Vadim awoke to the sound of the bridge's alarm, the one tool that was supposed to ensure no Officer would fall asleep during their watch. Apparently that worked out poorly this time, though for the life of him he couldn’t recall how he wound up lying on the ground in the middle of the bridge.

The ship rolled and an empty mug slid lazily in front of his eyes. Oh yeah, he was sipping his coffee when he was knocked out by the mother of all electric storms or something. He remembered some sort of pink lights before blacking out.

The ship rolled to the other side and the discarded mug crossed his vision again. With his mind still a bit hazy, Vadim followed the object with his gaze. It came to a rest at the foot of the door that led to the port bridge wing. He saw a slightly overcast but well-lit sky outside.

Wait a second.

Well-lit.

And he had the first watch.

The alarm rang again and Vadim practically bolted upright, only to stumble and catch himself on a console with his hands when his feet failed him. He slammed a palm against the alarm's reset button and froze.

Pressed against the button was something that certainly didn’t look like his hand. First off it the colour was wrong. The appendage was covered in a matte yellow layer of slightly scaly skin. The fingers, one less than on a human hand, were arranged differently with the “thumb” further away from the rest of the fingers, each ending in a wickedly sharp talon.

The young slav's eyes followed the limb upward, a yellowish scaly hide covering his arm up to the elbow at which point the scales were replaced with dark frey feathers. The grey was only broken up by the bright orange of his coveralls’ sleeve somewhere above the elbow where he had folded it. Looking behind him, he spotted his discarded jacket on the spot where he’d fallen seconds ago.

Looking back like he did allowed him to spot a flicker of brown in the corner of his vision. He attempted to turn around to follow the object but the moment he let go of the console he was leaning on he lost his balance and once again got acquainted with the floor. Landing on his back sent a sharp jolt of pain coming from two bulges in the middle of his back. Vadim instinctively let out what sounded like an irritated growl and grit his teeth.

This seemingly harmless act brought its own set of problems because he now noticed that his arm wasn’t the only body part affected by whatever it was that caused him to grow claws and lose some fingers: right in the middle of his vision (which, by the way, now appeared oddly sharp and with a wider field of vision) protruded a matte yellow object.

He brought up his hand to feel it, and lo and behold, it was a beak. The sharp and slightly curved appendage –like a falcon's, he could feel the notorious tooth shaped indentation- poked out of the middle of his face. It looked like he would need a mirror later on, he noted numbly.

Vadim slowly crawled backwards and used the console he leaned on to prop up his torso. Once he felt himslef stable, he took a long look at the rest of his body.

Even through his clothing, he could easily spot how misshapen he now was : the way his shoes bent and the pain in his feet made it very clear he would need a new pair. The shape of his hips was all wrong, and his legs looked shorter as well. This had the effect of making his coveralls look a couple sizes too big for him.

And then there was the tail. Covered in light brown fur and ending in a darker, almost black tone of colour, it poked out of the rear of his clothing, having torn a hole in the seat of the coveralls.

He could also spot some grey downy feathers spilling out of his collar.

Worst of all, the two bulges Vadim had felt on either side of his back when he fell were visibly straining the fabric of his coveralls.

All in all the poor Ukrainian was pretty weirded out by what happened to him, understandably.

“What the fuck is this...” He muttered somberly in Ukrainian. The more alarming part of this all was that the sky was clearly indicating that it was at least early morning, yet no one had come to the bridge to wake him up in the meantime, allowing him to merrily snooze on duty for a couple hours. Logically the bridge's alarm should have at least warned someone when he failed to reset it on time.

Except that, even more bizarre (as if that wasn’t enough already), the bridge's clock indicated that it was 01.30, meaning that he was only out for a couple minutes (not that it was any better) instead of a couple hours. It didn't appear to be damaged either.

Crawling back to the radio station, he quickly checked on the navtex to see if the ship had received any of the periodical automated messages, but no, there was nothing in the message log except for messages they had received prior to the electrical storm. This couldn’t be a fault in the system, the Captain himself had programmed the weather stations into the bloody thing and the antennas had been inspected two days before the event. Still, there should be a new forecast in the log.

Confusion growing by the minute, Vadim walked over to the electronic chart display. Or rather: he attempted to. The moment he let go of the console he was leaning on, he once again got a faceful of the flooring. He let out an exasperated sigh and gave an annoyed glare at his own misshapen legs.

All while keeping his eyes locked onto his rear; he twisted himself so that he was lying on his side and tried moving his leg and foot. First came the foot, which bore a similar connection to his leg as it was before, so no problem there save for the continuous discomfort he was getting from within his shoes.

Step number two: trying out the knee. There, he noticed a slight problem as his knee felt much closer to his hip than it had any right to be. The range of motion, however, stayed similar to that of a human knee.

The last step turned out to be the real problem because if he could probably overcome the higher position of the knees; the range of motion of his new hip prevented him outright from walking on two legs. He simply couldn’t move it far enough backwards. He could probably manage to stand up relatively normally if he could figure out how to balance which ought to be doable, but the hip structure prevented him from taking any significant step without leaning forward so much that he’d fall. Whatever he’d turned into definitely was some kind of quadruped species.

Resigning himself to stick with the four-leg drive option for now (which came with no small amount of internal mantras to prevent himself from collapsing into complete misery), Vadim shakily hoisted himself onto his four brand new limbs. The position wasn’t very stable but it was a definite improvement over trying to walk upright. Still, from that height he could barely peek over the consoles that bore the navigation instruments, being halfway as tall as a human.

He shook his head in annoyance and centered himself once again. First off, figure out what the hell happened and what was wrong with the clock and the sky, only then would he let himself fall into self-pity. He slowly but surely began walking toward his original objective: the electronic chart display, which would tell him a number of things about the ship and hopefully yield some answers. Vadim kept a close focus on the order of legs as he walked, front left, rear right, front right, rear left, one at a time. “Kiddy steps” He muttered to himself “One at a time, learn to walk before you learn to run like they say”.

The mantra didn’t stop him from falling over once, letting out a loud “Kurwa” in passing (so what?, he lived in Poland, of course he’d pick up some of the local profanities), but he did make it to the console. Thankfully for him, the console was right beside the navigator’s seat so he just lifted himself up by grabbing an armrest and secured himself firmly in place. The position wasn’t comfortable because of the tail and the protrusions in his back, but he was at least in a position from which he could achieve something.

He gave a gentle tap on the keyboard with one of his talons (he would have to be careful with those, they looked kinda sharp) and the screen sprung to life. A quick survey of the screen’s contents allowed him to better assess the situation: the ship had barely moved during the time he had been out. Amandine was completing a lazy circle around her anchor, still safely secured to the ground if the tension on the chain was anything to go by.

Yet some information was still puzzling him: while the ship’s digital clock indicated that it was indeed a little past 01.30, the time check he was getting from the GPS satellites was telling him it was about nine in the morning. Adding to that was the fact that the direction of the current had suddenly reversed (not a problem to the safety of the ship by itself but it shouldn’t be occurring in the first place, the tide was supposed to swing around by dawn that day).

All these problems with the time however, were but a fickle when Vadim gave a second hard glance at the electronic chart in front of him. Usually in this part of the world the chart would be showing him a large number of green arrows moving about, the symbol being a representation of other ships observed with the instruments, be they from the radar or the radio transponder.

There were no such symbols on the chart. The only transponder data they were receiving was coming from buoys marking some sandbanks in their vicinity.

Vadim double checked his findings by casting a glance at the radar; maybe the link with the chart was defective or something else. But no: none of the radar antennas were spotting any vessel in the vicinity, not even the trademark pilot vessel that ought to be anchored in visual range of them. In fact, of the fifty something vessels anchored in the area, a lot of which could easily be seen from the bridge earlier, all of them had mysteriously disappeared. The only things present around the ship at the moment were a couple buoys and some offshore wind farms far off in the distance.

The Ukrainian was in deep thought, trying to fit all pieces in a puzzle that didn’t make much sense. By force of habit he began to rub his temples with the tip of his fingers but hissed in pain when his sharp claws almost pierced his skin. Another habit he would have to be mindful of until he solved his feather problem (which had to be linked with the navigational conundrum he was facing, not that he knew in which manner). Vadim resumed the motion, but this time with his knuckles, feeling less like rubbing the tip of a knife against his skull.

Now to the matter at hand, one more time.

First off, the radio picks up some static on a seemingly random set of wavelengths.

Second, big bright pink electromagnetic storm knocks him out. The time at which the event occurred was 01.23 according to both the GPS time and the ship’s clocks from what he remembered.

Third, he wakes up to the sound of the bridge alarm. Ship time was 01.30 but the outdoor lighting was indicative of morning. What did the GPS time tell him then? 09.03.

Vadim grabbed a pen from a drawer and began to write it all down on the back of an old navigational note. Having to write with knives for hands and with one less digit barely made him better than a doctor, but as long as it could be read he didn't mind.

Next up, the ship didn’t receive any of the periodical navtex messages and neither Alejandro (the Chief Officer) nor Micha came to take their watch. And he only heard the bridge alarm once knowing it starts beeping every 15 minutes if he doesn’t reset it.

Just in case he pressed the alarm's button.

So that leads him to the conclusion that the ship had, somehow, jumped seven and a half hours into the future. This was further supported by the current being different from when he had last checked it. It didn't match the predicted current for 01.30, but it did for 09.00.

Didn’t explain the anchorage being deserted though.

Nor him turning into some bizarre kind of quadruped creature.

From where he was looking at his notes, Vadim’s gaze strayed ever so slightly to the side and met the control console for the interphone. The item that was generally used to contact the Captain or the engine room whenever necessary.

The current situationcertainly called for it.

But how would he react to his third officer having a beak and feathers? Vadim spent a good five minutes weighing in the pros and the cons. On one side the Captain deserved to know about the incident and Vadim couldn’t possibly be blamed for it, but on the other hand he was uncertain on how to explain to an experienced mariner that his ship had managed the feat of travelling through time.

Vadim’s hand (or claw as probably should start calling it) hovered over the handset for a few seconds, was he really ready to take the leap?

He grabbed the phone.

Author's Notes:

The Amandine is based on a real ship that was built relatively recently, so of course it would be equipped with the most modern equipment available on the market. This gives the crew exceptionnal situational awareness, and its capacity for telecommunications will come in handy later on.