1.1: Involving yourself - Mathematical Ensemble
Apart from Likely Founders' model of a functioning set of core loops, which were as minimalistic and accessible as he could make them for new initiates to learn from, you've not entered anybody else's core loops before now. Shi YenFang is working in yours, and Miriam Alawi has been helping out since the beginning, but you had never considered that you might be invited into somebody else's one day.
Rin Tessa has invited you into hers, and while you're not sure what you expected, it certainly hadn't been something this depressing. You don't know where she found this endless white realm of floating cubicles, but found it she has, and populated it with identical chairs, desks and partitions in cubic three dimensional array. There are no bridges between adjacent cubicles, no wires or struts. Nothing connects them but empty air. Each cubicle is small. The one you've found yourself in is barely large enough to fit yourself and Rin. The next one over is identical, containing another Rin duplicate, as are the other sixteen you can peer into from your vantage point.
The only sources of colour are the long streamers of fabric that twist and circle in the white void, fluttering softly like hundreds of flags undulating in the wind. Why they are there and whether they mean anything you don't know, but they are the only thing stopping you from leaving immediately for the sake of your mental health.
"Feel free to make yourself comfortable," Rin says, despite the obvious impossibility. "When you are ready, we can begin."
"Please," you reply, waving at her in what you hope is a signal for her to make it brief.
She holds out her hand and a sheaf of papers falls into it, which she hands to you. You take it from her without comment, and begin to scan the contents. It's a document listing various timeline branches, loops and places where antimatter annihilation events have or are due to occur... all of them inside her core loops.
You look up from the document. "Your core loops are under attack?" you ask her. "This one right here? The one we're in?"
Rin nods. "Yes, but not outright attack. Infiltrators, I think. Or maybe collaborators. They don't destroy indiscriminately. At first they would temporarily delay results. But then it progressed up to whole iterations vanishing. Now it's progressed to bombing. I've had a hard time catching them. Either they are privy to my decision making processes, or their reach is larger than mine."
This... was going to be tricky.
___
Even if it isn't open battle, any kind of fight within someone's core loops is going to be a messy affair. Time travellers like to insulate their core loops from outside interference for the same reason people like their brains to remain inside their skulls. Having your core loops damaged might not necessarily mean death, but the loss of access to the memories, skills and relationships of thousands of your alternates isn't exactly pleasant either. Since Rin is still a fully functional time traveller in the here and now, it might not be a fully fledged incursion, but that doesn't leave very many clues as to what it could be either.
The other thing is that since core loops are pretty much as far from linear time as is possible, you're pretty much guaranteed to get yourself lost within one you aren't familiar with, even with your time machine keeping track of your jumps for you. To help with that, Rin offers to send you directly to the trouble areas using her own time machine, and considering the disorienting state of her core loops you heartily accept. You also send a duplicate under stealth to each and every cubicle in the area anyway. One good thing, possibly the only good thing, about the layout of the cubicles is how easy it is to tile this dimension with your duplicates and ensure maximum coverage by simply ensuring each cubicle has one of you inside.
As the predicted time approaches you ready yourself for the imminent attack, slicing time down to the microsecond, then the nanosecond scale, taking advantage of your duplicates to pre-emptively extend your exclusion field over everything you can. Your experience with the Shi YenFang job has you anticipating that any minute now an entire cubicle is going to disappear and rematerialise as antimatter. As with before, you check in with your future selves, and are slightly reassured that there are no reports of devastation coming in from your immediate future, though the incoming reports of heavy fighting indicate are that you're about to get very busy.
[Opponent vs Rin. Lightning attack (?) vs Reaction (Banked Talent)]
[1d20+?]=[24] vs [1d20+?]=[12]
Rin never stops working at her cubicle right up until the appointed time, but when it comes she is prepared. The moment a portal opens up beside her she explodes into action, dodging away faster than you can follow even with nanosecond-scale time slice activated. From the portal a single glowing white line of light whips out, splitting into jagged branches of lightning and blasting through the air towards Rin's chair. It passes straight through your microkinetic exclusion fields without any effect, striking and punching through the chair Rin had just vacated. That chair disappears, seemingly pulled into the light, and the other branches of the lightning attack redirect towards Rin even as she dodges.
From her position on the ground, Rin materialises a shield of pure reflectiveness into her hands moments before the attack reaches her. That shield is also pulled into the light, but this time instead of punching through the shield entirely, the lightning seizes up, then shrivels into soft, drifting motes.
More lightning shoots out from the portal at Rin, and though she regains her footing she is unable to do anything but raise more shields and keep blocking.
[You vs Opponent. Reaction (Banked Talent). Difficulty 24.]
[1d20+2]=[10] vs [24]
As Rin blocks the second and third attacks, you realise that you won't be of much help if your reaction time is slower than her's. Your first instinct is to try to match Rin's speed, revving up your time machine to dive even deeper into time slice. You've never tried to go this far in; at this speed literally any movement within your bubble of time slice is outpacing light outside the bubble, and indeed the transition to FTL induces your time machine into blaring a bevy of warnings into your mind.
"Safety limit exceeded: Exotic radiation escaping bubble."
"Proximal space-like causality warning."
"Initiating FTL protective protocols. Error: Exotic matter exclusion field in place."
Cursing, you drop your microkinetic exclusion field, since it's not helping right now. Even so you realise that you need to try something else instead. In the small instance that you spent inside the world of sub-nanosecond time slice, you saw using the enhanced superluminal vision the time machine provides that Rin and the lightning was still faster than you. In fact the relative difference in your reaction speeds hadn't changed.
You have your time machine query hers, and the information comes back that her time machine is just set to defend mode, meaning it will try to cancel out the effects of any malicious time travel around her by copying it. So her time machine is speeding up her movements, but in addition to that she must be getting her speed from another source.
The lightning is faster still.
[Opponent vs Rin. Imposition (?) vs Takeover Resistance (Banked Talent+Connectivity+Crew Size)]
[1d20+?]=[25] vs [1d20+?]=[18]
The probing branches of light weave around the raised wall of shields to surround her from all sides. Before Rin can be fully enclosed by the prongs of the attack, she disappears. You instruct your time machine to follow her, and you find yourself a few hours in the past. Rin is here, but just as you have followed her, so has the portal, and the attacks have also followed her through time. Now she is surrounded by attacks from all sides, and by attacks coming back in time from the future. One attack slips through, then another, and before they can touch her, Rin resorts to time loops to rewind any attacks that pierce her defense. The assault is pressing in and you have no idea how to help or to reach her through the intensity of it.
Maybe Rin doesn't see it, or perhaps she is reaching a limit to her ability, but a flicker of lightning bypasses her shield wall without her being able to form a time loop to cancel it. The light strikes her leg and pulls her in, and in an instant both she and the light vanish. The portal remains open.
[Noticing your presence. Opposed Stealth(Banked Talent) vs Revelations (?)]
[1d20+2+2]=[11] vs [1d20+?]=[18]
[You vs Opponent. Mitigate defeat (Outcome Reach) vs Securing victory (?) check]
[1d20+3]=[9] vs [1d20+?]=[Nat 1]
On a hunch you re-establish your exclusion field. Just in time, as you watch the portal spit out a fist-sized lump of antimatter.
Perhaps after they had taken Rin, they wanted to erase the site of the crime to hide the evidence. Whatever their reason, they clearly didn't account for you being here.
You hastily negate its forward velocity with your kinesis, and equally hurriedly reverse its path to throw it back through the portal.
This time the light that pours through the portal is not a line of white lightning, but something more familiar, individual flickering beams lazily piercing the air, almost syrupy in the slow motion conditions of nanosecond scale time slice. A wash of exotic particles follows, hitting your exclusion field and rebounding off. Something on the other side breaks, and the portal shatters into shimmering angular shards.
Finally, you have a way to fight back.
You loop back, jumping into the body of your previously indecisive self. As blows rain down on Rin's shields, you grab the first piece of stationary that comes to hand, a big red stapler, jump it forwards, jaunt it backwards, and throw the now antimatter stapler at the portal. Using your telekinesis you move aside the air in its path of travel, allowing the stapler to pass through the intervening space un-annihilated and dragless. The stapler exits your nanosecond time slice bubble just as it enters the portal, transitioning to real time at faster than light speeds as it impacts the air on the other side.
Just like before, the portal shatters, but this time the opponent doesn't go down without a fight. Your past updates to retroactively put the portal into a new position, away from the path of the stapler. The attacker is looping back too, creating branching timelines where your stapler didn't hit its target. You loop back also, redirecting the stapler to the new target. Now it's a contest of who can change and merge timelines more efficiently. It's a fight of braids-over-braids and loops-within-loops.
[Fighting for event prominence. You vs Opponent: Securing victory(Outcome Reach) vs Mitigating Defeat(?)]
[1d20+2]=[9] vs [1d20+?]=[22]
Even though your skill at telekinesis is ensuring that the stapler ends up in the portal more often than not, the unseen attacker is finding an increasing number ways to dodge it by persistence alone. The past continues to update, retroactively changing the portal's position multiple times for only a single one of your own stapler-throwing loops. In terms of being efficient at consolidating success your attacker is simply better at it than you, and the branching timelines begin to merge again in their favour. You divert some of your attention to making sure that if the stapler misses it doesn't do too much damage to Rin's cubicle dimension, and your attacks begin to falter.
But as much as you were diverting attention away from the attack, so too was the opponent being distracted from attacking Rin. The rapidly changing portal positions meant the actual attack against Rin was becoming less and less organised, and Rin was waiting for her moment to strike.
[Shutting the portal down. Rin vs Opponent. Anti-portal skill (Banked Talent) vs Imposition (?)]
[1d20+?]=[Nat 20] vs [1d20+?]=[30]
Rin takes advantage of a momentary lapse in pressure to surge forward, jamming her reflective shield into the portal. The edge of the shield aligns with the edge of the portal, fitting perfectly, fusing shield and portal together just as the lightning attack strikes again. This time, though the shield is drawn into it like before, the fused edges of the shield also pull the portal into the light too, closing it.
Undeterred, the unseen opponent retroactively shifts the portal opening to a new position. But again, Rin is already there, jamming a shield into the portal mouth.
Another retroactive update, this time shifting the portal back to its previous position. But Rin had left behind her previous shield there, the shield that now existed once again. The portal edges fuse to the shield before it can even finish opening.
Multiple portals begin opening at the same time, but they are met by your duplicates and Rin's from the other cubicles. It seems that these portals are being diverted from other areas, and the duplicates there are following them here. The enemy must be limited in the number of portals they can put out simultaneously. For every portal the unseen attacker opens, either you are there to throw a stapler in, or Rin is there to jam a shield into it.
The end comes suddenly. One moment, you are playing retroactive antimatter tag with portals. The next, silence. You quickly check in with all your duplicates, and take in the condition of all the closest timelines. Across nearby timespanse, loops are straightening out and excessively wound up timeline braids are being unwound.
The opponent has given up.
___
Some portals remain, shattered, the ones from your initial successful antimatter stapler bombings, abandoned possibly because they had already served their purpose. It takes almost a full real time millisecond for the shards to fade, the harsh light of annihilation pouring out of them all the while. Piece by piece Rin plugs up the portal shards with smaller version of her shields. You stay to watch just in case something re-establishes the portal from the other side, or sends the lightning attack again. But nothing more happens, and over weeks of subjective time in nanosecond slice but fractions of a second in real time, the portal shards shrivel up and disappear.
---
A more extensive merge with your alternates reveals the extent of the damage. It seems that despite your local success, there still remained the odd cubicle in a handful of timelines where Rin remains abducted. In the grand scheme of things, Rin has lost an insignificant number of her duplicates, perhaps less than one in a ten thousand. Backups exist, so it's not as if all their experience and information has been lost with them, but the ones who were abducted are still real people, and they are gone. No doubt the opponent withdrew because those few successes were enough for its purposes, whatever they were. You don't fancy your chances of success if you re-opened the battle for the sake of those few, but the thought of leaving them unrescued makes your stomach churn.
You and Rin reconvene at the cafe in Serentia. Neither of you wanted to remain in the cubicle dimension. After all, it was obvious that the opponent knew where it was, and had no trouble entering either.
"It's the Ensemble," she says without preamble. "They've found me."
"Excuse me?"
"The System Ensemble. It's another time travelling polity, like Serentia. A network of world systems, each sentient and with the ability to time travel. I worked for one of them once, on one of their worlds, before I escaped. It wants me back," she sighs. "I guess it got what it wanted."
"I'm sorry, you've lost me," you say. "Start with the bit about world systems."
Rin says nothing, but instead lifts a single finger to point towards you. A floating rectangular screen emerges where she points. Reminiscent of a dialog box, it says:
Three buttons appear underneath.
"Please press Accept," she says. "For now at least. It will make the explanation easier."
You wave a finger at the "Accept" button. The dialog box disappears, replaced by a larger translucent rectangle, reminiscent of a screen. "Decius", it says at the top. "Access type: Emulated System: Tessa Rin's Custom System."
You look away from the screen and note that various things in the world are now tagged with little boxes stating what they are.
"Ah," you say. "Character sheets and item descriptions. I do know about this. I've seen this before, when I went too far afield on the Slipbraids trying to find more Decius alternates."
Rin nods. "They tend to be rarer near Serentia, which is strange because the Assembly does have its own World System. Perhaps it was imported or created for the purpose like mine was. In any case, the System Ensemble is a network of naturally arising world systems which all either developed time travel capabilities themselves, or were locals who got uplifted by the travellers. They are one big conglomerate ruling over millions of alternate timelines, just as Serentia claims to do.
"I ascended to become an administrator in my home timeline by clever use of time travel, but as it turns out, the Ensemble was a lot less impartial and a lot more tyrannical at the admin level. So I took what I learned and escaped, making random jumps in timespanse. I found Serentia by pure chance, and when I got here, I thought that I had surely come far enough that they couldn't find me. I even thought that assimilating into Serentian culture would empower and protect me beyond the ability of the Ensemble to harm.
"Evidently not," she sighs.
You consider your coffee for a moment, and on a whim you decide to choose the
"I can see how this could be neat, even if it is a little intrusive," you say, putting the cup down with perfect etiquette. "What will you do now? Your core loops aren't in the best shape, and after what just happened I don't like your chances if they come back for round two."
She pauses to think about it for a moment. "I will call for higher help," she says at last. "Serentia promised me backup and protection when they took me in. I will hold them to their promise, and address the Assembly." She downs her coffee, then stands up and bows. "Thank you. All of this was outside the scope of what I had originally hired you for, but you remained by my side nonetheless. Of all the timelines where I hired outside help, the timelines where I hired you had the best outcomes. I will arrange for payment as soon as possible. Please excuse me."
She disappears, but somehow, you have a feeling you know where she's going.
___
Rin Tessa has invited you into hers, and while you're not sure what you expected, it certainly hadn't been something this depressing. You don't know where she found this endless white realm of floating cubicles, but found it she has, and populated it with identical chairs, desks and partitions in cubic three dimensional array. There are no bridges between adjacent cubicles, no wires or struts. Nothing connects them but empty air. Each cubicle is small. The one you've found yourself in is barely large enough to fit yourself and Rin. The next one over is identical, containing another Rin duplicate, as are the other sixteen you can peer into from your vantage point.
The only sources of colour are the long streamers of fabric that twist and circle in the white void, fluttering softly like hundreds of flags undulating in the wind. Why they are there and whether they mean anything you don't know, but they are the only thing stopping you from leaving immediately for the sake of your mental health.
"Feel free to make yourself comfortable," Rin says, despite the obvious impossibility. "When you are ready, we can begin."
"Please," you reply, waving at her in what you hope is a signal for her to make it brief.
She holds out her hand and a sheaf of papers falls into it, which she hands to you. You take it from her without comment, and begin to scan the contents. It's a document listing various timeline branches, loops and places where antimatter annihilation events have or are due to occur... all of them inside her core loops.
You look up from the document. "Your core loops are under attack?" you ask her. "This one right here? The one we're in?"
Rin nods. "Yes, but not outright attack. Infiltrators, I think. Or maybe collaborators. They don't destroy indiscriminately. At first they would temporarily delay results. But then it progressed up to whole iterations vanishing. Now it's progressed to bombing. I've had a hard time catching them. Either they are privy to my decision making processes, or their reach is larger than mine."
This... was going to be tricky.
___
Even if it isn't open battle, any kind of fight within someone's core loops is going to be a messy affair. Time travellers like to insulate their core loops from outside interference for the same reason people like their brains to remain inside their skulls. Having your core loops damaged might not necessarily mean death, but the loss of access to the memories, skills and relationships of thousands of your alternates isn't exactly pleasant either. Since Rin is still a fully functional time traveller in the here and now, it might not be a fully fledged incursion, but that doesn't leave very many clues as to what it could be either.
The other thing is that since core loops are pretty much as far from linear time as is possible, you're pretty much guaranteed to get yourself lost within one you aren't familiar with, even with your time machine keeping track of your jumps for you. To help with that, Rin offers to send you directly to the trouble areas using her own time machine, and considering the disorienting state of her core loops you heartily accept. You also send a duplicate under stealth to each and every cubicle in the area anyway. One good thing, possibly the only good thing, about the layout of the cubicles is how easy it is to tile this dimension with your duplicates and ensure maximum coverage by simply ensuring each cubicle has one of you inside.
As the predicted time approaches you ready yourself for the imminent attack, slicing time down to the microsecond, then the nanosecond scale, taking advantage of your duplicates to pre-emptively extend your exclusion field over everything you can. Your experience with the Shi YenFang job has you anticipating that any minute now an entire cubicle is going to disappear and rematerialise as antimatter. As with before, you check in with your future selves, and are slightly reassured that there are no reports of devastation coming in from your immediate future, though the incoming reports of heavy fighting indicate are that you're about to get very busy.
[Opponent vs Rin. Lightning attack (?) vs Reaction (Banked Talent)]
[1d20+?]=[24] vs [1d20+?]=[12]
Rin never stops working at her cubicle right up until the appointed time, but when it comes she is prepared. The moment a portal opens up beside her she explodes into action, dodging away faster than you can follow even with nanosecond-scale time slice activated. From the portal a single glowing white line of light whips out, splitting into jagged branches of lightning and blasting through the air towards Rin's chair. It passes straight through your microkinetic exclusion fields without any effect, striking and punching through the chair Rin had just vacated. That chair disappears, seemingly pulled into the light, and the other branches of the lightning attack redirect towards Rin even as she dodges.
From her position on the ground, Rin materialises a shield of pure reflectiveness into her hands moments before the attack reaches her. That shield is also pulled into the light, but this time instead of punching through the shield entirely, the lightning seizes up, then shrivels into soft, drifting motes.
More lightning shoots out from the portal at Rin, and though she regains her footing she is unable to do anything but raise more shields and keep blocking.
[You vs Opponent. Reaction (Banked Talent). Difficulty 24.]
[1d20+2]=[10] vs [24]
As Rin blocks the second and third attacks, you realise that you won't be of much help if your reaction time is slower than her's. Your first instinct is to try to match Rin's speed, revving up your time machine to dive even deeper into time slice. You've never tried to go this far in; at this speed literally any movement within your bubble of time slice is outpacing light outside the bubble, and indeed the transition to FTL induces your time machine into blaring a bevy of warnings into your mind.
"Safety limit exceeded: Exotic radiation escaping bubble."
"Proximal space-like causality warning."
"Initiating FTL protective protocols. Error: Exotic matter exclusion field in place."
Cursing, you drop your microkinetic exclusion field, since it's not helping right now. Even so you realise that you need to try something else instead. In the small instance that you spent inside the world of sub-nanosecond time slice, you saw using the enhanced superluminal vision the time machine provides that Rin and the lightning was still faster than you. In fact the relative difference in your reaction speeds hadn't changed.
You have your time machine query hers, and the information comes back that her time machine is just set to defend mode, meaning it will try to cancel out the effects of any malicious time travel around her by copying it. So her time machine is speeding up her movements, but in addition to that she must be getting her speed from another source.
The lightning is faster still.
[Opponent vs Rin. Imposition (?) vs Takeover Resistance (Banked Talent+Connectivity+Crew Size)]
[1d20+?]=[25] vs [1d20+?]=[18]
The probing branches of light weave around the raised wall of shields to surround her from all sides. Before Rin can be fully enclosed by the prongs of the attack, she disappears. You instruct your time machine to follow her, and you find yourself a few hours in the past. Rin is here, but just as you have followed her, so has the portal, and the attacks have also followed her through time. Now she is surrounded by attacks from all sides, and by attacks coming back in time from the future. One attack slips through, then another, and before they can touch her, Rin resorts to time loops to rewind any attacks that pierce her defense. The assault is pressing in and you have no idea how to help or to reach her through the intensity of it.
Maybe Rin doesn't see it, or perhaps she is reaching a limit to her ability, but a flicker of lightning bypasses her shield wall without her being able to form a time loop to cancel it. The light strikes her leg and pulls her in, and in an instant both she and the light vanish. The portal remains open.
[Noticing your presence. Opposed Stealth(Banked Talent) vs Revelations (?)]
[1d20+2+2]=[11] vs [1d20+?]=[18]
[You vs Opponent. Mitigate defeat (Outcome Reach) vs Securing victory (?) check]
[1d20+3]=[9] vs [1d20+?]=[Nat 1]
On a hunch you re-establish your exclusion field. Just in time, as you watch the portal spit out a fist-sized lump of antimatter.
Perhaps after they had taken Rin, they wanted to erase the site of the crime to hide the evidence. Whatever their reason, they clearly didn't account for you being here.
You hastily negate its forward velocity with your kinesis, and equally hurriedly reverse its path to throw it back through the portal.
This time the light that pours through the portal is not a line of white lightning, but something more familiar, individual flickering beams lazily piercing the air, almost syrupy in the slow motion conditions of nanosecond scale time slice. A wash of exotic particles follows, hitting your exclusion field and rebounding off. Something on the other side breaks, and the portal shatters into shimmering angular shards.
Finally, you have a way to fight back.
You loop back, jumping into the body of your previously indecisive self. As blows rain down on Rin's shields, you grab the first piece of stationary that comes to hand, a big red stapler, jump it forwards, jaunt it backwards, and throw the now antimatter stapler at the portal. Using your telekinesis you move aside the air in its path of travel, allowing the stapler to pass through the intervening space un-annihilated and dragless. The stapler exits your nanosecond time slice bubble just as it enters the portal, transitioning to real time at faster than light speeds as it impacts the air on the other side.
Just like before, the portal shatters, but this time the opponent doesn't go down without a fight. Your past updates to retroactively put the portal into a new position, away from the path of the stapler. The attacker is looping back too, creating branching timelines where your stapler didn't hit its target. You loop back also, redirecting the stapler to the new target. Now it's a contest of who can change and merge timelines more efficiently. It's a fight of braids-over-braids and loops-within-loops.
[Fighting for event prominence. You vs Opponent: Securing victory(Outcome Reach) vs Mitigating Defeat(?)]
[1d20+2]=[9] vs [1d20+?]=[22]
Even though your skill at telekinesis is ensuring that the stapler ends up in the portal more often than not, the unseen attacker is finding an increasing number ways to dodge it by persistence alone. The past continues to update, retroactively changing the portal's position multiple times for only a single one of your own stapler-throwing loops. In terms of being efficient at consolidating success your attacker is simply better at it than you, and the branching timelines begin to merge again in their favour. You divert some of your attention to making sure that if the stapler misses it doesn't do too much damage to Rin's cubicle dimension, and your attacks begin to falter.
But as much as you were diverting attention away from the attack, so too was the opponent being distracted from attacking Rin. The rapidly changing portal positions meant the actual attack against Rin was becoming less and less organised, and Rin was waiting for her moment to strike.
[Shutting the portal down. Rin vs Opponent. Anti-portal skill (Banked Talent) vs Imposition (?)]
[1d20+?]=[Nat 20] vs [1d20+?]=[30]
Rin takes advantage of a momentary lapse in pressure to surge forward, jamming her reflective shield into the portal. The edge of the shield aligns with the edge of the portal, fitting perfectly, fusing shield and portal together just as the lightning attack strikes again. This time, though the shield is drawn into it like before, the fused edges of the shield also pull the portal into the light too, closing it.
Undeterred, the unseen opponent retroactively shifts the portal opening to a new position. But again, Rin is already there, jamming a shield into the portal mouth.
Another retroactive update, this time shifting the portal back to its previous position. But Rin had left behind her previous shield there, the shield that now existed once again. The portal edges fuse to the shield before it can even finish opening.
Multiple portals begin opening at the same time, but they are met by your duplicates and Rin's from the other cubicles. It seems that these portals are being diverted from other areas, and the duplicates there are following them here. The enemy must be limited in the number of portals they can put out simultaneously. For every portal the unseen attacker opens, either you are there to throw a stapler in, or Rin is there to jam a shield into it.
The end comes suddenly. One moment, you are playing retroactive antimatter tag with portals. The next, silence. You quickly check in with all your duplicates, and take in the condition of all the closest timelines. Across nearby timespanse, loops are straightening out and excessively wound up timeline braids are being unwound.
The opponent has given up.
___
Some portals remain, shattered, the ones from your initial successful antimatter stapler bombings, abandoned possibly because they had already served their purpose. It takes almost a full real time millisecond for the shards to fade, the harsh light of annihilation pouring out of them all the while. Piece by piece Rin plugs up the portal shards with smaller version of her shields. You stay to watch just in case something re-establishes the portal from the other side, or sends the lightning attack again. But nothing more happens, and over weeks of subjective time in nanosecond slice but fractions of a second in real time, the portal shards shrivel up and disappear.
---
A more extensive merge with your alternates reveals the extent of the damage. It seems that despite your local success, there still remained the odd cubicle in a handful of timelines where Rin remains abducted. In the grand scheme of things, Rin has lost an insignificant number of her duplicates, perhaps less than one in a ten thousand. Backups exist, so it's not as if all their experience and information has been lost with them, but the ones who were abducted are still real people, and they are gone. No doubt the opponent withdrew because those few successes were enough for its purposes, whatever they were. You don't fancy your chances of success if you re-opened the battle for the sake of those few, but the thought of leaving them unrescued makes your stomach churn.
You and Rin reconvene at the cafe in Serentia. Neither of you wanted to remain in the cubicle dimension. After all, it was obvious that the opponent knew where it was, and had no trouble entering either.
"It's the Ensemble," she says without preamble. "They've found me."
"Excuse me?"
"The System Ensemble. It's another time travelling polity, like Serentia. A network of world systems, each sentient and with the ability to time travel. I worked for one of them once, on one of their worlds, before I escaped. It wants me back," she sighs. "I guess it got what it wanted."
"I'm sorry, you've lost me," you say. "Start with the bit about world systems."
Rin says nothing, but instead lifts a single finger to point towards you. A floating rectangular screen emerges where she points. Reminiscent of a dialog box, it says:
You have been invited to change your job to: Administrative Observer.Three buttons appear underneath.
Accept Refuse Delay"Please press Accept," she says. "For now at least. It will make the explanation easier."
You wave a finger at the "Accept" button. The dialog box disappears, replaced by a larger translucent rectangle, reminiscent of a screen. "Decius", it says at the top. "Access type: Emulated System: Tessa Rin's Custom System."
Decius Access type: Emulated System: Tessa Rin's Custom SystemJob Class: Administrative Observer.Serentian Initiate.Human Outsider LVL 1STR: 12AGI: 10INT: 13CON: 11CHA: 16LUK: 10Ability List:Heightened Access - Administrator's sight*.*Please refrain from using your administrative abilities within The Assembly. - Global Appraisal has been disallowed- Unlimited Range Status Checking has been disallowed.- Backend View and Copy Permissions have been disallowed.- Emulation bug report submission form has been added.You look away from the screen and note that various things in the world are now tagged with little boxes stating what they are.
Coffee says the tag on the cup of coffee in front of you. You concentrate on it and it expands into a larger screen describing the physical state of the coffee, a brief description of its blend, and, as if you didn't know how to manually drink a cup of coffee, a button saying drink."Ah," you say. "Character sheets and item descriptions. I do know about this. I've seen this before, when I went too far afield on the Slipbraids trying to find more Decius alternates."
Rin nods. "They tend to be rarer near Serentia, which is strange because the Assembly does have its own World System. Perhaps it was imported or created for the purpose like mine was. In any case, the System Ensemble is a network of naturally arising world systems which all either developed time travel capabilities themselves, or were locals who got uplifted by the travellers. They are one big conglomerate ruling over millions of alternate timelines, just as Serentia claims to do.
"I ascended to become an administrator in my home timeline by clever use of time travel, but as it turns out, the Ensemble was a lot less impartial and a lot more tyrannical at the admin level. So I took what I learned and escaped, making random jumps in timespanse. I found Serentia by pure chance, and when I got here, I thought that I had surely come far enough that they couldn't find me. I even thought that assimilating into Serentian culture would empower and protect me beyond the ability of the Ensemble to harm.
"Evidently not," she sighs.
You consider your coffee for a moment, and on a whim you decide to choose the
drink option to see what would happen. Muscle memory that isn't your own takes control of your limbs and guides you into a perfect recreation of the act of drinking coffee."I can see how this could be neat, even if it is a little intrusive," you say, putting the cup down with perfect etiquette. "What will you do now? Your core loops aren't in the best shape, and after what just happened I don't like your chances if they come back for round two."
She pauses to think about it for a moment. "I will call for higher help," she says at last. "Serentia promised me backup and protection when they took me in. I will hold them to their promise, and address the Assembly." She downs her coffee, then stands up and bows. "Thank you. All of this was outside the scope of what I had originally hired you for, but you remained by my side nonetheless. Of all the timelines where I hired outside help, the timelines where I hired you had the best outcomes. I will arrange for payment as soon as possible. Please excuse me."
She disappears, but somehow, you have a feeling you know where she's going.
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