Part 1: Quarantine
Part 2: Odd Jobs
Part 3: Shuck
Part 4: The Old North
Part 5: Dirty Dave
Part 6: Multipliers
Part 7: Kilogold
Part 8: Analysis
Part 9: Reversal
Part 10: Miss Meta
Part 11: The Fourth Consortium
Part 12: Young Ghost
Part 13: Dungeon Diving
Part 14: Puzzles
Part 15: Calm Before the Storm
Part 16: Eventual
Part 17: Changing History
Part 18: The Gaze
Part 19: Panic
Part 20: Panic
Part 21: All Good Things
Part 22: Mental Gymnastics
Part 23: Shadow Tactics
Synopsis(spoilers ahead if you want to read the story from the beginning)
Victor Meta is a time traveler who lived with his wife Janet and his young daughter Mira in a quaint timeline on the edge of obscurity. However, one day he was ambushed by soldiers of the Legion, and was forced to ally with a con artist named Shuck to save them from certain doom. By carefully manipulating time, he was barely successful, thanks to additional help surprisingly provided by his own daughter, now an adult time traveler.
But all of that pales in comparison to the revelation that Mira brings. They were not alone in being targeted. The time traveling family of Meta has been attacked throughout history. Ghost, another Gatekeeper who helped Dante Meta escape the coordinated assault, has joined the effort alongside that same Meta to find the masterminds behind the attack. And now, they all are working together to unravel the mystery of the Legion's ability to coordinate throughout time.
They now find themselves in the middle of a veritable warzone, facing contorted monsters called Vorpals. With few options left and other lives at stake, they throw in with a group of survivors to try holding back the encroaching horde. But it proved too much, and with their backs against the wall, Shuck played his trump card, ironically in the form of a summoning card.
With the overwhelming power of Panic, the group is now safe. For the moment. However, their suspicions have finally turned their attention to apprehending Shuck. After losing track of his now traumatized daughter and fleeing a suddenly homicidal Ghost, he now hopes to find some more substantial answers.
Victor marveled at what even the highest of authorities in Pause had also missed. It all seemed too simple to be true. The techniques used by Metas for generations had been used by non-Metas. No more, no less.
Mira had desynchronized herself from him. This meant her time was no longer flowing alongside his, so she could spend entire years away with him being unable to track her down. Without any information on where and when to go, it was impossible to find her. That was the trick. Any non-Meta could do the same thing, in a roundabout way. The existence of time resistance technology was already known to him and many others, but it never clicked that such equipment might be more nuanced than simply preventing time travel. It could also potentially prevent almost all forms of time tracking.
Victor sat across from Mira, in her home in some time he wasn’t aware of. Somehow, she had learned to transport multiple people through time simultaneously, though she only waved off questions by saying it was complicated. She spoke with a very familiar voice, though something in her tone had changed over the years that Victor couldn’t quite place. “So, father… how have things been?”
Victor sighed. “You should know! It’s been less than a day since I last saw you. You were the one who ran away from me!”
Mira frowned. “Apologies, I… I forget sometimes. You went from seeing your daughter as a child, then as a young adult, then… well, as I am now. Not quite old, but still far from being young. I imagine it is quite jarring.”
Victor crossed his arms. “You don’t know the half of it! All of this business is going to be a nightmare to know about. There are still many years I still must spend raising you as a child, and now I know a large portion of your future. Despite every instinct as a father insisting that I inform you before it happens, I can’t. It would kill me instantly through a time toggle. All the time that is meant to be spent just giving you a good childhood… my hair is going to be turning gray with worry!”
Mira let out a smirk. “Oh, don’t worry about that. There’s a solution.”
Victor scoffed. “A solution for having knowledge of the future that you absolutely can’t act upon? How could you possibly fix that?”
Mira was about to answer as the door opened, a man only slightly older than her walking into the room. His hair was a light brown, though his eyes were a steel gray with an almost imperceptible hint of blue. Victor struggled to place the face that looked oddly familiar, yet was unable to do so. The newcomer looked at Victor with a confused expression. “Uh… Mira? Who is this? You didn’t tell me we were going to be having company. I told you, today wasn’t a good day.”
“Shuck… this is my father. Victor Meta.”
The man who was named Shuck looked at Victor with sudden understanding. He walked over and quickly shook Victor’s hand. “So good to finally meet you! Mira has told me quite a bit about you… she thinks very highly of you.”
Victor frowned as he looked back at Mira. “Mira… did you seriously travel back in time and marry someone you met in the future, only their younger self? Care to explain how this didn’t cause a time toggle? Because I’m starting to think everyone is suicidal except for me.”
Shuck frowned. “What’s he talking about, Mira?”
Mira began to explain. “It wasn’t like what you think at all, father. After running off, I ended up running into a younger version of Shuck, going by a different name. I didn’t recognize him as Shuck until much later, but I eventually realized that changed little. I don’t know the full extent of what changed his personality in his advanced age, but he wasn’t like the Shuck you knew at all. He’s polite, and even… a certified electrotherapist.”
Victor raised an eyebrow. “An electro-what now?”
Shuck pulled up a chair and explained. “It means I work with electrocasting, but I specialize with interfacing directly with a patient’s mind. After finding Mira having a complete breakdown, I helped her work through her issues. It took longer than I thought it would, but over time… we grew… closer.”
Victor glared at Shuck. “Did you never find this to be… important information?”
“...excuse me?”
“As Mira stated, you ended up working with me when you were much older. I would have trusted you more if I had known you were married to my daughter.”
Shuck sighed, rubbing his forehead as electricity sparked between his fingers. “You do realize this is my first time meeting you, correct? I can hardly be held accountable for actions I haven’t taken yet. Besides, isn’t asking me to change those actions a very dangerous thing for you to do? Have you decided to ignore the possibility of a time toggle as well, now?”
“I don’t care. Both of you have been doing things that shouldn’t be possible. I guess I would like to know both how and why.”
Shuck frowned again. “How and why? Well… I hate to speculate. But I’ll try to guess my motivations for future actions I only have a cursory understanding of, after talking with Mira about them previously. Over multiple therapy sessions, mind you…”
Shuck leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head as he looked up at the ceiling. “A couple possibilities. First, it’s possible I become disillusioned in the future, and become a cynic towards the Meta at large. Maybe Mira leaves me? Or I leave her? Hard to say if either happened, but it definitely is possible. She’s not the first significant other I’ve had.”
Victor stood up. “You sleazy little-”
“Calm down, Victor. Mira is under no delusions about my past. She knows absolutely everything. Forgive me if I don’t wish to explain my full past to you as well, though. Moving on…”
Shuck tapped his finger on the table, now leaning forward. “Another possibility is Mira dies. At some point before now and when you first meet me, that is. Not entirely unlikely, given the event that led Mira to run into me in the first place. But personally, I’m inclined to believe a third possibility.”
Victor eyed Shuck skeptically. He was on the fence on whether he trusted a man he knew could mess with memories and was an admitted scam artist, even if his daughter apparently trusted him. If anything, that made him more skeptical. “Which is?”
“Perhaps it was all an act. Perhaps I didn’t make it known that I married your daughter in the past specifically because I didn’t want to cause a time toggle. Perhaps I pretended to swindle you while actually working events to your favor because you would be more distrusting of an entirely benevolent stranger than a self interested con man. You thought you understood my motivations, so you didn’t question them.”
“I questioned you plenty! I-”
“Yes, my ACTIONS, but not my intentions. That was always clear in your mind. Am I wrong?”
Victor shook his head. “This is all highly speculative, conspiratorial nonsense.”
Shuck shrugged. “Well, you asked. Neither of us can see the future, so you can either take my explanation or leave it.”
“How do I know you aren’t messing with my head, even now?”
Shuck laughed. “Now, that’s a good joke! But in all seriousness, you clearly don’t understand electrotherapy. I can make very minor adjustments to things like mood or feelings, but I can’t insert a thought that isn’t there. By the rift, I can’t even influence a thought that is already there in most cases! It’s extremely volatile, and incredibly limited. If a subject is consciously aware of what I’m doing and are not open to the influence, they become highly resistant to any sort of manipulation. It’s quite nuanced.”
“Couldn’t you just increase the intensity of your influence?”
Shuck laughed again even harder. It took him a moment to compose himself. “Yes, I could do that. If I was interested in frying their brain by shooting lightning from my fingertips. It becomes rather self defeating for multiple reasons at that point.”
After some moments of silence, Victor let out a sigh. “So, to reiterate where we are at… you don’t know why your future self did the things he did, nor do you have the full story behind Mira’s traumatizing event. And while we do know a bit about how the Legion has been attacking Meta’s across time, you don’t have any further information about them. After all, you are a younger version of your older self, who also didn’t know.”
Shuck raised an eyebrow. “I don’t remember saying that…”
Victor froze, staring at Shuck in disbelief. “What?”
“Yeah, me and Mira have pretty much figured things out. Sure, we might be married, but our relationship hasn’t completely monopolized our lives these past years.”
“...then what are we sitting here for?!? We need to go inform the-”
“Nope. Awful, terrible idea. The last thing we should do is spread this information far and wide. Those same informants they are using will catch wind and set us back to square one. The only solution is to handle it ourselves. It occurred to me earlier in this very conversation that this was why Mira brought you here, to this exact moment.”
Victor looked around. The simple house hardly looked fortified sufficiently for protecting people with highly dangerous information. “Why this moment? What’s going to happen?”
Shuck smiled. “I don’t really know. Mira has more of an inkling than I do. But I know it’s today, whatever it is. It couldn’t be any other day.”
The windows shattered as projectiles began flying into the house. Shuck had stood up with inhuman speed, catching the lethal shrapnel in a net of electrostatic energy. He spoke in the same, casual tone, as if nothing especially interesting had happened. “Right now, then? Imagine that. I couldn’t have timed that better if I had tried.”
Thanks for reading! If you are enjoying the story, you might also enjoy some of my other published work on Amazon! It’s set in the same fictional universe, but follows different characters.
Gatekeepers, Book One: Unquestionable Truth
Gatekeepers, Book Two: Order of Gravitas
Same post on Minds