If it's any consolation, I wanted to keep it, too. Applebottom is this dangling plot thread that I intended Puck to sort of fix eventually... which should terrify everyone, as Puck tends not to really do anything unless there's some entertainment he gets from it. He's not exactly the most philanthropic of characters...EnigmaticOne wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 4:18 pmBut don't get rid of Puck's asking who will stand up and take down Applebottom! I liked having Dennis' building realization about how we could do it.
It wouldn't create a paradox. I have some rules about time travel that I was super duper happy to see get included in a certain superhero movie that recently came out. Essentially, it's impossible to change the past. By going back in time, all you can ever hope to do is create a branching reality. If you go back in time to kill Hitler, you create a universe where some mysterious figure showed up and killed Hitler and things happen differently, but your world is still there. The reality that spawned you and gave you the impetuous to go back and kill Hitler still exists. If it didn't, there would be a paradox.Shock wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 5:08 pmMy mind started wandering last night and I got to wondering, what would happen if Black Ice got sent back to Pandora? I know they stopped using it since the truth about the Elpis came out but it has to still be a theoretical possibility. Would she then run into herself simultaneously arriving from her home dimension? Get stuck in some kind of time loop? Cause a paradox?
One of the features of the Astrolabe is that is creates a causality loop. The agents it employs are capable of altering the course of history without creating a branching reality. It and it alone is capable of altering the past.
So, if Black Ice were shoved through the Pandora gate again, she would have shown up on Pandora and been with the Armada... unless someone were to reconfigure the gate. All of the gates Argus distributed were set up so that whenever someone was shoved through, the arrived at a fixed time and location. Despite being sent through years apart, people like Hessian, Granddaddy Vitesse, and Therianthrope all arrived at the same time. If shoved through, she would arrive just as her younger self was arriving.
How will this be protected? Well, for starters, as soon as it was discovered what the nature of the Armada was, the gate on 137 was destroyed. No one is going through that one. Still, it's entirely possible for someone to reverse engineer it. This is actually a plot point I plan on bringing up later. It'll also explain something the Drifter said when she spoke about Pandora to Sophie:
"In my travels, I found a dimension... I didn't stay their long, but it... It's... It's a penal colony. I met this person--Chen Lei. He was like a chieftain. He told me that he had been exiled for trying to bring down an oppressive government. They used magic to banish him to this backwater world. According to him, there were people from other worlds. I've tried to find out more about it--how all of these unrelated dimensions all know about the same penal dimension."
There's a lot to unpack there--some of which doesn't mesh up with what Jack saw. Pandora's a world I intend on revisiting (though it won't be the first world we return to) and will slowly resolve some of this.