Tutorial: Dealing with Locals
Beach Bureaucracy
Empty timelines are timelines with no Locals in them, making them ideal to hide things in and get on with work undisturbed.
Most commonly an empty timeline is just one where humanity died out before ever gaining sentience. Finding one is normally tedious work, requiring an individual to travel back a million years and then forward again to check for human extinction. However, Serentia maintains access to quite a few of these 'template timelines' for expanding The Assembly into, and has no qualms about you splitting one off for yourself.
You buy and move a village's worth of cottages to a beachside location on one particularly pleasant day within the empty timeline, hook up a few solar panels for power, and buy some other furniture and supplies in preparation for moving in. It's rudimentary, but it works, takes the minimum effort, and there's plenty of space to expand later. Best of all, there's no chance that anything you do here will inadvertently cause time incidents to random bystanders.
Core loops - Administration has already begun stabilising into a looping 30-minute interval on a sunny morning in the mid 2020's, though it is expected to expand into an average of two dozen alternate timelines per individual as it iterates, then contract again as redundant loops re-merge.
Core Loop - Administration will begin issuing news, options, and random event rolls next turn.
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Parallel Olympics
Your collective assesses the capabilities of individual Decius's to sort out applicants for the Talent Bank, aiming to find which is the most capable in various areas of physical and mental ability, with one added pre-requisite that Talents must all be Veterans of the Morning Battle.
The Talents are found without much fanfare, just a mental update to the collective on who and where they are. Normally Talents would be put in a central location for easy access in an emergency, but yours don't get any special treatment, which is just how you prefer it.
Having been selected, the Talents immediately experience an explosion in the number of duplication requests and unsolicited merges. But they're prepared for that. It's what they signed up for, and loops are used to separate out each request and keep them from being overwhelmed.
___
DeciusCon Unwinds
With the core loops stable, you have finally moved out of the time loop at DeciusCon. The number of iterations individuals experienced ranges from 10 to 70, with most of you experiencing either 32 or 63 loops, depending on your involvement with the adjacent Local government's own time travel transition committee. DeciusCon now only exists for two weeks of normal, linear time.
The loop at DeciusCon was an actively maintained time loop rather than a passive one, so it is likely that any Locals who might have wandered into it should have been kicked out once you stopped resetting time every 14 days. Perhaps you should have taken more care in deconstructing the time loop, because you have left behind a shattered timeline. Even if they no longer loop around, the 14 remaining days of DeciusCon do not quite follow into one another. A guest might enter the first day and exit on the 5th day 5 minutes later in an alternate world without engaging a time machine. You worry that some child could have wandered in when nobody was looking and could even now be stuck inside, never to come back out.
Smaller time anomalies persist even after the 14 days, but these tend to occur in the night hours when only security is around. Core Loop - Banked Talent has been tasked with sending a representative to visit the convention centre every Local month to ask about missing security guards or children. No reports of lost or time-displaced persons have ever been reported back.
___
Summary on the population of your collective
The collective is expanding, especially now that you're leaning into time travel and actively creating duplicates and alternates. Now that your core loops are in full swing, you have a better understanding of what it actually does. Not a government in the full sense of the word, but more a networking exercise. Trying to track each and every member of your collective would be a Sisyphean task, possibly forever beyond your ability to fully accomplish, but for now it's enough that you can track the alternates you can reach.
Connectably you: ~7!
You can reliably reach roughly 5000 to 5100 distinct alternates in the case of a true emergency. The majority of this population will only help during a significant crisis, banding together in the face of the threat, and it won't be the same 5000 people each time. While there are more than 5000 of you in the collective, there's no way you can keep track of any more people for now without losing track of just as many as you add.
Support/Collaboratively you: ~(5+1)!
Around 110 to 130 people report to your piece of Core Loops - Administration to keep you informed, and you to theirs to reciprocate the favour. These are the alternates you feel are morally and mentally similar enough that you could casually braid their worldlines for updates. Some of your alternates also have an extensive network of friends, family and peers who you could also call on for support and who would treat you with just as much trust as their own timeline's Decius. This comes to around an additional 550-650 people. In total, you can reliably call in the support of 660 to 780 individuals to work together on major projects or events, though not everyone would answer. They have their own lives to live.
Crew of you: ~2!
You know of 2 alternates in the collective who are so similar to you that you could swap places and none of the people in your life would notice. These two are not your immediate duplicates; they are alternates from timelines long since branched, but have nonetheless retained similar lives and philosophies. In almost any combat situation, or any minor or major emergency, these are the individuals who will be first by your side, and you by theirs, thinking and reacting together as a unit.
___
For sneaking into trouble
You haven't explored much of the future, but with your decision to accept the request to act as a bomb diffuser in another time traveller's dawn war, you decide to do a little procurement for combat equipment.
A cloaking or stealth device is not the easiest thing to find. Even in a high tech timeline, good ones are usually military equipment, and anything a civilian could access, sports hunting camouflage for example, would be flawed in some legally-mandated way. The black market might be an alternative, but there's no way you have the connections there. Not unless the city is already in a bad place.
In a parallel timeline 250 years into the future, you walk into a clothing shop for holographic fashion in a grungy part of town in the depths of a hive slum and put down a 20 oz bar of pure gold. You immediately stop getting glares of hostility and start getting glares of suspicion, but a hurried call later, the shopkeeper's friend arrives to inspect the gold bar with a material scanner, and after another hurried conversation the shopkeeper is all smiles.
"Your best stealth," you tell her, your time machine translating for you. "The best you can find. I will be back for it in one year. If you have it, I'll pay 3 more gold bars."
So saying, you draw out another gold bar from a pocket and show it to her friend, letting them scan it.
"5 more gold bars." says the shopkeeper.
You stare her down. "Three, or I take my business and my gold elsewhere. I can drop all your friends coming around the back no problem. Don't think I can't."
She licks her lips and quickly whispers into her clothes asking for instructions. She listens to something internal, possibly an implanted communicator.
"Three," she agrees. "But you leave this one here too, and bring 2 more when you collect. We have expenses."
"Fine," you say, and set the gold bar down. "One year," you remind her.
You step out of the shop, and jump one year into the future.
30 minutes later and you step out of the shop again, pleasantly surprised and thankful you won't have to do another loop. This is the 25th shop you've visited, and it's the first one that has actually provided the goods and didn't try to ambush you one year later. In the earlier loops you had made fools out of the ambushers by slicing time and unloading their guns, and then beating the snot out of them with their own clips. But by the third loop your heart wasn't in it, and by the fifth loop you had stopped bothering, only pulling back into the past again to tell yourself to try another shop.
This shopkeeper had even found a tailor to fit your new spy-spec holovest for you and brought you food, drink and fake ID while you waited, since apparently everyone can see you're walking around without any. You had refused all of it, but appreciated the sentiment enough to take a look into her future, and give her advice about which investments to take, which to refuse, and who might be out to rob her the month after next.
Then you had traced the holovest's timeline back to its origin and put a duplicate back where it had been stolen from, and quietly arranged events to make sure that all the shopkeeper's friends who had done the heist made it out safely.
250 years earlier, back in a more familiar part of the timeline and no less infinitely rich than before, you gather your costume, merge with your Talent, and make a brief stop in your Core Loops to compare cloaks with the other members of your collective. To your further surprise, it was you managed to find the best one.
Then it was off to do a job for a fellow Time Traveller.
___
Combat turn to follow. Voting will begin after combat turn.
___
Empty timelines are timelines with no Locals in them, making them ideal to hide things in and get on with work undisturbed.
Most commonly an empty timeline is just one where humanity died out before ever gaining sentience. Finding one is normally tedious work, requiring an individual to travel back a million years and then forward again to check for human extinction. However, Serentia maintains access to quite a few of these 'template timelines' for expanding The Assembly into, and has no qualms about you splitting one off for yourself.
You buy and move a village's worth of cottages to a beachside location on one particularly pleasant day within the empty timeline, hook up a few solar panels for power, and buy some other furniture and supplies in preparation for moving in. It's rudimentary, but it works, takes the minimum effort, and there's plenty of space to expand later. Best of all, there's no chance that anything you do here will inadvertently cause time incidents to random bystanders.
Core loops - Administration has already begun stabilising into a looping 30-minute interval on a sunny morning in the mid 2020's, though it is expected to expand into an average of two dozen alternate timelines per individual as it iterates, then contract again as redundant loops re-merge.
Core Loop - Administration will begin issuing news, options, and random event rolls next turn.
___
Parallel Olympics
Your collective assesses the capabilities of individual Decius's to sort out applicants for the Talent Bank, aiming to find which is the most capable in various areas of physical and mental ability, with one added pre-requisite that Talents must all be Veterans of the Morning Battle.
The Talents are found without much fanfare, just a mental update to the collective on who and where they are. Normally Talents would be put in a central location for easy access in an emergency, but yours don't get any special treatment, which is just how you prefer it.
Having been selected, the Talents immediately experience an explosion in the number of duplication requests and unsolicited merges. But they're prepared for that. It's what they signed up for, and loops are used to separate out each request and keep them from being overwhelmed.
___
DeciusCon Unwinds
With the core loops stable, you have finally moved out of the time loop at DeciusCon. The number of iterations individuals experienced ranges from 10 to 70, with most of you experiencing either 32 or 63 loops, depending on your involvement with the adjacent Local government's own time travel transition committee. DeciusCon now only exists for two weeks of normal, linear time.
The loop at DeciusCon was an actively maintained time loop rather than a passive one, so it is likely that any Locals who might have wandered into it should have been kicked out once you stopped resetting time every 14 days. Perhaps you should have taken more care in deconstructing the time loop, because you have left behind a shattered timeline. Even if they no longer loop around, the 14 remaining days of DeciusCon do not quite follow into one another. A guest might enter the first day and exit on the 5th day 5 minutes later in an alternate world without engaging a time machine. You worry that some child could have wandered in when nobody was looking and could even now be stuck inside, never to come back out.
Smaller time anomalies persist even after the 14 days, but these tend to occur in the night hours when only security is around. Core Loop - Banked Talent has been tasked with sending a representative to visit the convention centre every Local month to ask about missing security guards or children. No reports of lost or time-displaced persons have ever been reported back.
___
Summary on the population of your collective
The collective is expanding, especially now that you're leaning into time travel and actively creating duplicates and alternates. Now that your core loops are in full swing, you have a better understanding of what it actually does. Not a government in the full sense of the word, but more a networking exercise. Trying to track each and every member of your collective would be a Sisyphean task, possibly forever beyond your ability to fully accomplish, but for now it's enough that you can track the alternates you can reach.
Connectably you: ~7!
You can reliably reach roughly 5000 to 5100 distinct alternates in the case of a true emergency. The majority of this population will only help during a significant crisis, banding together in the face of the threat, and it won't be the same 5000 people each time. While there are more than 5000 of you in the collective, there's no way you can keep track of any more people for now without losing track of just as many as you add.
Support/Collaboratively you: ~(5+1)!
Around 110 to 130 people report to your piece of Core Loops - Administration to keep you informed, and you to theirs to reciprocate the favour. These are the alternates you feel are morally and mentally similar enough that you could casually braid their worldlines for updates. Some of your alternates also have an extensive network of friends, family and peers who you could also call on for support and who would treat you with just as much trust as their own timeline's Decius. This comes to around an additional 550-650 people. In total, you can reliably call in the support of 660 to 780 individuals to work together on major projects or events, though not everyone would answer. They have their own lives to live.
Crew of you: ~2!
You know of 2 alternates in the collective who are so similar to you that you could swap places and none of the people in your life would notice. These two are not your immediate duplicates; they are alternates from timelines long since branched, but have nonetheless retained similar lives and philosophies. In almost any combat situation, or any minor or major emergency, these are the individuals who will be first by your side, and you by theirs, thinking and reacting together as a unit.
___
For sneaking into trouble
You haven't explored much of the future, but with your decision to accept the request to act as a bomb diffuser in another time traveller's dawn war, you decide to do a little procurement for combat equipment.
A cloaking or stealth device is not the easiest thing to find. Even in a high tech timeline, good ones are usually military equipment, and anything a civilian could access, sports hunting camouflage for example, would be flawed in some legally-mandated way. The black market might be an alternative, but there's no way you have the connections there. Not unless the city is already in a bad place.
In a parallel timeline 250 years into the future, you walk into a clothing shop for holographic fashion in a grungy part of town in the depths of a hive slum and put down a 20 oz bar of pure gold. You immediately stop getting glares of hostility and start getting glares of suspicion, but a hurried call later, the shopkeeper's friend arrives to inspect the gold bar with a material scanner, and after another hurried conversation the shopkeeper is all smiles.
"Your best stealth," you tell her, your time machine translating for you. "The best you can find. I will be back for it in one year. If you have it, I'll pay 3 more gold bars."
So saying, you draw out another gold bar from a pocket and show it to her friend, letting them scan it.
"5 more gold bars." says the shopkeeper.
You stare her down. "Three, or I take my business and my gold elsewhere. I can drop all your friends coming around the back no problem. Don't think I can't."
She licks her lips and quickly whispers into her clothes asking for instructions. She listens to something internal, possibly an implanted communicator.
"Three," she agrees. "But you leave this one here too, and bring 2 more when you collect. We have expenses."
"Fine," you say, and set the gold bar down. "One year," you remind her.
You step out of the shop, and jump one year into the future.
30 minutes later and you step out of the shop again, pleasantly surprised and thankful you won't have to do another loop. This is the 25th shop you've visited, and it's the first one that has actually provided the goods and didn't try to ambush you one year later. In the earlier loops you had made fools out of the ambushers by slicing time and unloading their guns, and then beating the snot out of them with their own clips. But by the third loop your heart wasn't in it, and by the fifth loop you had stopped bothering, only pulling back into the past again to tell yourself to try another shop.
This shopkeeper had even found a tailor to fit your new spy-spec holovest for you and brought you food, drink and fake ID while you waited, since apparently everyone can see you're walking around without any. You had refused all of it, but appreciated the sentiment enough to take a look into her future, and give her advice about which investments to take, which to refuse, and who might be out to rob her the month after next.
Then you had traced the holovest's timeline back to its origin and put a duplicate back where it had been stolen from, and quietly arranged events to make sure that all the shopkeeper's friends who had done the heist made it out safely.
250 years earlier, back in a more familiar part of the timeline and no less infinitely rich than before, you gather your costume, merge with your Talent, and make a brief stop in your Core Loops to compare cloaks with the other members of your collective. To your further surprise, it was you managed to find the best one.
Then it was off to do a job for a fellow Time Traveller.
___
Combat turn to follow. Voting will begin after combat turn.
___
- Character Sheet
- Traits
- Economy Stats
- Population Stats
- Societal Stats
- Events
- Involvement
- Resources, Infrastructure and Exploitables
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