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: Accountability
Part 21: All Good Things
Part 22: Mental Gymnastics
Part 23: Shadow Tactics
Part 24: Timeline Descynchronization
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.
But not if the Legion has anything to say about it.
Victor was getting some unwelcome flashbacks as uniformed thugs poured in. Despite his immediate reaction being to jump out of the time period, he forced himself to stay. He had been running from this group, either directly or indirectly, and he knew he must now face them. He was not going to abandon his daughter again, no matter what happened.
A man lunged at him with a sword. Quickly sidestepping, Victor grabbed the man’s arm and increased his throwing strength by adding a gravity field. The result was throwing the man completely through a window with great force, shattering the glass in a sparkling shower of shards.
But that was only one. There were several more, with more pouring into the house by the second. Victor clicked his pocketwatch, and activated a multiplier. Stepping aside to work next to his double, he pushed with all the gravitational energy he could muster, and sent the crowd flying backwards through a now destroyed wall.
Shuck and Mira were also making quick work of individual assailants. Mira yanked her opponents around the field with long range gravity fields, slamming them into each other when they made the mistake of not focusing on her. However, they faced equal opposition when trying to directly attack her. As a man charged at her with a massive warhammer, she waved a hand in front of her as she held her pocketwatch with the other. “Not so fast… you can’t get past my Time Shield!”
As the air shifted slightly in color, the warhammer collided with the construct, glancing off the hovering section of thin air. The attacker, dazed from the unbelievable resilience, was then further surprised by Shuck being thrown at him with another gravity field wielded by Mira.
The attackers began to flee. Shuck rapidly constructed some electric fabrication, and threw it into the air. “Mira! We need to catch one!”
Mira, picking up on the cue and selecting a target, bound the gravitational descent of the electro snare to the slowest of the escaping attackers. It flew after him with flawless accuracy, wrapping around him as he collapsed to the ground. His teammates, unable to escape while also carrying him, abandoned him entirely. Mira, Shuck, and Victor now walked nonchalantly to their disabled prisoner. Shuck was rather satisfied with himself. “Well, here we are. It took some baiting, but we now have a live prisoner.”
The prisoner began to speak rapidly after Shuck pulled off his mask. It was man in his early to mid twenties, younger than everyone else there. “Look, I don’t know what you think, but I was forced to do this! I had no choice but to engage in the attack, or-”
Shuck cut him off as he formed a fist, the electric bindings intensifying as the man groaned in pain. Shuck explained to the white faced man. “I’m no fool. I know you were thinking to distract us with conversation while you worked on undoing the bindings. You think you are a clever electro caster, but I promise you this. You are nowhere as clever as you think you are, considering the situation you now find yourself in. Try it again, and I’ll make it even more painful.”
Victor looked over at Shuck. “This whole time, it was this easy? Just the energy based equivalent of a net?”
Shuck scoffed. “Easy? You think this was easy? I had to meticulously design this situation. We needed to appear vulnerable, while not being quite as vulnerable. We needed you to be here, without openly making plans for you to be here. I know you didn’t see it, but we also had traps that activated on their approach here, and even those had to be precisely planned. Too few, and we would have been overrun. Too many, and they would have canceled the assault before they reached us. All of this was precisely laid out!”
The trapped man spat words of venom at his captors. “Liars! That’s all impossible! You could never-”
The man yelled as the bindings intensified for a second time before fading back to normal. Shuck continued. “I’m not answering your questions… you are answering mine. First off. What are your intentions in gathering the power of Meta?”
“I’ll never tell you! You are one of them… a man who cares nothing for the future, and would just as soon let it all burn!”
Shuck raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. So this seems to be a righteous crusade. What happens in the future that requires you to terrorize the present, so to speak?”
“You should know! You are colluding with the ones destroying it! They only delay the inevitable while hoping in vain that someone else will handle it! We, the Legion, are the ones trying to actually fix it, while you worthless Metas and Meta lapdogs do all you can to hinder us!”
Shuck looked at Mira. “Darling, do you know what he is referring to?”
Mira shook her head. “No… no, I don’t. It’s all nonsense, he’s clearly brainwashed.”
Both turned to Victor when they noticed he was silent. Looking at the man with an intense expression, Victor grimaced as he clearly sought to find the proper words. Shuck intercepted Victor’s glare, stepping between him and the prisoner. “Victor, it doesn’t take a genius to see you know something. Which is rather shocking when you are one who has been adamant that the Legion is the one causing the problems.”
Victor looked around, almost as if he was looking to escape. “Eh… Mira?”
Mira was growing visibly concerned. “Yes, father?”
“Can you jump all of us to Pause? Including the prisoner?”
“Is that wise? I thought there might be other double agents there. We probably shouldn’t turn him over to the authorities until we are done questioning him.”
“We aren’t letting the man go. I’ll create a time bubble once we are there, and we can take all the time we need.”
Both Mira and Shuck were openly skeptical, accusingly staring Victor down. Nevertheless, Mira complied, time jumping the entire group to an especially high bridge overlooking Pause. Victor walked to the edge of the bridge, looking down over the sprawling planet wide city. “I see… so we were on a mountain without me even realizing it. After all, time jumping can’t change our actual elevation. How serendipitous to the topic at hand.”
Mira stepped forward, growing more angry by the second. “Vic, time bubble. Now. You have some explaining to do.”
The time bubble appeared, freezing everything outside of it in place. Not that much visibly changed, as there were no people in sight and the city itself usually felt eerily silent anyways. “There… so, Shuck, before I continue, I expect some answers. It shouldn’t be a problem, given both you and Mira were on the cusp of giving them anyways.”
Shuck crossed his arms. “Fine, but don’t think you can change the subject. I’m not that easy to distract. What do you want to know?”
“How are you and Mira able to use infallible, first-hand knowledge of the future to direct your actions? That’s lethal to a Meta. She should be dead.”
Shuck smiled, and put a finger to his forehead. “It comes from understanding the underlying mechanics of time toggles. Yes, they very much exist, but not in the way you think they do. It is not mere knowledge of the future that creates the paradox, as all of mankind constantly predicts the future in a variety of ways. Predicting necessary resources, threats both internal and external, environmental changes… it’s just a matter of the tools and techniques used to acquire that information. Time travel is just another tool.”
“That’s a lot of words containing very little explanation, Shuck.”
“I’m getting to that. The key to preventing paradoxes is to not effect the causation chains that create the information. It’s the feedback loop of allowing information to affect it’s own creation that kills people when said information necessarily self destructs, in a fashion. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. So if you are going to bring a cake from the future back to the past, you better make sure it still gets made in that past in order to be taken from the future.”
Victor rubbed his head. “That makes sense, but only explains the why it can work. It doesn’t explain the how. How do you maintain the causation chains? If you find out your house is going to burn down, you will immediately begin preparing to prevent it or remedy the resulting damage better than you had before you had the knowledge. That’s exactly what you did, and that affects the observed event itself. You prevented an attack with precognizant knowledge.”
Shuck moved his finger slightly away from his forehead, electricity sparking between it and his own head. “But what if the memory of such knowledge itself is malleable? If you properly record mind states, you can entirely cut out sections of memory. We can puppeteer ourselves to not only prepare, but be unaware of what we are preparing for. We get the best of both worlds. A causation chain that fulfills the preexisting one leading to an event, while also being better equipped to deal with an event. It’s no different than simple planning ahead, in effect.”
“...are you saying you’ve been messing with not only your own memory, but with Mira’s memory?”
Shuck reached into an inner coat pocket, and pulled out several rectangular devices of varying colors. Each had a metal plate in the center. Victor looked at them, unable to guess their purpose. “Shuck, what exactly are those supposed to be?”
“Memory profiles. If events proceeded according to plan, you should have had a brief exposure to a version of them. With these, I can manage causation changes and have myself react naturally. After an event, I can remember the subconscious preparations I made. It’s not perfect, as I can’t fundamentally change an event in the future. But everything after is completely up for grabs. Now, is that explanation acceptable?”
Victor looked at Shuck, and sighed. “I would be lying if I said fully understood how this is possible. Altering the past to directly change a known future is one of the fundamental taboos hammered into the heads of every single Meta, so I can hardly conceive of a different way of thinking. Anyone who tries to test this rule ends up dead rather quickly. But I suppose I must accept this explanation. It’s the best I’m going to get.”
“Good. With that behind us, I return to our original question. What does our friend here mean when he says the Meta are only delaying the inevitable?”
Victor looked out across the city. He then looked back at the prisoner, and frowned. “...should we have said all that right in front of him? What if-”
“I’ll wipe his recent memory. It’s not a problem at all. Stop stalling and start talking, Vic.”
Victor sighed, looking back over the city. “Do you see the sun over there? It’s not actually real.”
Everyone was silent. The prisoner protested. “That’s… no! You are trying to deflect! You-”
Victor interrupted him. “You clearly don’t know the full story, only some of it. That’s rather common for cult members. But what I say is no lie, that sun isn’t what you think it is. Neither is the sky. In reality, from the point of time where we are standing, the world ended well over a hundred years ago.”
Mira struggled with the revelation. “But… how? Why? Everything has always been overwhelmingly peaceful here in Pause. Metas use it all the time for meeting up or sharing information. All basic necessities can be taken care of here! None of what you are saying is making any sense!”
Victor gestured around him. “Right now, we are standing within an isolated bubble of time. That is what Pause is, just on a much larger scale. Pause is simply the planet’s future, kept in limbo with a time bubble completely encapsulating it.”
Mira could not accept the statement. “That can’t be! You can’t time jump into another time bubble! The precision necessary is astronomical! And is making another time bubble inside an existing one even possible?”
“Well, there isn’t much point to nesting time bubbles most of the time, so you can be forgiven for not being aware that it is impossible. And as for time jumping into another time bubble being absurdly difficult, you are correct… if you are talking about a relatively small time bubble that only exists for minutes or hours. A planet wide time bubble that exists for decades, maintained by no small number of gravity casters? As you now realize, it’s hard to even notice that it’s there. Besides, they don’t stop with just a time bubble. Like I said, the sun we are seeing isn’t real. The entire sky is a light fabrication, maintained in secret by a massive number of light casters. It’s all a lie, meant to keep people from seeing what’s just outside the bubble. Which is, naturally, the very reason for such a coverup, that some people I’ve known in my own past have been trying to fix for their entire lives.”
Shuck, though more accepting of such outrageous claims, was also skeptical. “This is all insane! What’s outside that would cause such a reaction?”
Victor laughed bitterly. “What else? An Eventual. Not the First, but the Last. One to consume the entire world and everything on it. Meanwhile, we exist inside, constantly trying to delay the end of our world. But no time bubble can last indefinitely. Eventually, we will run out of people able to maintain this delicate equilibrium, and we will need to face the demonic forces on the outside. Whether we are ready or not.”
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