'An interesting challenge'.

A question and an idea by Silverwind on 2013-08-20 06:56:00 UTC Reply

I had an idea recently that I figured was worth sharing. Has there ever been a time traveling agent? I came up with the idea for an Agent who experiences thing in a different order than his partner while looking at the Continuum tabletop game.

IE Agent A, then non time traveler, experiences missions in order.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and so on.

Agent B, the time traveler, experiences those missions in a slightly different order.
13, 2, 6, 7, 1, 3, 11, 10, 12, 9, 4, 8, 5.

Does anyone else think that, if done right, this could be an interesting idea?

That would certainly be interesting, by Legacy on 2013-08-24 17:18:00 UTC Reply

But I too am concerned with problems of making sense of all this. It could prove rather difficult to handle two people interacting in the wrong order...

But if you do it right, then yes, it would be awesome.

Re: That would certainly be interesting, by AdmiralSakai on 2013-08-25 14:24:00 UTC Reply

Well, Homestuck did it pretty well with the trolls. That was just conversations spaced out over a lot of action, but a PPC mission would be as well. If you have an idea of where the missions are "going" and plan things ahead of time, it's doable. It'd definitely be more work than a standard PPC mission, but I think it would be worth it to make a "story arc" involving a displaced agent.

I've toyed with a similar idea... by Huinesoron on 2013-08-20 09:17:00 UTC Reply

... for a non-PPC story, in which two people receive the same time machine with sixteen preset coordinates. Of course, since the buttons are in a 4x4 array, one person presses them in order for a phone (bottom left to top right, reading horizontally), while the other reads them down in columns. So they meet 16 times, but in different orders depending on who you follow...

I think it could work in the PPC. You'd probably have to use a malfunctioning TARDIS to throw someone's timestream off (TARDISes are like that). The main problem is that... well, most people don't write that many missions. ;) Actually, the majority of written agents have... one mission (or even just an introduction). Obviously there are exceptions (Jay and Acacia, Indemaat, Tawaki, Laburnum, Araeph, and to some extent me... I'm sure there are other examples), but they are exceptions - and I'm not sure how well it would work if one only wrote two of the missions. Particularly since each one would necessarily be referencing others - many of which wouldn't have been written yet.

Time is out of joint — O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let's go together.
-Hamlet

hS
My only concern would be... by Rosie Azrael on 2013-08-20 08:30:00 UTC Reply

How would you actually make the receiving of their missions make sense? Do they stay in the same RC? If so, how? If not, why not? What makes B experience the missions in an order other than A (Not just 'time travel', but, like, 'B shows up on mission 13, falls through a plot hole at the end, finds themself in 2)?

I'd be interested in seeing this if you could pull it off, but that might be too much of a chore for you to explain how/why the different timelines, and making things mesh like this can be... difficult. Does A know that B is a timetraveler? How does this effect A's relationship with B, knowing that what happened last time for A may be what will happen three times from now for B?

Again, the idea is good, the execution on the other hand may be more than you want to tackle for something like the PPC...

One way to do it... by Huinesoron on 2013-08-20 14:27:00 UTC Reply

... and fleshing out my 'malfunctioning TARDIS' suggestion...

... would be to have both agents be without a partner due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (and funny, of course), and for the Marquis to insist they take a series of missions together but not partnered. Precisely why he'd do this is up to the writer - whim, I guess. ;)

Only problem is, one of the agents has a normal RC, the other has a TARDIS from the Macrovirus Infection - and in the incident when they lost their partner, the TARDIS was damaged. So after every mission, it wanders a bit in time, and lands back in HQ at a random point in the recent timeline - sometimes ahead, sometimes behind.

hS

That sounds like it could be interesting... by Lenore Snow on 2013-08-20 14:55:00 UTC Reply

...but maybe more trouble than its worth, by the time you get through all the explanations and find a way to integrate them in the story. A cool concept, nonetheless.

-- Len

Re: That sounds like it could be interesting... by AdmiralSakai on 2013-08-21 14:01:00 UTC Reply

The way I'd do it is through portals: the time-travelling agent gets irradiated with something or sprayed with something that won't come off, and every time they use a portal they end up at a different mission, more or less randomly. Thus, from the linear partner's perspective, every time they portalled into a fic hir partner would be replaced by a version who was trying to enter either an earlier or later mission (of course both would wise up to the fact after a few jumps (maybe through a time loop where Agent A explains it to Agent B, "then" a later B explains it to an earlier A)). Obviously, if this happened with EVERY portal it would just get unmanageably confusing, so either they can't use portals in-fic (which sounds like an interesting challenge but would probably just turn out to be really dull), or it only happens with inter-continuum portals (perhaps the traveling agent is sent directly from one mission to another even when (s)he tries to portal to the RC, and thus cannot access it?)

'An interesting challenge'. by Huinesoron on 2013-08-21 15:10:00 UTC Reply

I'm currently working on a mission where one of the agents refuses to portal ahead (much - and the one time she does, the RC nearly explodes ;)). It actually is a challenge, but fortunately the mission is Tolkienverse. Since we know the geography, I can write about them hanging around in Rivendell, or hiking ahead to check out the ruins in Eregion. I don't think not portalling has made the mission boring (at least I hope not!).

hS

Re: 'An interesting challenge'. by Anonymous on 2013-08-22 02:21:00 UTC Reply

Well, instead of portalling past the boring parts you could just skip over them narratively (which I really wish was a word), and then SAY the Agents were bored... usually we pride ourselves on "show, don't tell", but I don't think readers would want to be shown boredom. That would work.
It would offer more opportunities for char-dev, at any rate. (nm by Lenore Snow on 2013-08-21 21:51:00 UTC Reply

Re: Re: That sounds like it could be interesting... by Lenore Snow on 2013-08-21 14:07:00 UTC Reply

Ah, me gusta. Or you could go through one or two missions with the time traveling action, paradoxes, and general mind-bending confusion, and then after that write it as sort of a given, as you said. I would read that.

-- Len
Re: That sounds like it could be interesting... by Anonymous on 2013-08-21 14:02:00 UTC Reply

Drat. Still can't quite work the reply threading yet... oh well, you can all tell where this was supposed to go!