The widow placed them both on a baking dish, and slid it into the oven. They looked out at her walking around the kitchen licking her lips in anticipation of eating them.

“There’s no way out for us,” said Trudi, “In a few minutes she’ll open that oven door and take us out and eat us all up. You’ve been such a good friend to me since we got stranded here. Now I’m 39 and you’re 29, and we’re about to be the evening meal of a fifty year old giantess.”

“There’s no way out for the current us, as things are,” said Murray, “But there may be a way to stop things from turning out as they are.”

“What do you mean?” asked Trudi.

“I don’t have long to explain, but put simply, I found a file full of time travel methods left in an encrypted folder by my old boss’s former employee on the office computer. There was also a journal, in which the owner hypothesized that all of her fellow time travel students had vanished without explanation because of flaws in the time travel methods. So I’ve never taken the risk of attempting any of the techniques I learned from repeatedly studying the file. However, it’s no mere risk that we’ll soon be in that widow’s tummy, if I don’t make the attempt now,” said Murray

“I agree with you about the relative risks concerned, but how can we possibly make a time machine in this oven in the next few minutes?” asked Trudi.

“We can’t. However, there is one method in the file that doesn’t require the use of a machine to time travel. It involves a mental technique which enables me to send my conscious mind back into the body of my y0ounger self at some point in the past. If I can inhabit the body of the younger me, back before we found the portal into this land in the first place, and if I can find your younger self too, then I can talk her out of ever coming to this giant land and getting caught by the widow with me,” said Murray.

“If that really works, just go back to the day we first met in the bush and tell me then,” said Trudi.

Looking through the oven door window, they saw the widow walk out of the kitchen.

“She’s given me a bit more time to run another idea past you,” said Murray, “How soon after filming the last episode of the original run of “Mountains Family” did you move to America?

“About two months, I’d say.”

“And where was your exact home address in our village?”

“You want to find me back then?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said shyly, “I looked you up on the internet, and so I’ve always known that you’d been divorced for a few years by then. It would give me a clear window of opportunity in time, with which to court you and romance you, which we certainly won’t have in the widow’s tummy.”