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
Part 25: Resurgence
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. But after much turmoil, Victor has accomplished his goal. With Mira and Shuck's help, they now have a member of the Legion with which to get some real answers.
Victor turned to the prisoner. “So, now that all of that is out of the way… we have some questions for you.”
The Legion member’s face contorted with hatred as he spat insults at Victor. “You have the gall to spout the very crimes you are committing, and you still expect me to bend my will to your ends? Absurd! Disgusting! You are the most despicable-”
The man writhed in pain as Shuck intensified the bindings yet again. Shuck shook his head in disappointment. “You are a slow learner, but I’m sure we can beat it into your head eventually. You will answer our questions, and you will do so respectfully. Let’s start with a name. Make one up if you really wish to, but we need to be able to call you something.”
The man regained his composure, at least to the extent he could while tied up with electric bindings and collapsed on the ground, and then responded. “You may call me Theo…”
Victor nodded. “Good. Theo, what exactly do you hope to accomplish?”
“Is it not obvious? We wish to destroy the very notion of Pause. It is a dead end to history, and must die to allow the next era to continue.”
Victor frowned. “That’s it? Sounds… counter productive. If you are in the time period when it occurs, you will almost certainly die. If not, your ancestors will be the ones who die.”
“Perhaps… or perhaps not. The strong and those who ally themselves with the strong will survive. We won’t coddle the weak who cling desperately to a futile past.”
Shuck scoffed. “Absurd. You clearly don’t know what an Eventual is actually like.”
Theo responded with open hostility. “Oh, and you do? Or are you basing your opinions purely off historical accounts, which almost certainly exaggerate and distort the true nature of things? You Meta believe the Eventual as the end, when it might just be the beginning of the new age and the collapse of the old, degenerated hierarchy.”
Victor and Shuck looked at each other, and silently came to the same conclusion. Reasoning with him was pointless, as was informing him that they had indeed seen an Eventual firsthand. He would simply not accept anything they told him that conflicted with the doctrines of his cultish group. Victor continued. “I can see your position will not be swayed. Fair enough, since that’s not our goal anyways. But you are mistaken if you think we are letting you go anywhere before you answer our questions. We quite literally have all the time we could ever possibly need.”
Shuck stepped in, electricity arcing between his fingers. “I can do you one better, Vic… give me some time, and I should be able to make his mind more… pliable.”
It took several hours of constant work. Shuck would attempt to shift Theo’s uncooperative mind while Victor would question him in between electroshock sessions. Each time, he grew slightly less antagonistic, but he still forced them to pull the information out of him as slowly as possible. Though Shuck assured Victor that his treatments were doing something, Victor felt like the sustained interrogation itself might simply be wearing him down with old fashioned mental fatigue. At the end of it all, Theo was a barely conscious husk of a man, while the group of interrogators were only slightly better off.
They had learned everything they wanted to, though. They learned the Legion was strongly based on hierarchy, with all major decisions coming from one authority figure at the top that they called the True King of Time. No real name was given, but the fact the man could be easily identified in a location and general time period was enough. If they could capture or kill that one person, the entire organization would fall apart. No more dealing with the individual footsoldiers, they could go right to the source. Provided they could actually get to this single point of failure for the Legion, that is.
As they handed the man off to the authorities of Pause, naturally not telling them they had already interrogated him for several hours, Victor rubbed the back of his neck with anxiety. “Won’t they know? What we did, I mean…”
Shuck scoffed. “You Metas couldn’t figure out anything else by yourselves, why would you start now? I bet I could leave all the answers just laying around in Pause, and you probably would still be scratching your heads on how us mere mortals managed to manipulate the magnanimous Metas.”
Victor gave an odd look to Shuck. “That’s a lot of M’s…”
Shuck thought for a moment, a smile spreading on his face as he realized what he had accidentally done. “Huh, I guess it is. Alliteration always alleviates anodyne anecdotes, apparently.”
Victor shook his head. “Show off… and, though I could say that statement doesn’t quite make sense, I think our time is better spent elsewhere. Don’t you?”
“Indeed.”
Both walked off, meeting up with a waiting Mira around the corner, who had gone at the same time to inform Janet of their current progress. Victor’s wife, and Mira’s own mother, was still forced to guard a young Mira despite being utterly desperate for any information on their activities. Of course, she also had no interest in the cloak and dagger they were engaged in, so she wasn’t particularly opposed to the current arrangement.
The group continued to a rather normal looking restaurant, though one more off the beaten path than usual. It was a small establishment, one not directly managed by Pause and much closer to the physical surface of the planet. But not close enough to actually be on the ground, of course, as it still was connected to the rest of the monotone Pause that remained in static silence above them.
Right before entering the building, Shuck looked up at the twisting bridges and towers of ivory now above them, and then over the walkway to the distant planet surface below. “By the rift… it’s slowly dawning on my how much gravitational energy Pause must be constantly consuming. Why would they not just build everything on the ground?”
Victor selected a table, handing a menu to Shuck as he explained. “You realize Pause is a planet wide city, correct? It requires absolutely no energy to remain above the ground as it does. Any gravitational force pulling it to the ground is directly counteracted by the force acting on the opposite side of the planet. The real difficulty is making a superstructure resilient enough to withstand this pressure, but that is where using hyper light weight, gravity treated metal really comes into play. You should know what the real cost of maintaining Pause is…”
Shuck raised an eyebrow. “What would that be?”
Victor responded with his voice just above a whisper. “The time bubble preventing the apocalypse.”
Shuck frowned while Mira interjected. “Vic, now that we have a moment to ourselves, can you explain how you know about that? You never told me anything like that before. I’ve been to Pause many times, and no one else has ever told me. How do you know?”
Victor sighed, looking down at the table as if he wished he could forget. “It was… in my younger days. Before I met your mother. I gave it all up when I started seriously dating her, and-”
“Okay, I really don’t need to hear about you and Mom. I know all of that, backwards and forwards. What I want to know is what you aren’t telling me.”
“...right. After studying the history of Pause, I realized several things didn’t add up. Such as the population, construction decisions, projected resources compared to actual resources… and I started asking questions. The supposed scholars always told me I was just some conspiracy theorist, but I eventually bumped into another one that was actually involved in not just the cover up, but the actual maintenance of our delicate balance between tenuous peace and ultimate destruction. At his request, I can’t provide his name to anyone, but his name isn’t important anyways. The point is that I tried to help them find a way to fix the source of the problem.”
Mira tapped the table, deep in anxious thought. “What’s the problem, though? I mean, I guess it would be nice if time moved forward, but is it really necessary? It’s not like a time bubble has a limit…”
Victor’s expression answered Mira’s accidental question, and she stopped tapping at the realization. “Wait. Is there a limit? How much time does Pause have, then?”
“That’s the problem. Nobody knows. Some experts have suggested there is no limit, but the number of Meta required to maintain the bubble at any given time has been increasing. That simple fact leads most to conclude there is a practical limit, if not a theoretical limit. Obviously, there is only so much open real estate throughout history for us to go backward, so unless Pause is actively maintained, our descendants will inevitably have to face the disaster. It’s only a matter of time, and that’s an increasingly finite resource.”
Shuck chimed in. “Okay. So you have an unclear but very much real time limit before… well. You know. Exactly how do you try to resolve that? Gather a bunch of warriors, pop the bubble, and hope for the best?”
“That’s what we call the Omega Initiative.”
Shuck let out a half hearted laugh. “Oh, so it’s got a neat little code name! How nice. So, that’s the plan?”
Victor rolled his eyes. “It’s hardly what I call a plan, it’s more the first thought of anyone trying to tackle this problem. We didn’t even defeat that Eventual we were involved in, we only survived it. I don’t really know what caused that past Eventual to end, perhaps there were just enough people that died for those despicable Vorpals to think they had finished the job… which is hardly a viable solution going forward. A direct war against them is suicide, in my opinion, as they are clearly too powerful and too numerous. Our other plans were frequently… radical. My attempted contribution was to jump so far ahead in the future that we skip whatever devastation the Vorpals might cause to the planet.”
Shuck thought for a moment. “That sounds… shockingly viable. But I assume there is a problem with that?”
“Of course there is. How far ahead do we go? And what do we do when we get there? Like the fact that a time bubble has a limit, we aren’t sure what the limit of our time travel into the future is. We have a known limit for the past. The only rule we have in regards to that is to not deliberately go past the lifetime of the Pause time bubble, or the “Era of Pause” as most Metas know it. A couple people have broken that rule… but we never heard from them again to find out what limits they reached.”
Mira thought for a moment. “Perhaps they are okay, and just couldn’t come back for some reason? Maybe all we need to do is follow them.”
Victor glanced at Mira, a brief moment of despair filling his eyes. “To do so is to jump blindly into the future. We did something similar when we ended up trapped in an Eventual the first time. It’s rather frustrating, isn’t it? We might drop the time bubble and successfully stop the Eventual… maybe this final one is the last dying throes of their monstrous race, and they will be easy to defeat. Or maybe we will be entirely wiped out. It’s the unknown quantities that threaten us… but the only reason I tell both of you all of this is because of the Legion’s activities. I’m content to let other people figure out this future problem, I’ve done all I can in my younger years. We deal with the Legion, and stop them from trying to sabotage those efforts… and then we are done.”
Shuck crossed his arms. “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be done.”
Victor raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“You might have given up on being the savior of the future, but I’m still willing to give it my best. And I’m certain Mira will be helping me.”
Mira happily chimed in. “Absolutely!”
Victor grimaced. “Well, do what you wish. Don’t tell anyone that you learned any of this from me, and you will get no obstruction on my account. But before any of that, our objective is clear; the Legion must fall. And that means the so called True King of Time is due for a visit.”
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