PaRARGdox 31
Ambrosia’s time-slippin’…: Still following up on events seen in pages 7.16-18. Indeed, there was blood and guts, like, everywhere!
Freya acknowledges that, for Ambrosia at least, the gory deaths did happen and the young cadet experienced that in all its visceral reality… a good recipe for PTSD!
We also get a sense of how Magellan Academy is dealing with/trying to understand her time-slip ability.
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Families/Cемьи: Page 9 is now online. Page 10 will go up on Friday May 8, about 6pm Sydney/3am New York time. Stay tuned! By voting you not only get a new page of this story but you help raise Magellan’s profile and help potential new readers find us.
Next update: Wednesday, May 14, 2020: To fracture the timeline, or not to fracture the timeline?… that is the question.
“To fracture the timeline, or not to fracture the timeline?… that is the question.”
I guess it’s usually better not to 🙃
But theory might be heading out the window soon.
given what we saw earlier in this chapter… Likely is the only way to save earth.
This is interesting info to know.
And what do time slips of more than a minute, like half a day or so, do? Asking for a friend. All of the friends, actually.
There’ll be more discussion of her power next page. 🙂
Poor girl… She’s seen shit that literally didn’t happen for anyone else there.
I like Freya’s response to it: understanding, compassion, and making sure she lets Ambrosia know she can talk about it when she needs to. My mom’s a psychologist, so I have an interest in seeing mental health being treated seriously in fiction.
Her teammates seem less used to treating this tactfully.
“Damn, the teachers are gonna give me shit over this. Can you cover for me so I can get off the hook.”
“… I was just drenched in your blood and internal organs, after I watched an explosion tear you to shreds.”
A freak out like Zelda’s “you’re supposed to be dead” would not be unexpected.
Does that mean she’s split the time line before, before she learned not to?
The staff seem very, very attentive to that topic, and she certainly does too, which to me suggests that they must have been right on the job to set some ground rules for her as quickly as possible. I agree with you that they kind of imply either that she’s done it before or that everyone is super-concerned that she might. Also … “I know I’m not supposed to do one-minute slips …” that’s an interesting turn of phrase, right? As if maybe the power can work differently from that exact application.
The note about better control might mean she did the slips before WITHOUT MEANING TO. And “as we understand” suggests they are not entirely sure.
Unless they actually can and do travel to alternative timelines (without causing damages to the timelines), there is no way to be sure. Where’s the doctor when you need one?
I think The Doctor is sorting out their own timeline at the moment!
Another interesting question is… Do Magellan have the ability to detect such timeline alterations? I wouldn’t be surprised if by this point they had devised some kind of detector, after all they were able to intercept and redirect cross-dimensional pathways (seen in crossoverkill).
Perhaps they have the equivalent of a device showing a timeline number with 8 nixie tubes lying around? 😉
Certainly they will be able to detect temporal anomalies, but only if they are specifically looking for them… otherwise they would have detected Evil Maya & Chang when they arrived. Small anomalies are even harder to detect.
I think that a minute is the *most* she can currently do. We can guess, from the way she bends over in p18, that there’s some effort involved in doing that. It seems reasonable to assume that she can slip less than a full minute, and that that might be less tiring for her. Redd’s comment in the last panel makes me think someone has determined that ‘slips’ of a minute or less are relatively safe, but those of a minute are on the cusp of having unknown, possibly dangerous, consequences.
The current events are the results of DK/M meddling with time but it’s not a paradox. Since the title is parargdox I’ve been looking for possible “paradox” sources (Ambrosia being the biggest), and you just gave me an idea. She jumps back more than a minute to save the Earth causing “consequences” ex: maybe the Rarg wouldn’t have been on/in Jupiter for another few years (but still in time to get pissed off at some Soviet Martians) if they hadn’t detected a temporal anomaly and decide to investigate?
An anomaly that only appeared because they attacked and they only attacked as parts of a causal chain that anomaly was a part of.
So if the Rarg never attacked in the first palce -nosebleed starts- you know what I’m just gonna sit down and watch show.
Yes, it can be dangerous to think about it too much!!
Got a point there, when I travel back to May 10th maybe I shouldn’t make that post, I can get absorbed in theorizing once I start. Wait but then
-Nosebleed starts for first time-
Its going to take a while for me to learn my lesson isn’t it?
I agree! Justine and Freya are being very professional here (stern cop, “active listening” cop) but given Grace’s great characterizations, and past history of their dialogue, I’m picking up on a big undercurrent of fearful caution.
As long as no one has checked whether the cat is alive or dead, it’s all good.
Imagine Ambrosia slipping back to obtain a book of sports stats…..!?
With a bit of a mind flip, you’re into the time slip. And nothing can ever be the same
You’re spaced out of sensation, like your under sedation…
Let’s do the time warp again!
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself… but… Actually that DID describe the process Ambrosia went quite aptly… Grace, was that planned all along? 😀
Ha. Maaaaaayyyyybeee… 😉
So… Even assuming that 1 minute is her max per jump, is there anything stopping her from going back one minute, then going back another minute, then going back another minute etc. until she’s gone back far enough to change bigger things?
Just wondering… Possibly because that was the plot of a manga short I’ve read before: a girl who can travel back 30 seconds into the past uses her power over and over again to undo a disaster that happened several minutes before.
It takes her about a minute to recover from a one minute jump. She can really only tread water on the same 60 minute stretch, and even then not for a sustained period before she gets exhausted.
I hope I’m not ‘spoiling’ anything with this but I’m hoping that in order to save all of Magellan and the world Ambrosia doesn’t have to go ‘Tony Stark’…if you all get my meaning.