Veteran Bracket: Christoph vs. Relt Peltfelter

[Tainted Bushido]

The match begins at Midnight 7/31/2009 and ends at Midnight 8/15/2009.

Best wishes to both participants!

[Christoph]

How can time be a straight line while continuing to repeat itself? Is it time going in circles, or is it us? What draws us inexorably back around to our starting point? Of all the places in the world, why do I arrive time and again where I began?

The pleasant, fire-lit tavern buzzed with activity even as wind and rain battered the door and windows. Patrons of all sorts drank and talked in the warm, golden glow of the fireplace. Barmaids navigated through tables with expert precision, avoiding obstructing chairs and the groping hands of lonely men. The entire establishment functioned like a well-oiled machine, and having formerly been a cook and bartender, Elijah Belov couldn’t help but admire their efficiency. It reminded him of home.

He yawned and leaned against the counter, letting the pleasant heat sink into his travel-weary bones. In his pristine white chef coat, one would have expected to see him behind the bar, instead. In truth, part of him longed for the opportunity to simply serve drinks and make customers smile. He doubted that he could ever truly get used to sitting on the ‘other side’ of the counter.

“You’re new to these parts, I take it,” said the bartender. The burly man stood behind the counter, his thick hairy arms flexing as he polished and re-polished an endless cycle of glass mugs.

“I hail from Salvar,” he confirmed, brushing some curly strands of hair out of his face.

“I figured you were from way up there,” the heavy man replied. “You got that accent, and you’re always lookin’ about, tryin’ to see how everyone else is actin’. If you want to fit in, you just got to relax!” He slapped the young traveler on the shoulder, offered up a friendly smile, and slid him another ale. It was his fifth that evening, and they still didn’t taste any better. He took a drink anyway, and tried to ignore its depressing inferiority compared to the brews back home.

“What brings you all the way to Radasanth, anyway?”

“Just to get away, mostly,” Elijah explained. “‘See the world’, as they say.”

“I don’t blame you, lad,” replied the barkeep with a knowing nod. “I heard about that civil war that’s goin’ on up there. Lots of people dyin’ over nothin’.”

“It’s not as though I had much to hang onto. Just a job at an old tavern and the wonderful opportunity to get drafted into the service of one of the two warring sides.”

“Ha! I knew you’d worked at a pub before!” exclaimed the bartender. “I could tell. Your eyes know everything that goin’ on in here, and they’ve got this longing look to them every time you glance behind the counter.”

“I do miss it a little,” said Elijah. “Just a little bit. Maybe one day I’ll start up one of my own. For now, I just need to decide where to go next. Radasanth seemed like a good place to start.”

“Aye, this is the place to be if you’re sailin’ anywhere else in the world,” agreed the bartender, his chest swelling with patriotic pride. “Why, did you know that more ships docked here in a year than there are houses in the city?”

“Is that so?” The traveling cook rolled his eyes and took a drink with a grimace.

“It sure is!” answered the bigger man, apparently oblivious to Eli’s subtle mockery.

“Either way, I decided to take some time to explore what Radasanth has to offer, as they say.”

“Aye, lad. She is a beautiful city. Better than up in Salvar, I reckon!”

“Well, when there’s not a war going on, it’s not so bad.” Elijah sighed and took another swig of ale, noticing that the barman appeared very proficient at filling his mug before it emptied. He found this a little troubling, as he could no longer be certain of how much he’d had to drink so far that night. “There’s a lot of bloody snow, of course.” His voice had grown a little louder than he’d intended; the thick air and alcohol seemed to catching up with him. Oddly, despite the quantity of the latter he’d consumed since arriving, his speech was somehow becoming even more coherent and articulate than normal.

“Lots of snow, I hear,” said the barkeep.

“Jagged snow-covered mountains, vast forests of snow-covered trees, friendly little snow-covered villages. You see the theme, I’m sure.” Eli’s motions grew more animated as he spoke. “And let us not forget the copious supply of crazed religious zealots and blind loyalists to the crown popping out of the woodwork. Yet, it was home.”

“Do you ever regret leavin’?”

“Sometimes, I guess. What’s done is done at this point; I can’t go back in time and remake some of the burnt bridges.” Elijah sighed and shook his head. “Besides, Corone is nice; I’ll grant you that. They’ve got a little of everything, you know? A little forest, a little plains, a little… sprawling, corrupt, omnipresent government bureaucracy.” The bartender tilted his head and blinked a few times, but Elijah failed to notice. “It’s really quite amazing. You could find a little of almost anything on this island.” He paused, and then peered into his half-empty mug and wrinkled his nose, his face a flushed canvas of disappointment. “But what I’d really like to find is a little decent ale, like they brew back home. I don’t suppose this place has any Salvic imports…”

The bartender stood up and gave an affronted sneer. “What, is local stuff not good enough for you?”

“To be fair and honest, no it is not. Not when it tastes like frothy gutter water…” Elijah raised an eyebrow at the barkeep’s antics. “Maybe you could just check? I’d rather drink old goat’s milk than another sip of this.”

“Maybe you can just drink what you’ve got,” the barkeep retorted.

Eli raises his index finger. “That, my good sir, is a possibility that I have already deliberated upon and decided against after conducting an exhaustive field experiment.” The bartender blinked again, as though he were the borderline intoxicated one. “Okay, look… at least get me something so loaded with alcohol that its actual taste is irrelevant.” The two fell awkwardly silent for a moment before the bartender burst into laughter.

“Damn, boy, I can never figure out what it is your ever sayin’,” muttered the barkeep, shaking his head as he laughed. He placed a shot glass filled with a light blue liquid in front of the chef. “But this ought’ta get your blood hot!”

“It looks like something I’d use to kill rats, but it can’t be any worse than the ale.” Eli downed the entire glass with reckless enthusiasm, and wanted immediately to spit it back out. It took all the will he could muster to swallow. He gagged, his eyes watering and his throat burning. “Ack! Was I ever wrong about that! Gods, man! Did someone piss into a can of oil to make this?” He retched, covering his mouth with his hand. He coughed a few times, and laughed at the same time. “All right… You may have won this round, but give me a moment to recover and I’ll have my revenge.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Further down the bar, though not much further, there was a snag in the machine of commerce.

"Listen, I know, I know, that there's no-one in this world called Arthur Guinness, alright? I've come to terms with that. I've also reconciled with myself that Ireland is several space-time continua away. This no longer gives me pause. But I've explained the concept to you; beer, made with roasted barley, and foamy. And dark. And thick. Now, why can't you bring me a pint of twice-damned Guinness?"

"I, uh, I don't-" the poor barmaid stuttered in the face of the customer's perplexed anger. This woman had stormed into the pub several hours ago, and was evidently dissatisfied with both the service and the product, though even the barmaid suspected that this wasn't the source of her frustration.

The irate customer leaned back, shrugging off her rain-soaked uniform jacket. "Listen, I don't blame you, really I don't, you're an attractive enough young lady. But I've had three of these ales, and they taste like the juices leeched from a tinned beef item. Even the trenches at Ypres had better beer than this!"

The serving girl was shaking slightly. She looked sidelong at the bartender, but he was clearly engaged in his own contest. There was no backup coming from that direction. "I, I'm sorry, Miss-"

"Group. Captain. Do you so these stripes? RAF. Do not call me 'miss' again. I didn't serve my bleeding country to go around being called 'miss'..."

"Oh, s-sorry, um. I'll...see if there's anything better in the, ah, in the cellar."

"That's right you will. 'Miss'. Ha! If I had a pound for every...break that girl's nose, next time she..." the difficult patron muttered, trailing off as she tried vainly to enjoy the foamy urine she had been served.

Group Captain Relt PeltFelter of the British Empire's Royal Air Force swiveled on her barstool and looked out over the busy public house. She took a drag from her hempen cigarette, hoping to settle her raging temperament. It didn't help greatly, but the effect of being wreathed in thin smoke seemed to separate her from the bustling proceedings.

It was all this land travel, that was the problem. Land and sea. Relt was a natural pilot, never more comfortable than behind the yoke of a steamjet, or even just lounging on a luxury dirigible. Having to ride in a sailboat, or, god-forbid, an oxcart, was very nearly a physical injury. Two things she needed to acquire, if ever she ventured back home: keg of Guinness, and an aeroplane.

Cigarette having burned down, Relt ground it out on the scarred bar counter. She picked through the dish of complimentary nuts, finding only discarded shells. The pilot groaned, her stomach chiming in with similar sentiments. She looked further down the bar. Near the elbow of a male patron of the pub (who had just downed what appeared to be antifreeze) was a bowl overflowing with unfamiliar seeds and nuts, compliments of the house.

"Hey, you there!" Relt shouted down the bar, hands cupped around her mouth, "Fancy lad with the white coat and supercilious demeanor! Pass me that bowl. I need something which will stop the flavor of hog-swill with hops in from assaulting my palate."

[Christoph]

Bunnies approved.

“With pleasure, young lady with the apoplectic disposition and inexplicable manner of dress.” Elijah gave an ironic, but good-natured grin and rose from his stool to retrieve and deliver the desired bowl. Its contents consisted of various seeds and nuts, including what he recognized as Concordian pine kernels. He set the nut bowl in front of the odd woman, and glanced from bowl to woman with a chuckle. “There must be a pickup line in here somewhere, but I think that’s where it should stay in this instance.”

“Certainly a wise decision, as were I to desire sexual congress, I would have already made my intentions known. To her,” she replied, her tone and demeanor becoming somewhat rigid and difficult to read. “Thank you, by the way.”

“Ah, well. You’re welcome.” He shrugged. “I won’t hold your preferences in that area against you, especially when you seem to have such good taste in alcohol – or at least a sound sense for what isn’t good. I’ve written on canvas darker than what they serve here.”

He started to leave, but stopped. Normally, he would have delivered the bowl and politely returned to his seat. This time, however, he felt compelled to strike up conversation with a perfect stranger. In a world dotted with boring pubs filled with even more boring people, he knew that he would regret passing on the opportunity to acquaint himself with someone who actually seemed interesting.

That, and before he took his first step, he spotted the barmaid returning from the cellar with an armful of brown beer bottles. He recognized the shape, as well as the mountain emblem stamped into the bottle, as being Hanslev brand beer, named for the Salvic town north of Knife’s Edge that brewed it. He almost went teary-eyed when she set them on the counter.

“I knew you bastards were holding out on me!” he exclaimed, snatching up a bottle and giving it an awe-filled, almost loving gaze. “Ah, just like home.” He turned back to the strangely dressed woman. “These are best enjoyed with company, if you would permit.” She merely nodded and motioned to the adjacent stool, grabbing a bottle for herself. He took a sip, savoring both the flavor and nostalgia for a moment before speaking again.

“I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I really have no idea where you’re from. You have a military cut to you, but I can’t place it for the life of me.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Quickly wrapping her lips around the bottle to prevent it foaming over, Relt tilted her head back and took a long pull of the stuff. It was better than the farm run-off she'd been drinking, certainly, but there was a peculiar sort of twang in the rhapsody of the beverage. The pilot smiled inwardly, even as her liver began enumerating a list of petulant theses to nail to the cathedral doors of Relt's brain. Still mid-swig, she realized that her dry-fruit benefactor had deigned to remain in her presence. His question asked, but beer still slogging down her throat, she managed a rather complicated arm motion, tapping the insignia on her jacket shoulder.

Finally, the woman came up for air. "Her Majesty's Royal Air Force, British Empire," she wiped the residue from her lips, "I doubt you'll have heard of it. It's on another planet. Possibly another universe? I never know. There was an accident, a mad scientist, all this quantum, uh, business; so on and so forth. Typical pulp magazine rubbish, I'm almost depressed I was translocated by such a cliche." Relt cracked a relatively familiar-looking nut with the sharp application of the butt of her sidearm before slipping the revolver away again. She popped the flesh of it into her mouth, chewing delicately.

"You seem to be a native," she retorted after swallowing, "I suppose that's wonderfully interesting and fascinating in its own way. Though I'd say you're not a native of this particular landmass, from your stance and diction. Something sort of...Swiss about it, unless I miss my guess. Icelandic, maybe? No, no. At any rate, good to have some conversation in this dank tavern." The soldier leaned against the counter, picking intermittently at what little sustenance a bowl of nuts provided. She waved for the barmaid to leave another bottle of the good stuff, offering a smile and wink by way of coercion.

Amazing what a bit of protein and a decent beer can do for one's disposition.

[Christoph]

“An ‘air force’ from another universe?” Elijah’s eyebrow gave a quirk of interest. After having waited for a response for what seemed like an unreasonably long time for a respectable lady to have her lips attached to a bottle, the woman’s reply took him off guard, if only for a moment. He took another measured sip from his bottle to buy time as he formulated a response. “I’m not sure what’s crazier: what you just said, or that I’ve experienced enough in my life to actually feel inclined to take you seriously.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and laughed softly. He had anticipated interesting conversation, certainly, but an honest-to-science visitor from another reality came as a surprise. Of course, the possibility remained that she was lying to him, but it seemed rather unlikely. Her attire didn’t resemble any military in the known world, and her firearm didn’t match the designs of any engineer he’d heard of from Alerar. Given his past similar experiences, he reasoned it to be more likely that she actually did arrive from some distant planet than for anyone in the known world to have crafted such a weapon and acquired such clothing for the sole purpose of playing pranks on folk in pubs.

“I’m sure you don’t hear that very often, but I do believe you,” he said. He produced a tattered leather-bound journal from his bag and leafed through it, pressing his thumb on a page covered with mathematical scribbles, arcane formulae, and various diagrams that would have given the entirety of the Radasanth Guilds of Astronomy and Alchemy collective headaches.

“See, you’re actually the second woman that I’ve met who has claimed origins in world beyond this one. I was far more skeptical back then, of course, and I didn’t believe a word of it. In fact, I went so far as to devote countless hours of study to the sole purpose of proving that her story could not have possibly been true.

“My preconceived views on reality had been called into question, after all, and I couldn’t have that. ‘Visitors from other worlds?’ I thought. What rubbish! Don’t let my attire fool you; I’m a student of the sciences in addition to other things, and thus I set out to every library I could find, reading and researching until my eyes nearly bled. I corresponded with some of the great minds of both Corone and Raiaera and even conducted some experiments.

“And do you know what I found out? At first, disappointingly little. I failed to conclusively disprove the phenomenon of alternate realities, but neither could I conclusively prove it. The most I could do was prove that it was highly unlikely. This led me to research the other alternative: the Cosmic Teleportation Theory – that is, the idea that these visitors merely teleported by happenstance across the cosmos and randomly ended up here.” He turned a few pages until he reached a series of equations, all calculating out to extremely small fractions. He nodded toward it, tracing his finger along the numbers.

“At first glance, it sounded preposterous, a virtual statistical impossibility. As you can see, the odds of a random teleportation landing an individual here, or anywhere even remotely safe, compared to the incalculable vastness of space were so astronomically low that they were basically zero.

“I knew that I was missing something important. That’s when I heard about the Consciousness Anchor Theory on teleportation. It states that teleportation is guided, targeted, by actually anchoring a bit of your consciousness ahead of you, to your destination, and using it to guide your physical form. When someone teleports at random, that obviously doesn’t happen. The pattern still exists, though. The person being teleported is inexorably drawn to large concentrations of similar consciousnesses – in other words, places with comparatively dense populations of sentient beings that are like them. ‘Like attracts like.’ This has actually been tested, albeit on a micro scale.”

He paused and glanced around. “How could I demonstrate this?” Suddenly, he spotted a small brown form scurrying across the floor. With a grin, he slid out of his stool and snatched up the tiny mouse. “Here we have a mouse, as you can see.” He stuffed one of the seeds in its mouth to prevent it from biting his hand. “If I wanted to, I could teleport this little guy anywhere I wanted to within this room, but that wouldn’t prove anything. What I will do is cast a small teleportation charm without any destination; according this theory, this mouse should be drawn to the nearest concentration of other mice. And just to make him easier to find…” He traced an invisible glyph onto the mouse’s fur. “In about ten seconds, he’ll light up like a tiny sun.”

He gripped the mouse a little tighter, closed his eyes, and uttered a few arcane syllables. An instant later, the mouse was gone. There was a sudden silence in the pub, and Eli realized that he had an audience. No pressure, of course. He would only look like a complete fool in front of everyone if it didn’t work. He began counting down.

“Four… three… two… one.” Right on cue, a crack between two boards on the wall began to bleed golden light like a wound, followed immediately by a faint, but unmistakable chorus of startled squeaks. “And that would be the source of your apparent mouse problem, barkeep.” He gave a bow, and some of the patrons actually clapped.

He leaned back, and took a self-congratulatory drink. He turned back his new acquaintance. “And so there we have it. If you were teleported randomly into the cosmos with a massive amount of energy behind you, it’s actually statistically possible that you would have arrived here instead of, say, in the vacuum of space or the warm embrace of a star. Much of the bar seemed to return to regular activities. Eli shrugged. “And then there’s the fact that you are here, which definitely counts as empirical evidence that cosmic teleportation is possible. As opposed to time travel, which is completely impossible.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt took the opportunity of her new drinking companion's obvious showboating to help herself to another pre-bottled beer. She looked up at the barmaid, who was clearly enthralled by the grown man rubbing paint on a mouse's back. A brief debate raged inside the pilot's slightly pickled brain, and she quietly grabbed three further bottles off of the barmaid's tray. Four became three again quite rapidly. Relt watched the little performance in a bemused haze.

When things had settled down again, and the bartender had ordered an unfortunate young man to start pulling rats out of the wall with a hook, Relt turned to the young man in the fine coat. She opened a further bottle, letting the vapor hang in the air a moment before downing it. The pilot turned an old-fashioned smirk on her smug associate. "A fine pantomime, to be sure, but I must take issue with your magical thinking. Consciousness attracts consciousness? 'Teleporting', which I'm sure isn't a proper word, mice towards other mice? Poppycock."

Relt leaned far forward, not betraying at all the destabilizing influence the ethanol militia was having on the provisional government of her body. "Now, I don't pretend to fully understand the science behind it, as I am but a simple pilot of steam-powered faster-than-sound aeroplanes, but here's what I am given to believe about my stranding here. It was a scientific display of a device which purported to effect the interactions of subatomic wossnames.

"Apparently, when activated, it would disentangle the, what's the name, 'quirks' or something, which caused a temporary coterminous state between two universes. It was designed to access only greatly disparate universes, because being plopped into one which was identical save for the labeling on a tin of herring would be...scientifically unhelpful." Relt paused for the consumption of intoxicating libations, reducing her total hoard of bottles to two. "So that's why I'm here, apparently here is different enough from there that it was the reality selected. It's all very quantum, though I imagine that sounds like a sort of stone fruit to you."

A handful of nuts was consumed.

"And for the record, my good man, time travel is very possible. We're all traveling through it right now, for a start. Forwards-wise."

[Christoph]

Bunny approved.

“Wait, but that’s just… no,” stammered Elijah, before stumbling into a baffled silence. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and groaned. ‘Forward-wise’? A few snarky comments came to mind about how backward-wise her thinking was, but he decided it best not to share them with the loaded pistol of a woman (figurative and literally), even if she did have the nerve to challenge him in the arena of existential science and philosophy. He quickly forgot all about the teleportation issue, focusing instead on her latter comment, which fell under the purview of an issue on which he possessed a strong opinion.

“I don’t believe that you adequately comprehend my meaning or, for that matter, the fundamental nature of time.” His words came out in a smooth, innocuous stream. He finally emptied his bottle and snatched up another one, pulling a long swig from it; in his estimation, he wasn’t nearly inebriated enough to make it through explaining the properties of time itself to this woman. He took his feet, cracked his knuckles, and prepared for another performance. He only hoped that his eloquence would continue to vary directly with the quantity of alcohol in his system.

“We are not traveling through time simply by existing; we are merely experiencing time’s effects. Your misconception stems, I believe, from viewing time as a river or stream in the metaphorical sense, or anything else that can be traversed. This is by and large a flawed view.

“I’ll admit that time is a tricky concept to unambiguously define. Scholars of old have used many metaphors to illustrate the nature of time, such as the ‘stream’ that I just mentioned, but none truly paint a clear picture. It is best to think of time in the simplest possible way: a unit of measurement used to sequence events and their durations. Perhaps time is an artificially constructed concept that only transient beings such as us require to make sense of things. Do events occur because time passes, or does time pass because of the occurrence of events? I can’t hope to answer that question.” He had begun pacing, slowly and purposefully, across the strip of floor in front of the bar, gesticulating with a touch of moderate theatrics. His eyes took on a mysterious glimmer.

“There are three key components of time, or rather, the passage of events: the past, the present, and the future. The present, naturally, is happening right now. It is fleeting and instantaneous, elusively becoming the past the moment we become aware of it. The future has yet to happen. It is a swirling chaos of endless possibilities and potential. It can be predicted, but not seen. It cannot be seem because it has yet to happen and can still be changed by the free-willed actions of life. The past is the exact opposite of the future. It has already occurred and cannot be changed; we know this for certain because the past can be seen.”

“That is a blatant oversimplification of the function of time and you, sir, are an imbecile,” interjected the woman with a snort. “You can't actually see the past. What you see are the remains, fossils of the past left by the actions of man and nature.”

“Ah, please forgive me, my good madam,” replied Elijah coolly, inclining his head toward his new acquaintance. He had expected this exact challenge, though perhaps with a less hostile wording (then again, he’d already come to know this woman well enough to have expected that as well). “I realize that my claim must sound preposterous without clarification or a solid explanation to back it up. Allow me to use magic – not to demonstrate or directly prove a point through practical application, but rather to, shall we say… elucidate my assertion.” He shook his arms to loosen up, and then held then rigidly out in front of him. A strange breeze swept through the tavern as he gathered up arcane power.

“I would ask that no one in the pub be alarmed. You are in no danger; some groups with dubious standards and judgment on occasion consider me a trained professional, when duly reminded to do so.” No sooner had he said this than did each lamp in the hall go out one by one, followed immediately by the fireplace. Darkness consumed them. There were a few startled gasps but fortunately no chaos. With a flick of his wrist, Eli called forth a swarm of tiny still-glowing embers from the extinguished fireplace; he scattered them in a wide dome above them in a stunningly convincing imitation of a night sky. With a small effort of will, he suspended them in place and kept them alight. “This, for the sake of argument, is the night sky. Normally, this breathtaking and beautiful display can be achieved by merely stepping outside, but the current weather forces me to improvise.” Not that he lamented an excuse to exhibit his supernatural talents to the easily impressed common folk.

“So here we have a picturesque sight, a peaceful veil of stars hovering far into the heavens – a gift from the gods, some would say. Many don’t know this, but according the leading astronomers and arcanists in Corone, these tiny twinkles are actually gargantuan balls of burning gas incalculably far from our tiny world. These brilliant minds have also determined that light travels from place to place just like anything else – it merely moves so fast that we never notice. We can see only because light reflects off of objects, and as I said, it happens so swiftly that it is virtually instant.” He gestured broadly to his glowing rendition.

“These stars are so far away, that light actually takes days, weeks, years… even hundreds or thousands of years, to reach us here.” He pointed to one of his artificial stars, bringing out a brighter glow from it. “Pretend that this is Elnorion, the bright southern star that is said to have guided the great hero Radasanth through the night and to victory against the demon invaders in the olden age. This star’s distance from us is estimated as being so far that it takes the light it produces five hundred years to reach us. For all brave Radasanth knew, the star that gave him hope could have already burned out hundreds of years before the war and he would have never known. Granted, the fact that it still hangs in the heavens today proves that the stalwart star was still shining back then.

“But I digress. My point is that every time we gaze wistfully into the night sky, we are looking into the past; we are seeing the literal reflections of it. We are seeing the stars as they were hundreds of years ago. Sure, the distance obscures the details, but it still proves that we can see it, which proves that it is static and unwavering. That then proves that it cannot be changed, because we can see the evidence of these past occurrences.” With a few complex hand gestures, Elijah returned the tiny embers to the fireplace and reignited the goals, as well as the lamps.

“And a past that cannot be changed cannot be traveled to.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

The sound of drumming filled the pub; Relt's fingers beat a rhythm of annoyance on the scarred wood of the counter-top. There was an itch in the back of her mind, the fleeting memory of boarding school. The debate club. The time she and Marianne Smythe-Goutersby came to blows over the validity of Plato's Socratic dialogues. This prancing show-off would not defeat an RAF officer with his specious reasoning and smoke-and-mirrors trickery. "I must continue to refute this argument," she said calmly, standing up and crossing the floor. "I apologize that I have no preposterous visual candy with which to mollify you."

The pilot stopped at the blackboard on which was scrawled the rough approximation of a menu. A stub of chalk was still present, which Relt picked up. Wiping the board clean with one arm, she used the other to draw (a bit shakily) a circle. "Let us say, my good man whose name I have yet to care enough to learn, that this...egg-shape represents the shortest possible increment of time, an instant within an instant. That minuscule moment is 'now'. As you have explained the function of time, now flows smoothly-" and with this Relt drew as straight a line as she could, "-into the next 'now'. And by that understanding, your assertion that the past is immutable makes some sort of sense."

"On the other hand, leading physicists, whose works were required reading at the academy I attended, have described time rather differently. For instance, let us postulate that outside that door is a heavily armed burglar." Despite themselves, several concerned heads swiveled to look anxiously at the entrance. "This man has a number of choices: he can enter, and attempt to rob this establishment, or he can go on his way and rob another local business." Relt drew two lines curving away from that which emerged from the circle, one up and one down, and capped each with another wobbly oblong.

"In actuality, both possibilities occur. At the moment the choice is presented, the universe diverges into two otherwise identical universes, one in which we are all brutally murdered and our bodies pillaged, and another in which the would-be thief balks at this tavern and instead goes home and has a cruller." The top circle was embellished with a sketch of a man bleeding to death, while a pastry was added to the bottom. "Now I know this sounds unlikely, but one must understand that the nature of reality is quite a great deal more complex than it seems to human eyes.

"There are the three dimensions we exist in, height, depth, width. Some posit that the fourth is time, being as it is as much a trait of something as anything else. The rest, up to either ten or eleven, I can't remember which, are all kinked up and very small, like a fractal." Relt drew a bunch of little lines branching away from her two futures. "It is in these dimensions that this whole universe splitting business occurs, entirely invisible to us. Time is neither a stream nor a stagnant procession of sliced moments, but an unnaturally fecund hydra; at every instant, every possible scenario is enacted in a series of alternate, fractal continua."

"With this understanding, it makes perfect sense that one can travel through time, with the proper motive force. The act of travel would create a new split from your own present, and arrival at the destination time would do the same; the hydra's neck leading up to the moment of your temporal relocation would remain intact, hence the rigidity of your fanciful stars. Yet, by traveling to the past, your very presence would send proceedings in an entirely new direction, creating an entirely new progression which would itself continue onward, even if you returned to your point of origin." By this point, lines and irregular circles had covered most of the blackboard, and were spilling over into the surrounding woodwork.

"And that, friend, is proof of your inferior education. Drinks all around, I say." Relt returned to her stool, intoxicated by victory and ethanol.

[Christoph]

Elijah’s jaw twitched slightly and a red spark flashed in his eyes for but an instant. Those were the only signs of the storm of rage that he contained with a mere thread of self-control. He wanted to strangle the cocky life right out of her. Instead, he emptied his bottle in one pull, partially to relax and partially to resist breaking said bottle over her head. Anger means defeat, and I am far from defeated. He could work through both anger and alcohol separately, but not the two combined. He let his fury simmer down internally for a moment and plastered a smile smug and patronizing enough to make the entire socialite-saturated court of Alerar jealous of its superior self-assurance.

“I think that your allegedly superior education relies far too heavily on ineffectual pseudoscience and skimps greatly on deductive reasoning,” he said, taking to pacing once again, this time holding a regal posture with his hands folded behind his back. “It also seems that they forgot to teach you that if you wish to commit yourself to a debate, it is usual helpful to actually refute your opponent’s statement.” He shrugged condescendingly. “Of course, perhaps you actually believed that you did. But I will illuminate for you that your claim and mine are not mutually exclusive, and thus that your argument is completely irrelevant.”

The chef strolled toward the conveniently placed blackboard, snatching the bartender’s cloth on the way and ignoring the large man’s protests. He cleaned off the board without a word. Inferior education? He just wanted to slap her. He’d studied the properties of space and time for three years – almost to the degree that he’d studied magic.

“Despite our vastly different origins, I am in fact very familiar with the theory you just demonstrated,” said Elijah, sketching out a simple branching tree diagram. “Though many scholars find it more likely that all of these other paths were merely potential realities that didn’t actually occur. This leaves one single strand, with the other ghost realities fading from the metaphorical (and metaphysical) tapestry of time.” He erased all of the extraneous branches, leaving a single jagged line. “That difference is merely semantics, however, since we all live in this same timeline and there’s no way at present to prove one or the other.”

“Where you seem to get off track is with what you call ‘time travel’,” he continued. With the chalk, he marked a dot on the timeline representation. “So let’s say this is the point in time at which you make this fabled temporal jump into the past.” He drew a line from that dot to a location a half-inch above the original line. “And, as you suggested, create an entirely new timeline. While there is no evidence supporting that this is possible, there isn’t any conclusive evidence against it. The problem with your application of this theory in this debate is that it’s not actually time travel.” He let that sink in for a moment, and then drew a dotted line between the old timeline and the new one.

“You haven’t actually traveled back to your past; you’ve traveled to a specific point in different, similar dimension. Thus, your demonstration was completely irrelevant because it is not proper time travel, as it can’t actually change your past.” He erased the second timeline and darkened the first one to accent his point.

“In fact, I would posit that not only do we have proof of the static nature of our timeline, but that the act of changing the past would be the anathema of reality. It creates a paradox. This has been illustrated with hypothetical anecdotes of a man who travels back in time and kills his grandfather, father, mother, or what have you, before he was born; in doing so, he would then cease to exist. That would also mean that he never existed to travel back in time to kill his crucial ancestor, which means they never would have died, meaning he would have been born, a time paradox ensues, universe explodes, etcetera.

“In truth, any act of going back in time to change something would violate causality in a similar fashion. By going back and changing something, you effectively remove the reason you had for going back in the first place, which means that you wouldn’t have gone back at all.” He sat back down, deciding that it was his turn to enjoy a drink of triumph. “Of course, I’ll be gracious and just assume that you already knew all of this. I wouldn’t want to insult your intelligence or education, after all.” And that smile returned, daring her to argue further.