like, electricity.'

Even this was almost void of information, but at least the concept was enough to intrigue the benefactors. It led to nought, but the idea was there.

Many would view the towns as a noble but greatly unnecessary expense. Throughout its history very little of use was be obtained from it, besides an increasing stock of depleted electrical goods. By their abandonment in 1944 the most successful thing to be said for the towns of Rückstadt and Vorausdorf was it's fourth objective: `To simultaneously isolate the insane, the belief of whom is that they have travelled through time.'