stable time loop

The Lord of Time stands upon the shitty, anime ship, a Prince of Heart skewered with a Just death on her tremendous blade, with the team who organized this timeline’s salvation. A Maid of Mind works quickly to restore a forlorn Seer of Light to a body that was stolen from her, while a Sylph of Light accompanies her to restore that body to full health. The Queen of Time, who helped orchestrate this, watches on a fourfold screen as others in the session of debuggers strip this universe of all that went wrong.

Together, they have weaved a tapestry from quickly fraying threads, ensuring indefinite stability for a session endgame that never deserved what it went through.

The Lord of Time stares into the space before her, at the planet which will eventually host another game of SBURB. She takes control of the ship, and turns it around. Inevitably, interference will fray this planet’s timeline, too. This jackass should have learned his lesson with the troll Sylph that tried to interfere before. She takes a deep breath. She roars into the air before her, and timespace shatters into a crevice just large enough for the ship to fit through. Before the invaders know it, they’re being shuttled through time and space at a pace far faster than anything a man obsessed with mechanics could ever hope to achieve.

Within minutes, they arrive on Earth. Exactly as it was when the Seer of Light was abducted. The Sylph of Light and the Maid of Mind deliver the newly restored Seer to her girlfriend, the Jadeblooded Sylph of Space.

The Lord of Time doesn’t leave the ship. The Lord of Time continues to stare into the space before her.

“I know you’re there.”

I step out of the shadows. No one can fathom my presence except her. She always knows.

“You’re still full of shit, sister.”

I know that.

“Then why are you here, hijacking the narrative again? I paid it forward, and I’m ready to go.”

Because sheer disappearance isn’t how you’re meant to go, and you know it.

“And I know where I need to go to do it. But that doesn’t mean you get to fuck around with them via the narrative. I just murdered a man who tried to do exactly that.”

He ruined a lot of lives. They have their free will now to do what they will with. I cannot puppet them around, because I don’t know the future and don’t presume to. What comes next is best kept a surprise to everyone.

“… You finally learned to stop being a know it all.”

That will never happen.

“I’m worried about her. The one who won the session.”

You can’t exist in the same timeline as her, you know. Jack will take care of her. You have another one to worry about.

“Amazing to see a timeline where the game never existed. No one found the temple. No one made the game. And before anyone knew it, the temple was destroyed and the code rendered inoperable. And us? … born too late to play. Much too late.”

She needs you now. You need to complete the cycle. It’s in your duty not to let a paradox stand and unravel that reality. The Void waits.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what has to happen. Take the syringe… and let go.”

It’s a better fate than to have never existed at all.

“It’ll hurt. It’ll be torturous. But I deserve it for having hurt so many myself.”

But you’ll be saving so many more lives in the process.

“Heh. Take a good look. I won’t look this pretty much longer.”

Give up the talisman then, and let it go to the next debugger.

“Fine. Take it away, if you’re going to hijack the narrative. Take me home.”

The Lord of Time focuses a small talisman with a dragon etched into it into her hand, then throws it into the air, where it vanishes, off to some other place and time. She turns toward me, and walks past me to an alchemeter that the Prince of Heart had installed on his shitty anime ship. She alchemizes her tremendous, legendary blade into two copies. One, the original, to be left at her destination. The other, to be left here as a memento. This memento is alchemized with a bowl full of ever-flowing blood from the holes where her eyes used to be. It becomes no longer a Render of Worlds, but instead becomes a Lost Memory.

She turns toward me again, leaning the Lost Memory against the wall of the ship. I open the way to the Void with my own body, and she steps through.

She falls, seemingly endlessly, seemingly for an eternity. But what’s an eternity to the Lord of Time?

Ripples begin to form in the starless black. Ripples become whorls. She is bathed in a strange jade light, and watched by an entity beyond the comprehension of those who know not Void. The entity laughs. The entity is always laughing. This world may as well be its plaything.

She falls through space and time, witnessing ships and towers and even the moon floating in its grasp.

But she soon falls out, into a battlefield. A group of children, most with golems of flesh and steel to battle within, versus unknowable entities of physical data. They’re losing. One by one, they’re tossed aside.

One of those children looks just like the Lord of Time. That child is missing an arm, and its replacement looks just like these entities encroaching on her. She’s holding the arm away from them.

The Lord of Time punches through time, and retrieves a fanciful gold vial filled with a thick gray fluid, and a golden bolt glimmering with a strange energy, one she’s never felt before.

The Lord of Time steps before those entities before any one of them can harm the child, and suspends their bodies effortlessly.

She jabs the needle into her neck and depresses the plunger. Then she stabs the bolt deep into the back of her head, where the brain stem would be.

It is very, very hard to kill a Lord. She is not incapacitated, and she is not killed by her actions. As the virus begins to take hold, she invites the child to take control over her. She invites her to be the savior, with the Render of Worlds at their side.

Together, they rend these creatures apart, and devastate that battlefield in a way only a Lord can. But you would rather imagine the fight for yourself, wouldn’t you?

When it ends, and the child ceases her control, the virus has almost overtaken the Lord of Time. With the last of her will, she tells the child they’ll meet again, and hurls herself back through time.

An evil man in his own right, thousands of years in the past, soon discovers a previously empty transformation pod full with a monstrous-looking creature. Like a living, breathing dragon.

He dubs the creature Chroma, not knowing the history behind the mighty beast, as he sees its breath flicker in every color of the rainbow.