Chronos, Chapter 15 (Patreon)

Chapter 15 – Time

After sending my pawn to be on her way, the rest of the day went by as normal, leaving me to plot out this new game I was setting up. That was something I had not done in a long time. Since the Pulse, I had not really been ‘doing’ anything. I’d simply been reacting to things, taking opportunities as they came to me, instead of actively working on ideas.

Oh, there was a reason for that, of course. The Pulse had fundamentally changed the world, and everyone in it, including me. More importantly, it had changed the way everyone’s powers worked, including magic.

This was important to those using any normal powers, of course, but it was a fundamental issue when you looked at those who had the ability to travel through time. We were not an especially large group, my fellow time travelers and I. Most people had a healthy fear of what could go wrong when playing with time by science fiction and fantasy stories. Those who had access to lore (for mages) or experimental data (for the other types) learned quickly that the horrors in popular fiction were the dumbed down, sanitized versions. Practically children’s stories by comparison.

So, no one feared the results of time traveling gone bad more than time travelers. The few travelers that were either too stupid or insane to care about such things got… taken care of. We policed our own, for the most part.

Covering up a time traveler’s mistake usually got messy. The last time I’d helped with something like that, Pompeii was destroyed. And according to those who could see multiple timelines, it wasn’t just ‘our’ Pompeii that was destroyed. In all timelines where there was a Pompeii, the city was destroyed at the same time.

At the same time, but not necessarily the same way. Some Pompeiis burned in the fires of Vesuvius. Others suffered and earthquake and fell into the sea. Some were destroyed by slave revolts. One was even wiped out by an alien invasion.

The point was, all Pompeiis across the multiverse died, just to stop the horror and chaos that would be caused by one time traveler doing something stupid in the past. Before the Pulse, most of us had wards or sensors that allowed us to sense shifts in the time streams. There was an entire group of time-traveling heroes that dedicated themselves to simply keeping people from trying to kill off Hitler before he rose to power. Only hero group I well and truly respected, honestly. Most heroes were either zealots for righteousness, vain glory hounds, or hypocrites, but the Vigilants were none of those, committed wholly to their eternal vigil.

Before the Pulse, I would take vacations in time, going back and forth as I pleased. Oh, I was careful not to change anything, naturally, but I found myself touring many of the momentous occasions throughout history. And I picked up many wonderful artifacts as souvenirs.

But the Pulse changed that. Time itself had been wounded by the Pulse, leading some of us to believe that someone in our little sub-group of the superpowered community had been involved. The problem was that we couldn’t confirm what happened, because travel to before the Pulse was… cut off. Even communications to the past were disrupted.

It was like someone had placed a physical barrier on the flow of time. We could not go past that point. Travelers from the past were trapped in the future, and some travelers from the future had been forced to live in the past.

Those travelers, at least, came back to us. Eventually, they all made their way to the date and time of the Pulse, since that was the furthest forward they could travel. They all went to that time, so that they could see, and became trapped on this side of the Pulse with us.

Unfortunately for me, that meant that I was cut off from my main house and storehouse of artifacts. Oh, the structure was fine, since it was in a dimensional pocket pinched off from time and space. The problem was that I lost the access point to the structure, which existed only on November 21, 1983. And attempting to try and force my way in had resulted in me hitting that same wall as those trying to go back, before the Pulse.

The loss of my primary residence, and all the priceless artifacts within, hurt, I’ll admit, though it would have hurt more if I didn’t have my secondary home, my mansion, to fall back on. But I did not dare try and break through that wall. Not without knowing more about the Pulse, and what truly happened.

The great fear that I, and all time travelers, held was that trying to break through that barrier would bring the System to the times before it was implemented. The changes to the timelines, all timelines, would be catastrophic! There was even the very real possibility that so much change, all at once, could spark the creation of antitime, and cause an annihilation reaction that would wipe out all of existence.

That fear was not entirely unfounded, of course. Dimensional shifters were their own little club in the super community, but there was some overlap with time travelers. The Pulse had happened across all timelines that could be accessed, of course, but it had also affected the planes. Once someone affected by the System traveled to a plane, the Pulse hit that plane. And summoning a creature caused the System to force itself upon the creature. That had been a nasty shock for the celestial and abyssal planes, from what I’d been told.

Pocket dimension though it may be, the evidence suggested that my main house was still following the rules of the world, before the Pulse. Being cut off from time and space, and only connected at a single point in time, before the Pulse, meant that the Pulse would not have touched it. Trying to break through the barrier and enter my house might cause the whole thing to explode in antitime. Worse still, that antitime might pour back through the connection to spacetime and start annihilating that, as well!

It was the same trepidation the members of the Manhattan Project must have felt, when they compared their notes and saw that there was a very real chance that their tests might set alight the entire Earth’s atmosphere. The desperation of war pushed them over that hurdle, and I’m sure they all breathed a sigh of relief when the worst did not come to pass. No time travelers had been pushed so close to the brink that they became that desperate. Not yet.

The prevention of that doomsday scenario was something that united all time travelers. And so, despite our disagreements and the fact that we often fell on different sides of the law, all time travelers agreed to stay out of each other’s affairs. But, if someone tried to break the Rules, then we were all bound to stop them.

That was why I was not concerned with other time travelers coming to ruin my fun here in Liberty City. However, it was also why I had been listless, and undirected, since the Pulse. One of my major hobbies had been taken from me, and my powers restricted. It had taken two years to snap myself out of my funk, and start actually planning things again.

Actually, I hadn’t really started planning things, yet. Some villains made plans, and then started building or stealing the resources they needed. Those villains usually either had very definite ideas, or they were too impatient to do the job right. Usually both, and that’s why heroes swept down and foiled them, time and again.

I, on the other hand, had no definite plans. Instead, I was building an organization, one that could protect and defend me, as needed, and that could be sent out to do my bidding, if I wished. Once I had an organization that was able to assist me, I would start making plans based on the organization’s capabilities and my needs.

Well, that was the idea, anyways. The only plan I really had was to try and regain as much of my lost power as I could, while gathering effective pawns to my side. I was not ashamed to admit that the idea of trying to go back, past the pulse, was frightening as hell to me, and I was all on board with stopping anyone from doing that.

Changing the past was impossible for me, for many reasons. But my dimensional mansion was not in the past, not really. Could I, for lack of a better word, decouple my home from the point in time it was anchored to, and then forge a new connection to it?

Such a thing had not been tried, to my knowledge. Certainly, not since the Pulse. People were far too wary of what might happen. Dimension-hopping at least meant that time wasn’t getting rewritten, limiting the ‘blowback’ of the Pulse. But, in a space that was a time unto itself, what would happen?

Disconnecting the pocket dimension without blowing up both it and all of time would be tricky, assuming that powers could be used at all to affect someplace not burdened by the System. But going there? If the antitime hypothesis was right, anyone who traveled to a time without the System would cause an annihilation reaction.

Which, of course, was another reason for having minions. My temporal powers could restore me from death instantly, but was getting erased from existence actually ‘death’? I wasn’t willing to risk my eternal life on that. I was, however, perfectly willing to risk cultists on the endeavor, and let them see what would happen. Controlling a transit into the dimension to prevent a backblast of antitime was far easier than trying to survive that blast myself.

The experience would be far less survivable for the pawn, of course. But that was the reason I was making pawns, after all. I would have them suffer any potential consequences, while keeping my own ass out of the firing line. It was the perfect solution, honestly.

Assuming I could find a way to configure the access point without connecting to either side of ‘bridge’, that is. If magic could reach around the dimensional barriers, then I had a chance. I had designed the bridge so that I could break it, in case someone ever tried to attack me, or if I wanted to move the bridge to another focal point in time. If things still worked how I remembered them, then the failsafes should come into play when enough magic hit the bridge in the right kind of way. That would disconnect the bridge from the past, meaning that the risk of destroying the past would be all but eliminated.

But I would have to figure out a way to do that. And that meant experimentation. Experiments, especially with ritual magics, were easier if I had assistants. I could use them to figure out which approaches worked best, and decide how to reclaim my former riches.

That was all still well in the future, unfortunately. I would want more cultists by my side, capable of joining in the ritual to aid my own magic. A sacrifice would help empower the rites I needed to cast, but just snapping up sacrifices at random is a bad idea. That kind of sloppy preparation makes it more likely that something will go wrong, ruining everything you’ve spent so long preparing for.

Properly selecting a sacrifice involved research, and finding a way to make sure that the victim would not be missed. Or, if they were missed, to make sure that no one could find them. That meant you needed to keep any ties between yourself and the victim to circumstantial or completely nonexistent, and you needed to prepare a place ahead of time where they could be stored, hidden away from both mundane and superpowered searches.

It all boiled down to being patient enough to prepare the game board properly before you started making moves. Which, I chuckled to myself as I saw Miss Mysterious and Skytalon return, just after four, was what I was doing now. I was gathering pieces as I prepared for the game to come, and some pieces would be worth more than others, though I knew they would all be useful, in their own way.

“Hello, ladies. Are you ready to begin?”

Miss Mysterious was looking flushed as she nodded. That was probably the effects of the Elixir of Eros she said she’d be drinking. The potion, besides its aphrodisiac effect, reduced one’s ability to think clearly and resist influences. The System translated that to a penalty on the drinker’s Will saves. Perfect for what I wanted.

“Then, let’s begin.”