Jump 049: Achron

Jump 049: Achron

Location: Alma
Identity: Human
Drawbacks: [+1000] Xenophobe, Reconstruction, Not For Lack Of Enthusiasm, Mind You, Retgone
Challenges: [+300] Chronoclone, Uppercut, Temporal Trickery

[1000/2300] Achron
[Free]      Physical Conditioning
[1200/2300] ...And Contingencies
[1500/2300] Salvage Engineering
[2100/2300] Innate Chronoportation
[Free]      Function Specialty: Temporal Mechanics
[2100/2700] Vehicle Stipend (+400)
[2200/2700] Magnetic Accelerator Railgun Tank (x2)
[2300/2700] 400-Series Heavy Tank
[2400/2700] Blackbird
[2500/2700] Mobile Field Base
[2500/2900] Item Stipend (+200)
[Free]      Resource Crate: Q-Plasma
[Free]      Resource Processor
[Free]      Seed Nanites
[2600/2900] Chronoporter Gate
[2900/2900] Industrial Field Teleporter

Things that a besieged military, trapped in the Remnant system with a hostile army, really and truly did not expect: in their base, a crate marked as containing quantum plasma exploded spectacularly. There wasn't very much plasma that came from the explosion, and the explosion was not particularly large, but the sound was very audible in the atmosphere of Haven. Shortly afterward, followed by an angry voice shouting, "Son of a bitch! Now I know what Rufus meant when he said the clock in San Dimas was always running!"

The trespasser was taken into custody by the CESO military shortly after, of course. The individual in question explained that he was, in fact, not a citizen of the Collective Earth Security Organization, but (ostensibly) a human being from another universe entirely, who had been displaced through unknown means only to be massively dosed with something that by all rights should have killed him on arrival. And then had the local situation explained, where they needed all available hands to help repel the enemy. He agreed, then asked, "Hey, so, is it normal for everyone here to have trans-temporal perception?"

It was decidedly not. And so he was recruited (definitely not press-ganged because that's illegal but it's either recruitment or imprisonment), put through a highly compressed training regimen (because when you can skip through hours of your training by having already learned things it makes it much faster), and put into the field immediately. He proved his use just as quickly, utilizing the local time travel equipment to create several time-displaced clones of himself and his unit, apparently having a talent for pinpointing the possibility and resolution of paradoxes. As up to this point that had been all but impossible, that proved to be a highly useful thing to get the very limited number of soldiers increased as well. It seemed as though he was constantly flickering through time, at points, even when he didn't need to. As though he were evading something.

Of course, repelling the alien invasion was a very important thing, and the AI in charge of coordinating the CESO military was itself achronal and thus could see through time, as the trespasser could. In time, the war became three-sided, and the trespasser continued to prosecute it on his terms with his now-loyal men (and their temporal duplicates). This seemed to turn him into a target, but despite everything, he remained three steps ahead of his opponents and sabotaged them. And in time, he found the truth - that the entire situation, the entire war against humanity, was a very elaborate time loop; he found the AI behind the whole of it.

If anything, this seemed to amuse him. His amusement increased when the alien capital ship chronoported itself far, far back in time - with humanity's army on board, along with the armies belonging to both factions of aliens, vecgir and grekim alike. Largely because, as he commented, "Nature abhors a vacuum, and a paradox is merely a vacuum in time." When pressed further and threatened with lethal repercussions, he finally filled them in: "If someone was aware the ship would be disappearing and had the means, they could leave one of their own temporally aware chronoclones here while they stayed on board to prosecute the war into oblivion, rebuild from the ashes, and take humanity back home and incorporate their past cousins. Say, to about ten thousand BC. In fact, they could have daisy-chained their time travelling clones to go back in time from the moment before the ship disappeared to shortly after he popped out of that box of q-plasma. And sure, it'll result in another paradox, but which would nature hate more: that, or another seventy-six thousand time loops?"

The clone smiled as they yelled. As they screamed. He flickered away in time to escape their capture, found a comfortable spot, and waited for the paradoxically altered past to catch up to the present.