# TimeWatch RPG Playtest Story Hour (Updated 9-2-14)



## Ladybird (Jan 7, 2014)

Welcome to our TimeWatch Playtest Story Hour!

THE GAME: TimeWatch is a forthcoming RPG written by                               [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION]. You can find more information about it on Twitter @ TimeWatchRPG. If you're interested in supporting it, there will be a Kickstarter soon - watch the Twitter feed for details.

Because this is the chronicle of a playtest, I'll be talking more explicitly about the rules than I otherwise would. If you want to 'look under the hood' and see how the rules and stats operate, I'll be putting that discussion behind spoiler blocks. If you'd prefer not to break out of the story, you can just skip those bits.

Also, there will be lots of commentary by                               [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION] himself, since he's the one who's writing the rules! So, please ask questions - he's happy to answer.

THE SETTING: The PCs are agents of TimeWatch, charged with serving and protecting the integrity of the timeline. Ever since the invention of time travel, people have been trying to manipulate the timeline for their own purposes, causing paradoxes and complications throughout history. Therefore, TimeWatch was formed. Its agents travel throughout time correcting these paradoxes so that history can resume its proper course. TimeWatch agents can come from anywhere in history - or, in fact, anywhere in _any_ history. Many are themselves from alternate timelines.

THE CHARACTERS (in order of historical appearance):
- @CerebralPaladin, our intrepid GM!

- Hypatia of Alexandria (c350-415 CE), played by                               [MENTION=3722]Orichalcum[/MENTION].  One of the most brilliant scholars of her age; she was a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and teacher. History records that she was beaten to death by an angry mob, and then her body was burned. The real reason that her body was never found, of course, is that she was rescued by TimeWatch. Her intelligence and research skills have become invaluable. Now in her late 60s.

- King Edward V of England, (1470-1483?), aka Edward Plantagenet, aka the older of the Princes in the Tower, played by me. Briefly King of England upon his father's death in 1483, but Edward's uncle deposed him to claim the throne as King Richard III. Edward and his younger brother (also named Richard) were imprisoned in the Tower of London; they later disappeared and were presumed dead. They were actually rescued by TimeWatch, and they've both grown to adulthood in TimeWatch's safety. Edward is deeply concerned with matters of justice and honor . Now 20 years old.

- Yves, a wealthy French libertine, c. 1770. He spent most of his life pursuing luxury in all forms: wine, good food, parties, sex. But still, he found himself sinking in the deepest ennui, and sought out even more novelty. Eventually, he found the ultimate remedy for ennui in TimeWatch - he had access to all of the new things that had ever been! Also, all of the parties that had ever been.  Now in his late 20s.

- Dr. Michel Archembault, a French army medic, c. 1870. He served in the Franco-Prussian War and was horrified by the brutality that he saw on the battlefield. His horror made him try harder and harder to avoid violence, until he eventually deserted the army entirely. Shortly thereafter, TimeWatch picked him up. He's good at medicine, but even better at sneaking. Now in his 30s.

- Katarina Rasmirovna,  an actress and adventurer, c. 1885. Born Katherine Ramsey in southern England in the mid-19th century, she moved to London and started a career on the stage. Kat's London was different from our London, though - hers was full of dirigibles and other steam-powered technology. Kat's London was also deeply flawed, and some time-travelers tried to set it right. In doing so, however, they ended the timeline, leaving Kat stranded in time, but an ideal TimeWatch agent. She's good at acting, shooting, and thinking on her feet. Now in her 30s. (A character from the steampunk timetravel books Timepiece and Timekeeper)

- Mace Hunter! Adventurer! c. 1890. A British archaeologist, but definitely not the intellectual sort. He's far more interested in going to faraway places, digging things up, and hitting people. Now in his 30s.

So that's who we are! Coming soon: our first foray into time!


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 9, 2014)

*EPISODE 1: STARS AND BARS FOREVER*

*Chapter 1: Red White and Blue Alert*

Sirens blare through TimeWatch HQ, and the team comes running.

TimeWatch HQ sits at the end of time, a floating citadel dedicated to preserving and repairing the timeline. The team runs past gleaming glass windows, past replicas of adobe houses and thatched-roof cottages used for training, past doors marked PARADOX CONTAINMENT: DO NOT ENTER, past doors they're sure they've passed before - or maybe doors they _will_ have passed before?

The people who come running are Hypatia of Alexandria, Edward Plantagenet (also known as King Edward V of England, but hardly anyone calls him that, and he doesn't insist), Yves (he can never be bothered to give his last name), Dr. Michel Archembault, Katarina Rasmirovna, and Mace Hunter. 

By TimeWatch standards, they're a fairly uniform group: not only are they almost all British and French, most are from the 18th and 19th century, and only one is from an alternate timeline. In TimeWatch, you can never take for granted that your fellow agents will even be human: not every Earth timeline was dominated by humans, so TimeWatch personnel include intelligent dinosaurs and insects from those alternate timelines as well as Neanderthals, other hominids, and non-Earthlings.

This team hasn't worked together before, and some of them are new agents - Edward has only recently grown old enough for fieldwork - but they've all been told that the next assignment will be theirs, and they're all ready for the challenge.

The briefing agent also happens to be human: Dr. Maria Gonzalez, one of the chronal technician specialists. She wears a white lab coat over her silver TimeWatch uniform, and wears an unusually agitated expression on her face. "It's the radiation alerts," is the first thing she says. "We've detected multiple nuclear explosions in the past." She clicks a button on a remote, and the huge viewscreen on the back wall of the briefing room throws up a map of North America. Red dots flare up as Dr. Gonzalez recites the name of each city: "New York. Boston. Philadelphia. Seattle. Portland. Buffalo. Chicago. Indianapolis…" 

The team stares in horror as red dots bloom and spread across the map. "…and it's happening in 1938," Dr. Gonzalez finishes. 

The date is almost as chilling as the sight itself. None of the team lived in the 20th century, but as TimeWatch agents they've all had at least a basic education in Earth history after their lifetimes. They all know that to have nuclear weapons that early is almost as serious a breach of the timeline as the destruction of those cities.

"1938?" Michel repeats. "Someone is trying to fight World War II several years early."

It's serious enough that the team has to act fast, but they can take a few minutes to assess the situation before they leave. They're time-travelers, after all - they can just hop back to whatever time they choose.

Edward frowns as he studies the map. "But…why _those_ cities?" he asks. "They're all major cities, but Buffalo and Portland aren't on the same level as New York and Chicago. What do they all have in common?"

"Any particular industry that they all share?" Kat suggests. "Maybe someone's trying to take out their manufacturing. Or politics? Trying to destabilize the economy and the government?"

"If that were the case, they would have bombed Washington," Dr. Gonzalez observes.

"Wait," says Edward, looking at the map again. "They _didn't_ bomb Washington. These are all Northern cities. They aren't trying to fight World War II. They're re-fighting the Civil War."


----------



## Azkorra (Jan 10, 2014)

Very interesting premise! Looking forward to further posts in this story hour.

On a side note (as Piratecat seems to be involved here): Will there also be an Owl Hoot Trail SH sometime?


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 13, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 2. The Guns of the South*

"There has been a serious breach of chronal integrity," Dr. Gonzalez says soberly. "You are authorized to go back in time and take any necessary measures to repair the timeline.

The team decides that the best date to start is the site of the first bomb, a month before the explosion: Philadelphia, July 15, 1938.

They pull out their Autochrons - personal time-travel devices, each keyed to its owner through the best biometric security system that has ever been developed anywhere in time. To the untrained eye, an inactive Autochron looks like a silvery metal bar about a foot long. One by one, each agent activates their Autochron. A holographic screen shimmers up from each device, full of complicated controls. Each agent sets their Autochron to the same time and place. The Autochron will do the rest - it chooses an unobtrusive place to protect the travelers from being seen or heard when they arrive.

Each date and time gets set; each Autochron springs into action, sending a sphere of purple light around the agent that controls it.

One by one, the agents leave TimeWatch HQ and reappear in Philadelphia.

*Philadelphia, 1938*

The purple spheres of the Autochrons whir, waver, and retreat, leaving the team in an alley between two sets of rowhouses in a quiet neighborhood in Philadelphia. 

At first, the city looks exactly as they'd expected: the buildings look roughly the same as they did in the books the team consulted before leaving; there aren't any huge skyscrapers or wide-open fields or other major differences. 

But as the disorientation of time-travel wears off, they start to notice a few differences. There are more cars on the roads than they expected, and many more olive-green military trucks. From time to time, a low unsettling boom can be heard in the distance, and closer by, the team hears the rhythmic pounding of hundreds of boots marching in unison. American flags hang from almost every building - but those, too, look slightly different. 

Michel is the one who spots it first: the flag has only 25 stars. 

Yves hurries down the street to a newsstand, and picks up a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Yes, he's still dressed in a silver TimeWatch uniform; yes, he's a native of 18th century France. But the standard-issue TimeWatch equipment takes care of that: not only do all agents have an automatic simultaneous translation device for spoken language, they wear clothing over their jumpsuits that can easily be adapted to numerous times and places. Agents who need more elaborate cover or are especially interested in fashion sometimes pick up new outfits while they're in the field. 

Yves, in fact, is making mental notes about the quality of the suits he sees on his brief walk to the newsstand, and planning his new wardrobe in case of an extended stay in 1938. But not many people are looking at him, thanks to the Impersonator Mesh that's on his skin. It's not that Impersonator Mesh makes him invisible, it just makes him unobtrusive - people either glance past him or just assume that he's the sort of person who would fit into whatever surroundings he's in.

The rest of the team stays in the alley until Yves gets back with his newspaper, and they all gather around to start reading.

The whole front page is full of news of the war. And second. And third.

"ATTACKS ON CAPITAL PERSIST. Philadelphia. Southern forces continue to approach the capital in the third week of heavy fighting…"

"Does that mean that Philadelphia is the capital, not Washington?" Mace asks.

FIGHTING WORSENS IN NORTH SEQUOIA.

"Where on earth is North Sequoia?" Yves asks.

"Since sequoias are evergreens native to California," Hypatia explains, "it is presumably somewhere on the Pacific coast."

All of the articles add up to a very unsettling picture of the United States in 1938: there is a massive war going on, with fronts in Europe, the Pacific, and North America. 

"World War II and the Civil War at the same time," Michel says, glancing over at Edward with an uneasy, unhappy look. "It appears that we were both right."

Kat rubs her temples. "Can we just find a sixth-grade history textbook? Something that will tell us what happened to make everything go wrong, in very simple sentences?"

"Oh, of course!" Hypatia says confidently. "This is Philadelphia! We will definitely be able to find a good library." And if there is anything that Hypatia knows about, it is libraries. 

It's not too hard to locate a branch of the Philadelphia public library; and once there, it's not too hard to locate the history textbook that Kat has been longing for. We page back to the middle of the 19th century to see what happened in the first Civil War, and discover that the moment that the North lost was August 1863, when Britain and France recognized the clearly-ascendant Confederacy. 

"Wait!" says Edward. "What? What happened at Gettysburg? That was July 1863. How did the South win? Did something happen with Pickett's Charge? Or was one of the generals killed? Or - " Edward trails off, realizing that everyone is staring at him as he recites detailed information about a battle that took place almost 400 years after he died (or, at least, left history). "Look, military history is interesting!"

Rules Sidebar:
[sblock](Edward has one point in Military Science. That much is enough to let him know exactly what happened at the Battle of Gettysburg, or any other important battle in history. Military Science, and other Investigative Skills, are very powerful. If you have a point in one of those skills and want to take an action related to that skill, you don't have to make a check: you just say 'I have a point in X skill' and automatically succeed. If you want to do something really huge related to that skill, then you can spend a point. So, for having a point in Military Science, Edward knows about the Battle of Gettysburg. If he were to spend that point, he could have actually been at the Battle of Gettysburg at the side of one of the generals. For a small challenge like this, it's not worth spending a point, but when the stakes are higher, spending a point can gain you effective and exciting results.)[/sblock]

Hypatia flips back to the textbook's discussion of the Battle of Gettysburg. "It says here," she reads, "that Gettysburg was won by the South's decisive advantages of superior manpower and technology."

Everyone blinks. "That's…the opposite of what was supposed to happen," Edward finally says.

"Then let us find out what this superior technology was," suggests Michel.

Hypatia, the expert at research, starts pulling down books that will tell us more than the basic history textbook. She discovers that the South had two key pieces of military technology: the repeating firearm called the Whitney Gun which was invented by Eli Whitney; and a kind of smokeless gunpowder invented by Whitney's son, Eli Whitney, Jr. 

We quickly consult our tethers to see how that measures up against the master timeline.

The tether is one of our most powerful tools: it acts as a link to TimeWatch HQ's immense store of information, letting us check the world we're in against the master timeline. It also allows us to communicate with each other silently and securely so that we can coordinate our actions in the field.

According to the history that we access through our tethers, Eli Whitney spent a brief time in Georgia where he invented the cotton gin, then returned to his home state of Connecticut in 1797 to set up his firearms manufacturing business. In the biography of Eli Whitney that Hypatia finds, Eli Whitney stayed in Georgia and set up his gun manufactory there. Repeating rifles were lethal, but not very effective on the battlefield in the early 19th century - firing them created so much smoke that it was difficult for anyone else to see. According to our tethers, the invention of smokeless gunpowder in 1884 solved that problem. According to the history book that Hypatia found, smokeless gunpowder was invented in 1860, by Eli Whitney, Jr. The combination of smokeless gunpowder and Whitney guns won the war for the South.

It appears that history has been changed at least twice to bring about the version of 1938 where Philadelphia is threatened by nuclear war: once when Eli Whitney stayed in Georgia, and once when his son received future tech. Both of those changes made the South win the Civil War.

When should we intervene? And who might be responsible for this?


----------



## Cerebral Paladin (Jan 13, 2014)

A couple notes from the GM:
The PCs were told at the beginning that this was a Class 1B timeline crisis--one that threatens the existence of TimeWatch, but does not threaten the existence of all human history after a certain point.  Not sure it matters, but it's an additional bit of chrome.

Sequoia was, in the timeline in question, in fact the name of the CSA state that occupies the territory that became Oklahoma in our timeline.  It's named after the great Cherokee leader, not after the trees also named after him; various Native American tribes and nations in the general Oklahoma area fought on the CSA side in the Civil War (in real history), so in the aftermath of a Confederate victory, instead of facing a particular stringent Reconstruction, the Cherokee and other tribes in the area had more political influence and status, so the state ended up named after Sequoia (who died a generation earlier).  So the fighting in northern Sequoia was in fact fierce combat over the essential resource of oil, trying to control the oil wells of Oklahoma and Texas.

Also, Eli Whitney Jr. invented the Whitney gun, not Eli Whitney Sr.  The Whitney gun was essentially technologically identical to the Gatling gun, which was fielded by the Union Army in the late days of the Civil War in real history.  The usefulness of repeating rifles like the Gatling gun was limited until the development of smokeless powder, so it didn't have a huge effect on the Civil War.  But Gatling gun like technology plus smokeless powder at Gettysburg...


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 13, 2014)

Whoops! Sorry. All errors are mine. They do creep in sometimes


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 15, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 3. The First Date?*

When should we go next? 1860, or 1797?

1860 has the advantage of being more precise: we know when Eli Whitney Jr. made his invention, but we don't know exactly when Eli Whitney Sr. made his decision. But 1797 has the advantage of being earlier in the disrupted timestream, and therefore both safer and more productive. In the end, we decide to go to July 1796.

Once again, we duck into an alley; once again, six Autochrons whir in unison, sending six purple spheres spinning through space and time.

*Georgia, July 15, 1796*

In the sweltering summer heat that is barely eased at all by the thick shade of live oaks towering above us, seven purple spheres shimmer into being.

…wait, seven?

Yes. Seven.

The seventh Autochron - TimeWatch standard-issue, keyed to its owner and _only_ its owner - winds down, its purple sphere winking out. Standing there is a young black woman, probably in her late twenties, with the telltale flash of a silver TimeWatch jumpsuit peeking out from the cuff of her nondescript eighteenth-century clothes.

None of us have ever seen her before in our lives.

"Kat!" the young woman cries, her dark eyes lighting up with ecstatic relief. "Oh, Kat, thank God you're all right!" She flings herself at Kat and starts kissing her passionately.

We have _no idea_ who this person is. None at all.

Which puts Kat in a rather awkward position at the moment. 

Very gently, Kat extricates herself from the kiss; even more gently, she says, "Yes, I'm fine. Please don't worry about me. But…I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid I don't know you." 

"I'm Elizabeth!" the young woman cries. "Elizabeth Jackson. Do you mean that you don't remember me?" She sounds somewhere between North American and British - maybe early twentieth-century upper-class New England, or someone born in Britain who's spent a lot of time in the US and Canada?

Kat squeezes the newcomer's - Elizabeth's? - hand, and shakes her head. "I'm so sorry." Elizabeth squeezes Kat's hand back, but something feels odd about the gesture - even though Elizabeth is clearly holding desperately tightly to Kat, her grasp doesn't feel as firm as it should be.

Elizabeth's face crumples as she looks from one team member to the other. "You really don't recognize me? Any of you? Your Majesty?" she asks, looking to Edward first. 

Edward blinks in surprise - not many agents call him that - but shakes his head. "I'm very sorry," he says gently. "But no, I don't either."

"Michel?" Elizabeth continues, increasingly pained with each new blank look she gets from the team. "Hypatia? Mace? Yves?"

"No, I do not remember you," Yves replies with a flirtatious grin, "but I am very much looking forward to renewing our acquaintance. I am certain you were a priceless addition to our team."

Matching glares from Kat and Elizabeth cut him off before he can get any further. No, Elizabeth is not in the mood for flirting, and is clearly not interested, but hope springs eternal, and so does Yves.

As the rest of us look closer at Elizabeth, we're starting to notice that something looks a little _off_ about her. Kat noticed it first because she was hugging her, but as time goes on, we can start to see that Elizabeth seems a little wavery around the edges. Plus, the instant that the newcomer said her name, Hypatia was on the tether checking TimeWatch records. There's no Elizabeth Jackson listed anywhere in TimeWatch personnel records.

This is the downside of time travel: if you do it too much, or too recklessly, you can change time so much that you'll erase your own existence. Fading, it's called, and it seems to be happening to Elizabeth.

The only reason that she's lasted this long is the strength of her relationship with Kat - that's what's tied her to reality.

Rules sidebar:
[sblock]This is a nifty game mechanic, and a way to prevent the potential for infinite time-travel, which would give GMs infinite headaches. PCs _can_ travel anywhere in space and time, but every time they do, they need to make a Chronal Stability check. If they fail, they lose Chronal Stability points; if their Chronal Stability gets too low, then they start to Fade.[/sblock]

"I'm _Elizabeth_!" she persists. "I'm a member of your team! I always have been. But - but if you don't remember me," Elizabeth falters, tears starting to fill her eyes, "then that means we've truly failed to fix this timeline.


----------



## Cerebral Paladin (Jan 21, 2014)

The Kickstarter for TimeWatch is now live!  So if you like what you're reading in this Storyhour, you too can play games like this:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kevinkulp/timewatch-gumshoe-investigative-time-travel-rpg


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 21, 2014)

*Kickstarter Update*

The TimeWatch Kickstarter is now live! Check it out here, and help TimeWatch get out into the world!

...and it looks like CerebralPaladin traveled back in time to get his post in before mine!


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 22, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 4. Queens, Knights, Prime Ministers, and Pits*

"We have already failed?" Michel asks. "What do you mean?"

Elizabeth shakes her head. "I'm so sorry. I wish I could tell you, but I can't. I've already caused too much paradox as it is - if I told you what happened, it would cause even more."

The more Elizabeth speaks, the more her accent nags at Kat. She just can't place it - and for Kat, with her theater training, that's unusual. "Elizabeth," Kat ventures slowly, "where are you from? I'm sorry, but I don't remember that, either."

Elizabeth winces a little at the question, but she's getting used to it by now. "It's all right," she says, reaching over to squeeze Kat's hand again. "I'm from Boston, in 2014." For TimeWatch agents, 'where are you from?' always means 'when' as well.

Now Kat knows for certain that something is off, because Elizabeth's accent really doesn't sound like any variety of 21st-century Boston that she's heard. That's when Kat remembers one of the other things that can make someone Fade as badly as Elizabeth had: if your timeline gets erased. It nearly happened to Kat herself, before TimeWatch rescued her.

"You're American, then?" Kat asks. "2014 - that would be…President Obama?"

Elizabeth gives Kat a curious look. "That's an odd way of putting it."

Kat rephrases, around the sinking feeling. "How would you put it, then?"

"Well, _Prime Minister_ Obama," Elizabeth says, as if it should be obvious.

Except to us, it isn't. That's not a title that we've ever heard attached to that person. It looks like there are _three_ timelines in play: the one we came from, the disrupted one that we're trying to fix, and Elizabeth's.

"Prime Minister?" Michel repeats. "Does that mean that the American colonies never fought for their independence? Then what happened in 1776?"

"Um," Elizabeth flounders. "Not much? It was the middle of the Falklands War, I know that, but I'm not very good at history."

The Falklands War? That draws blank looks everyone else - if that phrase means anything at all to any of the other agents, it's a minor war in the 1980s, not the 1770s.

What else is different about Elizabeth's timeline? "Who reigns in England in 2014?" Edward asks, because of course Edward would ask that.

"Queen Anne," Elizabeth answers at once.

Edward blinks. "What? What happened to Elizabeth II? And Charles?"

Elizabeth shakes her head apologetically over her namesake. "They both died a long time before I was born. I'm sorry - as I said, I'm not good at history."

Hypatia says "So it would seem that we need to look even farther back than we are now to see where this timeline diverges."

"Wait!" says Edward. "I want to talk more about the English royal succession!"

"Yes, you would," says Hypatia dryly.

But something _is_ off about this, and Edward keeps puzzling it over in his mind. In a royal dynasty that's otherwise known for being long-lived, in a time when science and medicine are very advanced, a monarch and her heir both die young?

The others are right, though: we need to look farther back, because the timeline that Elizabeth left diverged before 1776, which means it was long before where we are now in 1796.

But for our current timeline problem, we decide to stay in 1796 and start investigating. If we've already failed here, maybe we can fix it the second time around; if our previous selves are still here, maybe we can give ourselves backup so that we won't fail again.

Just then, we hear a noise in the distance - footsteps pounding, and men's voices shouting. At the sound, Elizabeth's eyes fill with terror. "It's the knights!"she gasps.

Edward perks up again. "Knights?" he asks hopefully. He really shouldn't be that hopeful, though - if there actually were knights in Georgia in 1796, it would mean that the timeline had been even more disrupted.

"Not real knights!" Elizabeth has already grabbed Kat's hand again, and is trying to pull Kat after her down the path. "They just call themselves that. They're - they're - never mind! We need to run!"

The running footsteps get closer, until they emerge through the trees. The 'knights' are Klansmen: half a dozen white men in white robes. There shouldn't be any Klan at all in the eighteenth century; it wasn't formed until after the Civil War. These Klansmen are even more out of place, though. They're carrying guns that were clearly made in the 23rd century, and are only lightly disguised as 18th-century muskets.

"_They_ are calling themselves knights?" Edward froths, with the chivalric indignation that only a young medieval aristocrat can muster. "They spread hatred and bigotry and they call themselves _knights_? That's a travesty! That isn't what chivalry is supposed to be!"

Michel has no time for froth - he takes off down the trail after Elizabeth and Kat.

But Hypatia does not run, because she is Very Prepared. So prepared, in fact, that she figured that the agents might be pursued. So, just after we arrived, she set up a pit trap along the trail and covered it in vines. The trap is there, waiting for the Klansmen.

Rules Sidebar:
[sblock]Because really, what good is it to have infinite amounts of time travel if you can't do wacky stunts like this? 

One of the General Skills in TimeWatch is Preparedness. Unlike Investigative Skill points, which are only spent to do extra-special big things, General Skill points are spent relatively frequently. If you have a high enough Preparedness score, you can do Flashbacks: you are _so_ prepared that you can say 'Actually, I  knew that this was going to happen, so I made sure to bring that with me;' or 'Two days ago, I set that up…'[/sblock]

Right on cue, the Klansmen charge down the trail - and with shouts of surprise and anger, they all plummet down through the vines and into the pit trap.

"You dare call yourselves knights?" Edward shouts as a parting shot, as we all escape to safety.


----------



## RangerWickett (Jan 24, 2014)

A little mind-bending, but I'm very intrigued. And since I live in Georgia, and have friends who are big Civil War buffs, I kinda want to run this myself for them. How many sessions do you expect it to run?


----------



## Cerebral Paladin (Jan 24, 2014)

It runs roughly 8 hours or so from start to finish.  I have a cut-down version that can run in 4 hours that I've run at conventions; once the storyhour is finished, I'm happy to discuss both how to speed it up and a few more behind-the-scenes things for GMing (and if I can figure out a good way to get it to you, I'm happy to send you my GM notes).


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 27, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 5. The Price of Doing Business*

First: greetings to everyone who's joined this thread via the Kickstarter! Thank you for supporting TimeWatch. (and thank you to [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION] for the shout-out!)

Second: if you have not yet checked out the Kickstarter, here is the link: TimeWatch Kickstarter. It has already been amazingly successful, but the more supporters, the better! If we get to the last stretch goal, we all get pet dinosaurs! 

And now, on with the show!

--
The shouts of the Klansmen die away behind us as we flee to safety.

"What was _that_?" Kat asks

"Shouldn't we go back and interrogate them?" Edward asks.

Yves shrugs. "They are no longer any harm to us. Why, as you English say, borrow trouble?"

"They probably won't have any information, anyway," Elizabeth agrees. "They usually don't. I - we - have tried talking to them before. They're just Forrest's goons, brought in from the 23rd century. They don't know anything about the plan."

"So Forrest is the one we're after?" Mace asks eagerly. A big villain counts as big game to hunt, and Mace thinks he's found a good target.

"Nathan Forrest," Elizabeth says the name with distaste. "He's the one I've been chasing. You too, even though you don't remember it."

That name rings a bell with Hypatia, even though the events we're dealing with are far out of her time period. She's an expert in all eras of history, even the history that hadn't happened yet when she was alive. "The founder of the Ku Klux Klan?" she asks.

"Not the same person, but part of the same family." Elizabeth explains. "And with the same ideas. He's from the 23rd century."

"It is beginning to be clear why he would wish to remake history in the way that he has," Michel says. 

We decide to just leave the Klansmen where they are - they won't have any useful information, and they probably won't be coming after us. Instead, we go back to our main mission: see what Eli Whitney is doing here.

We head up to the main plantation house of Mulberry Grove and knock on the door. It's opened by a black man in a suit - clearly the butler, and undoubtedly a slave, which makes all of us feel uncomfortable. 

Edward, having been nominated as the one who is most aristocratic and diplomatic, takes the lead. "Good morning. We're here to see Mr. Whitney."

"Mr. Whitney isn't here right now," the butler says, "but if you'll all come in to the parlor, I'll fetch Mr. Miller."

The cover story that we've decided on is that we're a group of British and French investors who are interested in the factory's work in general and the cotton gin in particular. This has the advantage of all being true except the investor part - we're even almost all British and French; even Elizabeth, if you use a pretty broad definition of British. (Hypatia isn't, but we can't really explain that to Miller.)

Rules Sidebar:
[sblock] Yes, Elizabeth, a black woman, is sitting in the parlor of a plantation house in 18th-century Georgia, and nobody is really paying attention. This is another effect of the Impersonator Mesh: everyone notices that TimeWatch agents are there, but the mesh makes the locals assume that the agents are people who belong in whatever context they're in.

Racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry are awful enough in the present day, and in the past they were even more common. This aspect of the rules lets you get around that: you can play any kind of agent you want without having to worry about encountering historical bigotry on your missions. TimeWatch is about having fun, and discrimination is never fun.[/sblock]

When Miller arrives, he's got a friend with him: a tall well-dressed white man with a face that seems to be settled into a permanent superior smirk.  Elizabeth flinches, and we don't even need the introductions to know that this is Nathan Forrest.  It isn't just the way that Forrest looks at Elizabeth with amused contempt; it's that timetravelers can almost always tell when someone else is out of their own time. Which means that he can tell that we're out of our own time, too. 

Kat edges subtly in front of Elizabeth, getting between her and Forrest. Forrest notices, and smirks even more. 

'New plan,' Kat texts over the tether. (They can work as communication links between agents as well as information links to the TimeWatch mainframe. Very convenient.) 'We need to get Forrest out of here. And get Forrest alone so that we can talk to him.'

'And also get Miller alone so that we can ask him about Forrest,' Yves texts back.

Edward, Michel, and Hypatia keep up a reassuring stream of business talk, with Michel and Hypatia (as the ones with actual knowledge of science and engineering) filling in the technical details about the factory and Edward playing the role of The Money in our fictitious company.

Meanwhile, Kat puts her acting skills into practice. Her years on the stage have made her very good at drawing and holding people's attention, and that's what she does now: she catches Forrest's eye with a look that starts out as a glare, but gradually shifts to something more enticing - almost flirtatious.

After a few minutes of silent encouraging glances, Forrest finally speaks up. "Ma'am," he says to Kat, with elaborate fake courtesy, "I believe I am in need of some air. Would you like to see more of the plantation grounds?" He offers his arm to Kat, and they stroll off.

Under any other circumstances, Elizabeth would finally be able to relax now that Forrest has left the room, but now that Kat is with him, she's almost more anxious than she was before. Still, all she can do is trust that Kat can take care of herself.

Mace Hunter casually watches out the window, using his knowledge of archaeology and landforms to take careful note of the plantation's terrain, so that if anything goes wrong, he can get there in a hurry. 

Michel takes more direct action: he sneaks off to follow them. When he wants to be, Michel can be very very stealthy.  "I'm worried about her being alone with him," Michel explains over the tether.

"I think _he_ should be a little worried about being alone with _me_," Kat replies. She doesn't turn down the offer of backup, though.

So while Kat, Michel, and Forrest split off, the rest of us go to the factory. There, we finally meet Eli Whitney! He engages in an enthusiastic discussion of gears and mechanics: how all of the machines work, how he has this wonderful idea for interchangeable parts, and how he wants to move on to manufacturing muskets. Hypatia understands most of the technical stuff, and Edward is always interested in military things, but we're really just drawing him out so that we can ask him the real questions - the ones about Forrest. 

Forrest joined the company as an investor three years ago, just when Whitney and Miller were getting started, and he's been remarkably helpful. "He's got such good business sense!" Whitney gushes. "It's like he knows what's going to happen in the market before it happens!"

"Really?" Hypatia asks.

"Fancy that," says Edward.

Fortunately, the dripping sarcasm does not gum up any of the machines.

Whitney explains that it was also Forrest's idea to start up a cotton-gin manufactory in Georgia - it was closer to the market, and it wasn't that hard to bring the expert artisans down from New England.

So now we know exactly when Forrest first intervened with Eli Whitney: 1793, when he started offering advice on investments and technology. But if Kat succeeds in her plan, we're about to find out a lot more.


----------



## Ladybird (Jan 30, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 6: Why Forrest Should Be Afraid To Be Alone With Kat*

As soon as Kat and Forrest are out of sight (from everyone except Michel, that is), Forrest's posture shifts. The stiffly proper eighteenth-century bearing and words fade away, leaving a more casual attitude behind. The smirk is still the same, though. "All right," he says, stepping away to look at Kat straight on. "Cards on the table. You're not from around here either, are you? I'm 23rd century. What about you?"

"Late nineteenth," Kat replies, relaxing out of her persona as well - although, like Forrest, she keeps her expression the same, and her smile is admiringly flirtatious. As much as it nauseates Kat to have to keep flirting with Forrest, she's got a mission, and she'll stick with it. Her goal is to get as much information out of him as possible while making him think that he's the one getting information out of her. It looks like flattering is the way to do it - he seems like the sort of person who'd be pretty easy to goad into boasting about his accomplishments. Maybe she can even get him to monologue. "You look like you're much more well-traveled than I am, though," she adds. "You've probably figured out all sorts of tricks."

Kat's guessed right: flattery will get her everywhere. Forrest preens as he nods his agreement. "Oh, I've traveled a bit. Made a lot of money off of war bonds in the 1780s - pretty easy to bet on the colonists when you know they're going to win."

"Well done," Kat says admiringly. "And you're clearly having a big influence on Whitney and Miller, too, getting them to set up shop here in Georgia instead of up North."

Forrest's smirk grows bigger. "Oh, that's not the most important thing I've done. I've shifted the timeline _twice_."

"Twice?" Kat repeats.

“Let me guess," Forrest begins smugly. "In the world as you know it, the South rose up against Northern oppression in the 19th century, fought a war, lost, and was oppressed brutally for the next century.  None of that happened, before I started.” He came from the 23rd century in a different timeline, one where not only did the Civil War not happen, the American Revolution didn't happen. Instead, the North American colonies remained under British rule, and when Britain abolished slavery, that meant the end of slavery in the South. 

Which means that Forrest was born in _Elizabeth's_ timeline. 

"I couldn't stand for that kind of disorder," Forrest continues. "Nobody knowing their proper place? Everybody ignoring that some people were naturally superior to others?" He grimaces in disgust at the thought of equality. "Clearly something had to be done if there was going to be any kind of order in the world. Fortunately, a few right-thinking people in my time agreed with me."

So Forrest set out to make certain that the world conformed to his ideas. If British abolition meant the end of slavery in North America, then first he needed to make certain that Britain didn't rule over the South anymore. That meant that he needed to prevent - or at least diminish - another war.

Elizabeth remembered 1776 as an insignificant date in the middle of the Falklands War. In the timeline that our tethers tell us about, there was no Falklands War; in Elizabeth's timeline, it was a huge confrontation between Britain and France. The American colonies all rallied around Britain, and their patriotism outweighed their resentment about the taxation brought by the French and Indian War. So the American Revolution never happened.

"How did you do that?" Kat asks, stunned.

"A shot in the dark," Forrest boasts.

Kat blinks. "You didn't…shoot a messenger, did you?"

"No," Forrest replies, still smug. "In fact, I saved a life. I'm rather pleased about how things worked out."

"Really?" Kat pastes the impressed look back on her face. "That's very impressive." She steps a little closer, gazing up at Forrest. "How did you know which life to save?"

To Kat's great frustration, Forrest waves her off. "Oh, that's already taken care of. I'm much more interested in how I can change other things. And you know," he adds, with an appreciative glance at Kat, "I could use an ally. Someone I can trust to set things in the proper order."

Kat's eyes widen in theatrically surprised hope. "Could you really?"

"I think so," Forrest says. "If you were at my side, we could make this timeline even better than it already is."

"Really?" Kat says casually. "At your side? You know, there _are_ a few things I might want to change too. Little things. Could we maybe tweak a few things?"

Forrest smiles. "Oh, certainly. We could - "

And that's when Kat smacks him with her PaciFist. 

Forrest staggers back, completely taken by surprise. 

He's even more surprised by Michel shooting his blaster a second later.

With his last bits of strength, Forrest tries to shoot back, but in his flailing, actually manages to shoot himself. He tries to shoot back at Kat again, but he's too badly injured - just the effort of shooting makes him collapse, unconscious. 

Kat slaps a MemTag on him and sends him back to TimeWatch. "Well," she declares, as Forrest disappears in a tachyon beam. "That's one change that I wanted to make to this timeline." 

Rules Sidebar
[sblock]PaciFists and MemTags: two important components of a TimeWatch agent's equipment. PaciFists are stunners that work at close range. MemTags are little gadgets that help agents cover their tracks: stick a MemTag on an unconscious subject, and the person is picked up by TimeWatch HQ, where their memories will be wiped. Most of the time, the subject is then returned to their home time with only a slight sense of deja vu. Forrest will be kept at TimeWatch HQ. MemTags only work on unconscious subjects - if they're used on a conscious person, the subject's mind will crack.[/sblock]


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 3, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 7: For King and...*

As soon as Forrest has been dispatched, we all reconvene, because we really have a lot to discuss.

Putting together the pieces from Forrest and Elizabeth, we realize that our timeline is _not the original timeline_. The timeline that we left - that our tethers link to, that TimeWatch HQ is in - is the one that Forrest created. His changes created the American Revolution and the Civil War and all of the subsequent history that Yves, Michel, and Mace lived through. 

It only takes Hypatia a moment or two of research to figure out whose life Forrest saved. It was King Louis XV of France: he was nearly assassinated in 1757, but because he survived, he was there to overrule his foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, when Choiseul wanted to go to war with Britain over the Falklands in 1770. 

"I'm so glad you've finally gotten there," Elizabeth sighs in immense relief. "I couldn't tell you until you'd figured it out for yourselves! That's the mission where - where I lost you. We were trying to prevent Forrest from saving Louis XV's life, but we failed. Because the king lived, the Falklands War never happened, and the colonies rebelled."

"I must say," Hypatia murmurs, "I am more fond of democratic republics dominating in the 21st century than monarchies. I have seen the danger of absolute emperors."

"There's nothing wrong with monarchy!" Edward protests, surprising nobody. "As long as it's a good monarch." 

"Well, yes," Hypatia replies. "It's the predictability that is an issue."

Yves sniffs skeptically at all of this. "I am sure that you are a very good person, Miss Jackson," he begins, with an inviting smile in Elizabeth's direction, "but how can we be certain that you are telling the truth about this? You are not allied with Forrest, that is clear, but how do we know that you are allied with us? The enemy of our enemy is not always our friend."

"I'm a TimeWatch agent, just like you!" Elizabeth persists. "I'm telling you, we worked together! I have all of the standard issue equipment - you've seen my AutoChron, and my tether doesn't work, but I can show you that too. Look, I'm even wearing the uniform!"

She pulls back the corner of her eighteenth-century blouse to reveal the shiny silver collar of her uniform. It does look just like ours, except for some very significant differences: above the TimeWatch logo is a crown, and above that is written "H.M. TimeWatch."

Not only is her timeline not our timeline, her TimeWatch is not our TimeWatch. The timeline never sets on the British Empire.


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 6, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 8: A Royally Complicated Situation*

"Oh, mon dieu," Michel groans.

Kat texts Edward over the tether: "Our duty is to whichever is the true timeline. We have to know. I'll take her for a walk. Figure it out."

Edward, his head spinning just as much as everyone else's, meets Kat's eyes and gives her a short nod. "I understand," he texts back. "We'll try."

"Mais comment?" Michel texts. And then, having run out of even questions in French, just says "Merde." He plunks down to the ground in the grove of live oaks where we've retreated, head buried in his hands.

Kat clears her throat. "Elizabeth? I think they need some time to process this." Elizabeth nods, her eyes full of uncomfortable sympathy, as Kat takes her hand and offers, "Let's go for a walk." Kat is still texting, though - she'll make her thoughts known.

Yves is the one who starts. "We are TimeWatch agents, and we are sworn to uphold the timeline of _our_ TimeWatch. Our mission is to prevent the nuclear attacks in 1938, so we must prevent Forrest from altering the timeline in 1793."

"Our mission is to uphold the _true_ timeline," Edward objects, echoing Kat's words. "No matter which one that is. We have to go back to 1757 and thwart Forrest then, because that's his first intervention in the timeline. That's what our other selves were already trying to do."

Hypatia raises a different question: "Do we really feel comfortable with assassinating an innocent man? Admittedly, one with a somewhat unsavory personal life, but…"

"I assure you," Edward retorts, "I'm really not comfortable with a scenario where victory means killing a king!" 

Sidebar:
[sblock]The style changes here because the speeches I'm reproducing are actually what the players wrote themselves - we debated this over email. A Lot.  Mace and Michel are quiet in this discussion because their players were super-busy that week.[/sblock]

Kat's text comes through the tether: "Moral dilemma, my sainted great aunt. You _know_ I come from a vanished timeline. Did you somehow imagine innocents didn't vanish with it? Our job is to preserve the real timeline, whether or not it's the one we might most prefer. Once we start making decisions according to personal preference, we're no better than that moron white supremacist I just shot. There's no dilemma here. The only thing that matters is the truth. I'll keep her distracted. Figure out which is the real timeline, and then let's do what we have to do to fix it."

Yves lounges back against a tree trunk. "Ma cherie, you make it all sound so...noir et blanche.  We are tasked by Timewatch to restore the timeline, not HM Timewatch.  Shouldn't our loyalty be to them even if it isn't the original?  And who's to say what the original is?  Perhaps there is une belle French woman on our team who sadly disappeared due to chronal instability from the true original timeline...should we rescue her from the abyss of non-existence?  My dear Katarina, maybe you originate from the real timeline and Timewatch was set up by an aberration whose only goal is self-preservation.  The "real" timeline is whatever we think it is, n'est-ce pas?"

"In any case, aren't we rather putting the horse before the cart?" Hypatia objects. "Before we worry about 1757, shouldn't we first be concerned with 1793, when Forrest shows up and convinces Whitney not to move back to Connecticut? After all, we all agree that's the wrong timeline, and we haven't actually fixed it yet!"

Edward shakes his head. "The trouble with going to 1793 is that it's already in the timeline that Forrest changed in 1757. If we alter what happened in 1757 and capture Forrest in that time, then there won't be any need to change anything in 1793. It won't matter where Whitney sets up his factory, because there won't be any Civil War at all for his factory's location to affect. The bigger question is, do we change 1757? As TimeWatch agents, we're tasked with protecting the original timeline, but which _is_ the original timeline? Is it the one we came from? From what Miss Jackson says, it sounds as if it's not. The timeline that we came from has already been altered by Forrest, and therefore it is not the original. So I think we may have to change what happened in 1757. Still, as I hope you'll understand, I can't entirely bring myself to declare that our goal should be to kill a king."

"Quelle surprise!" Yves snorts. "Le roi d'Angleterre thinks it's a good idea to have a British Timewatch.  I am sure your motives are nothing but pure, your majesty."

"That's not what this is about!" Edward snaps. "This is not about England or France; this is about which timeline is the original! And about killing an anointed king."

"Let me say again," Kat texts, "I think you are all missing the point. The issue has nothing to do with any preference any of us might have for democracy over monarchy, the metric over the imperial, or HM TimeWatch over TimeWatch. Or whether Elizabeth Jackson lives or dies. Trust me, I have some preferences myself on some of these issues, but preferences don't matter.

"Nor does it have anything to do with our willingness or reluctance to kill a king. Edward, I actually do understand your perspective, but... when we correct timelines, people fade out of existence as an unavoidable side-effect. People die. Kings and chambermaids and Napoleonic war veterans and Regency debutantes and mad scientists. And sometimes TimeWatch agents. We *have* to follow the rules we say we follow. Yeah, it's black and white, Yves. Sometimes that's the way things are. Our task is to preserve the main timeline. Therefore, our next step needs to be to determine which timeline that is. What I may personally hope for doesn't matter; I'll do my job either way.  I don't say we should trust Elizabeth's word - in fact, I think we should not, as she is clearly compromised here. I think some independent confirmation should be sought. 

"I would also accept Yves's argument that our duty is to preserve the timeline that commissioned us to preserve it, rather than to whichever was here first - you could persuade me of the merit in that approach. I do not accept the any plan that sounds at all like 'we should examine each timeline, decide which we like better, and preserve that one.' We don't get to make those choices. If we did, I would have altered the timeline before now to bring some other people back from the dead."

While the rest of us debate killing kings, national rivalries, lost timelines, and other issues that hit far too close to home, Hypatia has, of course, been doing research. "It occurs to me that attempting to find the person who attempted to assassinate Louis XV might give us a different perspective. His name was Robert-Francois Damiens, and I suspect that he might be a time traveler himself. The tether indicates no clear reason other than mental instability and vague religious grudges for Damiens' attempt. Or maybe a time-traveler convinced Damiens to do it somehow. If Damiens or his instigator was a time traveler, then that further suggests that ours is the original timeline." She starts to draw large complex diagrams of intersecting lines and circles in the red Georgia dirt, which most of us manage to follow, mostly. "So T1 = Life as we Know It; T2 = Louis XV gets assassinated, Falklands War happens, no Amer. Rev. (Jackson's timeline); T3 = Forrest eliminates assassin, creating (originally) something similar to T1; T4 = Forrest makes Whitney settle in Georgia, creating nuclear war in 1938."

This suggestion actually gives Edward a little hope. "If the assassin was a time-traveler, then yes, we _should_ find him and address the matter, because the real issue," he says, with a pointed glare at Yves, "is which timeline is the original one! That is what I have been saying - that we need to determine which timeline is original and protect that one. We know that the one we're in at the moment was created by Forrest's actions - so now we need to figure out if Miss Jackson's timeline was the original, or if it was created by Damiens."

Yves is unmoved by glares or diagrams or arguments about lost timelines - he's back to lounging against the tree. "Mademoiselle Katarina, you seem to be under the delusion that there is one objective Truth to all of space and time.  Allow me to relieve you of that burden.  The first thing we learn as time agents is that time is relative, n'est-ce pas?  If your British poet Keats is correct in his presumption that truth is beauty and beauty truth, and beauty, as we all know, is in the eye of the beholder, then doesn't it logically follow that truth is just as intimate a quality?

"It is self-evident that I work for Timewatch, that is my personal truth.  You may believe Mademoiselle Elizabeth for I have no doubt that HM Timewatch is just as real.  But there is no external judge to tell us which is more valid over the other.  It is we who decide what is ultimately real, and you would be fooling yourself if you didn't think our preferences weren't part of that consideration."

"It seems as if we need more information before we can make a final decision," Hypatia says. "Our options are: to go to 1793 to try to prevent Forrest from influencing Whitney, to go to 1757 to find out more about Damiens, or to go to 1757 to try to stop Forrest from intervening then."

Consensus leans towards 1757 - and if we find out that the would-be assassin was in fact a time traveler, then that would allow us to bypass all of the arguments about killing kings and HM TimeWatch. 

So we head off to 1757, to try to find out who wants to kill King Louis XV and why.


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 10, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 9: Time To Say Goodbye*

While the rest of the team prepares to jump, Kat takes Elizabeth aside one last time.

"We're going back to 1757 - " Kat begins.

Elizabeth finishes the thought for her. "And I can't go with you."

Kat steps back, equally surprised and relieved to hear Elizabeth say it before she can. "I was already unstable," Elizabeth admits ruefully. "I'm not sure I could take another jump, especially to a place where I've already been. The risk of paradox would just be too much."

That's all true, but the real reason that Elizabeth can't come with us is that we may end up trying to erase her timeline - which, of course, Kat can't tell her. Even though Kat can't remember her previous relationship with Elizabeth, there's still enough of the emotional resonance left over for her to feel strongly about wanting to keep Elizabeth safe, and to make this farewell very painful. They've just found each other again, but soon they may lose each other entirely. 

While Kat and Elizabeth spend their last few moments together, the rest of us do some advance research on the assassin and his background. We suspect that he might be a timetraveler himself; but even if he isn't, we need to know more about him. 

Robert-Francois Damiens was born in northern France. He served in the military for a short time, but spent most of his life as a domestic servant. He had trouble keeping a job, though - he was fired from several posts for misconduct. Nobody really knows why he tried to kill King Louis XV. It might have been related to a church matter? He worked for the Jesuits for a while (although they fired him too) and held some odd religious views. But Damiens also seems to have blamed the king for his own problems. After trying to assassinate the king, Damiens didn't try to flee, and was captured almost immediately. He was tortured, but didn't give up any info on accomplices - either he was protecting them well, or he acted alone. His execution was pretty gruesome, as you might expect for someone who tried to kill a king. He left behind a wife and a daughter, both of whom ended up changing their names and leaving France.

"So he wasn't a timetraveler," says Edward. "He has a past and a family. The tether knows the names of his parents and siblings, as well as those of his wife and daughter."

"Or, if he is a timetraveler," says Yves, "he's a very committed one, to have jumped back and forth to set up all that evidence."

Hypatia suggests, "Even if Damiens isn't a timetraveler, he may be working for one. He's got a history of instability, so he might be easy to influence, and someone must have planted the idea for the assassination in his head. It's a bit random to blame the king for getting repeatedly fired for being a bad cleaner."

"People blame kings for all kinds of things," Edward points out.

"If you say so, Your Majesty," says Hypatia.

Since the assassination is on Jan 5, 1757, Yves suggests that we jump in on New Year's Day. That might be close enough to the event that Damiens might have already gotten the idea.

So that's what we do. Happy New Year, 1757!

Now that we're here, how do we find Damiens? He's a religious person, so maybe we can trace him through church records? Maybe he made donations to his local parish?

Then Edward remembers something. "Yves, aren't you _from Paris in the 18th century?"

"Why, yes I am!" Yves says. "A bit later than this time, but yes."

"Maybe we can have a home base with Yves' relatives," suggests Kat. "Just don't prevent your father from falling in love with your mother, or anything like that."

Yves smirks. "Even I have that much self-control."_


----------



## Kaodi (Feb 11, 2014)

He does not appear to have many lines but I must cheer for Mace Hunter anyway.


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 14, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 10: Finding a Lost Sheep*

Yves parlays his family knowledge and resemblance to get us some fairly nice accommodations with his relatives, pretending to be a distant cousin. Privilege has its privileges! His local knowledge is useful to our mission, too: he knows exactly which neighborhoods to start looking in, and we soon find Damiens' parish church.

It turns out that the priest knows Damiens well, and is worried about him. "He is…he is not well," says the priest, a little uncomfortably and very sadly. "There is something that preys upon him. I might almost say something that possesses him." 

Damiens rants the way some people rant while they're drunk, explains the priest, except that Damiens says those things when he's sober. He's pious, but says odd things about the church; patriotic, but says odd things about the country. It's starting to sound like Damiens is just mentally ill.

"Has he said anything against the king?" asks Hypatia.

"I don't want to bring a lost sheep to harm," the priest hedges - which is about the same as saying 'yes.'

Still, Edward reassures him: "We don't want to hurt him! We're trying to prevent him from doing harm to himself or others."

"Yes, he blames the king," says the priest, reluctantly. "For church policy, for national policy."

"Who does he work for?" asks Hypatia.

The priest hedges again, but this time, from uncertainty rather than protective instincts. "As best as I can tell, he has found it difficult to remain in service. He is a troubled man."

Damiens might be mentally ill, but that doesn't mean that he's acting alone. "Does he have any particular friends?" Yves asks.

The priest shakes his head. "None that I've noticed, other than his family."

Yves presses a little more, because this is one of the most important parts of our puzzle. "So you don't think he's being influenced in any way by a friend? Or a charismatic?"

"No," the priest repeats. "Not that I've seen."

"Has anyone else been acting strange in a similar way to Damiens?" asks Mace.

"Not really," says the priest.  "Others become embittered, or have trouble keeping a job, but no, there is no one quite like him."

"How long has he been troubled?" asks Kat. 

"As long as I have known him," sighs the priest. "And from what I have heard, longer than that."

"How very sad," Kat says, and she means it.

"I hope you can do well for him," says the priest.

"So do we," says Edward. "We very much want to do the right thing."

So we leave the church and retreat to Yves' family's house to discuss what we've found. All of the signs are pointing to Damiens being mentally ill and acting alone: he doesn't have many friends at all, let alone ones who could have planted the assassination plot in his mind; and his erratic behavior seems to be a lifelong pattern.

Now our question is: what did Forrest change to prevent the assassination? The tether says that the assassination failed because Damiens was using a penknife, and that Louis XV was wearing a really heavy coat. So either Forrest made sure that Louis was wearing heavier clothes (by influencing his valet?) or he made sure that Damiens had a really bad knife. 

But Forrest still let Damiens try and fail. "What would happen if Damiens didn't try at all?" asks Edward. "What if we stopped him from getting anywhere near the king?"

"That might not fix everything,"  Kat says.

Hypatia agrees. "The most important thing to do is to stop Forrest. So we should watch both Damiens and the king." Which means that we should split up. "Some of us are better suited for dealing with kings, some for looking for lunatic domestic servants."

Edward is obviously on Team King, and so is Yves. Kat decides to go with them, while Mace and Hypatia volunteer for Team Lunatic.

Sidebar:
[sblock] Michel's player couldn't make this session. We are soon going to regret Michel's absence in more ways than one![/sblock]

But the first step in any plan concocted by Hypatia is, of course, to do Research. Now that we've learned more about Damiens, we want to figure out where Forrest might be and what he might be doing. We know that he made a fortune later in the 18th century by predicting financial markets, so Hypatia tries to search through financial records to see if anyone is following a similar pattern. She can't find any records, so we decide to see if court gossip turns up any information. That's definitely Edward's territory - he's very good at getting along with the nobility, and soon finds his way to the people who know everything about court gossip. There are a few notable winners and losers at court, but nobody who has the uncanny record of success that would match Forrest's pattern. 

There is, however, someone who matches Forrest's description: the king's new valet. The person in charge of dressing the king is a noble, not a servant - because the position gives such proximity to the king's person, it implies deep trust. And in this case (as Hypatia and Mace suspected) it places Forrest perfectly to ensure that the king will be wearing a nice thick coat in a few days to turn aside Damiens' knife.

So Edward, Yves, and Kat stay at court, while Hypatia and Mace head back to Damiens' neighborhood. Hypatia trails Damiens as he goes about his daily business, but Mace is really not suited to being unobtrusive. Mace Hunter! is kind of the opposite of unobtrusive.

"Happy New Year!" Mace shouts as he bursts into a tavern. "The next round's on me!"  Cheers erupt around him, and much festivity and alcohol ensues - followed by some leading questions about local gossip and neighborhood people, once everyone is in a thoroughly good mood. Local gossip about Damiens matches what the priest said: he's erratic, a loner, has trouble keeping a job, occasionally rants against the king and the church, and doesn't seem to be under anyone's influence.

Meanwhile, Hypatia is subtle enough to manage to track Damiens to his house. He's having a fairly ordinary day, it seems - he's celebrating the New Year with his wife and daughter, and nobody else. His wife and daughter look a little wary of him, but nothing terrible is happening. Plus, when Hypatia sees him, she can tell that he's local to this time.

So their investigations confirm what we've found so far: Damiens isn't being influenced by Forrest or anyone else that we can determine; he isn't a time traveler; and his hatred of the king seems to stem from mental illness alone.

Next up: Team King!


----------



## Piratecat (Feb 14, 2014)

Kaodi said:


> He does not appear to have many lines but I must cheer for Mace Hunter anyway.




As all right-thinking people must. Mace Hunter is the eternal everyman, whether he knows it or not.


----------



## Piratecat (Feb 17, 2014)

I'm looking forward to Team King. Briefly, however, the game just got featured on the website iO9. A good interview, too!

http://io9.com/in-the-timewatch-rpg-paradoxes-are-part-of-the-fun-1523120387

I now return you to chronal mayhem.


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 19, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 11: In Which a King is Imperiled, But Not How We'd Planned*

Two more days till the end of the Kickstarter! Some awesome stretch goals are already unlocked, and there's only $560 to go before the 96-page campaign supplement gets unlocked. (And only $999,930,560 before we all get pet dinosaurs! Hey, if our future selves all come back and chip in, we can totally reach that last stretch goal!) Anyway, check out the TimeWatch Kickstarter here, and help make this excellent game happen!

And now, on with the show...

---
Back at court, Team King is trying to track down the new valet, whom we know to be Forrest. The trouble is, we've just met him a few hours ago forty years from now. That's kind of risky, but we know how to avoid paradoxes as much as possible, so we're safe for now.

Rules Sidebar:
[sblock]Paradox Prevention is an amazingly useful skill, and also one that you can use to do ridiculous time-travel stunts, because ridiculous time-travel stunts are one of the most fun parts of time-travel stories. What we're doing now is a relatively easy Paradox Prevention task. If we'd wanted to, we could have spent some points to do something bigger, like meet up with our former selves when they were confronting Forrest here in 1757 so that we could give ourselves backup.[/sblock]

"What do we do when we find him?" Yves asks.

"We should make sure that he's disgraced!" Edward suggests eagerly.

"Might be nice," Kat agrees. "But all we really need is to get him alone so that we can knock him out and MemTag him." She would know, of course - that's how she dealt with him before. "If we can just sneak up on him, that would be best of all."

We find our way to the salon where high-level functionaries go when they're not on duty, doing our best not to call attention to ourselves along the way, and doing our best to sneak in so that we can take Forrest by surprise. Kat's great at sneaking, but Yves and Edward aren't. Kat can help cover for Edward a bit, but it quickly becomes clear that Yves is just not going to be able to blend in at all.

Rules Sidebar:
[sblock]On aiding other characters: If you have at least some points in a skill, you can benefit from another PC's assistance. Edward has 2 points in Unobtrusive, so Kat can help him. Yves has 0, so he is conspicuously out of luck.[/sblock]

"Well…perhaps we could go the other way, instead," Edward suggests. "Instead of trying to blend in, Yves, could you be a big noisy diversion so that Kat and I can sneak up on Forrest?"

"But of course!" Yves cries happily.  "How would you like me to call attention to myself?"

Kat opens her mouth. Closes her mouth. Looks at Edward.

"Er. Drunkenness might work well?" Edward suggests hopefully. "Be loud and drunken."

You will be shocked, shocked! to hear that Yves makes a very convincing drunken nobleman. He shouts and staggers around the kitchen, and the palace servants wisely stay out of his way, watching him warily. Because they're all watching him, nobody is watching Kat and Edward, which allows them to sneak much more effectively.

As soon as we're in the servants' salon, we spot Forrest. Just as we've hoped, he's watching Yves very closely. And then after a moment, he's watching even more closely than we'd hoped. Has he figured out that Yves isn't local to this timeline? Or has he just started to suspect that something is up?

Time for Plan B?

Plan B is to get into a fight with Forrest outright: either we can take the fight outside, or just punch him out right there in the servants' hall. 

Edward is only too happy to go along with any plan that ends with him punching Forrest. He musters his best attempt at a drunken stagger (not as convincing as Yves, since he hasn't had quite as many opportunities to draw on real-life experiences) and lurches over to Forrest. "You!" he slurs. "You're the one I saw with my girl! You stay away from her!" And then he punches Forrest in the face.

But, oddly, it hurts Edward's fist almost as much as it hurts Forrest's face. Forrest is wearing some kind of armor. Uh-oh.

Kat springs into action with her part of the plan: doing her best impression of a senior palace functionary, she storms up to Edward and Forrest, shouting, "Both of you! Your behavior is unbecoming. Get outside!" If we can just get Forrest alone...

Forrest still looks unconvinced, though, and keeps scuffling with Edward.

Since we can't seem to get Forrest outside, Yves tries to get the other servants outside instead. "It is best to avoid the affairs of the heart if they are not your own," he advises them. "I think it best for us to leave them to their own private matter." He's convincing on his own, but his little speech is made even more effective by the coins he starts handing out.

The servants hastily file out, finally leaving us alone with Forrest. But now that he's managed to get a good look at Edward, Forrest's eyes are starting to sharpen with recognition. "Oh," he drawls. "You're one of _them_." And pulls a blaster pistol, and shoots Edward point-blank.

Kat is utterly astonished at what she thinks next: "I should throw myself between the King and the bullet. I…guess I'm still British?" 

As patriotic as the impulse is, she's too far away to actually do anything - Edward is hit. Fortunately, they're in such close quarters that Forrest's second shot hits himself. And then his third shot - 

Wait, Forrest is shooting _again_? Yup. He's got some kind of timegadget - it lets him move faster than any ordinary human can. He gets off two more shots: again, one hits Edward, and the other hits Forrest himself.

Edward collapses, very badly shot. He didn't succeed in taking Forrest out, but he got the satisfaction of implying that he's dishonorable and punching him in the face, which counts for something.

Kat finally gets to take a shot with her PaciFist, hitting Forrest squarely. He staggers, but doesn't drop - and because he's got that nasty gadget, he can shoot yet again, this time at Kat. 

But while Forrest is shooting at Kat, Yves leaps in and whacks him over the head with a candlestick. That does the trick! Forrest falls to the ground, unconscious.


----------



## RangerWickett (Feb 19, 2014)

What's with all the "shooting himself"?


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 19, 2014)

Trying to use a ranged weapon in very close quarters means that if you miss badly enough, there's a risk that you'll shoot yourself instead of the other person


----------



## Piratecat (Feb 21, 2014)

1 in 6 chance, I think. Why, that could only happen one time in a million!

Thank you, Ladybird et al, for writing this. We're just about done with the Kickstarter (6 hours to go!), and it's a complete honor to be reading this.


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 21, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 12: In Which Everything is Spilled*

Just a few more hours left in the Kickstarter! Help make TimeWatch happen! We've had an amazing time playing, and we want the world to see how great this game is.

And now, on with the show!

--
As Edward bleeds on the floor and Yves celebrates his triumph at knocking out Forrest, Kat quickly tethers to Team Lunatic, telling them to get back to the palace. Fortunately, they get there quickly - Mace Hunter! knows some shortcuts, and he and Hypatia hurry back in time for Hypatia to give Edward the medical attention that he very badly needs.

Now we settle down to the real interrogation.

"How about Good Cop-Bad Cop?" Mace suggests.

We all consider our various skills to see how we can go about doing this. To everyone's surprise, it turns out that Edward is the most intimidating (in a technical skill-point sort of way). To everyone's greater surprise, he's only too happy to be the Bad Cop. Edward enthusiastically intimidates Forrest, impugns his honor, and even punches him a few times. 

Equally surprising is the fact that Mace takes the role of Good Cop, offering his own particular brand of friendly reassurance to Forrest. So, while the 20-year-old chivalry-obsessed king plays Bad Cop, and the battle-hardened adventurer plays Good Cop, Kat uses her knowledge of psychology to play mind games on Forrest. Through everyone's combined efforts, he spills everything.

Forrest explains that he doesn't actually know that much about Damiens, but does know that Damiens killed Louis. Yes, on his own, and yes, with a penknife. So Forrest's first attempt to change the timeline was to just try to keep Damiens away from Louis, but Elizabeth prevented him from doing that. (In telling that part of the story, Forrest describes Elizabeth in some racist and sexist terms that make Edward hit him again.) 

"So I started looking for alternate timelines," Forrest explains. "I found one where Damiens failed because the knife didn't go deep enough. So Louis lived, and he overruled Choiseul on the Falklands War, and the American colonies rebelled. It wasn't ideal, but it was the best I could find." That familiar smirk starts to crease his face. "I could work with it. After all, it was a timeline in which the South rose up against Northern oppression. I could encourage that."

After we've gotten all of that, we start to pump Forrest for information about his home timeline. "What's the government like?" Hypatia asks. The British Empire dominates North America, which is what we'd thought.

Kat leans over to say quietly to Edward, "You were interested in the royal succession. Now might be a good time to ask."

Edward nods, and says, "Queen Anne reigns at the beginning of the 21st century. What happened to Elizabeth II? And Prince Charles?"

"Oh," says Forrest, with the offhanded tone of someone discussing the distant past, "they died when London was bombed."

Everyone is silent. 

Finally Edward manages to ask, very quietly, "Bombed by whom?"

"The Soviets, of course," says Forrest. "You know, in the second phase of World War II."

The first phase of World War II was the one that happened in our timeline, more or less, although in Forrest's, it was mostly the Nazis against the British Empire, since there wasn't any US. The second phase was between the British Empire and the Soviet Union, triggered by still-PM Winston Churchill's Operation Unthinkable. In our timeline, Churchill planned Operation Unthinkable but never put it into practice.

The second phase of the war was nuclear: all major cities on both sides were nuked. Moscow, London, Edinburgh, Leningrad, and many more. When London was bombed, Elizabeth II and Charles died, but Princess Anne - who was just a baby - was saved somehow. 

(Edward thinks that a baby being saved in the middle of a nuclear war sounds exceptionally lucky. If Princess Anne was saved by more time travelers intervening, he really doesn't wanna deal.)

"I do not think that this is a very good timeline," Yves says quietly.

We also think that we've gotten as much out of Forrest as we need. We knock him out again, Memtag him and send him up to TimeWatch HQ to join the other copy of himself. It's even more satisfying the second time around!

But…now what do we do?

Forrest and Elizabeth's timeline is the original one, but in that timeline, most of Europe was destroyed by nuclear war. The one that we all came from was better, but it was created by Forrest's intervention.

Which one do we choose? And _how_ do we choose? How can we possibly choose between nuclear war and racist time-traveler manipulation?


----------



## Cerebral Paladin (Feb 21, 2014)

Couple comments from the GM:
1.  Queen Anne was a mistake I made when answering a question off the cuff.  I knew I wanted Elizabeth and Charles to have died--it was a clue about the nuclear war, that there had been a calamitus event that had killed both Elizabeth and her heir-apparent.  But Princess Anne surviving didn't make much sense--I could come up with a story where she was with a nurse and stuff safely away from London to keep her safe while the Queen was back there, but it's pretty thin gruel.  In retrospect, the King should have been King David (possibly King Albert, depending on which name he wanted to use)--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Armstrong-Jones,_Viscount_Linley having succeeded his mother, Queen Margaret (the real-world's Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon).  They could much more reliably have been away from London--indeed, deliberately so to protect the succession.  Oh well.

2.  The nuclear exchange was substantial, and destroyed many of the major cities of Europe, but ti was far from mutually assured destruction (hitting too early for a massive build-up of nuclear weapons beforehand).  It also was basically limited exclusively to Europe, because the exchange happened before the development of ICBMs.  So it was probably about 10 or 15 cities total that got nuked--something like London, Manchester, Birmingham, maybe Leeds or Liverpool, Paris, Berlin, maybe Munich or some additional continental cities, and then all the major cities of the Soviet Union--Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Stalingrad.  Not "most of Europe" but still a huge catastrophe, with enormous loss of life.


----------



## Ladybird (Feb 27, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 13: Chasing the Truth*

"I believe we should ensure that Le Roi is wearing a nice thick coat," Yves begins.

Kat frowns. "I disagree. We can't pick and choose which timeline we like best."

"Exactly!" Edward chimes in. "Our duty is to find the _right_ timeline, and that means the original one."

"But even if that one is the original, it seems like a bloody awful one," says Mace.

"Let us vote," Hypatia declares, as democratically as you'd expect. "I say we take the time travelers out of it. Forrest can do nothing now, and we should do nothing as well. Let history and chance take their course."

Slowly and painfully, Edward and Kat agree. "We can't intervene in the timeline anymore," Edward argues. "Hypatia is right: we have achieved our goal here by taking out Forrest, and now we have to stay out of it."

Yves and Mace hold out. "There will always be disturbances in the timeline," Yves counters. "It is our job, through our commission by Timewatch, to make sure that Timewatch exists. So that is what we need to do. It is circular, yes, but that should be our paramount concern. We must save the king."

Michel is skeptical. "In what way does that differ from the logic of M. Forrest, trying to make certain that the timeline he likes best wins?"

"It does not!" Yves declares. And then adds. "Except for the white supremacy."

Everyone stares.

"Well," Kat finally says. "That makes my decision easier."

Edward agrees. "Yes. A lot easier."

Mace Hunter! still isn't convinced."What is the point of Timewatch if we're not going to figure out the right answer and make sure that that happens? The right answer is right there on our tether. That's the timeline we have to protect."

"Timewatch sent us to stop Forrest," Edward argues back. "We can't do that if we allow - or _make_ - the same change that Forrest attempted."

Michel adds, "If we do intervene, how do we know that we will not create even worse ripples in the timeline?"

"Timewatch would not send us out to do nothing," Yves sniffs.

"We haven't done nothing!" Edward protests. "We've apprehended Forrest. Twice!"

"Yves," Michel asks, "what do you propose that we do that does not compromise the integrity of the timeline by introducing ourselves to a major political figure?"

"Simply ensure that the king wears a warm coat in four days," says Yves.

Even that is too much intervention for the rest of us. Hypatia suggests, as she has all along, "Just let the old valet come back. Let Damiens try and - we hope - fail anyway."

Michel does have one small intervention: "Let us make sure that the valet isn't so bitter that he dresses the king in unsuitably thin clothes to try to give the king a cold."

Which is all very reasonable. And all very distracting. While we're debating and making other plans, Yves is slipping out his Autochron. By the time we notice it, the purple globe is already forming around him. All we can do is chase!

Rules Sidebar:
[sblock] Well, we _could_ have shot him, but we wanted to test the time-chase mechanics 

This was our first real speed bump in the playtest. Somehow we'd missed the fact that time chases are based on the Vehicles stat, and with an entire party of pre-modern people, none of us had enough points in Vehicles to make a decent chase! So instead, we decided to use Athletics instead, and made a note of that for the future.

Also, this session took place before a really great update to the rules. Now when you engage in a time chase, you hop in and out of famous historical chases! Chariot races, Olympic sprints, 1920s mob car chases, futuristic spaceship battles - any chase you want. Alas, that had not yet entered the rules.
[/sblock]

Edward, being a quick and athletic sort of person, is the first to leap after Yves. He takes the lead in the chase, steering us through space and time, past whirling stars and fleeting glimpses of alternate times.

We land on a balcony - still in Paris, still in the palace, but a century earlier. We're in 1657, witnessing the signing of a treaty between King Louis XIV and Oliver Cromwell.  We barely have enough time to realize what's going on before Yves winks out again.

The stars whirl again, and tentacles slither out to grab at our Autochrons. Yves is fast, but so are the rest of us - Edward's expertise at Paradox Prevention has prepared him for just this kind of chase, and he's leading the group at top speed through the chaos of time.

We land in a desolate wasteland, so blasted by nuclear war that we couldn't even begin to guess when and where we are. Only our tethers tell us: it's still Paris. This is the 23rd century. It's the time that Forrest came from, the future that will follow if we do nothing.

And then Yves jumps out again, and when the stars stop spinning, we're almost back where we started. Still in Paris, back in January 1757. It's January 3: two days after we left, and one day before Damiens will try to assassinate King Louis XV.

We close in around Yves, prepared for him to jump away again - but he doesn't.

"You have exhausted my ability to escape you," Yves says, "but perhaps you have seen the consequences of not saving the king's life. You have a choice: you can arrest me right now. Or you can just allow me to pay the new king's valet a small bribe to make sure that he is extra warm in a couple days."

"Does it not occur to you that you are about to talk to the valet?" Michel cries in exasperation. "You could spare yourself so much effort." That is, in fact, what we had been about to do when Yves fired up his Autochron.

Edward is still focused on the big picture, though. "We already understood the consequences," he says steadily. "We still can't allow you to do this. Our whole purpose here is to prevent the deed that your'e trying to do."

Yves shakes his head. "Understanding something intellectually is not the same as experiencing it."

"We still need to prevent time travelers from interfering in this timeline," Edward persists.

"But that's what created our timeline!" protests Yves.

"You don't know that," Hypatia counters.

"Are you willing to risk your entire existence on that chance?" Yves asks.

Edward quirks a faint smile. "Isn't that what we do every day?"

Yves clearly isn't making any headway with Edward or Hypatia, so he tries a different tactic now. "Michel, I thought your love for La France would make you act in a different manner."

"Yves!" Edward exclaims indignantly. "Weren't you just accusing me of trying to bend the timeline for nationalist purposes?"

"Yes," Yves admits calmly, "but you were doing it for England."

Edward throws up his hands. "Oh, it's all right if _French_ people do it!" 

Michel answers the question, and doesn't take the bait that Yves has been trying to hold out. "I have been on the battlefield defending France against invaders. I do not want to do it again."

Eventually we talk Yves down - he's outnumbered, after all, and he's already lost one chase, so he'll very likely lose if he tries to run again. We watch him very very closely, and move ahead with our original plan.


----------



## Ladybird (Mar 4, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 14: Comedy, Tragedy, and the Fate of Kings*

After recovering from the chase, we resume our original plan: to find the courtier who was acting as the king's valet before Forrest. We're worried that he might be bitter about losing his position, and that his bitterness might result in some subtle action against the king - nothing violent, of course, but maybe he would let the king go out in a thin coat in the hopes that he'll catch cold, which would put the king at greater risk from Damiens' stabbing attempt.

The valet still around court, and not hard to find. Hypatia has a strong appreciation for of all sorts, and 18th-century royal fashion definitely counts as that, so she can draw out the valet fairly easily. "What the king wears _is_ fashion!" he declares happily. 

Fortunately, the valet doesn't seem to be hostile - he's still very proud of his position, and very much wants to keep it now that he's gotten it back.  Edward, as you might expect, is good at telling when nobles are making veiled insults against kings, and can tell that the valet isn't doing that.

But would there be anyone else who might encroach on the valet's position, or who might try to influence the valet to do something that might affect the timeline? Michel Flatters the valet expertly to find out. "I'm certain that many lesser people have tried to influence you, but it's good to see a man of such integrity in this role - someone who would _never_ be influenced by anyone's petty maneuverings!"

The valet is more than happy to insult those "lesser people." People like Forrest, for instance. "Oh, he was awful!" gasps the valet.

Hypatia lowers her voice to a scandalized whisper. "I heard he got into a fistfight in the corridors!"

"Did he?" Edward gasps. "How shocking!"

The valet eagerly chimes in with some gossip of his own: "I heard he was sleeping with someone's wife!"

"And who knows what crimes against fashion he may have committed!" Michel adds.

"After the fight, he was never heard from again!" the valet informs us. "He must have been so embarrassed that he left town."

So there's no danger that the valet will take any action either to harm the king of his own volition or to protect the king under the influence of another timetraveler. There's no danger that Yves can slip away to take action on his own: he's really not an Unobtrusive person, and we're watching him like a hawk.

All the loose ends are tied up. So we wait.

Two days pass. 

On January 5, 1757, a sudden uproarious shout begins outside the palace, and spreads throughout the city. The king has been stabbed.

At first, nobody knows for certain what has happened, and rumors run all around the city. He's alive, he's dead, he's dying - nobody knows. But as the hours pass, it becomes clear that he has been very badly wounded, and is on the verge of death.

On Jan 6, 1757, King Louis XV dies.

His son succeeds as Louis XVI - a name that in our timeline was borne by Louis XV's grandson. Because Louis XV survived in our timeline, he outlived his own son, and was succeeded by his grandson instead. But now we have a new king, one who never reigned in our timeline.

Our tethers are broken.

Over and over, we try to contact TimeWatch HQ, but there is no answer. Only silence.

There is an enormous outcry against the assassin - Robert-Francois Damiens, an unknown servant who apparently acted alone. His execution is gruesome and prolonged.

Our tethers are still silent. There are no messages from HQ. No messages from anywhere.

Where do we go? What do we do?


----------



## RangerWickett (Mar 4, 2014)

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NiceJobBreakingItHero


----------



## Ladybird (Mar 12, 2014)

*Episode 1, Chapter 15: Where Do We Go From Here?*

Where do we go? What do we do?

We can't communicate with TimeWatch - we're not even sure whether there's a TimeWatch to go back to. All we can do is stay together. Even Yves wants to stick with the group. 

In the end, we decide to find the one person we know is in this timeline: Elizabeth Jackson.  We spin up our AutoChrons and head back to Georgia in 1796.

As soon as we land, Elizabeth rushes towards us, flinging herself at Kat in giddy joy. "It worked!" she cries. "It worked! Everything works. My tether is up again!"

"Oh," says Edward. We succeeded, but he's too numb and shocked to feel much joy at the confirmation. "That's…what I thought would happen."

[sblock]If you're the kind of person who likes a soundtrack to your RPGs, we decided that 'Where Do We Go From Here?' from Once More With Feeling would be playing over this scene.[/sblock]

Our tethers only work to let us communicate with each other. Kat texts to Edward: "We won. Hooray?"

Edward texts back: "I'm not feeling much of the joy either."

"Any timeline designed by Forrest is not one we really wanted to live in," Hypatia suggests. "Think of it that way." 

We all agree - that's what most of us had been saying all along, after all. But it doesn't change the fact that we've erased our own timeline, and it doesn't make us feel any better about it.

Michel has at least some idea of how he can make himself feel better. "Du biere, Yves?" he suggests.

Yves nods. "The strongest possible, Michel."

Kat sees their drink offer, and raises them one more: "Gin. Lots of gin."

Hypatia's not interested in drinking, but ventures one more small suggestion: "I suppose the rest of you are against killing Churchill? We could stop Operation Unthinkable..."

"_No_," says Edward immediately. "No more intervention."

Where do we go from here? Well, Elizabeth can show us the way. She sets her Autochron to lead us back to the end of time - the end of _her_ time. We spin through stars and time, past tiny glimpses of alternate timelines - alternates to this one, not the one we were born into.

We arrive at the end of time, at the headquarters of His Majesty's TimeWatch. 

It looks like the place we left, and also not. Just like the TimeWatch we left, this room is full of agents in silver uniforms and scientists in white lab coats, all bustling in different directions as they coordinate dozens of missions at once. But the color of the carpet is different, the shape of the viewscreens is different, the corridors run off at different angles. And of course, there are crowns over all the logos. 

But it's still TimeWatch, and it's all we have now.

As we step out of our Autochrons, still reeling with disorientation, Edward spots a familiar face: his younger brother, Richard. In a rush of sudden joy, he races towards his brother, arms out to embrace him…

…only to be faced with a look of utter confusion. "Who are you?" Richard asks.

Edward's heart sinks. "I'm your brother Edward," he says slowly, the painful realization starting to come over him.

Richard shakes his head. "I'm sorry," he says, sincere in his apology, but still blank with lack of recognition. "Are you…from another timeline where I wasn't imprisoned?"

"No, we were _both_ imprisoned!" Edward struggles to explain. "I was the elder brother - I was the one deposed, and then we were both rescued…"

"Pardon, Your Majesty," a tech says as she edges between the brothers on her hurried way through the crowded room.

Edward starts to respond - he still responds to the title instinctively - but Richard is the one that the tech was addressing, and it's Richard who reassures her, "It's quite all right." 

This is what it means to Fade from the timeline. Even though Edward and Richard were born long before 1757, when the timelines changed, Edward faded out. That means that in this timeline, Richard was the oldest son: _he_ was the deposed king, and he alone was imprisoned in the Tower and rescued by Timewatch.

Edward is heartbroken. The one person he knew from home, the person he loved the most, doesn't know him. Yes, Richard is safe and happy, which is what Edward wanted, but now Edward is more alone than ever.

Our team may be confused, uncertain, and ambivalent about what we've done, but HM TimeWatch's commanders are unanimous in treating this mission as a success. For our heroic service to HM TimeWatch in rescuing the timeline, we're all named Companions in the Order of St. Michael and St. George. 

Well, except for Elizabeth - she's named a Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, and promoted to a desk job. With the pivotal role that she's played in the destruction and restoration of this timeline, it's just too dangerous now to send her out into the field anymore and risk having her Fade.

And, except for Edward. It's not clear what Edward's status is in the Order of St. Michael and St. George. He's not really in the line of royal succession, but does he still outrank knights? In HM Timewatch, these distinctions matter.

One kind of status _is_ clear: the status of Kat and Elizabeth's relationship. "Please come back with me to the 21st century to meet my family?" Elizabeth offers. "You've met them before, but they don't remember you. And I want them to know you."

And so we move forward into the original timeline, which we've restored - in the service of His Majesty's TimeWatch.

***

Here ends Episode 1! 

Thanks to Cerebral Paladin for GMing, thanks to Piratecat for creating the game, and thanks to all of you for reading! I hope you'll stay tuned for Episode 2 - we all had such a great time that we wanted to keep playing. 

Any questions? Comments?


----------



## RangerWickett (Mar 12, 2014)

Are you making a whole campaign out of this? And how much did you plan in advance for all the dead-end timelines and alternate realities?


----------



## Ladybird (Mar 13, 2014)

RangerWickett said:


> Are you making a whole campaign out of this? And how much did you plan in advance for all the dead-end timelines and alternate realities?




The second question I'll leave to  [MENTION=3448]Cerebral Paladin[/MENTION], but as for the first, we'd love to make it a campaign! We've got one more adventure that we've already played (GMed by  [MENTION=3722]Orichalcum[/MENTION]), and I'm in the process of working up a new adventure that I'd GM as Episode 3.


----------



## Ladybird (Mar 20, 2014)

*Episode 2: The Glow of the Talisman Pillars*

Here begins Episode 2! 

There were a few changes in personnel for this one.  [MENTION=3722]Orichalcum[/MENTION] is the GM for this episode, and  [MENTION=3448]Cerebral Paladin[/MENTION] joined us as a new PC, Henry. Kat's player couldn't make it for this one, alas, so the team is a little smaller.

And now, on with the show!

--

Some time has passed (well, in a relative sense) and the team is settling in at HM TimeWatch. It's much like the TimeWatch we left, carrying out the same kind of missions and research, but more attention is paid to rank structure and social status. Management is still sort of debating where Edward fits.

Kat is still on leave in the 21st century, meeting Elizabeth's family, when the rest of us are called to the meeting room.

Our briefing commander is Dame Agatha, an older woman with short white hair and the businesslike manner that you'd expect from a senior TimeWatch agent. Edward notes that she bears a striking resemblance to an author photo on the back of some of the mystery novels he's been reading in the TimeWatch library in his spare time.

There's also a new person there: a young man whom Dame Agatha introduces as our new team member, Henry XJ37. 

Edward blinks. "May I ask what the XJ37 stands for?"

"It's my clone line," Henry explains, unflappably.

Edward is slightly more flappable - he realizes that he's committed at least one breach of etiquette, possibly more, if asking about someone's clone status is a social faux pas. "Oh! I'm sorry. I haven't introduced myself. Edward Plantagenet."

Now it's Henry's turn to be disconcerted. "Er?"

Edward's had to do this explanation a few times by now. He sighs. "Richard's elder brother." Henry stares. "Alternate timeline."

Henry stares more. "Oh. _Oh_! Your Majesty? Your Highness?"

"Most people just go for Edward."

Once introductions are over, Dame Agatha calls up a map.

There are pins in various places around the Mediterranean, color-coded, and dated between 50 and 634 CE. "As you know," Dame Agatha explains, "TimeWatch keeps careful track of radiation. We have recently noticed a number of spikes in radiation that do not correspond with the expected local levels. We suspect that at least some of them may be connected."

Sudden radiation spikes? That sounds _very_ familiar.

"Merde," says Michel.


----------



## Ladybird (Apr 3, 2014)

*Episode 2, Part 2: Familiar Patterns*

Sorry for the long time between posts! Real Life got away from me, and unfortunately I couldn't hop backwards in time to post something more punctually  But now, on with the show!

--

Henry double-takes at the reaction, and Edward sighs, explaining, "We've had some unfortunate experiences with radiation anomalies."

"Yes," agrees Dame Agatha. "That's why we're calling your team. You'll be relieved to know that for the most part, these spikes do not match what you saw before - except for last two. The ones in Mecca and Medina, around 634, come close. Not to the same degree as the ones you found in your timeline in 1938, but closer to that than the others."

Henry mulls this over. "So, not an actual nuclear explosion. A dirty bomb, perhaps?"

"Possibly," Dame Agatha says. "Certainly not the same magnitude as the bombs that hit London." Edward winces at that.

"What do the different colors on the map signify?" Yves asks.

"The difference in magnitude," Dame Agatha explains. "The ones in red are very small - we wouldn't ordinarily have noticed them at all, except that they begin in 50 CE, when we aren't expecting any radiation at all. They all fade out, but periodically return over the next 500 years or so." That the radiation levels would decrease makes sense to Mace - his knowledge of Science! tells him that that pattern is consistent with a radioactive substance being created and then fading out over its half-life. 

Rules Sidebar
[sblock]Yes, there is a skill called Science! and yes, it has the exclamation point on it. If your PC knows about any kind of science, then you know about all kinds of science, past, present, and future. TimeWatch is not a hard crunchy sci-fi kind of game; it's a hand-wavey make-it-happen-for-the-sake-of-a-good-story kind of game.

Plus, it's fun to say "Science!" in an excited exclamation-point tone [/sblock] 

Mace is less certain why they would return, though. 

"The black pin in Rome in 113 CE represents a quite significant level of radiation," Dame Agatha continues, "but it fades out around 200 CE. Then there are two more spikes in Istanbul and Alexandria around 550. And, as I said, the largest ones are in Mecca and Medina in 634."

"Mecca and Medina?" Edward echoes, already unhappy about where this is going.

"Yes," Dame Agatha agrees. "Just after Muhammad's death."

"Forgive me," Yves says, "but why is Hypatia not with us? This is her home time, her home city, even!"

"Unfortunately, Hypatia is already on another mission," Dame Agatha explains. "Someone is selling scrolls purporting to be from the Library of Alexandria in 1920s Berlin. Her expertise is needed there, and she cannot be called back from the other mission."

[sblock]Also, obviously, her player is GMing  [/sblock]

We turn our attention back to the map, trying to find patterns. "All the sites marked in red - are those major Parthian sites?" Henry wonders.

"A few Parthian," says Dame Agatha, "but mostly Roman."

"There aren't many Jewish or Christian religious sites," Edward notes. "There's Rome and Ephesus, but not Jerusalem."

"And Ephesus is a major Roman pagan site," Henry adds.

Edward tries a different angle: "Of those red sites, which one was the very first?" It's Kemerhisar, which showed its first radiation spike in 50 CE. It had a different name then, though - it was called Tyana. "Are there any notable people from Tyana?" Edward wonders. "Especially philosophers, or natural philosophers?" 

As it turns out, there was one: a man named Apollonius, who lived from 3 BCE-98 CE, precisely the same time that that first radiation anomaly happened. He was a philosopher, and also a magician.

"A magician?" Edward asks skeptically. "So…someone with unexplained skills? Mysterious knowledge?" We can all tell where this is going.

"Who wishes to bet that Apollonius is a time traveler?" Yves asks.

Nobody's taking that bet.


----------



## Ladybird (Apr 13, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 3: Hitting the Books*

We've got a person and a place on which to focus our research, so Henry hits the tether's databases. He finds a summary of a third-century-CE biography of Apollonius - at least, it purports to be a biography, but many people doubt its truth. Here's what it says:

The developments start from his miraculous birth at Tyana in Cappadocia [today the village of Kemer Hisar, Turkey]…..Dressed - as Pythagoras before him - in a white robe, barefoot or in sandals, long-haired and striking-visaged, he observed the rules of Pythagorean asceticism in a more uncompromising manner than Pythagoras himself had...

In truth, his most faithful companion and observer of his acts was the already mentioned Damis, whom he met in Nineveh, the former Assyrian capital.  Wandering with his Pythagorean and religious mission from India to Gibraltar, Apollonius talked to high officials, and instructed common people...Called by Philostratus not only a divine man (theios aner) but also divine being or even god by virtue of his wisdom and supernatural abilities, Apollonius showed qualities to justify such claims. He possessed the extrasensory capability of prognosis (foreknowledge, foresight, or prescience) of future events. 

From this supernatural wisdom (sophia), from prognosis, from the purity of his life sprung his spiritual power, divine energy which enabled him to perform miracles, expel demons, unmask evil spirits such as the empusa or lamia, or creatures like the satyr. 

He was capable of bilocation, understood the speech of birds and beasts, commanded every human language, and could read the minds of those who were silent. 

His divine power and extrasensory perceptions Apollonius also used as a physician, a healer, a role that was directly related to his gift of prognosis….He relieved entire cities of plagues as was the case e.g. in Ephesus, where he recognized the demon of the pestilence. 

He participated in empire's political events and was a politically active philosopher. He met with emperors and instructed them on the correct way to exercise sole rule, fought against the tyranny of Nero and Domitian, while he supported the rulers Titus and Nerva. In the end he faced Domitian's trial on charges of goeteia (black magic) and of human sacrifice conducted with Nerva to overthrow Domitian. 

Miraculously, he disappeared from the imperial court without making the triumphal apology pro vita sua which he had prepared. 

He lived to be over a hundred years old and yet to the end he kept his vigor and fitness, and an appearance even more pleasing than in his youth….Nor was he without a posthumous episode. After his death he appeared in a dream to a young man in Tyana to confirm his belief on the eternal soul.


----------



## Ladybird (Apr 17, 2014)

*Episode 2 Chapter 4: Hitting the Road (to Rome)*

By the end, Edward has his head in his hands. "Foreknowledge? Curing plagues? He is _totally a time traveler_."

"And bilocation!" Yves adds, groaning just as hard. "He could be time-traveling back to meet himself."

We have two choices at this point: do we want to talk to Apollonius directly, or go to one of the other sites on the map? Talking to Apollonius is probably our ultimate goal, but we think we want to try a later time first, to get more information about what these radiation spikes are and what changes Apollonius (or his accomplices) have made in the timeline and why.

We decide to head for 113 CE. That's the first appearance of radiation in Rome, and a very big spike. In our timeline, it's supposed to be the reign of Trajan - who knows what it's going to be when we get there.

Dame Agatha gives us two final things: a warning, and a special piece of equipment. "Rome is very crowded at this time, so be careful of your entrances and exits. You'll have to take more care than usual not to be seen." 

The special equipment is a set of Geiger counters, one for each of us. "This can measure radiation, both for the purposes of tracking it and for letting you know when you're in danger," she explains. "Although I don't know if all of you are susceptible to radiation?" she adds, giving Henry a sidelong look.

"What?" Henry sniffs, somewhat offended. "I'm biological. Do I look like a robot?" We assure him that no, he's very human, and leap back.

We land in Rome, 113 CE. We're in a narrow alley between two stone and concrete buildings, both about 6 stories tall. Our feet hit the ground…then sink 18 inches to the _actual_ street surface, through mud and muck and things we don't want to think about. Ew.

We wade out of the alley and onto a broad Roman street. It's dusk: a few people carry torches, and there are some litters going by with slaves carrying torches to light the way for the wealthy person hidden inside. There are so many people around that nobody pays much attention to us, and probably wouldn't even if we weren't Unobtrusive.

Henry does a quick check against his knowledge of Ancient History: do the people around us look like they're supposed to? Mostly, yes. They wear tunics, mantles, long robes - nothing immediately stands out as being odd or anachronistic. The only two unusual things are, first, that Henry expects to see more togas; and second, a lot of people are wearing circular brass medallion around their neck.

The medallions look like they have images on them, but it's hard to get a good look at them while everyone is moving. So Edward intercepts a passerby, and does what any tourist would do: asks for directions. 

Edward: Excuse me? Could you please tell me how to get to the…[searches tether] Forum?

Random Roman:  Which forum? The Roman Forum? The Forum of Augustus? The new forum of Trajan?

Edward: Yes! That one. It's my first visit to the city and I couldn't miss it. 

And, if there is something newly built in this time, we want to see it.


----------



## Ladybird (Apr 28, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 5: A Slightly Radioactive Thing Happens On the Way To the Forum*

The Random Roman is only too happy to tell us about the new forum. "Oh, it's a marvel! It's going to be considered one of the wonders of the world! Our emperor is an architect himself, you know. Here, let me tell you how to get there. Keep going down this street, and then turn to dexter. Then…"

Edward isn't listening at all to the long string of dexters and sinister; he's looking at the medallion that the man is wearing. It bears a symbol that none of us have ever seen before: an Ionian column with two serpents around it. It sort of looks like a caduceus, except with a column instead of a staff.

Mace has noticed all of the medallions too, and figures that if there are so many around, there must be plenty of people selling them or giving them away. And, indeed, not far away, he sees a stall that's selling medallions, along with other kinds of jewelry and some crackers. The crackers are pretty yummy. (Mace's first priority is a snack.)

The column-caduceus isn't the only design on the medallions. Some have fish on them, and some have seven-branched candelabras. We recognize those as symbols of Christianity and Judaism - we're not at all expecting to see those religions so popular in Rome at this time. Some of the other medallions have symbols we don't recognize at all: palm trees, a woman, and…male genitalia?

While Mace peruses the offerings at the booth, Yves decides to take the direct route and just asks: "Pardon, but what is that medallion you wear?" 

"Oh! This is a medallion of Apollonius of Tyana," Random Roman explains. "This one they say has the blessing to keep away rats and spiders. I'm really hoping it works, because my apartment is just plagued by rats!"

While Yves is distracting Random Roman, Michel is Unobtrusively scanning the medallion with his Geiger counters. There is a very very faint touch of radiation, but hardly any higher than would ordinarily be in the atmosphere - measurable, but not meaningful or dangerous. Henry can't see any signs that the medallion was made with anachronistic tech, either.

With all of our questions answered, we thank Random Roman and let him go, and instead move on to the booth.

"I'd like to buy one of those medallions," Mace says, joining Yves in the direct approach. "Could you tell me about them?"

The shopkeeper is very happy to tell us all about her wares. "Of course! This one helps you heal;  this one protects against rats and spiders; this one protects against poison, and this one just gives general good luck. 

Michel notes, a little uneasily, that the healing medallion registers slightly higher on the Geiger counter.

"I could use some general good luck," Mace says.

The shopkeeper smiles. "That will be 16 sestertii."

Yves and Michel double-take. They're Streetwise sorts of folks, and they can tell that she's totally trying to defraud Mace.

"Please!" protests Michel. "We may be from out of town, but you cannot fool us so easily. It is not as if we are from the Hebrides!"

The shopkeeper stares - clearly, the reference to the Hebrides has gone right over her head.

Edward hastily texts over the tether, "They won't have gotten to the Hebrides yet. Just say Britannia. You know you want to."

Michel tries again, happily casting scorn on England: "We aren't from Britannia!"

Except that the shopkeeper's blank look doesn't change.

Edward blinks. They should have gotten to Britannia about 75 years ago, in the reign of Claudius. And now they've never heard of it?

Michel tries again: "…we're from Gaul?"

Finally, a light dawns in the shopkeeper's eyes. "Well, you must be from Southern Gaul!" she concludes. "I'm surprised your companion can even speak Latin - the rest of Gaul is barbarian!"

Okay then. Clearly we're starting to find some differences in this timeline besides a different taste in jewelry and clothes.


----------



## Ladybird (May 1, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 6: Making Heads and Fish Tails of New Religions*

We're starting to see the differences between our timeline and this one, so Yves tests out a big one: "Have you heard of Jesus of Nazareth?"

The shopkeeper nods. "Oh, yes! You're one of his followers? Would you like a fish on your medallion, or a cross? They're very popular with the Jewish population."

"A cross?" Edward perks up, being a good medieval Christian boy. "Ooh, I'd like a cross." Going on a pilgrimage to Rome is a big deal for him, and he needs a pilgrim's token to mark that he's done it.

Way at the back of the stall, Yves notices a medallion with an image of a head on a plate. Michel and Henry and Edward all recognize this as the icon of John the Baptist, who did have an independent following in the early days of Christianity. But Yves doesn't recognize any of the rest. "What are these others?" asks Yves.

"This one is Mithras, this is Isis, and this is Priapus," the shopkeeper explains, pointing to several medallions in turn. (The last of these is the one with the penis on it.) "And if you follow the old ways, here's Jupiter's thunderbolt." 

"The old ways?" Edward echoes. 

"The gods of our ancestors," replies the shopkeeper. "Instead of all these new religions from the east."

Which Edward thinks is a very odd way to refer to the standard Roman polytheist religion. Henry realizes that all of the medallions are the symbols of religions that in our timeline, were considered mystery cults and secret religions in the second century CE, but now they're all out in the open. Not only that, but among all of the religions and holy people being venerated, there aren't any references to the emperor cults.

Clearly, the religious situation in Rome is very different from the one that our tethers tell us about. "At this point, a library would seem the appropriate course of action," says Michel.

As it turns out, the best library in Rome in 113 CE is in the brand-new Forum of Trajan - exactly where we'd decided to go anyway. Fortunately, Mace was paying attention to the directions, even if Edward wasn't.


----------



## Ladybird (May 6, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 7: Title Track*

As it turns out, the general flow of traffic is going towards the Forum of Trajan anyway. The Forum is a huge plaza full of people, and at its center is Trajan's Column: a giant column covered in carved depictions of Trajan's triumphs. That's what we expected.

What we didn't expect is the green glow. 

Our Geiger counters click wildly as we stare at the _glowing radioactive pillar_ in the middle of Rome, with hundreds of people draped over it as they pray for healing miracles.

Michel doesn't think that it would be immediately dangerous to get a closer look, but knows that we really shouldn't to spend extended time near it. Fortunately, Michel is Prepared, and has a camera with a telephoto lens so that we don't have to get close to get a better look. Yves is likewise Prepared with some radiation-absorption materials, hidden in necklaces, so that we'll be safe even if we do go closer.

So with all of that Preparation, we go to study Trajan's column. Once we're closer, we can see that the glow is coming not from the stone itself - that's marble, just as it should be - but from a thin layer of paint over the marble. (Or, actually, a thin layer of paint over the paint. The base is white marble, but the carved figures are painted in bright colors. The radioactive paint is on top of that.)

The story told by the column's images is one of Trajan's conquest with lots of scenes depicting battles against bearded fur-clad barbarians. Near the end, Edward and Henry notice something that doesn't map onto their knowledge of Ancient History: there's a cave opening with large numbers of people going into it, then large numbers of barbarians being herded into it, then rocks being brought out of it. The rocks being brought out are painted with even more glow-paint than the surrounding carvings. 

"Great," Edward groans. "They found a radioactivity mine."

The other main difference is in the inscription. It says that this column is to commemorate Trajan's great victory in the Lachian Wars. Our tethers tell us that it should be in honor of his victory in the _Dacian_ Wars. Lachia is slightly west of Dacia, and much farther north - farther north on the Continent than the Roman Empire ever got in our timeline.

So we know that the Roman Empire is aiming farther north and farther east than it actually did. They haven't conquered Britannia or Gaul, but they have conquered Lachia Why? 

Henry wonders if something happened with Julius Caesar. Clearly Trajan and Augustus exist, so Julius Caesar must have existed too, but why didn't he conquer Gaul?

Michel wonders, based on our previous mission and his interest in military things, if there are some differences in military technology that are making the Romans change their geographical focus. He knows that the military campaign that Trajan undertook in Lachia would mean much more mountain-climbing than the one in Dacia would have. But we can't spot anything on the column that stands out. Edward spots a few more depictions of Romans using Greek Fire on the barbarians than there should be, but there don't seem to be any tech advances that would help them climb mountains more easily, or anything else that stands out as anachronistic. Whatever the timetravelers did to change the timeline, it wasn't in the realm of military technology.

Next, Henry thinks geographically. The major anomaly that we're tracking is the use of radioactive material, so he wonders,  "Where are there deposits of radioactive material in the Roman Empire?" 

Michel checks, and discovers that in Europe, there is exactly one known mine that contains radioactive elements. It's in a town called Jachymov, in central Europe, and in our timeline, it was first mined in the mid-16th century - there's silver in it, too, and initially it was only mined for silver. It wasn't mined for radium until the late 19th century. That's where Marie Curie got her radium samples.

And, oh look, Jachymov is in Lachia. And it's definitely big enough to account for all of the radioactivity that we've seen.

So something turned the course of Roman conquest towards Lachia, and away from Britannia and Gaul.

Finally, Michel says, "I would like to go to the library and find the history of Julius Caesar's great defeat in Gaul."


----------



## Ladybird (May 26, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 8: All Dacia is Divided Into Three Parts*

Fortunately, one of the best libraries in Rome is right here in the Forum. Unfortunately, it's evening right now, so the library is closed.

"I suppose we'll have to wait until morning," Edward sighs.

"Or," Yves points out, "we could _time travel_ to when it's open."

So we do. Because really, what's the point of being time travelers if you can't use your powers to make life more convenient for yourself!

There are actually two libraries in Trajan's Forum, one for Greek texts and one for Latin. We head for the Latin one: a long rectangular building with columns around the edges of the large central room.

The librarian looks at us with slight skepticism as we walk in. "Are you all Roman citizens?"

"Oh, of course!" Michel says, in a Reassuring sort of way. "All of us. We would like to see books on Julius Caesar's wars."

"Oh, you mean the Dacian Wars!" the librarian says. "Everyone knows the story of Julius Caesar's conquest of Dacia."

Right then.

So, from 60-50 BCE: Julius Caesar intercepted the hostile Helvetii in the neutral lands of Dacia and defeated them. Afterwards, the grateful Dacians joined Rome. While Julius Caesar was there, he discovered some profitable gold and silver mines. There was one expedition farther north to Lachia, but he doesn't seem to have established any permanent outpost.

In our timeline, Julius Caesar did fight against the Helvetii, just in a different place. They'd left their lands because of famine and went west, where he intercepted them in Gaul. So why did they go east?

Edward looks around for some geography books, to see if there are any clues or anomalies there. Is the land or climate  different in this timeline, so that the Helvetii were prevented from going west? He finds a guide to Roman roads, which tells him that the Empire includes all of the Iberian peninsula, but only southern Gaul. Britannia, northern Gaul, and Belgium are all "allied nations," but not part of the empire as they were in our timeline. The Empire goes a little farther east - to the Tigris/Euphrates valley -but not dramatically. The main expansion seems to be to the northeastern part of Europe. 

Also, nobody thinks Gaul is profitable enough to want to conquer it. The Roman empire is much more interested in mining gold and silver, and that's found more in eastern Europe than the west. Because of that interest, their mining tech is slightly ahead of where it should be. It doesn't seem to be anachronistically enhanced; they've just spent more time improving it.

So we're starting to focus in on the source of the discrepancy: something made the Helvetii go east, and something made the Romans want to focus on mining.

Once we know what to look for, we see differences everywhere. Tacitus's monumental book about the nobility of the barbarians who haven't been conquered by Rome is called 'Gallia' in this timeline, instead of 'Germania' as it is in ours. In this timeline, it's the Gauls, not the Germans, who are seen as the archetypical unspoiled barbarians, because Gaul has had so little contact with Rome. Edward looks for books on Britannia, of course, but can't find any.

We still need to figure out how Apollonius fits in, so we head to the natural philosophy section next.  "Apollonius was more likely patsy than timetraveler?" suggests Michel, as we wait for the librarians to deliver our next round of books. It sounds reasonable to the rest of us. Apollonius is clearly part of this, but is clearly _not_ the first link in the chain.

"What about Apollonius's friend Damis?" Edward asks. "Could he be the timetraveler?" If Apollonius is just a pawn, then his mysterious student/best friend sounds like a good possibility for a timetraveler. 

Damis turns out to be even more mysterious than we thought. The stories can't even agree on whether Damis was a man or a woman! 

"Maybe Damis is wearing an unobtrusiveness suit?" Mace suggests. "That might be why Damis sometimes appears to be a woman and sometimes a man. Or maybe Damis was multiple people - a team of timetravelers, each taking turns being Damis."

While we're poking around in the natural-philosophy section, looking for information about Apollonius, Mace and Michel notice that the section is larger than you might expect. In particular, there are a lot copies of Lucretius's 'De Rerum Natura.'

Lucretius is a contemporary of Julius Caesar: he wrote c80-c60 BCE, and 'De Rerum Natura' is a seriously weird book. It talks about the origin of the universe, the nature of matter, the origins of life, the nature of the body and soul, etc. Most notably, though, it talks about atoms, and in a strangely accurate way. He didn't get everything right - for instance, he believed that worms spontaneously generated out of compost heaps by some kind of compost-to-worm matter conversion - but he did get a lot right about atoms. Also, according to our tethers, nobody really knows when or how Lucretius died. Some say he drank a love potion, went mad, and disappeared.

In the editions of De Rerum Natura that we find in Trajan's Library, all of the stuff that Lucretius got wrong is gone, and all of the discussion of atoms is correct, and even expanded. So there's more evidence that future knowledge is being seeded back into the first century BCE, and specifically knowledge about atomic theory.

"So what's their overall goal?" Edward wonders.

"Blowing up Mecca and Medina," Henry reminds him.

"Oh. Um. Right," says Edward 

"It might be the work of some of those lunatic Crusader timetravelers," Henry suggests.

Edward gets uncomfortably quiet about the Crusades. Then Henry does, too. These two are definitely racking up the mutual awkward silences.

Meanwhile, Michel does more research. First, he looks into Julius Caesar, to see what other divergences he can find from the timeline that we know from our tethers. The main one seems to be that the war between Caesar and Pompey seems to have been shorter, because Caesar had more wealth in the east from all of those mines he conquered. But he still got assassinated, right on schedule.

Before Julius Caesar, everything seems to be the same. The Punic Wars go just as we expect them to, and so do the Greek wars. The first big difference looks like it's when Julius Caesar invades Dacia instead of Gaul.

Michel has one more idea for a way to find out what Roman history and culture are like: the Aeneid. Edward remembers that there's a long 'prophecy' - history, from Virgil's perspective, but future, from Aeneas's perspective. (We can relate to the temporal confusion.)

There are several differences in the section that Edward and Michel check. The original said that Augustus would extend the empire from East to West, but here it says  'from the frigid waters of north to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.' Again, there's that northward focus of the empire. The original had a few references to Lucretius the Wise, but this version gives Lucretius a long monologue, and quotes extensively from De Rerum Natura. Finally, there's a difference in Virgil's career overall. In our timeline, the big work that got Virgil noticed enough to get the job writing The Aeneid was a long poem called the Georgics, about farming. In this timeline, it's a poem about mining. By Virgil's time, the Roman Empire's biggest point of pride was its mines.

So we've got several places to go. Where do we go next? To talk to Apollonius? To talk to Lucretius? To check out the mine? To see what's going on with the Helvetii?

We decide on Lucretius: he's the earliest chronologically; he's a single person who's easy to locate in geography and time; and he shows obvious changes in his work that suggest some time-traveler interference.

Next time: off to find a crazy philosopher!


----------



## Ladybird (Jun 3, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 9: Poetry (and Poets) in Motion*

We decide to look for the poet/philosopher Lucretius in 56 BCE, when he;s is in the middle of writing, or has already completed, his great work De Rerum Natura. That's also when Caesar's conquests are going on, so maybe we can get some more reliable info on what he's doing too, and why he and the Helvetii are all going east instead of west.

It's an easier trip than usual, since we're only traveling in time, not in space. We land in another Roman alleyway, which looks pretty similar to the Roman alleyway we landed in a few hours ago and 150 years in the future. The Romans outside the alley don't look the same, though. There are more people wearing togas, and fewer people who look like they've come from places outside Italy. We're definitely still in the Republic, not the Empire.

Michel, being Streetwise, finds a reliable-looking Random Roman to ask directions.  "Have you heard of this poet Lucretius? I wanted to give him a commission."

Random Roman looks surprised. "Oh, yes, Lucretius Carus. He lives on the Aventine. But my good man, if you want to commission poetry to give your girlfriend, don't go to _him_. He doesn't write anything that she'll like. You know who you should go to instead? Catullus! Now _he_ can write a poem that - "

"Oh, no!" Henry cuts him off, before Random Roman can talk in any more detail about exactly what kinds of poetry Catullus writes. (The answer: poetry that, when I read it in my intro Latin class in college, made me learn all sorts of new, interesting, and R-rated vocabulary words.) "He's planning to send it under the name of his rival," Henry explains. "That way, she'll think the rival is not only unromantic, but also missing something upstairs."

Random Roman is confused in a whole new way now. "Wouldn't it be easier to just send flowers?"

"Well, yes," Henry concedes, "but you're missing the difference between normal people and people like him." He gives a pointed look at Michel.

We've got our directions now, and we head up to the Aventine, into a neighborhood that's fairly swanky, but mostly apartment buildings rather than single-family villas. Most of the residents seem to be young wealthy bachelors. Yves feels instantly at home.

A slave greets us at the entrance to the building. "What are you doing loitering around?" The presence of slaves makes us feel uncomfortable again, but not as bad as it did in 1790s Georgia.

"Loitering?" Yves begins grandly. "Oh no! we are here to visit the great poet Lucretius!"

The slave regards Yves suspiciously. "What are your names?"

"Je m'appelle Yves…"

"…and we are representatives of a patron who wishes to remain nameless," Michel finishes smoothly. Equally smoothly, he slips the slave a bribe.

"Oh!" says the slave. "I understand. Second one on the left."

The apartment where the slave directs us is off of a central courtyard, its doorway covered by a curtain. Since there isn't a door, we knock on the wall.

Lucretius is on the border between middle-aged and old, with a whitish-gray beard, middle height, dark eyes, fairish skin for an Italian. His clothes are high-quality, but old. Most of his possessions are, too - he's clearly got money, but doesn't bother spending it very often.

But the most notable thing about Lucretius is that he seems a little…off. Our Timecraft-senses are picking up something odd about him. He's not out of his own time like Forrest, but he's a little wavery like Elizabeth. Not the most chronally stable of people. We're not surprised - we'd guessed that either he was getting help from timetravelers or traveling himself - but we're on our guard.

Yves takes the lead, since this is his sort of neighborhood, and since he's good at talking to wealthy poets. "We'd like to talk to you about your poetry," he begins. "We're great admirers of your work."

Lucretius waves a hand modestly. "Oh, I'm really just following in the footsteps of my masters, like Epicurus."

"But you have ideas that Epicurus never dreamed of!" Yves persists.

"Oh, no," says Lucretius. "I'm just putting it in language that Romans can understand."

"No, no, you're being too modest!" says Yves.

Michel does not Detect any Falsehoods, but we all detect some BS. Lucretius is telling the truth when he says he got some ideas from Epicurus, but he definitely isn't telling the whole truth.

Edward tries a slightly more direct approach: "We were very interested in what you had to say about atoms."

Henry becomes even more_direct. Intimidatingly so, even, as he begins to play Bad Cop. "Some highly placed people in the Senate are interested too," he says, looming closer to Lucretius.  "We know you're passing secret military messages through your poetry. We need to know who you're sending them to."

Lucretius backs away, terrified and bewildered. "What? I'm not doing that! And - and - I have friends in the Senate too! Titus Memmius! Caesar! _Cicero_! Who sent you? Why are you doing this?"

"I'm not going to answer any of your questions!" Henry shouts. "You're going to answer mine!"

"Nobody gave them to me!" Lucretius flails.

"Then where are you getting them?" Henry presses.

"From great philosophers!" says Lucretius.

"From unpublished works?" Michel asks skeptically.

"Yes!" Lucretius says. "I'll show you!"

We all follow Lucretius _very closely_ as he goes to get some scrolls. Henry cuts out the 'following' step and just barges into the apartment, with Edward right behind. We don't want to let Lucretius get away.

As it turns out, our instincts are correct. Lucretius goes over to a wooden chest and starts to reach in…and starts to shimmer faintly.

Henry shoots the chest.

Lucretius yells. A sudden burst of temporal instability waves out from the chest. Edward manages to hold fast, but Henry - right next to Lucretius - starts to feel a little unstable. A rosebush in the courtyard is even less fortunate than Henry - it Fades out.

Edward springs forward, tackling Lucretius to the ground. As he does, he notices that Lucretius has a little wooden box in his hand, with little metal wheels or gears on the front. "Get the box!" he shouts.

The others are rushing into the room by now, and Yves tries to help Edward pin the philosopher. Unfortunately, Yves is not very used to physical activity, and doesn't pin very effectively.

Mace and Michel both go for the box - Mace misses, but Michel succeeds. He grabs the box expertly out of Lucretius's hand while the philosopher is struggling with Edward and Yves. 

Lucretius manages to wriggle free just long enough to grab the box back from Michel. While the rest of us chase after him, Lucretius starts to fiddle with those little gears on the box. We can tell he's prepping for time travel, probably to a pre-set place.

Fortunately, Lucretius is so distracted with the gears that even Yves can't miss this time when he attacks. Unfortunately, Yves is just a little too late. Lucretius vanishes, and so does the box.

In his place is a very confused boy of about 12, with red curly hair, with a scrubbing brush in his hand. "Oh! Sorry, sirs. Were you checking out the room?"

No Lucretius. No box. The wooden chest is there, but it's very heavily damaged from Henry's shot.

Sometimes, when there's a burst of temporal instability and someone leaps away to a different time, the timeline replaces them with another person from the local time, just to maintain some sort of continuity. So instead of our very suspicious philosopher, we have a very surprised young member of the cleaning crew.

Yves, ever hopeful, asks the boy, "You don't know a Lucretius Carus, do you?"

The boy shakes his head. "No, sorry. I'm Aiax, I work for the manager here. Sorry, didn't mean to disturb."

"It's all right," Edward sighs. "Go about your business."


----------



## Ladybird (Jun 12, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 10: On Bugs and Bugs*

Looks like we erased our primary lead. Oops.

Edward checks his tether, and discovers that Lucretius hasn't entirely disappeared from history. There was still a poet Lucretius, and he still wrote De Rerum Natura. And, just as the tether had told us before, he disappeared mysteriously in mid-50s BCE. Looks like we know how that mysterious disappearance happened.

One thing that is different, according to our tethers, is that one of the passages from De Rerum Natura is missing: 

"All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully, endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited, die off quickly. But nothing — from our own species, to the planet on which we live, to the sun that lights our day — lasts forever."

Apparently we prevented Lucretius from finding out more about evolution.

But, as we discover when we look in the chest, Lucretius has already been hopping around in time to do his research. The chest is full of notes. Some are written in Latin, but some are in modern French, and some in modern German. It's hard to puzzle them out, because even though they're written in modern languages, there are no spaces between the words, and no punctuation, just like the Latin writing of Lucretius's home time. Plus, there are lots of complicated equations mixed in. But Michel's knowledge of Science! helps us puzzle it all out. The notes in French are about radioactivity, and refer to the lecturer as 'she'; the notes in German are about relativity, and were taken at a lecture at Princeton University. Looks like Lucretius learned physics from the best: Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. Presumably, if we hadn't stopped him, he would have learned about evolution from Charles Darwin.

The tether can't tell us for certain if this handwriting is Lucretius's, because there aren't any known documents in his own handwriting. There was only one known manuscript of De Rerum Natura, and it wasn't recovered until the early 1400s in the German monastery of Fulda. Three copies were made, but then the original was also lost.

So…now what? Our main lead has disappeared.

Edward remembers that Lucretius mentioned his highly-placed friends. Two were Cicero and Caesar, but the third was someone whose name we didn't otherwise recognize: Titus Memmius. He checks the tether, and discovers that he's the person to whom Lucretius dedicated De Rerum Natura. Titus Memmius is from a very wealthy and prominent family; his older brother married one of Pompey's sisters. Titus Memmius himself was mainly known for his scandalous romantic life - he was one of the notorious Clodia's many affairs.

"I'd think that we should try to get information out of him by seducing him," Mace muses, "but it doesn't sound like he swings that way."

Seduction or not, it might be worth at least talking to Titus Memmius about Lucretius. As his patron, he would remember Lucretius; depending on how close they were, he might remember something more.

We find Titus Memmius's house pretty easily, but the steward tells us that Titus hasn't lived in Rome for the last four years. He's retreated to Baiae for his health - there are hot springs there that he hoped would do him good. Edward's good at reading servants - he can tell that the steward is genuinely worried about Memmius, and definitely telling the truth that his master left Rome for his health. 

"Do you remember the poet Lucretius Carus?" Edward asks. "Titus Memmius was his patron."

"Ah, young Lucretius!" the steward says. Which we all think is a very odd way to refer to the 60-something man we just saw. "Titus Memmius supported him when he was very young, just starting out, 15 or 20 years ago. One of many poets for whom he was a patron, but the one he favored the most." Which means that Lucretius should be in his 40s now, but the man we saw looked much older - more evidence that Lucretius has been timetraveling, since he's lived much more time than he should have.

"If there were other poets, why choose Lucretius over other talented individuals?" Yves wonders.

The steward smirks knowingly. "I'm sure I couldn't say."

Apparently Lucretius was a hottie.

We can't talk to Lucretius or Titus Memmius now, but Henry has other ideas. "I'm tempted to go back 25 years, plant bugs in Lucretius's room, and collect them now." 

After 25 years, we collect the bugs a few minutes later.

We discover that most of Lucretius's time is filled with a) writing, and b) not being there. There are large chunks of time in the last 25 years when Lucretius wasn't at his apartment. He appears, pays his rent, goes away, and comes back looking much older. 

There aren't a lot of visitors. The most regular one is a heavyset man, about 20 years older than Lucretius, who started visiting 25 years ago - before Lucretius's first timetravel absence - and stopped visiting about 5 years ago. Presumably, that's our man Titus Memmius. Is he a timetraveler, we wonder? Well, he doesn't have anything anachronistic on him as far as we can tell, but our bugs do pick up a few odd things. First, despite our expectations, he doesn't touch Lucretius - if they were ever romantically involved, the relationship is over now. Second, there's a slight odd noise that goes with him - a faint humming/buzzing/whirring sort of sound.

"I'd like to get the people back at Timewatch to isolate and analyze the noise," says Edward, "but that would take time."

"We have time machines!" Yves points out. "We have all the time in the world!"

"Yes, but we don't have all the chronal stability in the world," says Mace. Jumping back and forth to HM Timewatch HQ so many times would be risky. Fortunately, Mace has a few of the relevant skills himself, so he starts working on the audio analysis.

After a few minutes of fiddling with the equipment, Mace manages to isolate the buzzing noise. On its own, it sounds almost like an insect. It starts up every time Titus Memmius speaks, a fraction of a second before we hear the Latin words start, and stops a fraction of a second before the Latin words end - as if there's something translating the buzzing noise into the Latin. 

"It sounds like a cockroach," Mace decides. "A very large, very loud cockroach." 

"Titus Memmius is a bug person?" Edward boggles.

Also: ew.


----------



## Ladybird (Jun 19, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 11: The Hardworking TimeWatch Team*

Something about this rings a bell with Henry. "Some of my fellow agents in HM Timewatch have encountered giant cockroaches before," he remembers. "In the mid-1960s - they had something to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They kept trying to start nuclear wars." The giant cockroaches are called Ezeru, and they can make themselves appear human, but the telltale buzzing gives them away, and they can't touch anyone or anything.

"Nuclear wars," Edward sighs. This is starting to make more sense. "Isn't that what they say - that after a nuclear war, the only things left will be cockroaches?" So by starting the nuclear age 2000 years early, the cockroaches are trying to clear the way for themselves.

Besides Titus Memmius, the other person who visits Lucretius a lot is Julius Caesar. He, thankfully, does not buzz.

"So has Titus Memmius been replaced?" Henry wonders.

"He must have been," says Edward. "He can't always have been a cockroach - he was famous for having sexual affairs, and you have to touch people for that!"

"Well, we know that he wasn't replaced 30 years ago when he had the affair with Clodia," Henry agrees. "But maybe Real Memmius was elsewhere in Rome while Cockroach Memmius was visiting Lucretius."

"I think we should try to talk to the man himself," Edward decides. "Shall we go visit the seaside?"

Henry grins. "Nothing wrong with having a nice seaside vacation on the clock. As it were."

Mace grins too. "I like the idea of a seaside vacation that might involve a giant cockroach."

"Um," says Henry. "Your idea of vacation and mine are different."

So we rent a carriage and some horses to take us to Baiae, a seaside resort on the Bay of Naples. Henry volunteers to drive, and we're all happy to let him - none of the rest of us know much about Vehicles. Edward and Michel know about horses, but that's about it.

It's at that moment that we realize that nobody has ever asked Henry what his day job was before he became a Timewatch agent.

He was a _spaceship pilot_.

**

"Can't these things go faster?" Henry shouts, as we careen around a corner on one wheel, horses panting and lathering.

"No, they can't!" Edward shouts back frantically. "They're animals! You can't treat horses like that! Look at the poor things - they're nearly falling down!"

"But they're going _so slow_" Henry groans.

"And they will go even more slowly if they die," Michel points out. "You will observe that these are the only horses we have. We cannot exchange them at the next post - we must conserve what we have." Fortunately, he manages to persuade Henry to share driving duties with him.

[sblock] If you're the type who likes to imagine a movie soundtrack, at this point in the movie, there is a montage. It alternates between peaceful slow music while Michel drives along at a nice moderate clop, and VERY LOUD FAST MUSIC while the horses gallop along with Henry at the reins.[/sblock]

Baiae is a resort town, with a lovely natural harbor and beach below layers of terraced cliffs going up the hillside. The Mediterranean sparkles a beautiful blue, and the sun shines down brightly. 

Our two objectives here are to find out whether Memmius is a cockroach, and to lie on the beach.

We decide to tackle our second objective first: BEACH DAY.

It turns out that Baiae's celebrated beach is in fact a nude beach. So we lie around naked on the beach, while bath slaves offer us fruit juice and chilled wine and whatever the Roman equivalent of drinks with umbrellas in them are. One even brings around some peeled grapes. "I didn't think that actually happened!" Edward marvels.

Yves flirts a woman into a cabana. Edward eats peeled grapes. We all have a wonderful time.

Your TimeWatch dollars at work, folks!


----------



## Ladybird (Jun 27, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 12: Bug Bugs and Buzzbuzz*

And then, after a lovely afternoon on the beach, we finally get down to business. We ask around after Titus Memmius, and find out that at this time of day, he's usually in the tepidarium room of the baths. So that's where we go.

It's easy for us to find Titus Memmius, and also easy to determine that, fortunately, he is not buzzing. He doesn't have any kind of chronal instability, either. He's still overweight, just as we saw in the video footage from our bugs, but thinner than he once was, and his skin has a sickly grayish look to it. Just as the servant said, he is here because he's ill. These symptoms look very familiar to Michel - he's seen them before in patients who had long histories of using drugs and alcohol. It might be withdrawal; it might be hepatitis; it might be both.  

So did someone keep Memmius drugged for long periods of time so that the cockroach could take his place? Anyone who wanted to get close to Lucretius would know that Memmius was a good way to do that - he's the person to whom De Rerum Natura was dedicated.

We go back to re-examine the video footage from our bug, trying to figure out when Cockroach!Memmius shows up, and when Lucretius starts timetraveling.

Lucretius's timetravel device appears to be the little wooden box that he was so anxious to protect. It's about as big as a shoebox, and looks like this.

It first appears fairly early in our surveillance period, around 79 BCE. Lucretius brings in an amphora, opens it, and takes out the box. He looks very surprised at the box, and a bit confused, too - from the expression on his face, it looks like he was expecting to find something in the amphora, but was surprised to find that. For the next few weeks, he studies the wooden box, trying to figure out what it is.

Mace focuses on the amphora to see if there are any inscriptions on it. There are two marks on it: first, on the amphora itself, the seal of the island of Rhodes; and on the top, a Roman seal with the word Sullani - ie, the army of Sulla, who conquered Greece and the Near East. 

The box itself has some markings on it too: there are Greek letters on bottom that spell out "Archim"

"Archim?" Edward reads. "Could that be Archimedes?" It could be - he lived about 200 years before the time when we are now.

"Who was in Rhodes," Michel wonders, "who could have had Archimedes' things?" Lots of people, we realize, when we think about Ancient History. Rhodes was a major center of math and science research at this time. It was especially known for mechanical inventions - even automata. 

Edward checks the tether to see if anyone in Sulla's army was particularly interested in science - ie, if there was anyone in particular who would have been gathering up items like this to send to Lucretius, and therefore who might be another timetraveler - but he can't find anyone. So instead, he focuses on the amphora itself. If we track that, maybe we can find who sent it to Lucretius.

We go back to the video footage and concentrate on the day that Lucretius brought the amphora home. We see a slave come in and hand Lucretius a message; when we zoom in on the message, we see that it says: "Sulla's expedition is selling off interesting trinkets at harbor that you might like to take a look at. -- Memmius"

So someone - presumably one of the cockroaches - knowing that Lucretius would trust his patron Memmius, forged a message from him to get Lucretius to pick up a time machine.

So where next? Caesar's campaigns in Dacia in 60 BCE? That's a long time after Lucretius gets the box. The first radiation spike, with Apollonius in 50 CE? That's even longer.

"I want to gank Buzzbuzz," Henry declares.

The premodern majority of the team stares.

"Attack the cockroach from behind so that we can interrogate him," Henry explains. 

"But won't that create a paradox?" Michel wonders. "We cannot prevent either Actual Memmius or Roach Memmius from talking to Lucretius."

"We could have one of us pretend to be Roach Memmius," Henry suggests. "We can go to him and buzz."

"Or we can plant a device that buzzes?" Michel suggests.

"We'll plant a bug bug!" says Edward.

Instead, we do another round of time-traveling and Spying to plant some bugs in Real!Memmius's house 30 years ago to see what he knows. 

And sure enough, our surveillance shows that there's a night when Titus Memmius is passed out drunk and a 7 1/2 foot tall cockroach appears in his bedroom.

Michel hits stop. "I do not want to see what happens next."

Edward grimaces. "Neither do I."

"No, no," Michel explains. "I do not wish to see what happens next, because we are about to change it."


----------



## Ladybird (Aug 3, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 13: Roaches Check In, But They Don't Check Out*

We start our preparation to capture Roach!Memmius. But Edward has a few words before we go: "Just to be clear, because our last target got spooked and tried to get away - our objective is to _capture_ and _interrogate_.”

"So…no going in with blasters firing?" Henry asks, a little disappointed.

"No!" This is, in fact, exactly what Edward is trying to prevent. "No blasters!"

"PaciFists?" Henry is less interested in this than blasters.

"Yes! That!" says Edward.

"So what happens if he uses force or tries to run?" asks Henry.

Edward, being a Prepared kind of guy, goes back to set up some nets over the bed. That way, we can trap Roach!Memmius so he doesn't try to flee. 

With all that in place, we jump back to 80 BCE, into Titus Memmius's bedroom. All of the jumping is starting to take a toll on Henry - he's feeling very wobbly and unstable. 

The rest of us are feeling uncomfortable for other reasons. First, because Memmius's room is very small. It's only 10 X 6 feet, and full of furniture - in addition to Memmius's bed, there are several wooden cupboards. We're pretty crowded. And we're also slightly uncomfortable because on those cupboards and narrow walls are paintings of sex scenes. Lots of people having lots of sex. Sometimes, with goats.

"Goats?" Edward stares. "Are those actual goats? Ew."

Otherwise, the scene is what we saw in our video surveillance: Memmius himself is in bed, snoring in a kind of deep sleep that Michel and Yves recognize: he's clearly passed out drunk. And standing over him is a 7.5-foot tall cockroach, which has just spit some kind of mucus out of its mouth at Memmius.

The net is all ready, but we're so cramped that if Edward drops it now, he'll catch half the team. So everyone else takes this opportunity to do some smacking first.

Mace Hunter! leaps in first, of course. He lands a good solid hit with his PaciFist, but the roach just hisses at him, and doesn't show any signs of being harmed. Its carapace is so thick that it's very hard to damage. When they see how tough the roach is, Henry and Yves slam into it with even more force, Henry actually hitting twice in quick succession. Through their combined PaciFist smacks, the roach is actually injured - a few of its many claws start to drag and dangle.

Finally, everyone has managed to clear the area around the bed enough that Edward sees his chance. Down goes the net! Roach is trapped!

For a second, Roach just hisses and struggles in the net - but then the pitch of its hissing changes. Instead of just an incoherent angry noise, it turns to a high piercing shriek, so high that it's at the very edge of humans' ability to hear. So high that our ears burst with pain; so high that we're very lucky that we're not stunned or driven mad by it. 

Then, while we're still staggering and shaken, Roach's claws - the still-working ones - poke out through the holes in the net. We'd thought we were standing back far enough to be safe, but the claws almost look like they're growing as Roach stretches them out. The claws clamp down on Edward's arm, hard. Blood gushes out alarmingly fast, and Edward yells.

Fortunately, Michel is standing right next to Edward, and hastily patches up the worst of the damage. 

Meanwhile, Henry, Yves, and Mace all whale on Roach with their PaciFists, but its shell is so hard that their blows barely make any difference. 

Once Edward and Michel are back in the fight, they have better luck. While Edward's first shot skitters right off the carapace just like everyone else's did, his second is a solid hit. Roach twitches violently, barely managing to stay on its feet. (or claws, or whatever)

Michel is much better-suited to close-range Scuffling than to Shooting, so he's equipped himself with a stun-wand PaciFist. He manages to dodge in between all of the shooters and tases Roach.

As Roach staggers around with its last shreds of energy, it shimmers and starts to grow wings. But that effort is too much for it, and it collapses on the floor.

As the sounds of battle die away, we start to hear some mumbling from the direction of the bed: Titus Memmius is waking up. Only now, after there's been yelling and roach-shrieking and PaciFist combat? Yes. He was _very_ drunk. Henry revs up his PaciFist, ready for more smacking!  But Michel steps in to jab him with a sedative shot. There's no need to MemTag - we think there's a good chance that Memmius was asleep the whole time, and if Memmius actually woke up briefly, he'd assume that the brief glimpse of a giant cockroach was a really bad dream.

Some people in the house _are_ awake and able to hear the odd noises coming from the room. From the hallway, a servant's voice calls, "Er. Master? Are you all right?"

We all stare at each other. Uh. Uh. What do we say?

Finally, Edward - figuring that the staff in Memmius's house are used to hearing unfamiliar young men and women calling out from the bedroom - steps up to Reassure the servant. "Everything is fine!"

There's the expected pause, and the expected, "Ohhhhhh!" when the servant thinks he realizes what's going on. "Do you need anything? Food? Drink?"

"Er. No," Edward calls back. "Just…privacy?"

Thankfully, that gets the servant to go away, so we can examine Memmius and interrogate our giant roach in peace.

First, Michel checks out Memmius, who's been sprayed with some kind of roach slime. Michel thinks that the slime has some kind of effect that's both psychic and soporific: it keeps subject unconscious, and lets you borrow their thoughts. That's how Roach was impersonating Memmius to talk to Lucretius. It's pretty powerful stuff, though - over time, its effects could cause some pretty serious damage to a person.

"It makes you really sickly and have to retreat to the countryside?" Edward figures.

"Exactement," says Michel.

So now we know that Memmius isn't in any immediate danger. And we've got a roach.

Mace: Do we really want to bring a giant unconscious cockroach to TimeWatch HQ?
Yves: It is probably the most secure facility in the space-time continuum
Edward: The other alternative is to interrogate it here, I suppose. But if we're going anywhere else, TimeWatch is the safest.
Michel: We could take it into the backyard and smack it with a very large shoe. Except that Roman shoes aren't quite that good
Edward: Can you give it a sedative?


Actually, Michel can do one better: with his knowledge of medicine and Science! he can come up with a cockroach-worthy truth serum.

Meanwhile, Edward searches Roach - we don't want Roach timetraveling away, so we need to confiscate any timetravel mechanism that it's got. But Edward doesn't find anything to confiscate. "Do these things have an innate timetravel ability?" he wonders, and checks the tether to find out. Yes, says the tether; this kind of roach manipulates sound to travel through time.

But the answer comes back through the tether much more slowly than it should. There's some kind of delay, and that bothers Edward a lot.

"Does that mean that something in the system is down at TimeWatch HQ?" Mace asks.

Edward shakes his head. When there's lag on the tether like this, it's usually because the tether is no longer the precise model that HQ expects to be connecting to it. "More likely, it means that we're moving farther away from…" He trails off. He can't say 'our home timeline,' because that's not an option right now; at least, not for any of us except Henry. He finally settles on… "the timeline we left." 

Even more unsettling is that the tether problems are new. Our tethers were working just fine in 113 CE and in 56 BCE; they're just not working now.

That plus Henry's chronal instability make us decide to interrogate Roach here rather than risking a jump back to HM TimeWatch HQ. 

We divide up the Good Cop/Bad Cop duties again - this time, Edward is much more surprised to find himself in the position of Bad Cop, but he seems to be the most Intimidating person around, so he'll do it. Mace is equally surprised to be the Reassuring one.

Yves, surprising no one, is disappointed that this is a situation that he can't solve by Flirting, but is just fine to not have to try to flirt with Roach.

And, most usefully of all, Michel administers his truth serum just before we wake Roach up.

Edward summons every bit of his royal authority as he stands before the roach. "You see what has come of your plans? You are no match for us. We will never let you destroy the timeline. You are trapped and powerless, and if you tell us everything, we _might_ show you a little bit of mercy."

[sblock]There was a lot more to this speech, but I didn't actually get to write it down because I was saying it  [/sblock]

Roach hisses back. "You are foolish! Did you think that you petty humans would rule the earth? It is we, the Ezeru, who shall rule."

"How were you planning to do that?" Edward presses. "You know, before we petty humans beat you up and captured you? We'll do the same to the rest of your accomplices, too."

"You cannot!" Roach retorts. "We are legion! Too many for you."

"Where are the others?" Edward asks. "And when?"

"Doing what is necessary for survival of the fittest," hisses Roach. "We are increasing the rate of mutation of our ancestors so that we may achieve our greatness before you humans destroy too much of the food."

"Oh, but this is very clever!" Michel good-cops. "How is it that you are assured of introducing the mutations that you need?"

"The weak will die and the strong will survive!" says Roach. "We are legion! We established centers of columns of radiation in the cities where our ancestors dwelt, to feed on your waste. More pillars spreading throughout! Sooner or later the Ezeru will come. The Ezeru will grow strong."

"…I'm actually kind of impressed by this plan," says Michel. We all are. It's a pretty good plan: introducing radiation to induce mutations in cockroaches so that they grow stronger while causing humans to grow weaker from radiation sickness, and accelerating the onset of nuclear wars. "This is all very elegant! But what do you do? Destroy crops to change migration? Frighten young politicians? This seems like cheap tricks and chicanery."

"You humans are easily fooled by cheap tricks," Roach scoffs. "We foretold your future, what you thought would be your future. We promised healing, too."

"You foretold the future?" Edward repeats.

"My colleague," explains Roach. "To whoever asked him. He was very convincing."

Just then, Edward Notices that there are some bugs coming in through the window.
Tiny roaches, beetles, caterpillars - all kinds of bugs. Lots of bugs. Roach must be summoning them by making some noise that they can hear but we can't. We don't have much time….

"Is your colleague the one who was talking to Apollonius?" Edward guesses.

"Talked to!" Roach repeats smugly. "I like that."

Michel edits, "Who took the place of Apollonius?"

"There is still an Apollonius…" Roach taunts.

So either Apollonius is begin manipulated by Roach!Damis, as we'd suspected before, or he's being roach-goo-ed and impersonated like Memmius. Or something else. Either way, we know that we need to deal with him - and either way, we're running out of time here.

"I think that's all we can get," Edward says, eyeing the growing swarms of bugs coming in through the window.

Henry instantly perks up. "Can we kill it? Can we kill it a lot?"

Yes, we can. So we do. A lot. Our blasters smash Roach into little bitty pieces. Henry does not jump up and down on the bitty pieces, but he's very tempted.

As soon as Roach is dead, the swarms of other bugs immediately disperse - or, rather, just go back to wandering aimlessly, the way bugs normally do. Mace Hunter, thinks this is absolutely awesome. "Check out this grasshopper, guys!" he calls, eagerly catching bugs.

The rest of us are not quite as thrilled to be in a room full of bugs. "Is there a dustpan?" Michel asks, looking around the room in disgust.

Edward looks around too."There's, er, that urn?" he suggests. Like most of the furniture and knick-knacks in the room, the urn is decorated with all kinds of interesting sexual art. Edward might find it educational, if he weren't so busy trying to get rid of bugs.

Michel looks at the urn skeptically, but hey, it's the best we can get. He starts scooping bugs into it and dumps them out the window.


----------



## Ladybird (Aug 27, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 14: A Geneva Convention*

So now that we've dealt with Roach!Memmius, where do we go next? Apollonius? It's much farther forward than we are now (as Michel objects), but it's a definite person who's got a location that's easy to pin down. The other main source of Ezeru interference is Helvetii, and we think they'll be harder to find.

But the logic that we should go as far back as we can is pretty convincing. So we check our copy of Caesar's Dacian Wars (which Edward has Preparedly brought along from our 113 CE library trip) to see what we can get about the Helvetii.

What Caesar says is: In 61 BCE Helvetii chief named Orgetorix started agitating to leave Helvetia and invade another land. The other chiefs called a tribal council at which Orgetorix was brought up on charges of treason - in addition to his invasion plans, Orgetorix was also trying to declare himself king, which was Not Done among the Helvetii. But Orgetorix had a huge group of warriors with him; large enough that the other chiefs thought it would be a good idea to acquit him. So Orgetorix actually did become king, and led the Helvetii east to Dacia. Eventually, he died in glorious single combat with Marc Antony.

We check that story against our tethers - which are still slow, which is still unsettling. The _Gallic_ Wars follow the same story up to a certain point: Orgetorix tried to declare himself king, was charged with treason, and acquitted because he had a huge army. But before the council could meet again, Orgetorix mysteriously died. The rest of the council decided to move the Helvetii west, to Gaul.

So our new questions are: was Orgetorix replaced by a roach? or just influenced by  one?

We give Henry some Reality Anchor so that he's more stable, and then head to 61 BCE. We land in summer, a week before the council is set to convene, on the shore of Lake Geneva. This leap feels a little harder than the last - the same lag that's dragging on our tether communication is starting to affect our travel.

Lake Geneva is very different from Rome. The lake is glittering blue, surrounded by reed-and-thatch huts. A few huts are even on the lake, supported by platforms. 

The one similarity that this place has to Rome is that it's noisy and smelly. But unlike Rome, the noise and smell mostly comes from farm animals. 

The people look different than the ones we saw in Rome: they're taller, with paler skin, and blond hair. At least, most have blond hair - some men (and a few women, too) have hair dyed bright blue or green. They're generally young and athletic, so we figure they're warriors. The clothes are bright, too. Most women are wearing tunics dyed in garish shades of red, blue, and orange, often all on the same garment. The men are wearing very little.

Yves's first thought is to check his Geiger counter. Fortunately, there's nothing unusual there.

Mace's first thought is to start chatting. He notices one particularly big tent being built, and heads over to strike up a conversation with the people building it.

Random Helvetii: Well met, cousin! This is the hall for the council. And the trial.
Mace: Trial?
RH: There are some who say that Orgetorix thinks he's better than the rest of us. Thinks he wants to be a _king_
Michel [shocked] A king?
RH: It's scandalous! We have never had kings! We are a free people! [spits]
Edward: [scrunching awkwardly down] "Er. what made him think he was better?"
RH: [shrug] He always has. He's just like that. But nobody can deny that he's impressive. And a brilliant war leader.
Michel: What's so impressive about him?
RH: See that man over there? [He points to a large burly man setting up a tent - easily six inches taller than most of the people we saw in Rome] Orgetorix would make three of him!
Michel: He must be very young
RH: Not that young. His father died before last gathering of chieftains - so, 4 years ago? He has a son old enough to be a warrior and a daughter old enough to be married.
Henry: I'd like to hear what he has to say for himself. Where can we find him?
RH: He's not due to arrive himself until tomorrow. But his scouts have secured that area for themselves [points to a spot at lake's edge]

It's pretty easy to tell that Orgetorix's camp has both the best access to water and the most defensible position of all of the Helvetii.

That's where we go next. Orgetorix's particular branch of the Helvetii is a tribe called the Tigurini. The man himself isn't here yet, but his advance guard is, and they all love him. "Where he's taking us, everyone can have their own herd of cows!" one of them gushes.

"Where's he taking you?" Mace asks.

"Oh, I'm not important enough to know that," says the scout. "And we wouldn't want our enemies to know. Like the Romans! You can't trust them."

While the others are talking to the scout, Edward is looking around at the other Tigurini. Nobody is acting like they've been mind-controlled; their love for Orgetorix seems to be sincere. Nobody is acting like they've been replaced, either - if Orgetorix is being influenced by the Ezeru, they're sticking pretty closely to him.

Mace also Notices that some of the Tigurini are building a ditch around their camp. "Oh, that's for bringing water," the scout explains, when we ask. But Mace and Edward can tell that it is totally a fortification. The Tigurini are preparing for war.


----------



## Ladybird (Sep 2, 2014)

*Episode 2, Chapter 15: Beer, Parties, and Trials*

We draw back from the Tigurini, and try to figure out where to go from here.

"Maybe we can make Orgetorix die nonmysteriously," Henry suggests. "If there are lots of witnesses who see him die, then he can't be replaced."

"But our tethers say that he _was_ killed mysteriously," Mace objects.

"Well, our tethers are going by Caesar's Gallic Wars," Edward points out. "That's the only written source that talks about Orgetorix's death. All we need is for it to be mysterious to Caesar. It doesn't have to be mysterious to the Helvetii."

Our tethers tell us that the penalty for treason among the Helvetii is to be burned, which would definitely count as public and nonmysterious. And maybe the kind of death that the Helvetii wouldn't want to talk to the Romans about.

So if we want to influence the council to convict Orgetorix instead of acquitting him - or, if we think that someone within the Helvetii wants to kill him - who are the power players? Michel Streetwises around, and discovers two other major leaders. First, there's Divico, who's the senior elder on the council. He was a war leader against the Romans 47 years ago, which makes him very elder indeed. He really doesn't like Orgetorix. Second, there's Dumnorix, who seems to be the Most Likely to Assassinate - he's got a reputation for being crafty. But that's not likely to happen at the moment, because Dumnorix is betrothed to Orgetorix's daughter. ("Good move, Orgetorix!" says Michel.)

The next day, all of the leaders arrive. Divico arrives with 150-ish warriors, which by current standards is a good-sized retinue.  Orgetorix arrives with TEN THOUSAND people. Considering that the entire population of the camp before Orgetorix arrived was only 7000, this is a really huge number of people. Not all of Orgetorix's retinue are warriors, but a lot of them are. It's a huge power play, and the rest of the Helvetii are, unsurprisingly, really upset.

With that big a group, it's not hard for Michel to mill around with them, trying to get Unobtrusively close enough to hear if anyone is buzzing. Fortunately, nobody is - not the advisors, not the warriors, and not Orgetorix himself. 

Orgetorix is just as impressive as everyone said he was. He's unfailingly kind to his followers, and has an enormous amount of charisma. He has a lot of physical presence, too: he's very tall and strong, with long blond braids and a huge blond moustache dyed in red and orange stripes. His mantel has red and orange in it too, but also blue and gold, and purple. In this time and place, wearing purple is a power play too: it’s a sign of royalty.

As soon as the tribal council begins, Divico charges Orgetorix with treason for his attempts to overtake leadership of the Helvetii. Orgetorix speaks eloquently in his own defense: as long as the Helvetii stay in mountains, he says, they'll never achieve their greatness. They need to go elsewhere to find their destiny.

Because of his eloquence (and also probably the 10,000 people camped outside) Orgetorix is acquitted. 

Chaos breaks out in the council tent. Orgetorix's people cheer; others boo and hiss (but not hissing in a cockroach way.) Divico, trying to distract everyone, shouts, "Bring out the beer!" Will getting everyone drunk really reduce the likelihood of brawling? Maybe not, but it's traditional - as soon as Divico gives the order, women start bringing in kegs of beer, wheels of cheese, and pots of stew. Time for a very tense post-council party!

Mace Hunter! never passes up an opportunity for a beer! He starts drinking.

Michel and Yves both have the same thought: maybe they could poison Orgetorix during the party and make it look like he had a heart attack? But most of the Helvetii are drinking from horns, not cups, and Orgetorix is sharing his drinking horn with 5 or 6 friends. It would be very very hard to make sure that only Orgetorix got the poison.

After a bit more carousing, Orgetorix's men lift him up and carry him back towards his camp. We grab a last round of beer and join the fun, trailing back to the camp. With 10,000 followers, who will notice a few more?

When the crowd gets to the edge of the ditch (which is now a moat), Orgetorix asks to be put down. That's when Michel notices some people being Unobtrusive - a few people who are shorter than the others, with mantles that don't look quite right. (Maybe some of those treacherous Romans that the Tigurini warned us about? Michel can tell that they're not timetravelers, but he doesn't know enough about Ancient History to be able to tell much more than that. 

Whoever they are, they're certainly treacherous. One of them pulls a knife and cuts the throat of one of Orgetorix's guards.

Michel texts: Looks like unexplained circumstances are about to start. Look out for interference.

That's all he has time to say before the knives get turned on Orgetorix.


----------

