PaRARGdox 32
To fracture the timeline…?: Okay, the first re-appearance of two more semi-regular cast members – Ken Spence (Academy Council member, founding member of Force Magellan, Academy co-founder, former superhero aka Nitro-Man who can shoot plasma blasts from his fists, and general hard ass) and Tom Bass (current Faculty member, head of security, and superhero aka ThundaKlap who can vocalise sonic destruction). They’ve been seen throughout Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, etc…
Anyway, here they are in the next room from Freya, Justine and Ambrosia… with some thoughts on Ambrosia’s time slip ability. The way I see it… in most cases, what Ambrosia changes by slipping back one minute only affects some very localised event. She slips back and changes the outcome… meanwhile, the rest of the world continues on as it had and the same thing happens everywhere regardless… some temporal sensitive people might experience deja-vu. The act of slipping back exhausts her temporal charge for at least a minute, so she can’t keep continually jumping back from a specific point.
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Families/CŠµŠ¼ŃŠø: Page 10 is now online. Page 11 will go up on Friday May 15, 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: Sunday, May 17, 2020: Class dismissed.
damm… now i know how my readers feel cause i dont post more….
hate you xmung š
Sista Superior is totally going to kill that green woman, isn’t she?
This makes sense actually, Grace. Physical backwards time travel is by definition a paradox, and timeline splitting is how those paradoxes are resolved. Mind-only time travel doesnāt cause any paradox because itās just a psychic communication that happens to be temporal.
Also, āformerā Nitro Man? Thought he was āstill the goddamn Nitro Manā.
lol. Guess he called it a day after Lock(e)down!
Will we see a new Nitro-Man take up the mantle? š
Graceāeven retired, aged, and legless, I still reckon that Spence could still be a threat to any young upstart teenage villain stupid enough to challenge him to a fight. What can I say? I have faith in the veterans. š
You don’t mess with The Spence!
He still has the super-human ability that made him Nitro-Ma, but his body is not up to going toe-to-toe with the super-baddies on a regular basis since he lost his legs, especially as he now has no toes to go with. But when push comes to shove, well look out. “I may not be as good as I once was, but I am as good once as I ever was.”
She can only go back a minute, and her power takes a minute to build back up to charge so she can’t chain it to go farther than a minute… But if she trained to make sure that charging back up doesn’t take longer than a minute she might be able to save-scum, redoing the same minute over and over until she gets everything right. Maybe she could do it continuously over the course of a fight, gaining a few seconds every time she corrects and actin where she failed. Get punched, rewind, dodge the punch, get a few good hits before the opponent pulls a weapon, rewind, dodge, get a good hit in, steal the weapon…
A simple power but once she gets experience she’s going to be a scary hero to go up against.
Very true.
Scary hero? If I were on the council, I’d be sweating the thought of her going bad like Miasma and DragonKlaw š°
I would think they have those concerns about any and all cadets. Letās just say that the alternate future Maya and Chang (and, technically, Kaycee) were not the only cadets to get derailed along the way to herodom. Guess Iāll have to do a flashback story about that one day.
We still don’t know much about the obviously dubious cadet situation concerning He Whose Name Is Not Spoken at Magellan, but whose initials spell “Wombatman.”
And that leads me to think about the conversations on that matter which must have ensued between Lock(e)down and this story.
Yes, he’s another example, although clearly more on the side of ‘doing the right thing (usually)’ than going evil.
š¤«… Go on! š
Yeah, I can imagine that they concern themselves with such things. What I was referring to was the huge edge that Ambrosia would have in a variety of situations. Some abilities might be deemed ‘Trumps’, for being hard to overcome or extremely flexible. The best example of that to date is Maya’s mind mojo, particularly Miasma’s experienced use of it. Ambrosia’s ‘replay’ ability seems to me to have that kind of potential, and that’s *beside* the dangers that seem to be concerning Ken on this page.
She could make a mint at poker.
Maybe Ambrosia’s power is not really travelling to the past, perhaps she Ā”s just is a pre-cog who experiences her sensory input one minute into the future. She has a one-minute delay between her senses and her reaction to them, so her body is in the present, replaying what her mind experienced one minute ago
Exerting a side of her power, she can shunt that delay and use her knowledge of the future to the present, thus changing that predicted future. Therefore, no parargdox or messing with the time line.
That seems the more likely theory, but they can detect a temporal displacement using whatever gadgets at their disposal, so the working theory is that she uses some kind of time displacement rather than simply seeing the future.
My working theory is that Ambrosiaās energy actually forcibly erases the last minute of the timeline at the same time as it sends her mind back. Thus, the timeline doesnāt split because the last minute is just gone, much akin to cutting off part of a treeās branch; the broken end may still regrow but the old piece will decompose on the ground.
Wondering if someday we get to know what happened to Spence’s legs.
That’s possible, yes š
If you get a chance, watch Netflix’s movie About Time. It’s a very cute rendition of how localized time travel could work. Expect future – potentially naughty – questions about Ambrosia’s power. I.e. IF her ability extended more than a minute (with practice) could she undo the appearance of her own children (The “how do you get the same sperm” every time problem)?
My brother and I worked out a temporal displacement conjecture (nowhere near as complete as Dr. Hawking’s) that if you were to travel to the past, you would have to do it outside your own rear-ward light-cone. Otherwise you would start inviting paradoxes. In other words, you can not go to the past in a way that can influence your now, just your future.
A one-minute light-cone would encompass the entire Earth and Moon and include a few satellite parking locations called the major Lagrange points. The other planets, most asteroids, other than the few near-Earth ones, and the most minor bodies of the solar system would be outside her sphere of influence.
Hmm, Jupiter is between 33 minutes and 54 minutes away by light (depending on relative locations of the two planets), so if given a means to physically get there, could Ambrosia jump back far enough to save the day before it even gets started? I guess jumping back only an hour would not be able enough to stop things before they get out of hand.
Speaking of possible paradoxes, could Ambrosia be Paradoximan’s little sister? Each with their own versions of reality-warping powers.
The last names are different from different countries, so I doubt they are related. Too bad.
Yep, not related. She’s from Bolivia in South America, he’s American.
Re: paradox – I note that Tom and Ken didn’t get to finish their conversation, but ‘paradox’ was not a stated concern by Ken, and Tom used the hedge “usually”.
I think if you parse the distinction between time-travel and precognition enough that it gets hard to tell the difference, you end up with ‘safe’ time-travel or timeline-splitting precog. It seems we’re on the ‘safe’ side of that currently, but the folks doing the research still aren’t sure just how safe it is.
I hope Spence was using “in my day we walked uphill both ways” hyperbole. If a typical day in his time was so eventful that narrowly averting having two trainees blown to bits didn’t make the top 10, I shudder to think what the yearly casualty rate looked like.
To be fair, in his day they didn’t have the experience training new heroes, they WERE the new heroes. Magellan, the very guy this entire thing was named after, was part of the IJF, which included Nitro-Man.
“In his day” includes a time when there was no training school, no organized teamwork, just muddle through and hope you come out the other side alive.