At this point in time, relative to the events back on the surface of the earth, a flat black mechanoid toad randomly appeared in the middle of space, facing the wrong direction and slightly disoriented, (stop me if you’ve heard this one,) listlessly drifting in a small cloud of glittering gravel composed of spent rounds, steel jacketed lead slugs and bits of flash-bang grenade shrapnel. In the case of an uncalculated temporal acceleration, the chances of mishap increase considerably when the pilots are navigating the jump through a hailstorm of bullets. If you find the sudden and silent appearance of a giant black mecha toad drifting in low orbit unnerving, imagine that you are a three-foot-tall grayish humanoid temporal tourist who had only just witnessed their first traditional American welcoming party at point blank range from the comfort of a kid's car seat.

  While time and space are regularly described as an interwoven fabric or even a river-like flow, others would readily compare it to a substance, not unlike an aspic, an apocryphally popular gelatin-based entree with various sweet and savory foodstuffs trapped in the wriggling, chilled fluid. Like an aspic, time and space tend to get all gooey around big heat sources, hence the seeming intrepid march of time when one is spinning around a sun.

  Should one randomly appear in space from an unspecified distance in the future, having miscalculated for both time as well as space, it might be possible that the relief of having escaped a barrage of gunfire will be quickly replaced by the dread of having accidentally transported oneself back too far, thereby drifting in space for all time. Another terrifying possibility is that after drifting through space long enough, the eventual return to the earth's surface without proper reentry preparations could result in the mechanical toad and occupants melting into a molten ball of slag as they burn through the upper atmosphere.

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  Relax. This isn’t that ball of molten slag. Dentures, right?

  While the ninja had calculated for a very short jump – a few brief hours to arrive before those other guys with the guns – the miscalculation in space meant that they had arrived precisely where they had been standing just a moment before, but the Earth just hadn’t quite got there yet. As they rotated in the suddenly terrifyingly silent vacuum, they had only moments to panic before recognizing that they were, plummeting towards the earth, but backward. Interestingly enough, had they jumped just a few minutes further back in time but not space, there was the distinct possibility that they might have collided catastrophically with a satellite, or even the International Space Station. That they did not was through no special effort on their part. This proves only that the universe is sometimes cold and unfeeling in very fortunate ways. As the robot twisted and contorted itself, again preparing for a landing, the entire episode seemed at worst mildly inconvenient.

  More disconcerting, however, was the fact that a hailstorm of molten lead and steel shrapnel would return to earth with them, raining down on the very spot they abandoned just a few hours earlier

  Incidentally, it is also quite difficult to navigate in an aspic, especially without goggles.