Chronos - Chapter 5 (Patreon)

Chapter 5 – Considerations

The next morning, after enjoying Raquel once again in the shower and having some breakfast while reading the morning newspaper, I considered my plans for the day. It was Thursday, and I needed to show up at the library to relax the wards on the Mystic Arts section, but I wasn’t worried about that. Time, after all, was mine to command.

No, my thoughts were on another matter entirely.

I had told the truth in yesterday’s meeting. I was a very specialized type of mage. Within the field of time magics, I was fairly confident that I had no equal. However, outside of that field, I struggled to so much as light a match without tools. Certainly, mastering time made my need for other types of attack largely unnecessary, but I was not so foolish as to rely entirely on just that. If I ever came across an enemy who was immune to time magic, or just magic in general, I would be in big trouble.

The problem, of course, was that anything I could get ‘off the shelf’, as it were, was not something that would reliably work against supers. Handguns were good for dealing with normal people, but supers tended to have enough defensive measures that a normal gun would be useless. Adding armor penetrating rounds or higher calibers would help, certainly, but there was only so much you could do if you weren’t going to be hauling around an antitank weapon like you were in a video game.

So, if I was going to defend myself against individuals who were immune to magic, that meant I needed to do one of two things. Either I needed to get the kinds of weapons that supers used, or I needed minions. Both options had their pros and cons, of course.

The biggest problem with getting a weapon that a super might use is that it did not really gel well with my public persona. This might be the land where everyone could have a gun, but that didn’t mean someone could go walking around with what was effectively military-grade weaponry without causing a stir. If I went that route, I would have to find some way to justify Dr. Livingston having weapons like that.

Of course, that was just considering damaging weapons. If, instead, I went for something with a nonlethal effect, perhaps something that would allow me to escape and evade an enemy? Well, that was a lot easier to talk my way around. That wouldn’t help me defeat my opponents, but it would give me options.

Minions, on the other hand, were problematic for other reasons. If I hired people to be my minions, then they were potential leaks of information. A major part of the reason why the heroes hadn’t connected Chronos and Dr. Livingston was because I was, literally, the only person who knew that the two were one and the same. My pets around the house only knew me as the doctor, and my interactions as Chronos rarely had witnesses.

Another weakness to the normal type of minions was that they would need to be armed and protected, same as me. Which only further increased the likelihood that someone, somewhere, would catch on, and leak the existence of a new organization moving into town. That would eventually get back to the heroes, and I’d be toast.

And using mind control to force people to be my minions wouldn’t work, either. My magic wasn’t flexible enough to allow me to properly control all those minds, and someone would inevitably notice. It had been tried before, so people were always watching out for mind controllers building a zombie army. A skilled mentalist could do ‘surgery’ to mold a person’s mind to their will, but that was a delicate, customized process, and I needed something more ‘one size fits all’.

So, if normal minions wouldn’t work, what about abnormal ones? Specifically, I could use summoning to bind a creature to me, and bring it forth to do my bidding. A magical creature with physical weapons like claws and teeth and fire breath could do a number on even enemies that were immune to magic.

The idea had merit to it, but I would have to create a talisman or focus for the summoning, due to my own limitations. A talisman would be the simplest, something I could whip up with my Artificing ability, but such things were single-use items. Good for an emergency, but not a reliable defense. But to make a more permanent focus, I would have to do something to force the System to give me more experience. And that meant fighting.

Or did it? Certainly, my killing the Black Hat had given me the XP I needed to remove the last locks on my powers after the System had hampered me, but all my actions against supers before and since hadn’t gotten so much as a drop of XP. I didn’t think that it was a product of killing, since I had witnessed other supers growing stronger just from the actual fighting.

Perhaps it was the fact that the grenades exploded inside of time? That would make sense, actually. Even if the grenades exploded right as time started, there was still a chance that the Black Hat could have done something to stop it, or had a contingent spell to protect himself. There was the chance it could fail.

So, if I wanted to grow stronger, that meant I needed to engage in actions that did not simply happen between one breath and the next. I needed to risk, in order to grow. That was not the conclusion I hoped to reach, but it made sense.

That just left the question of what kind of risk would I take? I wasn’t going to just go and poke the supers in the eye, just because. I needed some justifiable reason.

Looking back at the paper, I saw a headline. ‘Pardoxical Escapes Greenstone! Vows Vengeance on Protectors!’ Well, now, that was an interesting twist. Paradoxical was a mutant with time-warping abilities, allowing him to create all manner of effects, some of which were ludicrously unlikely, simply by ‘bringing forward’ the timeline where those events occurred. It was a power based on the multiverse theory, and it was potent enough that it had taken all of the Protectors working together to take him down. Even so, two of their members were still in the hospital.

Taking down Paradoxical would be a feather in my cap. More importantly, it would get me some of that XP that I’d need to get permanent boosts to my power. There was also the worry that, if the Protectors were allowed to fight too much with Paradoxical, then they might develop tactics that could be used against me. And that was something I wished to avoid.

I finished my coffee, and got up from the table, allowing the girls to clean up. Moving to my library, I stopped time as the door closed. Now, I would have all the time in the world to research and craft the talisman I would need to make Paradoxical no longer a threat.

Chronos’s   Knowledge (Arcane Lore) check: 1d20+20 = 32 (Success)

Chronos’s   Craft (Mystical) check: 1d20+18 = 36 (Success)

Finished Artifice:

Talisman   of Impotence

Curse   12 – Curse of   Mystic Knowledge, Will DC 22

Extras:   Duration (Continuous), Improved Curse

Flaws:   Action (Full), Check Required (Knowledge: Arcane Lore), Distracting,   Side-Effect (Always, Damage)

Drawbacks:   Noticeable, Power Loss (Must speak incantation)

Total:   22 PP

This single-use   talisman inflicts a curse upon the victim, preventing them from using any of   their powers (regardless of descriptors) unless they make a Knowledge: Arcane   Lore check with a DC of 10+Power’s Rank each time they activate or attempt to   use a power.

The talisman took over twenty hours to research and design, and eighty more to create the proper line work infused with magic, but, when it was done, I was quite please. Of course, all of this happened while I was in my bubble of stopped time. I was fortunate that one of the items I carried made me immune to such concerns as starvation or thirst. I still needed to sleep, of course, but I could do projects like this without my pets ever knowing or wondering why the food suddenly depleted.

The final result was a paper talisman, like those used by exorcists of Eastern traditions. Of course, instead of using the talisman as a focus for my own powers, as the Eastern mystics did, this one carried its own power, the power to force the victim to use their knowledge of the arcane to activate their powers. Since Paradoxical was not a magic-user, I doubted greatly whether he had spent the time to truly learn about the arcane arts.

Between the talisman, and my other abilities, I believed I was ready to face Paradoxical, if I found him. Of course, finding him was going to be the issue. If he had half a brain, he wouldn’t go charging straight at the Protectors. He’d search, and find a way to isolate them, one by one.

That meant I had some time to figure out how I was going to force a confrontation. It also meant that I would, to some extent, need to be seen. Fortunately, I’d already considered this. While I was never going to be one of those costumed heroes or villains running around in tights with capes and cowls and all that, it didn’t mean I couldn’t disguise myself.

My disguise was more of the ‘movie secret agent’ style than the ‘costumed super’ style. A black trench coat, red scarf to hide my face below the eyes, and a black fedora. None of it screamed ‘supervillain’, but it was distinctive, when you looked at it. And I had a bag of holding that I could use to store the distinctive items in when I was done dressing up, going back to looking like a boring nobody. If someone was looking for a distinctive outfit, then all it took was to switch coats and hats, and put the scarf away, and I might as well be invisible.

At any rate, I was ready. But, in order to keep my cover, I needed to get to the library. So, with time flowing once again, I got dressed, and made my way out to my skybike.

Flying along the express routes downtown, I had to grit my teeth and force myself not to just stop time in order to skip traffic. There were enough cameras in the city that something like that could be noticed, so doing it when I didn’t have to was a bad idea.

It wasn’t just cameras I needed to worry about. If there was someone who either sensed magic, or was immune to it, then that would be a problem. If I kept the bubble of stopped time small, to keep from alerting those who were sensitive to magic, then that limited how much I could move while still remaining within the stopped time. If I widened the bubble, so I could travel freely, and suppress anyone sensitive to magic, then I risked having people immune to magic caught in the effect, which would be the kind of problem I was working on solutions to.

That was why I normally kept the time-stop ability to as small a radius as I could get away with. Yes, I could reach the moon with how far I could stop time, but doing that would make the chance of me alerting someone immune to magic to my abilities a mathematical certainty. Someone would notice, and if I did it too often, then there was a chance that they could track me by my magic.

Mages had a ‘fingerprint’ or ‘signature’ to their magic, that you could identify, if you were skilled at analyzing it. I didn’t have those skills, but my teachers did, which is part of the reason why I knew that they could find me if I went ‘rogue’ and broke my geasas. They would be able to find me, and lead others to me. And if they could do it, then others could, as well, if I gave them reason to.

Normally, I wasn’t too worried about that. After all, most of my magic was done in stopping the flow of time, so anyone trying to catch my signature was going to have to be very fast. However, if they were caught inside my field, then they would have all the time I gave them to identify it and track me. They might even be able to use the time to design devices that would let others do the tracking and capturing parts for them, while they remained behind the scenes.

That wasn’t something I wanted to deal with, as I told myself yet again whilst idling in rush hour traffic.