Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter Four:Special Rules and Systems (section)

== Time Travel: ==

...is almost always a bad idea. But that hasn't stopped many masters of Skafoi from building time machines. And time travel is possible. It's not even all that difficult for a powerful genius, but it is phenomenally dangerous.

Now, we're all grownups here and we all know what time travel is and what it does, but the question is, what happens when I screw with the past?

What used to happen (and here the past tense gets in a bit of trouble), is that you got your ass kicked by the transsapient gods who lived at the end of time. The Terminals, as they were called, didn't like any timetraveling blunderers whose actions might have prevented them from existing.

They were right to worry, because apparently someone annihilated them from the timeline. Now it's a kind of temporal free-for-all, with mad scientists and arch-magicians and alien psychics from the black hole in the center of the Galaxy all running about history, mucking things up. However, this did not (and again, the past tense would like to apologize) last long. A détente settled into place, agreed to by various powerful factions and enforced by a group calling itself the Guardians of Forever, the Terminals' former servants. This group―not a fellowship, as it includes much more than just mad scientists―allows others to "blow off steam" by permitting minor changes to the timeline: a murdered wife rescued here, a genius' wretched younger brother striking it rich there. The idea is that the relentless enforcement of absolute causal stasis is what eventually forced the rebellion against the Terminals that resulted in their destruction.

Nonetheless, the Guardians of Forever enforce the unfolding of the grand sweep of history: the dinosaurs must perish, whether by an asteroid or a plague or a volcanic apocalypse. Rome will fall, as will the Spanish Empire and the Eternal Terran Dynasty of Yao Ming. The Guardians' solution is simple and expedient: whenever a major shake-up occurs, they travel back in time to shortly after the event (or sometimes during, if they cannot fix the problem afterward) and juggle events around so things unfold as they always have. When a furious genius went back in time and killed Helmut Schenk, the cruelest genocidal mastermind of the 20th century, as a child, the Guardians of Forever went back and elevated the art student Adolf Hitler to that same role.

It's not like they enjoy doing that. In fact, the genius who made the above "swap" committed suicide a week later. But the Guardians have discovered that the Terminals were not acting entirely out of self-interest: the timeline that leads to the Terminals' existence, despite its horrors, produces a universe of boundless life and richness. It may be the best of all possible timelines.

However, there appears to be no going back to the way things were: the future is unstable, with constant subtle shifts producing enormous effects, despite the best efforts of the Guardians, and scholars of time fear that things will grow worse, as the eagerness of explorers to travel back in time outstrips the resources of those determined to maintain the timeline. Even with an agent placed (it sometimes seems) once every ten years, the Guardians of Forever are losing control of the universe.

So, can you travel back in time and kill Hitler? Yes. He's been killed six times: the Guardians gave up finding new candidates and have just started cloning him. (There's a facility outside Hamburg in 1921, actually. Feel free to drop by. They give tours.) Can you go back in time and ask out that pretty girl? Yes, and when you come back to the present, you might be married to her. However, make sure that you come back to exactly the point where you left, or you'll find that the other you is married to her. And of course, even if you merge back perfectly, you won't have the set of memories from the timeline.

You can travel backwards in time, but you better have a good reason and/or take excellent care of the local causality, or there's a good chance that a very angry Guardian will show up, while you're there or when you get back, explaining to you what she will do to you the next time you go to "show the kids some dinosaurs" and accidentally step on a bug.

Fortunately for minor blunders, though, time is pretty stable. The Terminals appeared to have created much of our current timeline as a kind of "causality trench," and screwing things up requires a lot of effort.

You can go forward in time, too, but that's the least stable of all, and for a very good reason: the moment you travel forward in time, you disappear from the timeline, and the future where you emerge is one where you ceased to exist. Since you're a genius, and you probably changed the world in some important, if small way, you cannot travel to your own future, since you won't have been there.

And yes, if you kill your own grandmother before your father is born, you will cease to exist. The universe, it turns out, doesn't care that much if your grandmother gets shot in the head and there's no shooter. You still go poof. Ditto if you bring your past self into the future. (If your past self is in the future, he can't become your present self, now can he?) Ditto if you kill your past self, or your presence gets him killed.

Other than that, though, you won't suffer too many directly dangerous effects from journeying in the past: your memories won't be overwritten, and you won't simply "pop" out of existence―there seems to be some kind of system in place that makes it very unlikely for the beating of the chaos butterfly's wings to knock a genius out of existence, unless you accidentally kill off the entire human race or something.

=== The Cost of Making Changes: ===

"The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Whether it was the work of the Terminals in creating a "causality trench," as many temporal scholars say, or whether time is just naturally inelastic and inertial, causing changes is exhausting. To cause a change, a genius must "fuel" it with his own Inspiration.

Making most minor changes that affect a single person (rescuing your grandfather, fixing your friend up with that pretty blond) costs one point of Willpower and ten points of Mania. If the subject to be manipulated is metanormal in any way, it costs one point of Willpower, as well as ten points of Mania per dot of the relevant Metanormal Advantage.

More significant changes, from "family line" up to "village" requires an expenditure of one dot of Willpower, and ten points of Mania. If anyone in the affected area is metanormal, this costs ten points of Mania per dot of Metanormal Advantage of the creature with the highest Advantage, plus 20 points of Mania and a Willpower dot.

"Village" or "off-world colony" is about as large an area as the Guardians of Forever will tolerate before they go back and fix things (and possibly kick your ass). Sometimes exceptions are made if the area has no longterm viability (if you want to transport a whole doomed planet into the past, the Guardians won't care if the planet burns up in the supernova or disappears five minutes beforehand, as long as the survivors don't affect the timeline as they live out their lives). If permitted, these larger changes, up to redirecting the timeline of a whole world, cost one dot of Inspiration, one dot of Willpower, and 100 points of Mania.

Failure to pay this cost to the timeline in short order will result in the regular timeline reasserting itself: "rescued" people get killed off, relationships that the genius built that weren't there to begin with fall apart, and generally things slide back to the way they were. 

Alternatively, sometimes Guardians will crawl all over a site because of minor changes that might "jump the trench" and produce significant future deviations. What triggers a butterfly effect in the timeline is never clear, but occasionally a seemingly minor change will result in a lot of pissed Guardians popping out of the temporal stream to stop a genius' plan.

=== The Temporal Tithe: ===

Maintaining the timeline costs money, and this comes in the form of the tithe for any change. This temporal tithe is distinct from the cost paid to make changes; the former arises naturally from the nature of time and time travel; the latter is a tax leveled by one's fellow beings. Geniuses who make changes will be visited by one or more Guardians shortly after their change, who expect payment in the form of Mania. This is usually ten times the amount the genius had to expend to make the actual change. The Guardians of Forever are in no rush to receive payment, but refusal to pay can result in the Guardians going back and changing things or just killing the offending genius. Picking a fight with a Guardian of Forever is usually a bad idea: they're frighteningly powerful, and if there's trouble, they travel in groups.

However, it's becoming increasingly clear that not all Guardians of Forever are honest, and not all who claim that title are who they say they are. Temporal protection rackets, con jobs, and shakedowns have been reported "recently" all over the timeline. The Guardians seem to be losing their grip on their owner members, as well as the timeline as a whole.

=== Really Stupid Time Travel: ===

Messing about with yourself from a previous time travel jaunt is about the stupidest thing you can do without a death ray and a bottle of tequila. Whatever quantum coherence you naturally maintain is enough to keep you in existence while you're operating in the same time frame as a previous jaunt, but it doesn't feel good.

While in any past time frame you function much like a mane, and can go up in a puff of Havoc if not careful. In ordinary past or future time frames, this isn't a danger. However, when in a previously visited past time frame, the danger is there. Merely being in that time frame causes you to suffer from a severe Derangement as your memories get overwritten and scrambled. You must make a Havoc check (using your Inspiration as a dice pool) if you directly interact with your past echo in any way, or if your past echo sees or otherwise
clearly detects you.

This experience is worse than mere physical discomfort. Interacting with your previous time-traveling self is a hideously traumatic experience, as memories and ghost-thoughts tumble through your head, trying to sort themselves out. Even the maddest scientist knows not to interact with his previous time-traveling self, even if interacting with his younger self is perfectly fine.

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Gabriel and Immanuel--Doctor Xenon and Professor Nebula, thirty years ago, though they're retired now, even if their metal suits are still in the basement--look out on the cityscape of Madrid, their adopted home. Gabriel has a bottle of beer in his hand. Immanuel cradles the love letters of Dr. Cadiz, which he never sent to Alice. (They are both dead now.) They watch a humanoid silhouette bound across the rooftops, black against the indigo sky.

"What's his name?" Gabriel asks.

"I think that's the Hunter for Nalexa," Immanuel says. "They have better names, now, don't you think? So evocative."

"I've heard of him."

"Mm?"

"Every time he stops a crime, he whispers to the perpetrator, 'For Lee-Chey,' and to the victim he saved, 'I'll make it better soon.'"

"Sounds crazy." Immanuel clutches the letters, old emotion striking him. "Who's Lee-Chey? A girl?"

"It took me a year to work it out," Gabriel says. "No. It's a timeline."

"Really?"

"Really. Lee-Chey is some city, or empire, currently in Asia Minor.

In some other timeline, obviously. The Hunter for Nalexa ('Nalexa' is another city, I think, or maybe a political party) wants to restore it."

"And he thinks fighting crime will do it?"

"I guess so." Gabriel sips his beer.

"They'll kill him if he tries to change the timeline," Immanuel says.

"I know," Gabriel says. "But until then..."

"Until then..."

They watch the figure as he traverses the rooftops of Madrid, black against the indigo sky.
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