Subject: At this point...
Author:
Posted on: 2013-09-13 12:55:00 UTC
... I'm not sure we could mess up each other's future timelines any more if we tried. I'm just assuming that 4D being from Animorphs will show up at some point and fix everything - or maybe Superboy can show up and give the space-time continuum a punching.
hS
Presenting a collaborative effort between me and the Irish Samurai:
Prologue: Entanglement
Where the wrong man in the right place can make all the difference in the world…
I’d like to thank the Irish Samurai and Huinesoron for beta-reading this piece.
Concrit is welcome, as always!
I liked this when I beta'd it, and I still like it now. I particularly like some of the lines which weren't there when I read it before - 'It was sort of like having a very nicely dressed falcon stare you down.' And in general, it was fun to read - and it's fun to see the timeline folding and refolding itself.
The question is, if the PPC community still exists in the 2030s, will we be able to resolve these timelines? And how?
And if we don't, do I get to write another History dealing with the Sundering That Didn't Sunder, and explaining exactly how everything ended up going on as usual? 2030... yeah, that should be enough time for me to want to go through that again.
hS
Hundreds had died and so had most of Flowers - shouldn’t this be most of the Flowers?
Is that grammatically and temporally correct enough, or I need to go on? - shouldn’t this be or do I need to go on?
I’m quite confused now. I may need to re-read Huinesoron and Samurai’s stories.
I'll fix them right away.
Thanks for reading!
Because there's just not enough of that around HQ :P
I really like this piece, I think you've got a very interesting concept for the storyline (and I'm not just saying that because it's based on mine!). I look forward to seeing how things go for Gaspard with all his future knowledge.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again - the interaction between Skeet and Amy was brilliant (particularly Skeet's line about the 'emergency flare').
Nicely done.
Time lines, that is. As I see it, you have the Paladin-line (which only occurs if the Paladins don't come back in time), the Tick-tock-line (started by the flowers vetoing the DoE) and now this new time line, which is new and different because of all the information that Gaspard has at his disposal.
I can't wait to see how it gets more complicated down the line. How many branching time lines can one series of stories create? I don't know, but I want to find out.
Well done, all around.
-Phobos, lover of tangled time
I'm eager to see if more people will write things set in the Sundering era. We've got the divergence and merging of timelines and all of that stuff... what's not to like?
Anyhoo, thanks for reading!
I've got my own future story in the works (I posted a side story from it during a monthly writing challenge), though it has nothing to do with the Sundering. I should be coming out with it very soon.
I do like divergent timelines. I'm just waiting for the inevitable Mobius Double Reach-around.
-Phobos
Actually, I'm not sure that I am - mostly because I have no idea what a Mobius Double Reach-around is, nor why it should be so inevitable.
It sounds complicated though, and this piece does kind of complicated things to the timeline, so maybe it's close enough. In fact, it's possible that anything of sufficiently advanced complexity is indistinguishable from an Inevitable Mobius Double Reach-around.
Anyway, this piece (probably/possibly) takes place prior to SeaTurtle's Triple Prime, and might even explain a little bit about just how my agents ended up in there:
~~~
Skeet and Amy stepped out of the portal and into the SO's office, the handheld chrono-tracker showing that they had made it to the right point in the timestream.
The SO wasn't there yet, which gave them time to hunt for the assassins. Suddenly, two (very familiar looking) human figures stood up from where they'd been hiding behind the room's large desk.
“You?” Skeet said.
“You!? I mean, me? I mean... oh hell, I don’t know.” The other Skeet said.
The Skeet and Amy that had been hiding behind the desk looked identical to the other pair, except for the fact that these ones had obviously recently been in combat. Their clothing was torn and patched, their faces smudged with dirt – the other Skeet had a bandage on his upper arm, and his Amy had a cast on her wrist.
“What are you doing here?” Skeet asked his doppelganger.
“We're here to kill the SO, before he can trigger the Sundering and the End Times.”
Skeet and Amy shared a look. "We're here to stop the SO from being killed, so that with his leadership the Board votes against the Department of Efficiency proposals, thereby avoiding the Sundering."
“Huh, well this awkward.” Injured!Skeet said.
“Yeah. Hey, wait a minute, why were you surprised to see me?”
“Because I wasn’t expecting you, dumbass.”
“Listen, smeghead, I wasn’t expecting you either. How does that work? We can’t have both got here before each other, can we? How would that work?”
The two Skeets began trying to work it out, using their fingers to represent different points in time and seeing if they could be moved into order, but then quickly fell back to insulting each other. It was left to their partners to try and sort it out. As the girls began to work things through, their partners moved on from insults, to arguments, to actual fighting.
“Er, guys?” Injured!Amy said. “We’re AUs of each other. This is our first meeting, from both sides.”
The Skeets looked up at her. Injured!Skeet had Skeet in a headlock, and had been trying to convince him of his superior reasoning powers via a series of blows to the head, while Skeet was preparing to make a cunning counter-argument by elbowing his opponent in the stomach.
“AUs? Radagast on a bunny sled, how much more complicated is this gonna get?”
“Quite a lot actually,” said a third Skeet, as he appeared out of a portal. This Skeet had short hair, was clean-shaven, and dressed mostly in white. A chatter of voices could be heard from the other side of his portal. “That’s why we formed the Council.”
“What Council?” asked Skeet.
“The Council of Us: all the Skeets, and all the Amys. We’re gonna sort this mess out.” He turned and walked back to his portal, calling over his shoulder, “Come on, you don’t want to be late.”
“Dude, we’re time-travellers-”
“Exactly, so think how embarrassing it would be for you if you were late.” Councillor!Skeet said, as he walked through the portal.
Four confused Assassins followed him.
They emerged in a large chamber, possibly one of HQ’s auditoriums. The grey walls seemed pristine when viewed from some angles, but were clearly battle-scarred from others. There were at least twenty different versions of Skeet and Amy in the room, several dressed in the identical simple black of a PPC agent, but some of them looked more distinctive.
As the last four arrived, a Skeet near the podium (this one wearing an eyepatch on his left eye) called for order.
“OK, now as I'm sure some of you have noticed, our efforts to go back in time and prevent the Sundering haven’t exactly gone smoothly...”
This brought a round of chuckles from his audience.
“...which is why we’ve decided to try and bring some level of rationality to our efforts. Now, we’ve got some visitors from even further in the future,” he gestured to four hooded and cloaked figures behind him, “but their involvement is going to have to be strictly limited. They’re basically just here so we don’t waste our time, but they can’t just tell us what to do – we have to come up with the solution that they used ourselves.”
He paused for breath, and was about to continue when he was pre-empted by a beeping from his pocket. Seconds later, another beeping started up from with the crowd, and an Amy rushed forward to the podium. The two held a hurried, whispered, conversation.
“Shit, sorry about this.” Eyepatch!Skeet addressed the crowd. “I’ve got a thing.”
With that ‘explanation’ given, the two of them disappeared through a portal, leaving confused mutterings in their wake.
Another Skeet took to the stage and took off his fedora, revealing that he too wore an eyepatch. “Right, well, now that that’s been taken care of – and I can assure you, it was very important – we can get down to business.
“First things first: it’s going to be difficult enough telling us apart as it is, so if you haven’t already adopted some ridiculous affection,” here he nodded at a pair of partners in full pirate regalia, “to make your appearance more unique, then I suggest you do so now.
“Next up, let’s start by mapping out the distinct timelines we’ve identified so far, and look for points of commonality and divergence...”
(Is this canon? Tell me this is canon)
I've played with a similar idea before - various incarnations of Agent Lou have run into each other, and I have two stories stored away involving a dozen different versions of me (from different stories) meeting up - but I don't think my versions have ever organised. I can definitely see it of Skeet and Amy, though.
The story itself, I enjoyed - things like the two versions having opposite reasons for being there, and the 'We can’t have both got here before each other' discussion. And the 'how embarrasing it would be to be late' thing, and of course the 'ridiculous affectation' thing... yeah, basically it was a fun little read.
I wonder what's going on with the cloaked group, though. I do hope they're not from really far in the future and engaged in a religious war...
hS
Yeah, this story falls under the same category as 'Trousers' did - it's canon for my agents, and anyone else that wants it to be. If it messes up anyone else's plans for future timelines, then they're free to consider it non-canon. But yes, as far as I'm concerned, all of that was canon.
As for the hooded figures, well, they could be anyone (or anything - surely they're not just wearing those hoods and cloaks to be fashionable. Hmm, a religious war hey... *starts scribbling notes furiously*)
I'm glad you liked it, and I'm planning more in stories in this little mini-series.
... I'm not sure we could mess up each other's future timelines any more if we tried. I'm just assuming that 4D being from Animorphs will show up at some point and fix everything - or maybe Superboy can show up and give the space-time continuum a punching.
hS
That was a challenge, right? Where you said 'not sure we could mess up each other's future timelines any more if we tried'? Cos that sounds like a challenege to me :)
Actually, while I am planning on writing several more pieces featuring Future!Skeet and Amy (currently under the working title 'The Glass Clock Sequence' - for what I'm assuming will be obvious reasons to you), there probably won't be much more timeline mangling going on.
As it happens, the piece that I failed to finish writing for your Third Writing Challenge, and the piece that I am currently failing to finish for your Fourth, both feature my future agents. I really need to get round to finishing those off...
...was way more than a Mobius Double Reach-around. Well done. I'll have more specific comments when I have more time.
-Phobos
My questions were answered in the sequel! Since the original Door From the Future RP/Trousers of Time world didn't have someone neuralyzing the agents, this timeline proceeded with less knowledge of the DoE.
The Flowers found out through the agents that retained their knowledge, or possibly just because they're the Flowers, so seeing all and knowing all is part of their job, but the agents not retaining their memories set off a temporal domino effect, In Want Of A Nailing the entire timeline to a different course!
Not only does this remove my previous "how is it an Alternate Universe story for all but a few people when the few people exist in the same universe as those who it is an Alternate Universe story for" by revealing that the timelines were in fact distinct all along, just imagine how Amy is going to react when she realizes that she was unintentionally responsible for the timeline containing the Tick-Tock Men and the DTOM to come into being! I mean, judging by Skeet's dialogue, the two would have known at least at some point that their arrival into the past was the cause of the timelines differentiating each other, so it's not going to be an "I did what?" sort of reaction, but it's probably still going to be a huge emotional hit.
I wish you hadn't used the term "fixed point in time", though. It may have been unintentional, but it's giving me unpleasant flashbacks to when I tried to puzzle out how Steven Moffat's time travel rules work. Uuggghh. Logic and Moffat do not combine.
By the way, before Skeet's watch beeps, there's a [SI3] in the text. What does that mean? Does it represent a sound?
...though I don't quite exactly follow your temporal reasoning. The way I saw the timeline was:
Present PPC ==> Huinesoron's Sundering ==> Door From the Future RP ==> [Board of Department Heads forewarned] ==> [Rise of the DTOM] ==> the Irish Samurai's Sundering ==> [Skeet and Amy's time travelling] ==> [Return to the Door From the Future, neuralysed all present except one] ==> [Prime Timeline reestablished] ==> Triple Prime
...so this is the third lap around the block for everyone involved.
As for the use of "fixed point in time", I chose it because it was short and to the point. While I wasn't trying to make it into a Moffat-ism, I felt that it was a term a lot of people could recognize or understand quite easily.
Erp, the [SI3] was a leftover from my betas. All gone now! Thanks for pointing it out.
The Door From the Future RP occurs, in which people from Huinesoron's original Sundering time stream enter the "prime" or "main" PPC time stream.
Differentiation occurs with the arrival of the Skeet and Amy from either The Wrong Trousers's time stream or the future of the SeaTurtle's Sundering time stream(this detail was unclear, but doesn't affect event progression, and actually opens up some interesting questions by remaining ambiguous), and Amy neuralyzes most of the agents who witnessed the arrival of the future-people.
In addition, a separate differentiation occurs when Skeet leaves a psychic message from alternate-older-Gaspard. This doesn't create a new timeline, but simply further alters an existing one.
In the main timeline, the Flowers found out about the bad future from the agents that witnessed the future-people and took steps to prevent it, resulting in a timeline that, while not free of conflict and potential future power struggles, lacks a Sundering.
In the altered timeline, most of the "present" agents were neuralyzed, save Gaspard and a few others that weren't in the room when Amy and Skeet came in, such as Kayleigh Leonard. This caused future events to change, since there was less knowledge in the "present" about the DoE and Sundering than there was in the main time stream, setting off a chain of events that allowed the DTOM to form and rise to an level of power unseen since the Mysterious Somebody's day.
I admit, this is a bit of a leap, since as I said, it is currently unclear whether the Skeet and Amy were bringing a message from STS Gaspard's future self, or simply the future self of a Gaspard. If it was just the future self of a Gaspard, the future of the STS time stream may not have a DoE or a DTOM, may being the operative word due to the potential(in time travel, this is a distinctly different word than "possible") synonymity of the STS timeline and The Wrong Trousers's timeline.
Regardless, events would have proceeded similarly to the main timeline if Amy hadn't neuralyzed the Agents.
Judging by General de Grasse's dialogue, if Gaspard were ever to reveal the information that he now knows about the future, events in STS Gaspard's native time stream would proceed similarly to those in The Wrong Trousers's time stream, or perhaps the two timelines would become synonymous, as I said before. I'm not sure how much hyperbole was used in alternate-older Gaspard's statement there, but going by main-current-Gaspard's demeanor, I'm guessing not much.
I figured that, with the "Triple Prime" chapter title, you had been referring to the three time streams: one in the STS story, one in The Wrong Trousers, and one original timeline that the two latter time streams differentiated from.
From what I can tell, my interpretation seems to at least be close to what you were trying to go for, save that bit at the end about some people having been on a "third lap around the block". Does that mean there have been major characters in three separate timelines, or that the reader has seen iterations of the main characters in three separate time streams, or what exactly?
Perhaps my original reasoning being hard to follow was just due to me phrasing things poorly. It wouldn't be unlike me.
I know you weren't trying to invoke Moffat with that line about fixed points in time, especially since your take on the term as "circumstantial simultaneity of events in several related but unconnected alternate universes" is different than his less-suitable definition. I just inwardly flinched when I saw the term, is all. It's nothing against the way your story handled time.
In fact, I actually quite like your time travel model. Keeping details and possibilities in flux while still keeping a few elements of predestination would seem like trying to, to invoke a phrase, both having and eating one's cake, if it was handled in a less effective manner. As it is here, it opens some interesting mysteries and potential for dramatic tension, which is always a plus.
I realized just after posting that one of my sentences is really confusingly structured. I think you'll probably be able to to figure out what it means, but it's got too many clauses, and one of them's in the wrong spot. Just... well, too late for a warning, so an apology, then. Sorry.