Where's the disclaimer that all references to people living or deceased is purely coincidental?
<grin>
How can one be sure if it was alive or... having not lived... that it was now deceased?
[ QUOTE ]
Where's the disclaimer that all references to people living or deceased is purely coincidental?
<grin>
[/ QUOTE ]
I like to keep people wondering!
*The events above MAY or MAY NOT be referrencing to people living or dead in a puerly coincidental manner*
Players' Choice Awards: Best Dual-Origin Level Range Arc!
It's a new era, the era of the Mission Architect. Can you save the Universe from...
The Invasion of the Bikini-clad Samurai Vampiresses from Outer Space? - Arc ID 61013
Let's face it, it's a staple of the genre. Charactrers go for a variety of reasons, often tied to poor sales ("You're a what??" *boots from team*), but also because a new author may have a chip on his shoulder about a certain someone, the new supergroup comic book series would have two too similar heroes, or just because it had been several issues with no deaths and the poor sucker happened to draw the short straw. It's a fact of life we've all come to accept.
.
But on the other hand, characters may be wanted back for another variety of reasons, an unexpected surge in old issue sales ("You're a what??" *Spam Invite*), the particular shoulder chipped author getting himself booted, the supergroup failing catastrophically, or because the lucky sod got the long straw when it came to resurrect someone for filler issues.
So, in that spirit (and not because I just wanted to make a fancy "I'm back!" post, not at all!), I present thee, the...
IT'S ALIVE!!!
Thread. Where you can tell us the how and, if you feel like it, why your characters got resurrected. Knock your socks out!
(Mind you, chances are this will unceremoniously sink to the bottom of the forum in no time, ignored, flamed, locked, or all of the above, but there you go!).
---------------
It was another busy day at the Vanguard headquarters. With the renewed Rikti activity at the Crash Site, the heads of the Shield Division, Borea and Levantera, could hardly keep up with all the work coordinating all the heroes protecting the city.
"If anything," Serpent Drummer muttered, "it's a bit too busy here. The sisters are running like headless chickens around."
"Don't look at me! I didn't do anything this time!" His monkey spirit friend retorted. "Not that I wouldn't try, mind you..."
"I know, friend, I know." Drummer answered, looking left and right. "We seem to be highly uncoordinated today. What's happening with the intel?"
Intelligence duties were divided between two divisions of Vanguard. The Helm, with the main duties of intelligence gathering, and the Sword, with counter-intelligence and special ops duties. The respective leaders were the Dark Watcher and Gaussian, but unlike the sisters, who seemed to be in ten places at once at any given moment - almost as if there were several clones of them running around, although it's not something you can casually say as a joke in a place like Paragon City - these two were nowhere to be seen.
Leaving his monkey friend in charge for a few minutes - always a good laugh, that, - he went looking for Lady Grey.
"What is it, Serpent Drummer?" She asked without looking up, she was reading one of the many reports that kept piling up on top of her desk.
"I am looking for Gaussian and the Dark Watcher, we're in need of good intelligence work and these two have disappeared without a trace."
"They haven't disappeared," she answered calmly, "the Dark Watcher took Gaussian with him for some job he wanted to do back at Portal Corps."
"Oh?"
He left the question hanging, and Lady Grey looked up from her read.
"Devon isn't one to go about with meaningless tasks when he is needed, Serpent Drummer, so I didn't ask him about it. I assumed it was important. If you are curious, you may take our portal and go to Peregrine Island to ask him."
That was a stopper. Lady Grey did that often; whenever she had to she would chide her subordinates, yet her manner of speaking and tone of voice never made them feel like they were being disparaged. It was more akin to a parent who, with weary patience, taught her little ones about proper manners and conduct, but without being condescending.
Serpent Drummer thought about it for a couple of seconds, and decided he would very much like to know why exactly they were left to fend for themselves when the last Rikti offensive hadn't even ended. So he gave Lady Grey a quick salute, and left post haste towards the portal. A stomach-turning jump later - he was sure he'd never get used to it, - and he was in Peregrine Island. It was surprisingly easy to find his Vanguard comrades in the huge Portal Corps facilities, and both the Dark Watcher and Gaussian were hard at work with one of the multi-purpose dimensional traveling portals.
"So here you are." He said in a cautious tone, waiting for the reaction.
He was slightly disappointed, neither of them even acknowledged his presence.
"We have a war going on out there, what are you two doing?"
Again, no response. Although disappointed, he wasn't entirely surprised by this; after the time they had been working together, he had come to expect it. The Dark Watcher was merely being the Dark Watcher, and Gaussian usually needed a cattleprod to be awakened when he was concentrating on something important. Or a monkey, the monkey worked great too.
Thinking ahead, he positioned himself between the Dark Watcher and the piece of equipment that seemed to be the most important, that is, the biggest one that had the most cables coming out of it. Sure enough, after a few minutes the Dark Watcher turned to fiddle with it, and bumped into him. Serpent Drummer couldn't tell if he was annoyed or not behind his hat and sunglasses, but he imagined so. Regardless, he didn't budge.
"What is it, boy?" The Dark Watcher asked.
"What are you two doing? We could use your help out there, Borea and Levantera are having a very tough time coordinating the defense by themselves."
"The sisters are very capable, Serpent Drummer, they will manage fine."
With that, the Dark Watcher tried to resume his work, as if that alone was enough to end the conversation. But Serpent Drummer wasn't about to let him out of the loop so easily.
"What are you doing??" He asked once again, emphasizing every single word, and not getting out of the way.
The Dark Watcher looked up and made a sound of annoyance. He seemed pensive for an instant, then apparently decided to answer. He knew quite well the extent of Serpent Drummer's resolve, if he wanted an answer, he'd not go until he obtained it even if Rikti started raining from the sky outside.
"Very well. Do step aside please, I will tell you as I work."
"Thanks." Serpent Drummer answered dutifully, as he stepped away from the work area. "So?"
"So. As you have so appropriately pointed out, we have a new Rikti offensive in our hands, and we could use all the help we can get."
"Uh-huh." Serpent Drummer nodded.
"With that in mind, I am bringing forward in time a group of heroes to help us with this."
"A group of... Wait, have you forgotten...? No, scratch that." Serpent Drummer babbled speedily. The questions he wanted to ask just kept piling up in a confused jumble. "Who are you bringing forward?"
"Well, the group of heroes that were connected with Aliana Blue. They didn't have a name, but you know the lot I am talking about."
"Uh... Yes, I remember them. They've helped us plenty of times, but they were wiped out with a biological attack almost a year ago."
The Dark Watcher turned to Serpent Drummer for an instant, and if he had to put one word to the expression he wore - as much of it as the disguise let him see, that is - it would have been 'duh'.
"Okay, fine, you want to bring this bunch forward from the time before they disappeared. But if I remember correctly, that's not going to be of much help!"
"And why is that, boy?"
"You are going to use the same method you used when you made Aliana Blue hop forward for the fight with the Honoree, are you not?"
"Indeed I am, what of it?"
There was a whole conversation contained in the two phrases the two of them had exchanged. Several members of this group of 'sidekicks' of Aliana Blue had been involved in a Task Force, which Lady Grey had organized, aiming to strike at the top ranking military leader of the Rikti Second Invasion. And after fighting for what seemed like an eternity through a sea of enemies, right at the end, they were about to be overwhelmed.
To help them out, the Dark Watcher used their portal technology to bring back Aliana Blue from a moment of her recent past, to help them out with the final fight. They were not supposed to know that it was her, though, so he sent her in full Vanguard armor hoping to keep her identity a secret. But during the fight with the Honoree her identity was revealed, and the implications of the meddling with the timeline were devastating for one of the members of the group. If one looked carefully, the Dark Watcher still carried a mark on his left cheek because of that. A five-fingered mark.
But timeline implications aside, there was something else. The time-hop was not permanent - Aliana Blue had been sent back to her timeline in less than an hour, even before the fight with the Honoree was over - and it was not possible to choose what moment from the past to use when pulling someone forward. Because the method relied on portal technology, it was only possible to get someone from the past while they were on a dimensional trip somewhere out of their original dimension.
"So you're going to bring them forward for an hour or two, what are they supposed to do in that time?"
"I plan to bring them back permanently, obviously."
"You... what? Is that even possible?"
"Of course it is. Last time I sent Aliana Blue back just to make sure I didn't mess with her particular timeline, at the point I chose to bring her forward from, because it was a very complex one. Keeping her here would have created a second Praetorian Earth dimension, and you can imagine the headache that would have been!"
"A sec... Hu... Uh??"
The confusion that Serpent Drummer showed on his face spoke more eloquently than anything else he could have managed to articulate at that point. In a way that somewhat resembled Lady Grey's manner of speaking, the Dark Watcher continued explaining to his dim-witted pupil.
"When I use the Portal method to bring someone forward in time, a temporary rift is created where the timelines with both the presence and the absence of that person from the chosen point in time forward exist in simultaneous superposition. The way the timelines collapse depends on what the person brought forward does."
Blank, that would be the way to describe the look Serpent Drummer was giving the Dark Watcher.
"Ye gods," the Dark Watcher thought, "if I were to put his head to my ear, I bet I could hear the sea."
"So..." Serpent Drummer resumed slowly, after his brain had had time to reboot, "if you bring them forward and don't send them back, a new dimension will be created where they had been sent back?"
"No, the dimension with the timeline where they never left, or returned right at the point where they had left in the first place, would be this one. The new dimension would exist with the absence of the person, at the point in time and multi-dimensional space where they left."
"So no matter what you do, for us, in this dimension, it will be as if they had never left?"
"That's right."
"Uh-huh..." A flicker of understanding reached Serpent Drummer's head, looked both ways, and seeing no traffic it jumped ahead with excessive enthusiasm. "And when you sent Aliana Blue back, you sent her to this other dimension so that it'd be like she never left too?"
"What? Of course not! I sent her back in this dimension!"
"Uh... But if it is as if she never left, how could you send her back to where she already was?"
"Because the timeline paradox created by this can only be resolved when the second possible dimension-timeline collapses into this second entity of the person, and thus overlaps with the original one, with the same unmodified events."
"But you said sending them back stopped the creation of the new dimension!!"
"And it does!"
Beep.
If Serpent Drummer had a screen on his face, he'd be showing the booting diagnostics POST messages.
"Gaussian... Do you understand any of this?"
Silence. Serpent Drummer regretted not having brought his cattleprod.
"He won't be of much help, Serpent Drummer. He had the same deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes you did when I tried to explain it to him." He paused to look at Gaussian, who was continuing his work undeterred. "But at least he agreed to help."
"Wait a minute..." Another idea had crossed the emptiness of Serpent Drummer's head with careless abandon. "If you are not sending these people back to... Wherever you send them to, then does that mean you're going to create another dimension?
"For starters, we don't even know if this actually creates that dimension, or merely makes that dimension available for us to travel though the portal technology. And if the hypothesis of the infinite dimensions is true, think you can figure out which is it?"
"Uh... okay, but... are you?"
"No. This will actually add over a thousand of these new dimensions to the repertoire. Each containing a unique combination of returned and non-returned members of this hero group."
"A thousand... Goodness gracious, Dark Watcher! How can you do that??"
"How?" The Dark Watcher said in a mocking tone, not devoid of some outrage for being morally questioned like that. "How can I do that? Ask yourself how can you pass judgment on what I do when you don't even understand it, do you think I have not considered it? Do you think I won't take responsibility for these other dimensions if my bringing them back will cascade into dangerous effects? And do you even know if this has not been done to us already, which would explain why this dimension is a magnet for all kinds of misfortunes?"
He took a large breath in, and continued.
"And moreover, we are in the middle of a large scale war here, Boy! A war that can have consequences in more worlds than our own! Would you be so morally defiant if you knew that inaction would have more dire consequences than action? How indeed! Spoken like someone with the narrowest view!"
This time Serpent Drummer really felt like he was being chastised by the Dark Watcher. Somehow the plan still didn't sit right with him, but he wasn't sure he'd be willing to duke it out with the Watcher.
He sighed, and decided to move on.
"Okay. So when will you have this thing ready? I assume you'll come give us a hand afterwards back at the Crash Site."
"It may take a while. For all the powers and technology we possess, there is one thing we couldn't fight against."
"And that is?"
"The postal service losing the parcel with the key components I'm missing."
"..."
Bummer.
-----------------
(I should have been back a week ago! >_<
A.-
Players' Choice Awards: Best Dual-Origin Level Range Arc!
It's a new era, the era of the Mission Architect. Can you save the Universe from...
The Invasion of the Bikini-clad Samurai Vampiresses from Outer Space? - Arc ID 61013