The first time the man tried to kill me, I thought he was crazy. I mean, who wouldn't? I was just an average girl, walking down the sidewalk past the mall with a chicken sandwich in one hand and a soda in the other. Well, I was also an avid collector of German board games, a founding member of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons club at the church, and already entering my final semester of college at the grand old age of fourteen, so a little off average, admittedly. But only the sort of things that might get you beat up in an eighties movie. Nothing that should put you in any danger in the middle of the next century.

That was my explanation at the time. Crazy. But the man had his own explanation for what he did. He explained it perfectly clearly as he came lurching out of the alleyway, and he was still explaining all the while he was swinging the knife at my throat. A wild-haired man in a rock and roll T-shirt bleached down the front with drool, and with something white powdering the lower extremities of his greying beard. He told me he was trying to kill me because I had invented time travel, and somehow because of that he had suffered a cardiac arrest as a teenager, and got kicked out of his own band, and led a life of misery and suffering ever since I ruined his big break. I thought the life of misery might have something more to do with the white stuff on his beard. The heart attack too, probably.

But later, after the police and ambulance let me go and I had fended off Mom and Dad, I looked up the name on that filthy tee, and someone in one of the photos looked a lot like him.

That proved nothing, of course. Maybe he'd been in that band, but it didn't make me a mad scientist. I was mad about science, of course, but it was more chemistry I was into. At the time.

He waited eight years before he tried again. Eight long years. That's dedication.

The second time was five states over. I'd just come out of class - one I was teaching. I'd gone on to coffee by then, and it was a good job, because it was the only thing that stopped him. He'd upgraded to a machete, and simultaneously downgraded himself to a gibbering bony mess. He still had that T-shirt on. I vaguely remember wondering, as he charged out of the office screaming about silver lights, if it had ever been off in the intervening time between his visits.

The scary thing is, I don't think the scalding brew that took half the skin off his face would have stopped him for long. He would have just kept going once he'd peeled off the flesh. But it threw him off just long enough for campus security to follow the screams and get him on the ground.

I was safe then. I don't know how he'd got out the first time, don't want to know, but he was put somewhere he could never get to me again. I wonder if that was for the best.

Ten years flew by, just like that. I got bored of chemistry, started dabbling in physics. When that got stale, I moved to the West Coast to teach mathematics to disadvantaged kids. And one Wednesday afternoon, two months on, one of those kids turned out to be a killer robot that shot me through the arm with something I still can't describe.

I can still see that boy. He just sort of... unfolded.

I'd like to say I made a daring escape. Shielded the kids - the real ones, that is - and ushered them out the window before raising my good arm and shouting some banal heroic taunt like "Over here, you big plastic lump!" and leading my attacker on a merry dance down the corridor to save the defenceless cowering humans all around that it would otherwise dissolve with its mega-blaster-thing. As it happened, one of the kids directly behind it - I'm still grateful, Kate, though you know not what you have done - just pushed it over after the first shot and it couldn't get back up. A design flaw, perhaps, from whoever or whatever created it. But there again, it wasn't made to go on a rampage. It only wanted me.

I saw a police officer briefly. Very briefly. Then, the cop car went - suddenly - and a flotilla of black trucks arrived instead. The gentlemen inside didn't introduce themselves, but they seemed nice, good citizens one and all.

I would say my arm had to amputated, but there wasn't much left to cut. I could have done it with kitchen scissors. Sadly, the brain was wholly unscathed.

Or maybe not completely. I took eight long weeks to myself after what nobody but me dared to call the assassination attempt. My biggest achievement in that time was Baldaron, my level 20 Dwarf Paladin who plundered the haunted treasure vaults of Margaropolix with a set of bold adventurers from Minnesota, via the ancient wizarding miracle of livestream. It was a long campaign, and that was great, because it kept me from thinking.

It was good not to think. Because when I thought, it was all about the fact that I had escaped death three times in my short life, and not in the usual ways like illnesses and car crashes, but in bona fide action hero set pieces wholly at odds with my charming nerd-supreme persona. Two times involving a gentleman of questionable mental stability, and one by something which I hardly dared think of in case the men in the vans decided to come back for me too. It didn't make sense.

The other thing that didn't make sense was the funny shapes I kept seeing at the corners of my vision when I went down the street. Violet, transluscent, transcendent. I'd have thought it was the return of my childhood migraines, apart from those migraine lights don't usually stalk you from the tops of buildings and through the grates of storm drains. I started staying home and just ordering in to keep me alive. A convenient two days later, the letter came. It was Aunt Alice, begging me to come up to North Dakota as soon as I could. There was something big to tell me, something really serious, and she just couldn't bring herself to say it over the phone.

I almost fell for it. Even booked the train tickets. I did try to phone her, of course, but somehow she was never in. And that got me panicked, because Alice was always in, with a TV dinner on one knee and a megapint on the other. Where could keep that old hag out? The hospital? Police station? Cemetery?

I packed. I turned off the power and the water. Did my final checks. And then, just as I was leaving, the early morning sun fell on that letter again, open on the drawers in the hall, and goddamn if I didn't see that twinkle in the ink, just for a moment. It was the same violet as I had seen so many times outside, peering from behind garbage cans and soaring high overhead with the pigeons.

So I didn't make the train. And watching the news later, through the tears, I wondered if I should have done more. Because all those people didn't deserve to die. But how could I have expected they'd go to those lengths, just for me?

There's two things so obvious I won't even say them. I'll leave a little test for you, and if you don't get it right, I'll just stop right now. First up, the colour of that explosion. And second, what Aunt Alice had to say about the letter when I finally got through to her.

Got it? Good. I suppose I'll tell you the rest, now we've got this far.

That fourth time broke me. It's one thing to think you see little purple men everywhere, and quite another for them to derail a train outside of your head. And it was attempt number four. I couldn't tell anyone, because I'd be locked up, ready and waiting for monster of the year number five. There would be a number five, of course. By now I was sure of it.

That locking up thing did spark my imagination though. If I got my ass in gear, and more importantly, my brain, then maybe I could get put somewhere where nobody could get to me. I was a highly qualified chemist, physicist, mathematician, and translator of elven languages of the first age, and three of those things could get me far away from here.

So I quit teaching for good, and signed up with the government, and transferred out to some place I'm not allowed to tell you about, and won't even now. And that's where, after two and a half years from the first idea, I discovered The Thing. The other thing I can't say.

What I will say is that I was wrong. About a madman raving about people from the future, and a killer robot hiding as a child, and blobby aliens writing you fake letters, not making sense. They all make perfect sense if you just go right back to the start and take that madman at his word.

I don't believe all that bullcrap about causal loops. Yes, the facility helped me. No, I didn't discover it alone. But I'm a clever girl, and I'd have got there eventually. The assassins didn't make me mess everything up. I'm sure I'd have made The Thing all by myself in the end.

And the rest, they say, is history. Or maybe it's the future. Or just the present. The rest is whatever you want it to be.

It goes without saying that our fine government did the two things they always do with new discoveries. First, they shipped the best bits off to the military, and next, they commercialised the hell out of what was left. Somewhere in the years to come, if that even means anything any more, there's a company selling package holidays to great events in history. Things like battles and volcanic eruptions and the starts of your favourite band. There'll be strict rules, I'm sure, to keep the timeline clean. Don't interact, don't be obvious, don't do anything that could alter the course of the past. I think by now we've all seen how that played out.

All I can say is that I did my best to help. I want that on record.

Because when you trace everything that's gone wrong back to the source, you find one thing. The more I thought about it, the more my sympathies changed. Maybe that songwriter could have made something of his ideas without the interferences of what I caused. Maybe that robot was civilisation's last hope of avoiding something far worse than the death of one insignificant teacher, even if she did get a record ten Christmas presents from the kids because she was so awesomely popular. Are those violet blobs homeless because of me, turned off their own planet thousands of light years away by a burgeoning intergalactic empire of the worst species in the universe?

When you have what I have, none of those questions are rhetorical. Or that's what I thought at the time. So like I said, I tried to help.

The US government is so paranoid about the intrusion of foreign superpowers and copororate spies that it's completely blind to what's going on within. This has been proved time and time again. It was proved once more when one night I just got up and just sort of... walked in and took it. Then I issued myself a pass and drove away into the desert. That was it. No paratroopers and secret agents and border searches. Just a smile and a wave and then freedom. For now.

And with The Thing all to myself and tucked away somewhere even more secret than the first place I didn't tell you about, I tried to sort things out. I stuck to the past first. Tried to get that budding rockstar his own career. But there's no straightening out the rat's nest that our combined meddlings had started.

I got that night sorted, and came back to dying cities filled with animals. Dogs that could talk, and pigs that sold strange and wonderful drugs to the humans that clung to the edges of life with them. I don't know what I did. There were no butterflies to step on in that pub in England. Maybe a few rats. So I went back and undid everything I was sure I'd done. Step by step. And when I came back, the pigs and dogs were still here. Them and a whole system of Christian power gone wrong. Apprarently, I'd taken some superglue with me, in one pocket or another, and in my fumbling about, I'd clumsily gotten it all over the edges of church and state.

The world I'd made was turning into a horror-show. And no matter how many notes I made, no matter how many flowcharts and action plans I crafted to get things back to how they were, more things just kept changing. Most of them aren't for the better.

I've learnt one thing about time travel, at least. Something all the movies miss the mark on. There's no such thing as re-writing history, or alternate timelines. That's far too convenient. Everything kind of just... jumbles together.

Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Either way, I tried. Did I say that already?

Anyway, that's in the past. My past, at least. One day, I just stopped with all those spreadsheets, because I don't think science can undo what it's started. It's too late to go back to the real world. Wait, I stand corrected, because it IS real, isn't it? Let's say the original world.

But I didn't stop going back.

I went forward first, for a bit of backup. These genetically modified clementines from 4586's New Australia would stop anything. They're meaner than any piece of fruit you'll ever know.

I'll find out just how mean they are soon enough. I think the list of people that want to kill me has grown exponentially since those golden, carefree days of dodging the odd knife attack. Most of those I've probably brought into existence myself, and that's a beautiful thing, right? I see that, now I've tried to let go and just relax into it. Now that I've made the decision to be my other self for a bit.

Because as you know, I'm not all workaholic mad scientist. I still love my board games, though when I fled my dorm in the middle of the night I only took the ones with a one-player mode. The way those oranges look at me, I wouldn't exactly dare ask for a game of Betrayal.

And I still love D&D. I really love it. It's that balance of rules and creativity that I like. There have to be mechanics, of course, but they're not set in stone like in your typical game. They're just a framework for your imagination. Especially if you're the DM. And nobody has EVER let me be DM before.

I made the mechanics back at that facility. I have the rulebook with me now, all those notes in the bunker next door, where I've hidden The Thing. I always keep my lucky dice tucked away in my jeans pocket. And the campaign? Well, the world is my campaign.

They'll be on my trail, sure. Governments and cartels and monsters from right across the centuries, all across space. They exist because I allowed them to. And I like them so much that I just want more and more.

Jungles in eighteenth-century Italy? Electricity in medieval England? Human barbarians on an exotic planet next millenium? Anything's possible, if the players have the right stats.

I realise that now. That's the secret to being a great DM. I was being too rigid before. You can't railroad the scenario. So I won't worry any more. I'll just start a new session instead.

The dice come first. After that, you just have to roll with it.