Strangers on a Platform

MOTE Week 15, 2025

This week on MOTE, I received the offering of Parrish Baker: She noticed the same stranger on the train platform every day for a week before realizing he was wearing her missing watch.

—

Lizabet caught the train every single day to go to work. It was a longish commute, fifteen minutes' drive to the station, then waiting for the train, then a half-hour trip into the city centre, then a fifteen-minute walk at the far end. Then the reverse at the end of the day. She'd had worse, going to other offices was much worse. The last time she'd been to headquarters she'd been out of the house for fourteen hours.

It didn't help that she'd lost her watch over the weekend. She'd had to buy another one on Monday lunchtime.

Today she looked around as she headed down the stairs on to Platform 2. The same strangers were standing in the same places they always were.

Then she started. One of the strangers was wearing her watch on his left hand. And so was the woman on his other side. She knew it was her watch because of the scratch across the face that her husband had accidentally caused when he'd had to grab her suddenly after she'd stumbled a few years' back. A scratch that both watches had.

Lizabet walked up to the gentleman. There was a few minutes before the train was scheduled to pull in. "Erm. Is there a reason you're both wearing the same watch?"

He glanced down at his left wrist, and then his companion's left wrist. "Oh. That's a mistake."

The stranger reached into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a device. A few taps on the device and his watch shimmered, turning into another one entirely. His companion did the same thing, and her watch shimmered into another model also, a different one to the one now sported by her partner. Now they had different watches to wear.

"Erm. How?"

"We're supposed to be incognito, but since you've spotted our errors, we'll start explaining on the way into the city."

That morning's trip wasn't long enough, but over the next few weeks the time travellers explained to Lizabet how their technology worked. She never did get her watch back, but when the travellers went home, they gifted her with one of their multi-appearance watches, with her lost watch programmed as one of the options, so she could wear a replica whenever she wanted.

—

My prompt this week cycled round to Leigh Kimmel. As always, I’m looking forwards to seeing what everyone comes up with.