Comic 1165 - Start work on time shenanigans
Posted on 14th Jan 2019, 10:52 PM
in Like a Bullet from Behind
Average Rating: 5 (4 votes) /
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Author Notes:
Other than that, you have no problem letting them all--even Edison--be free to wander the bunker, and you're going to leave Mini Mine with them to try out possession with. You're going to try and find them some more things to do, later.
"Th-thank you," Tesla says.
"Thank you!," Faraday adds.
After a brief pause, she gives a very light elbow nudge to Edison. "Oh, right. Yes." She inhales slowly, as if mustering up the energy to overcome some great obstacle. "...Thank you."
You mentally fill everyone in on the new developments, and you return to Bunker A.
"Caius and Dr. Finch went to go get trade up stuff," Fuse begins. "So, I gotta ask--possession? Like, straight up? ...Can we do that?"
"Dunno," Michelle says. "That one ritual pretty much turns us into ghosts, right? Don't see why we couldn't. No idea what possessin' a real person's like, though."
"That..." Fuse pauses. "We could do something with that."
"Oh, yeah," Michelle agrees. "Hell yeah. Like, think about it: half of us stay physical, half of us go as ghosts. If the Many starts brainjackin' folks, ghost team takes over. If Blondie can blood puppet somebody under the Many's power, possession oughta be able to do it, too."
"Maybe," Fuse replies, and nods. "The Many's brain hax are psychic, and it doesn't even work on animals. So... it shouldn't work on ghosts."
"It may come down to exertion," Liz suggests. "Mine's powers override the Many's influence--the strength of a possessing spirit might not be an equal contest. It should at the very least make it harder for the Many, though."
"Yeah," Fuse says, and nods again. "If it does work, that's a way easier way in than a lot of our other answers. Our ghost selves'll be safer in someone else's body, too... at least, safer than they'd be just wandering around Carpenter's base. Depends on how weird possession is, I guess--for everybody involved."
For now, you want to focus on manipulating time in the red. This will be slightly easier once Dr. Finch and Caius bring back some watches to trade up (probably?), but you can at least get started now.
You cut your palm, and bleed out onto the floor. You open a portal into the red.
You try to see if there's any way to... maybe perceive time. You've grown so adjusted to being able to see through blooded people, down to a microscopic level, and you've started to get used to feeling electricity. It... feels a little like being blind, trying to manipulate time in the red without having any way to measure it organically.
Fuse pulls a cell phone out of his pocket. He flips it open, sets it to display the current time, and casually tosses it into the blood pool. Sploosh. It disappears into the red.
"...Don't you need that?," Liz asks.
"I've got a small collection of burner phones, at this point," Fuse responds.
The phone drifts through the red for a moment, eventually slowing to a stop... and then just kind of hanging there in the not-quite-air.
The numbers displayed don't seem to be changing on their own, at least. It may still be carrying some of its... uh... native time.
You can't alter the cell phone's personal perception of time--you don't have any real control over it. However, if you can change the way time flows in a sort of pocket around it...
You focus.
The time goes up by a minute.
Then, after a lengthy pause,
another minute.
Then another. And another. It begins to accelerate rapidly, minutes turning into an hour into a handful of hours. You pump the brakes, trying to get it to stop--and by the time it does, the cell phone has gone through about six hours in a few outside seconds.
You suspect that precision is going to be, uh, a bit difficult. Once you start manually changing time, it really wants to go.
Before we go further, we ought to ask either BigRed or the tradesmen if there's a native god of time or subgod that is narcissistic enough that thinks time is its domain
we don't wanna be stepping on toes and making more enemies when we have stuff we gotta deal with already
We're working on a lot of good things right now. I'm not convinced we also need to be investing that much energy in time shenanigans.
I'd like to ask about the potential consequences of pulling out the red, mixing dimensions. It would be good to know if this is a thing we could keep in our back pocket in case of emergency, or if it would basically doom reality and we should never ever do it.
On the plus side, if it WOULD doom reality, the Tradesmen are likely to tell us so cheap or free - dooming reality is probably bad for their business long-term.
I mean, unless Mine likes the pain, or wants a reminder that she's not invulnerable, or something like that.
If we're willing to entertain the concept, we should speak to Fuse and the girls to set up an experiment to see if Fuse can concentrate through the static enough to make his pyrokinesis work - if he can't, then we can talk to the girls about if they'd like to help us deal with The Many. If the girls can shut down The Many's psychic powers while Mine gets into range, we could just dump Many into a blood portal like we did with Knox, and then give them the ultimatum that either they leave us (and anybody else that they've got to be around) alone and we drop them off unharmed somewhere, or we're going to find a nice abandoned place like Illworth or Mars and leave them there for the rest of their lives.
At this point we don’t even know how Carpenter is keeping The Many from interfering with his own mind - he may not even be keeping them “on the premises” because of the danger that they pose to himself and his underlings.
Worst-case scenario, she gets some not-in-body time that she might enjoy. Best-case scenario, her aura's spiky and she and Edison can spend some adorable prickly bonding-time learning to weaponize it.
(...heck. It wouldn't surprise me that much if it uncovered that she's a bit body-dysphoric? In which case, we might get a glimpse of what she'd prefer to look like.)
Two clocks synced over a wire on an open portal, the one in real time-space giving the one in red time-space your exit data.
speaking of the error room, get some random tips and Carpenters fuck it, I'm bored date while your there.