April 2011 Vignette: Let's Do The Time Warp Again!

Dr Archeville · April 1, 2011

FC:PbP is offering the community another "vignette" opportunity. If you'd like to read about our previous vignettes, check here.

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
-- Albert Einstein

Tears in the very fabric of spacetime are appearing all over Freedom City! Some are spitting things out from different times, some are sucking in people and sending them to the past or future! What's causing them? Is this a prelude to some invasion? The result of an out-of-control experiment in some Hanover or ASTRO Labs workshop? (The largest concentration are showing up in Hanover, though there are quite a few in City Center, Riverside, Waterfront, and West Side, and a scattering in the other neighborhoods, as well as Europe, Japan, South America, and in space orbiting Earth!)

There is one small consolation: all the portals do eventually close on their own, and as they do they pull/send back everything they took to their proper place. The effects of whatever happened to them remains, though, so a traffic cop trampled by mastodons in the Ice Age is going to come back to the present as a frozen & mashed corpse. Also, while the portals on this end all remain for but a day at most, the time spent on the other side is not always the same: someone could be pulled from their home during breakfast and sucked into the future, and spit back out into the present at suppertime, but have spent 20 years fighting bloodthirsty cyborg cannibals!

Who: Any player who is interested, for one (or more) of their characters.

What: Write a vignette featuring your character's encounter with one of these time portals. These can take two broad forms:
1) Facing something that pops out of a portal from another time. Will your character fight a megasquid from the year 200,002,003 AD? A stampeding herd of mastodons? A gang of splicers on flying motorcycles from 2041? A horde of viking berserkers, who are running headlong into a group of Tokugawan samurai? Feed scavengers from the Crash of 2112? Save the life of your own great-great-grandfather who stumbled into the path of an oncoming train? Or your own great-great-great-great-granddaughter?
2) Your char is sucked into another time, wherein hijinx ensue until the event's end snaps you back to the present. Any future (the MC2-esque FC2, the Batman Beyond expy Future Freedom of 2041, the Legion of Super-Heroes-inspired Galactic Freedom of 2525, or something ever farther and wilder) is game, as is any era of history. But there is a caveat: any trips via these portals is of the "predestination paradox" variety. I.e., if you go to the past, you're going to the true past of Freedom, whatever you do there will really happen in the timeline (rather than splitting off a separate timeline/universe like Doc Tomorrow did). Which is not to say you're totally restricted: if you're a legacy character, perhaps it turns out that you had a hand in inspiring the founder of your legacy! Or perhaps you are one of those "Unknown Soldiers" who mysteriously appeared during a crucial time, turned the tide of battle, then disappeared just as mysteriously.
Length should be at least one (1) page per character involved.

When: The deadline for submissions will be Saturday, April 30th, by 11:59 PM EST (GMT -5). The portals themselves will be appearing on April 15th (Tax Day!).

Where: Anywhere. When you submit your vignette, please make a note clearly indicating in which forum it should be posted.

Why: To enhance our community, to flex your writing muscles, to think more deeply about your characters, and to earn a bonus PP for your characters (the ones involved in this Vignette) for the month of April.

How: Once your story is finished and proofed, PM it to one of the Refs (AvengerAssembled, Ecalsneerg, Geez3r, ShaenTheBrain, or myself). When all the stories are in, one of our staff members will post them to the appropriate forums (which is why we need you to be sure to tell us where it should go!), and provide links to them in this thread. DO NOT post them in a forum yourself, otherwise it will not be counted for this exercise.

Cannonade
Cobalt Templar
Dead Head
Doktor Archeville
Dragonfly
Dynamo
Edge
Fenris
Fleur de Joie
Fulcrum
Gabriel
Harrier
Ironclad
Jack of all Blades
Lord Steam
Miss Americana
Myrmidon
Nick Cimitiere
Push
Rene de Saens
Supercape

KnightDisciple · April 1, 2011

Question: Are these portals ones that only change your placement in time (putting aside the automatic space adjustment so we're not floating in space since Earth has moved on)? That is, if Gabriel enters one in modern-day Freedom City, and it goes back 500 years, can he only ever be in Freedom City, or could it plop him down 500 years ago in, say, Ireland? Or wherever?