Under the Acacia Tree

[imhilien]

Under the Acacia Tree

(or, how a cave in Pliocene France sheltered the good and the bad)

 

1. Madame Angelique Guderian

 

Madame Angelique Guderian is the widow of Theo Guderian, who in the year 2034 invented the one-way time portal to Pliocene France, six million years ago. For the rest of his life, Theo believed the portal in his cellar was an oddity with little value.

 

Only in 2041, when a visitor begs the widowed Madame Guderian for permission to use the portal, does she see actual value in it… and a way to pay off debts and discreetly earn an income. She welcomes people to the new L’Auberge du Portail… and not everyone that enters, checks out again.

 

After years of successfully running the time portal and going through rejuvenation to have a second lifetime, Angelique eventually decides to travel through it herself in the year 2106, leaving the 22^nd century behind her for good. She will finally see the place where she has sent thousands of travellers on a one-way journey to.

 

When she secretly goes through at midnight, she finds herself caught up in a powerful dust storm that blows her into the bottom of a dry ravine. Knocked unconscious, she awakes at dawn and upon seeing a castle in the distance, she decides to investigate. Angelique pauses though when she sees that people have left the castle to wait for todays’ batch of time-travellers.

 

However, there aren’t any time-travellers coming through on that day, because back home in the 22^nd century, Angelique’s absence has upset her staff. This change in  routine causes the castle’s inhabitants to panic and send out soldiers, who pass close by to where she is hiding… and to her surprise, she notices an extremely tall exotic man in charge. In pain, she crawls into a shallow cave under the roots of a acacia tree on the ravines edge. The thirsty and panicked woman realises that for years she has unknowingly sent time travellers into the hands of alien slavers, and wishes for death.

 

But finding some fruit nearby, she makes her way into a nearby forest and encounters the Firvulag, becoming part of their resistance against the Tanu elite.

 

2. Angelique and Claude Majewski

 

Four years later, the cave (now a chamber) under the acacia tree becomes a refuge yet again for Angelique – this time with her new husband, Claude Majewski; widowed palaeontologist and a member of Group Green. Using amber to preserve a message, the couple have found a failsafe way to send a warning forward to the 22^nd century, to ask authorities stop sending through time travellers. They will take the warning through themselves though, sacrificing themselves in the process.

 

3. Marc Remillard

 

The third inhabitant of the cave is the Big Bad of the Pliocene Exile series, Marc Remillard. Forced to take refuge there after a coup by some of his fellow rebels to get rid of him, he turns the cave into the equivalent of a Bond villain lair, enlarging it in the process with the powers and technology at his disposal.

 

However, at the end when Marc has to make a choice between good and evil, he chooses to renounce evil and sends his two children forward in time to L’Auberge du Portail. He brings Elizabeth, the Pliocene Dirigent with whom he healed a baby, willingly back to the cave. Feeling more amicable towards each other, Marc eventually d-jumps (teleports) them both and the contents of the cave for a healing mission to the Duat Galaxy, original home of the Tanu and Firvulag.

 

The humble cave under the acacia tree was transformed and became a refuge for those who would save not only humanity, but those in another galaxy as well.