Time Frame: 50 years A.Q.B., 1.5 days pass
Ketyl’s POV
We headed out into the wastes and quickly came upon a drum that allowed us to move more quickly through the wastes. We now had a little less than two week’s journey to Silotown. We came upon some really tough undead that spit worms at us but we managed to defeat them. We also came upon a man who claimed to be from Rennin, also a ruin by now.
I guess that means mother is definitely dead by now. She wasn’t young before having me in the gutters of Rennin, the drugs didn’t help with that, and more than 50 years had passed since I had seen her. And then all this… perhaps Dad is still alive somewhere considering how slow elves age, but there’s no guarantee. Mom had told me how he had always kept her on her toes with his magic tricks before he became cruel. I don’t want to even think of the implications of a man like that having charming or ensorcelling magic. I hope the bastard is dead.
Part of me still wants to see Rennin again, but we had to keep moving. We have a larger mission than my childish parental issues. They would just laugh it off as a “Cat’s in the Cradle” situation anyway.
Eventually, we met up with one of the Silotown Saviors, Razzo, who tried to get us in on a deal to buy some ghosts and dune buggies, but his prices were way too high. He told us of how he kept ghosts prisoner until they performed services for him, even ghosts of children. I considered purchasing a few so I could release them once we had safely reached Silotown, but I couldn’t afford to be generous… plus perhaps they’d be saved if we saved the world anyway.
After a night of sleep, we set out on the path again. We came across a strange vehicle, and found that it was powered by hair. Next to some skeleton with a cowboy hat and a sheriff star pinned to his jacket. A note signed ‘D’ said that he clearly didn’t make it to where he was going, so we could take his stuff.
After some work, we managed to get the vehicle moving. I was taught how to drive it by Kronk, and I was doing pretty well for a while. It was nice feeling the wind blowing through my hair after the dry heat of the wastes. Unfortunately, I crashed it into a ritual full of what looked like cultists. They seemed to be stuffing corpses full of insects, presumably they were at least partly responsible for the undead menace.
Unsurprisingly, they did not take my offer of peace and attacked us. Without Korbin there, we had nobody to draw the attacks of our enemies. One of them was so powerful, using magic like I had never seen. That sleet… even the blistering heat of the wastes were nothing next to the chill freezing my bones. After we managed to beat a few back, he disappeared from existence. I had assumed that he had teleported away to report to his superiors, perhaps even Morael. How foolish I was. He had turned himself invisible, just as I had with the frost giants.
So stupid of me not to consider that possibility, and it nearly cost several of our party their lives. Even with the blessing of Ashava, we will not keep getting lucky forever.
Forgive me for going off track mid-fight, but something has been nagging me for a while. A time travel paradox happens when something is changed in the past that would affect someone’s present situation. For instance, say one or more of us died for good. We would complete our quest as normal and set ourselves up for the future to preserve the time loop. We would do this by setting up a “prophecy” with all of our faces, presumably with an artist so that our faces are recorded on that scroll. Let’s call them group A and our current selves group B. The original members of group B saw all of them depicted in that painting. But if one of group B dies for good before they can be depicted in the painting, then it changes their whole reason for going on the adventure, causing a paradox.
Further, say everything goes off without a hitch and we save the world. What happens to us? By saving the world, we’ll have negated our whole reason for going on the quest as the world would never have needed to be saved.
And even if we somehow don’t cause any paradoxes that destroy us or our family or whatever… the people of the future, Iona, Razzo, all the people in the monastery… by changing the present, or their past, we would be wiping out this version of them. While there aren’t many people left, changing the events of the timeline will effectively be genocide on this timeline. Sure, we’ll be saving many more people in the process, but does it excuse effectively killing all of the remaining people of this world? This is a far heavier burden than I anticipated, than any of us could have anticipated.
I guess we don’t really have a choice or any way around it. Not everybody can fit in that time machine and they’d be effectively trapped in it like Orin currently is. I can’t say I understand all of it, but we’ll have to do it, morality concerns be damned.
Sorry, had to get that out of my system.
Anyway, I managed to get rid of his invisibility with my faerie fire and took him out without much fuss. We mopped up the last few and took a look at our vehicle. A part of it had broken off in the crash, hopefully it could still run. We searched the bodies of the cultists for any clues and only found some gold and some scrolls.
No clues, a possibly broken vehicle, and a whole lot of time between us and Silotown. This would be a long trip.