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Inmate Ledger Page
Jun. 4th, 2025 09:24 pmAt the top of the page, where his name should be, it looks as though someone spilled the ink: a solid inch or two of the page is soaked through, slightly warped and brittle with it, although there are no stains on the pages to either side.
He fought in the Causality War - and in retrospect, that is the only thing he can say with any certainty.
User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW:
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shipoftheseus
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Jedao Two, Kahl
Character Name: ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️
Series: One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Age: ⬛️⬛️⬛️ Too old. Considerably older than he looks; it's implied that the Time Fuckery has affected his body's clock and he's not aging properly. He spent 20 years just building The Farm At The End of Time, and he was an adult and a veteran before that.
From When?: ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ After the end of the Novella; at some point in his Time War II against Weldon and Smantha, somebody Gets him.
Inmate Justification: He's killed so many people. So many! definitely thousands, many of them innocents, idealists, and optimists. He doesn't care about manipulating, ruining, killing, or erasing people from time to get his way, or about fucking with people in the past for a laugh. He is pro human extinction. He's extremely callous and casual about it. He's a controlling bastard on the scale of All of Time, and a hypocrite to boot, willing to fight the next Causality War to the very last man just like he did the first. Never Again means Never Again for everybody else, even if he has to do it over and over and over again to stop everybody else.
Arrival: Agrees and then rapidly regrets it when he realizes the extent of the Admiral's own Time Fuckery.
Abilities/Powers: Obviously he will not have access to a Time Machine in game (although he's probably capable of building one from parts, obv this is game-breaking. I would only use it if we had an event plot built around shit going sideways). However, in addition to being a former spy/solider/time warrior/all-time historical murderer with attendant skill sets, he's also extremely good at tinkering, building/rebuilding/retrofitting all manner of machinery, including-especially 1) Useful Farm Vehicles, from old Soviet tractors to weather control satellites, and 2) a wide variety of the scifi smorgasbord of possible murder weapons. Nanites, drones, robots, bombs, lasers, etc. He can get them working and by working I mean killing. He knows a lot about poisons, can snipe with any kind of historical or futuristic gun, etc. He can definitely use some historical weapons but probably more at a hobbyist/improvisational level of skill rather than the professional level he has with guns.
Inmate Information: The last time warrior is a man without a name, without a country, without a history. What he does have is a particular set of skills, and a steaming heap of nihilism, bitterness, and misanthropy, wrapped in layers of self-serving justification and low-key cottagecore hedonism. After becoming disillusioned with the Causality War, he made it his self-imposed mission to track down and eliminate every other time soldier, and then to set himself up as the spider in a web for any new time travelers, not only killing them, but following them back to their origins and preemptively preventing them from ever developing time travel in the first place.
He is completely disconnected from human empathy: he can enjoy a pleasant conversation with someone, then feed them to his pet dinosaur, then make sure their mother never marries their father. Because she was run over by a train, if need be. Time is irreparably broken, nothing matters, and everyone is, in some way, already dead. History is his playground, and he treats it that way. People of the past are just puppets he can play with. Until he and Zoe reach their truce, no one else he encounters even approaches being a real person to him.
He has also fallen all the way down a juiced-up version of the ecofascist rabbit hole. He fundamentally doesn't believe humanity should have a future. They had their chance and fucked it all up. It's his duty and his alone to protect the planet and time itself from human life and society continuing. There should be no more people.
And yet, somehow, there are. And he hates them, not only for existing, but also for daring to be happy. He hates their sleek sci-fi utopia for being "twee" long before he learns just how right he is about them repeating cycles he tried to break. But most damning of all, he's willing to go right back to repeating those cycles too: before Weldon and Smantha destroy his Farm At The End of the World with a Causality bomb, he could have eliminated them by sacrifing his own life; he's their grandfather, and if he died, the wave form would probably collapse. But it doesn't occur to him to make that sacrifice.
Partly this is natural selfishness - hasn't be earned his retirement? But it's also the reaction of a man who trusts no one, whose colleagues and superiors and companions and whose own identity were all rewritten by dueling timeline changes over and over until the paper tore through.
He can't rely on anyone else to prevent the next time war, even if he has to start the next time war himself to pre-erase another society with the capacity to start it. Only when he goes to fetch the last Causality Bomb, his enemies have beaten him to it. With his own time detonated and disconnected from his descendants in an act of preemptive self-defense, isolating them from any upstream changes he could make, he can no longer prevent them from existing. Instead of surrendering the future to the people of the future, he chooses to hunt them one by one, just like he did with his colleagues. He's going to jump right back into the next Time War and rewrite as much shit as he has to in order to eliminate his enemy, no matter how much of time he has to ruin to do it. He can't trust them to be stewards of a new stretch of time - even though he's proving by interfering that he's no better.
He gets to be the last person on Earth, he gets to have the good life and no one else, he gets to say humanity should end and he has the right to enforce his decision, no matter the collateral damage. He survived the Time War. He won, so he earned his retirement, he earned the right to end humanity forever. He's the strong man who has to/gets to do the bad things for The Purity of the World.
And so his arrogance, entitlement, and hypocrisy lead to a preemptive strike from his own descendants, and he does exactly what he hates his own former bosses and compatriots for doing. He hates the idea of another Time War with almost everything he has - but not quite enough not to try to win it, thereby sacrificing the closest thing he has to principles. No man should have the power to re-write the past, but also, no man should have the power to decide the fate of every generation after his. The last time warrior rightfully condemns the disastrous consequences of the former, but fiercely, viciously fights to keep power over the latter, resulting in the loss of almost everything he had built or halfway cared about.
Path to Redemption: Woof. This guy is gonna be a long road, and the time/identity fuckery and devaluing of death on the barge is not going to help matters. He won't take accusations of his own hypocrisy lying down; he's much too deep in his anger, but also won't want to admit to deep emotions easily. Every day he's not fighting in the Time War is a good day! Trauma, what trauma. He literally can't remember it, because plenty of it literally never even happened.
And yet. There's a part of him that does see the value in humanity. He repeatedly goes back to a one-minute fragment of time to hear the Shakespearean comedic actor Will Kempe perform, even though he can never hear the end of the joke. There was a time when he was so angry about the pointlessness of the Time War, destroying whole cultures for the sake of rivalries that don't even exist any more. He's not a sadist, although he does have a somewhat jaded Tex Avery sense of humor at this point. He wants to build something real. He wants to protect the natural world and the nature of the world. He hates humanity because he had an up-close seat to the worst of humanity's capacity for senseless destruction.
He needs to have an identity that isn't only 'the last survivor of the Causality War.' He needs to do more than care about individual people; he has to believe that humanity as a whole won't always self-sabotage, that it is capable of acts of greatness that it is not necessarily doomed to ruin, that it is not only worth saving, but that it is salvageable, that it can survive being saved. But even more than that, he needs to let go of his own certainty that he has the right to be the one who decides on everyone else's behalf that it shouldn't even get another chance to try, with or without a guarantee.
A warden will need to appeal to the small things first: his love of baking bread and fixing tractors, peaceful sunny days, a pet dinosaur who likes chin scritches. He doesn't want to be caught in endless Time Wars. He wants peace - because peace is good, because art is beautiful, because time should be whole.
He doesn't think anyone should do what he and his world have done. He needs to process his trauma around the black hole of his own origin, around having no name and no nation, having a life and a loyalty unraveled underneath him. Once he can reconcile with that, it might be easier to accept that his suffering and his survival do not make him uniquely qualified to decide the fate of the timestream and humanity as a whole. He needs to reconcile with the fact that people who are trapped by the decisions of others - people who suffer in history and who can't be saved - are still people - but that the answer to the problem of their suffering is not 'no one can suffer if there are no more people.' He deserves peace and agency, and so does everyone else, but he can't enforce it at the pointy end of a dinosaur - and also doesn't have to.
History: The last time warriorwas born in a country that no longer exists was never born.
It's possible that time travel could have been invented in a world where humanity existed with some level of Cold-Ward-esque tensions between major powers. Once knowledge of time travel existed, it's possible that both (or more than two) of the powers in such a quiet rivalry might acquire and develop that same technology. And if they did both have the capacity to time travel, then it would have been inevitable that they both stationed agents in the past, just in case. And because the first-mover advantage in the case of time travel is absolute, the societies that could have had time travel technology must have used it, preemptively unmaking their enemies in an attempt to do so before they were themselves made to have never existed. And because of the nature of time travel, actually all attempts to change the past were made in the past, at the same time.
Agents who had been assigned to the past, now stranded in time were cut off from these changes. They were patriots of countries that would never exist - but they had time machines. They could try to fix it. And in so doing, created new changes and new societies that tried to use time travel to guarantee their own emergence, leading to more time travelers and more changes. So the societies that had time travel inevitably were the most paranoid, the most military, the most aggressive, because their own time traveling soldiers meddled to shape them in that way to give themselves the most support against their enemies in time who could not be eliminated only by destroying their origins.
One of these societies developed Causality Bombs, which completely destroyed the continuity of time. With one piece of time no longer connected to the next, societies could be protected to some degree from meddling with their pasts, like a downstream river protected from detritus blocked at a dam.
And then Causality Broke. The narrator compares it to climate change: they never imagined that human activity could destroy something so vast and fundamental, but so many individual acts of degradation built up over time, until something in the nature of time itself failed. Time was no longer linear: instead of a tower with each block resting on top of the next, all of the blocks fell so they were no longer even touching, Instead of a river flowing from high ground to low ground, time became a vast region of isolated ponds, lakes, and puddles. Instead of a book moving from page to page, it was a scatter of torn-out pages disconnected from each other, and in some stretches - in the period of what might have been time-traveling nations conducting iterations of the Causality War - shredded into illegible scraps smaller than individual letters, into mere momentary sands.
The history of earth was filled with time refugees, glaringly out of place and yet irrelevant, because effects were no longer tied to causes on the larger historical scale. An invasion of future settlers in 1890s Europe would have zero effect on WWI, because the many months and years of 1914-1918 had no past, but were self-contained worlds whose starting conditions were unalterable and which did not continue past the ragged edge where that chunk of time was broken off. And in all of them, the former agents of dozens or hundreds of non-existent and mutually exclusive versions of non-existent nations were still fighting over the scraps, trying to build empires in the ruins of time.
One of the time soldiers grew completely disillusioned with this whole fucking mess. He realized there were no sides that meant anything; people who had been on your side in one version of time might have been born on the opposite side of the conflict the next time you met them, or they might be from a different version of the same country sent to eliminate your version in favor of theirs. What cause was left to be loyal to? Even if they had ever existed, what meaningful differences could there have been between nations willing to destroy the fabric of time to eradicate their enemies? If they didn't exist, did any of them have the right to protect themselves? What loyalty could there possibly be to a military hierarchy of a society he not only didn't remember, which not only did not exist, but could never have existed, because the stretch of time it might have been able to had already been pulverized to a wasteland of mere disconnected seconds.
Causality had broken, there was no purpose to the fighting, and yet people were still doing it. Bitter and furious, the nameless time warrior systematically hunted down every single agent, every other time traveler, killing them in every single fragment of time where they appeared before they could escape to another, and destroyed their time machines.
When at last every single one was gone, he retired. He went to the far future, to the time where linear causality picked up again on the shores of the destroyed period, to the untrammeled empty world. There, he sets himself up in solitary comfort. He builds a farmhouse. He raids the history of time for food and technology, fixing up soviet-era harvesters to run on renewable energy and programming weather satellites. He gets a pet dinosaur. He drinks wine from the best years. He learns to make bread. It's a perfect sunny day at the end of the world.
And in the scattered chunks of the past, with time shattered into pieces, it turns out to be almost trivially easy to invent time travel. It's possible for Neanderthals to do it if they bang rocks too hard. And every "new" time traveler comes to his final shore, the edge were time starts working properly again. His alarms go off. He comes to greet them, to talk to them, to learn about their lives. He breaks bread with them, drinks with them, and once he knows enough about their origin to erase it, rings the dinner bell for Miffly to come eat them. He keeps some of their time machines in the barn, and then goes back to uproot them, branch and stem, and from ever inventing time travel in the first place. He finds new ways to do it, sometimes. You've to keep yourself entertained.
He comes back to the moment right after the moment he left, keeping the timeline of his farm at the end of the world pristine and linear. He does this for twenty years of on-farm time, not counting trips back.
Then, one day, he gets a pair of visitors that he can't place in history - because they're from his future. Sleek and shiny in white and silver outfits out of golden age utopian scifi, cheerful and blithe and bland and twee, he hates them even before the most unbearable revelation: they take him to the future of their cheerful beautiful happy society, where there's a statue of him. Grandfather. The Founder. And some woman???
FUCK.
She's apparently from their society, several generations in. But she looks exactly like the Grandmother statue, so. Time paradoxes! Whatever.
(There's one single hint implying that there might have been a different woman with a different temporal origin for some "previous" iteration of the timeline, whose genes maybe just remixed back into a very similar person who was then identified as the founder's wife: the last time warrior has some protective suits that let him get closer to the Destroyed Regions, and he wonders why he has several. Was he always alone at the end of the world, or had there been, at some point, a companion? Who he doesn't remember because his life was changed for him without his knowledge or input. Or with the input of the person he no longer is. There's no way to know. He doesn't dwell on it.)
She comes back in time to his time. And he does his very best to kill her. And she does her very best to kill him right back. They hack each other's microdrones. They poison each other's food. They go hunting with laser rifles. They fight each other with mongol hordes and ray guns and trampling wooly mammoths. The go back to the past to get all manner of things to kill each other with, but neither of them goes back in time within the farmhouse time, to catch the other unawares at an earlier moment. In that sense, they are both viciously trying to sabotage and assassinate each other, but they are also both "playing fair."
He hasn't had a challenge against an equal in ages. He is having so much fun. Eventually they set up a battle royale arena brawl by proxy, drawing each of their forces from history's greatest monsters. Torquemada beats Stalin to death with a tractor axel. Vlad Tepes fistfights Pol Pot. Many of them are, frankly, not built for hand to hand despite the atrocities on their heads. It's a hilariously anticlimactic clusterfuck. Hitler hides until the end and they finish him off by having Miffly chase and eat him. The last time warrior and the woman he refuses to repopulate the Earth with laugh and laugh and laugh. He asks why she's trying to kill him, anyway. Doesn't she want to create her perfect society?
Fuck no. She had a front-row seat to all the ways that perfect society could only be maintained by authoritarian control and brainwashing. They couldn't fuck with her memories because it might risk changing her Destiny to Be the Founder's Wife, so she was the only one whose dissent was not erased - and she had to watch everyone being Happy in their Perfect society, knowing why and how that happiness was manufactured. She is perfectly happy to erase them all by refusing to produce them.
Her name is Zoe. They come to a truce: if neither of them wants to have kids and make the Glorious Future, maybe they can just take it as read that they're trying to kill each other, and skip the work. Maybe they can hang out and enjoy having the company of someone whose cynicism matches their own. Maybe they can each have a friend who isn't ever rewritten or erased. Maybe he can take her on a whirlwind tour of the highlights of history. They can dance in the roaring twenties and visit orgies in Rome and picnic on the banks of the Triassic. They can fuck like rabbits as long as they're both very sure they're using protection. And it'll be fine, for sure.
Two agents of the Glorious Future, Weldon and Smantha [sic], are stalking them here and there throughout time as they do this, "encouraging" them to come around and have babies after all! They are the Founders. They're in love! Come on -
The last time warrior doesn't like it. No one else is supposed to be gallivanting around time, and he doesn't know what they could or would do to force him to build their world. He resolves to go into one remaining fragment of time from ground zero of the Causality war, a one-minute spar of soldiers setting up one of the Causality Bombs that didn't manage to detonate. He's going to put an end to the beginning of Weldon and Smantha's future once and for all. But when he goes to get it, it's already gone.
Weldon and Smantha got it. The Founder told them where to find it on his death bed, in one possible version of time. And because they will detonate the bomb in between the time warrior's time and theirs, nothing he does or fails to do can affect the rise of their society, insulated in their own wellspring of time. As the very reality of the home he's build for two decades disintegrates, he and Zoe escape in their time machines, resolving to have their revenge and eradicate the future and the children they could have had, to do it all over again.
Miffly doesn't fit in the time machine and can't be saved. RIP Miffly.
Sample Network Entry: We're meant to do ice-breakers, yes?
In the spirit of sticking my tongue out and saying 'nah-nah you can't make me', which seems like the most appropriate response to an abduction this fucking absurd, I'm going to ruin one for you instead.
[He grins cheerfully, seemingly unbothered, despite the bluster.]
You know that question that goes, if you could have any four people from history over for dinner, or five, or ten, or whatever the default number is for your timeline? And people are always saying, like, Einstein or Marlowe or Martin Luther King II or the real Anastasia Romanov or whatever, geniuses and heroes and potentates and mysteries?
Well, almost all of those people are absolutely shit dinner guests.
Sample RP: TDM, TDM
Special Notes: I would genuinely like him to be listed as nameless. Perhaps as the Unnamed Narrator in OOC records, and for the Admiral to just produce [STATIC]/black square emojis when he would otherwise say the time warrior's name IC. The fact that he doesn't have a name because he was never born is really fundamental to the whole horror of his situation. In breaches he's gonna be, like. Guy Mann. But that's not his name.
User DW:
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Jedao Two, Kahl
Character Name: ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️
Series: One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Age: ⬛️⬛️⬛️ Too old. Considerably older than he looks; it's implied that the Time Fuckery has affected his body's clock and he's not aging properly. He spent 20 years just building The Farm At The End of Time, and he was an adult and a veteran before that.
From When?: ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ After the end of the Novella; at some point in his Time War II against Weldon and Smantha, somebody Gets him.
Inmate Justification: He's killed so many people. So many! definitely thousands, many of them innocents, idealists, and optimists. He doesn't care about manipulating, ruining, killing, or erasing people from time to get his way, or about fucking with people in the past for a laugh. He is pro human extinction. He's extremely callous and casual about it. He's a controlling bastard on the scale of All of Time, and a hypocrite to boot, willing to fight the next Causality War to the very last man just like he did the first. Never Again means Never Again for everybody else, even if he has to do it over and over and over again to stop everybody else.
Arrival: Agrees and then rapidly regrets it when he realizes the extent of the Admiral's own Time Fuckery.
Abilities/Powers: Obviously he will not have access to a Time Machine in game (although he's probably capable of building one from parts, obv this is game-breaking. I would only use it if we had an event plot built around shit going sideways). However, in addition to being a former spy/solider/time warrior/all-time historical murderer with attendant skill sets, he's also extremely good at tinkering, building/rebuilding/retrofitting all manner of machinery, including-especially 1) Useful Farm Vehicles, from old Soviet tractors to weather control satellites, and 2) a wide variety of the scifi smorgasbord of possible murder weapons. Nanites, drones, robots, bombs, lasers, etc. He can get them working and by working I mean killing. He knows a lot about poisons, can snipe with any kind of historical or futuristic gun, etc. He can definitely use some historical weapons but probably more at a hobbyist/improvisational level of skill rather than the professional level he has with guns.
Inmate Information: The last time warrior is a man without a name, without a country, without a history. What he does have is a particular set of skills, and a steaming heap of nihilism, bitterness, and misanthropy, wrapped in layers of self-serving justification and low-key cottagecore hedonism. After becoming disillusioned with the Causality War, he made it his self-imposed mission to track down and eliminate every other time soldier, and then to set himself up as the spider in a web for any new time travelers, not only killing them, but following them back to their origins and preemptively preventing them from ever developing time travel in the first place.
He is completely disconnected from human empathy: he can enjoy a pleasant conversation with someone, then feed them to his pet dinosaur, then make sure their mother never marries their father. Because she was run over by a train, if need be. Time is irreparably broken, nothing matters, and everyone is, in some way, already dead. History is his playground, and he treats it that way. People of the past are just puppets he can play with. Until he and Zoe reach their truce, no one else he encounters even approaches being a real person to him.
He has also fallen all the way down a juiced-up version of the ecofascist rabbit hole. He fundamentally doesn't believe humanity should have a future. They had their chance and fucked it all up. It's his duty and his alone to protect the planet and time itself from human life and society continuing. There should be no more people.
And yet, somehow, there are. And he hates them, not only for existing, but also for daring to be happy. He hates their sleek sci-fi utopia for being "twee" long before he learns just how right he is about them repeating cycles he tried to break. But most damning of all, he's willing to go right back to repeating those cycles too: before Weldon and Smantha destroy his Farm At The End of the World with a Causality bomb, he could have eliminated them by sacrifing his own life; he's their grandfather, and if he died, the wave form would probably collapse. But it doesn't occur to him to make that sacrifice.
Partly this is natural selfishness - hasn't be earned his retirement? But it's also the reaction of a man who trusts no one, whose colleagues and superiors and companions and whose own identity were all rewritten by dueling timeline changes over and over until the paper tore through.
He can't rely on anyone else to prevent the next time war, even if he has to start the next time war himself to pre-erase another society with the capacity to start it. Only when he goes to fetch the last Causality Bomb, his enemies have beaten him to it. With his own time detonated and disconnected from his descendants in an act of preemptive self-defense, isolating them from any upstream changes he could make, he can no longer prevent them from existing. Instead of surrendering the future to the people of the future, he chooses to hunt them one by one, just like he did with his colleagues. He's going to jump right back into the next Time War and rewrite as much shit as he has to in order to eliminate his enemy, no matter how much of time he has to ruin to do it. He can't trust them to be stewards of a new stretch of time - even though he's proving by interfering that he's no better.
He gets to be the last person on Earth, he gets to have the good life and no one else, he gets to say humanity should end and he has the right to enforce his decision, no matter the collateral damage. He survived the Time War. He won, so he earned his retirement, he earned the right to end humanity forever. He's the strong man who has to/gets to do the bad things for The Purity of the World.
And so his arrogance, entitlement, and hypocrisy lead to a preemptive strike from his own descendants, and he does exactly what he hates his own former bosses and compatriots for doing. He hates the idea of another Time War with almost everything he has - but not quite enough not to try to win it, thereby sacrificing the closest thing he has to principles. No man should have the power to re-write the past, but also, no man should have the power to decide the fate of every generation after his. The last time warrior rightfully condemns the disastrous consequences of the former, but fiercely, viciously fights to keep power over the latter, resulting in the loss of almost everything he had built or halfway cared about.
Path to Redemption: Woof. This guy is gonna be a long road, and the time/identity fuckery and devaluing of death on the barge is not going to help matters. He won't take accusations of his own hypocrisy lying down; he's much too deep in his anger, but also won't want to admit to deep emotions easily. Every day he's not fighting in the Time War is a good day! Trauma, what trauma. He literally can't remember it, because plenty of it literally never even happened.
And yet. There's a part of him that does see the value in humanity. He repeatedly goes back to a one-minute fragment of time to hear the Shakespearean comedic actor Will Kempe perform, even though he can never hear the end of the joke. There was a time when he was so angry about the pointlessness of the Time War, destroying whole cultures for the sake of rivalries that don't even exist any more. He's not a sadist, although he does have a somewhat jaded Tex Avery sense of humor at this point. He wants to build something real. He wants to protect the natural world and the nature of the world. He hates humanity because he had an up-close seat to the worst of humanity's capacity for senseless destruction.
He needs to have an identity that isn't only 'the last survivor of the Causality War.' He needs to do more than care about individual people; he has to believe that humanity as a whole won't always self-sabotage, that it is capable of acts of greatness that it is not necessarily doomed to ruin, that it is not only worth saving, but that it is salvageable, that it can survive being saved. But even more than that, he needs to let go of his own certainty that he has the right to be the one who decides on everyone else's behalf that it shouldn't even get another chance to try, with or without a guarantee.
A warden will need to appeal to the small things first: his love of baking bread and fixing tractors, peaceful sunny days, a pet dinosaur who likes chin scritches. He doesn't want to be caught in endless Time Wars. He wants peace - because peace is good, because art is beautiful, because time should be whole.
He doesn't think anyone should do what he and his world have done. He needs to process his trauma around the black hole of his own origin, around having no name and no nation, having a life and a loyalty unraveled underneath him. Once he can reconcile with that, it might be easier to accept that his suffering and his survival do not make him uniquely qualified to decide the fate of the timestream and humanity as a whole. He needs to reconcile with the fact that people who are trapped by the decisions of others - people who suffer in history and who can't be saved - are still people - but that the answer to the problem of their suffering is not 'no one can suffer if there are no more people.' He deserves peace and agency, and so does everyone else, but he can't enforce it at the pointy end of a dinosaur - and also doesn't have to.
History: The last time warrior
It's possible that time travel could have been invented in a world where humanity existed with some level of Cold-Ward-esque tensions between major powers. Once knowledge of time travel existed, it's possible that both (or more than two) of the powers in such a quiet rivalry might acquire and develop that same technology. And if they did both have the capacity to time travel, then it would have been inevitable that they both stationed agents in the past, just in case. And because the first-mover advantage in the case of time travel is absolute, the societies that could have had time travel technology must have used it, preemptively unmaking their enemies in an attempt to do so before they were themselves made to have never existed. And because of the nature of time travel, actually all attempts to change the past were made in the past, at the same time.
Agents who had been assigned to the past, now stranded in time were cut off from these changes. They were patriots of countries that would never exist - but they had time machines. They could try to fix it. And in so doing, created new changes and new societies that tried to use time travel to guarantee their own emergence, leading to more time travelers and more changes. So the societies that had time travel inevitably were the most paranoid, the most military, the most aggressive, because their own time traveling soldiers meddled to shape them in that way to give themselves the most support against their enemies in time who could not be eliminated only by destroying their origins.
One of these societies developed Causality Bombs, which completely destroyed the continuity of time. With one piece of time no longer connected to the next, societies could be protected to some degree from meddling with their pasts, like a downstream river protected from detritus blocked at a dam.
And then Causality Broke. The narrator compares it to climate change: they never imagined that human activity could destroy something so vast and fundamental, but so many individual acts of degradation built up over time, until something in the nature of time itself failed. Time was no longer linear: instead of a tower with each block resting on top of the next, all of the blocks fell so they were no longer even touching, Instead of a river flowing from high ground to low ground, time became a vast region of isolated ponds, lakes, and puddles. Instead of a book moving from page to page, it was a scatter of torn-out pages disconnected from each other, and in some stretches - in the period of what might have been time-traveling nations conducting iterations of the Causality War - shredded into illegible scraps smaller than individual letters, into mere momentary sands.
The history of earth was filled with time refugees, glaringly out of place and yet irrelevant, because effects were no longer tied to causes on the larger historical scale. An invasion of future settlers in 1890s Europe would have zero effect on WWI, because the many months and years of 1914-1918 had no past, but were self-contained worlds whose starting conditions were unalterable and which did not continue past the ragged edge where that chunk of time was broken off. And in all of them, the former agents of dozens or hundreds of non-existent and mutually exclusive versions of non-existent nations were still fighting over the scraps, trying to build empires in the ruins of time.
One of the time soldiers grew completely disillusioned with this whole fucking mess. He realized there were no sides that meant anything; people who had been on your side in one version of time might have been born on the opposite side of the conflict the next time you met them, or they might be from a different version of the same country sent to eliminate your version in favor of theirs. What cause was left to be loyal to? Even if they had ever existed, what meaningful differences could there have been between nations willing to destroy the fabric of time to eradicate their enemies? If they didn't exist, did any of them have the right to protect themselves? What loyalty could there possibly be to a military hierarchy of a society he not only didn't remember, which not only did not exist, but could never have existed, because the stretch of time it might have been able to had already been pulverized to a wasteland of mere disconnected seconds.
Causality had broken, there was no purpose to the fighting, and yet people were still doing it. Bitter and furious, the nameless time warrior systematically hunted down every single agent, every other time traveler, killing them in every single fragment of time where they appeared before they could escape to another, and destroyed their time machines.
When at last every single one was gone, he retired. He went to the far future, to the time where linear causality picked up again on the shores of the destroyed period, to the untrammeled empty world. There, he sets himself up in solitary comfort. He builds a farmhouse. He raids the history of time for food and technology, fixing up soviet-era harvesters to run on renewable energy and programming weather satellites. He gets a pet dinosaur. He drinks wine from the best years. He learns to make bread. It's a perfect sunny day at the end of the world.
And in the scattered chunks of the past, with time shattered into pieces, it turns out to be almost trivially easy to invent time travel. It's possible for Neanderthals to do it if they bang rocks too hard. And every "new" time traveler comes to his final shore, the edge were time starts working properly again. His alarms go off. He comes to greet them, to talk to them, to learn about their lives. He breaks bread with them, drinks with them, and once he knows enough about their origin to erase it, rings the dinner bell for Miffly to come eat them. He keeps some of their time machines in the barn, and then goes back to uproot them, branch and stem, and from ever inventing time travel in the first place. He finds new ways to do it, sometimes. You've to keep yourself entertained.
He comes back to the moment right after the moment he left, keeping the timeline of his farm at the end of the world pristine and linear. He does this for twenty years of on-farm time, not counting trips back.
Then, one day, he gets a pair of visitors that he can't place in history - because they're from his future. Sleek and shiny in white and silver outfits out of golden age utopian scifi, cheerful and blithe and bland and twee, he hates them even before the most unbearable revelation: they take him to the future of their cheerful beautiful happy society, where there's a statue of him. Grandfather. The Founder. And some woman???
FUCK.
She's apparently from their society, several generations in. But she looks exactly like the Grandmother statue, so. Time paradoxes! Whatever.
(There's one single hint implying that there might have been a different woman with a different temporal origin for some "previous" iteration of the timeline, whose genes maybe just remixed back into a very similar person who was then identified as the founder's wife: the last time warrior has some protective suits that let him get closer to the Destroyed Regions, and he wonders why he has several. Was he always alone at the end of the world, or had there been, at some point, a companion? Who he doesn't remember because his life was changed for him without his knowledge or input. Or with the input of the person he no longer is. There's no way to know. He doesn't dwell on it.)
She comes back in time to his time. And he does his very best to kill her. And she does her very best to kill him right back. They hack each other's microdrones. They poison each other's food. They go hunting with laser rifles. They fight each other with mongol hordes and ray guns and trampling wooly mammoths. The go back to the past to get all manner of things to kill each other with, but neither of them goes back in time within the farmhouse time, to catch the other unawares at an earlier moment. In that sense, they are both viciously trying to sabotage and assassinate each other, but they are also both "playing fair."
He hasn't had a challenge against an equal in ages. He is having so much fun. Eventually they set up a battle royale arena brawl by proxy, drawing each of their forces from history's greatest monsters. Torquemada beats Stalin to death with a tractor axel. Vlad Tepes fistfights Pol Pot. Many of them are, frankly, not built for hand to hand despite the atrocities on their heads. It's a hilariously anticlimactic clusterfuck. Hitler hides until the end and they finish him off by having Miffly chase and eat him. The last time warrior and the woman he refuses to repopulate the Earth with laugh and laugh and laugh. He asks why she's trying to kill him, anyway. Doesn't she want to create her perfect society?
Fuck no. She had a front-row seat to all the ways that perfect society could only be maintained by authoritarian control and brainwashing. They couldn't fuck with her memories because it might risk changing her Destiny to Be the Founder's Wife, so she was the only one whose dissent was not erased - and she had to watch everyone being Happy in their Perfect society, knowing why and how that happiness was manufactured. She is perfectly happy to erase them all by refusing to produce them.
Her name is Zoe. They come to a truce: if neither of them wants to have kids and make the Glorious Future, maybe they can just take it as read that they're trying to kill each other, and skip the work. Maybe they can hang out and enjoy having the company of someone whose cynicism matches their own. Maybe they can each have a friend who isn't ever rewritten or erased. Maybe he can take her on a whirlwind tour of the highlights of history. They can dance in the roaring twenties and visit orgies in Rome and picnic on the banks of the Triassic. They can fuck like rabbits as long as they're both very sure they're using protection. And it'll be fine, for sure.
Two agents of the Glorious Future, Weldon and Smantha [sic], are stalking them here and there throughout time as they do this, "encouraging" them to come around and have babies after all! They are the Founders. They're in love! Come on -
The last time warrior doesn't like it. No one else is supposed to be gallivanting around time, and he doesn't know what they could or would do to force him to build their world. He resolves to go into one remaining fragment of time from ground zero of the Causality war, a one-minute spar of soldiers setting up one of the Causality Bombs that didn't manage to detonate. He's going to put an end to the beginning of Weldon and Smantha's future once and for all. But when he goes to get it, it's already gone.
Weldon and Smantha got it. The Founder told them where to find it on his death bed, in one possible version of time. And because they will detonate the bomb in between the time warrior's time and theirs, nothing he does or fails to do can affect the rise of their society, insulated in their own wellspring of time. As the very reality of the home he's build for two decades disintegrates, he and Zoe escape in their time machines, resolving to have their revenge and eradicate the future and the children they could have had, to do it all over again.
Miffly doesn't fit in the time machine and can't be saved. RIP Miffly.
Sample Network Entry: We're meant to do ice-breakers, yes?
In the spirit of sticking my tongue out and saying 'nah-nah you can't make me', which seems like the most appropriate response to an abduction this fucking absurd, I'm going to ruin one for you instead.
[He grins cheerfully, seemingly unbothered, despite the bluster.]
You know that question that goes, if you could have any four people from history over for dinner, or five, or ten, or whatever the default number is for your timeline? And people are always saying, like, Einstein or Marlowe or Martin Luther King II or the real Anastasia Romanov or whatever, geniuses and heroes and potentates and mysteries?
Well, almost all of those people are absolutely shit dinner guests.
Sample RP: TDM, TDM
Special Notes: I would genuinely like him to be listed as nameless. Perhaps as the Unnamed Narrator in OOC records, and for the Admiral to just produce [STATIC]/black square emojis when he would otherwise say the time warrior's name IC. The fact that he doesn't have a name because he was never born is really fundamental to the whole horror of his situation. In breaches he's gonna be, like. Guy Mann. But that's not his name.
