She appeared suddenly. One second my eyes were tracing the pencil marks of my homework annotations, then suddenly they were drawn to the figure in the room who hadn't been there a second before. She was tall, thin, dressed entirely in a tight-fitting black suit. A low hum came from her dark blue backpack. She glanced at a watch-like instrument on her wrist, muttered something under her breath, then her eyes immediately fixated upon me.

"Where am I?" Her voice was low, anxious. Demanding.

"Earth," was my response. She did indeed look like she came from another planet.

Her eyes narrowed. "This isn't a joke. I need the exact coordinates of our position. Now."

I wasn't about to disobey the orders of a scary woman who just appeared out of thin air, so I obediently put down the copy of Hamlet I was annotating and opened my computer. A couple clicks in Google Earth, and the woman's eyebrows rose.

"Dammit. It didn't work." Again, she turned to me. "I assume the year is around 2020?"

I nodded mutely.

"And we were supposed to go back more than 400 years..." she muttered.

"Time travel?" I whispered.

She waved her hand. "Yeah, yeah. Just proving a point to a friend. Need to find something to change...." Her eyes fixed on my copy of Hamlet, and a smile crept across her face.

"Be right back," she said into the instrument on her wrist. Then she was gone.

I stared at the spot where she had disappeared, then absentmindedly picked up Hamlet again. Something seemed kind of different about the cover... written by Christopher Marlowe, read the subtitle.

I shrugged, and got back to my annotations.