As Ratchet and Twilight came out the other side of the Time Gate, they found the plains of Zanifar far more idyllic, covered in colorful grasses and flowers, with only the occasional wooden fence marking off a vegetable garden. The beginnings of the Tower they'd just been inside was visible nearby, and a computerized voice could be heard from the structure. "Dr. Nefarious is not a disappointment, as his mother once said."
"...wow," Ratchet muttered. "He's...actually got his computer announcing that? He's...got some major self esteem issues."
"His nemesis was Captain Qwark from before we got to him," Twilight pointed out. "This is news?"
Ratchet glanced at Twilight disapprovingly. "Don't you think that's being a little harsh on Qwark?"
"Can you tell me he'd hesitate even a moment before agreeing with that assessment of who he used to be?" Twilight countered. "You know how critical he's gotten of his own past. And it's not like he's like that anymore."
Ratchet shrugged. "True, I suppose...but now I'm kinda feeling sorry for Nefarious..."
"Save that for after we save Orvus," Twilight chided him. "Let's go!"
As they moved around the past Fongoid village, they heard the various Fongoids muttering phrases about how 'great and wonderful' Dr. Nefarious was. "Apparently, he's dabbling in brainwashing again," Ratchet muttered. "No longer feeling sorry for him."
"Let's go fix him, then!" Twilight proclaimed eagerly.
A nearby sign told them about a 'crash site' where Nefarious and Lawrence had arrived. According to the text, the reason the Fongoids had been so welcoming of them was because they believed it was a sign Orvus felt the Fongoids were ready for technology again, whatever that meant. As the pair continued to explore, the computerized voice recited the lines they'd heard the Fongoids muttering without emotion, showing how the gentle brainwashing was progressing. Twilight grumbled about being too close to an active temporal anomaly to risk the level of etheric discharge it would take to "shut that stupid machine up!"
As they approached the path to the tower, one of the Fongoids stopped them. "Hey!" he greeted warmly. "Are you here to help build Dr. Nefarious' outpost? We just finished building the bridge, but the winch crank rusted up, so we can't lower it."
Ratchet frowned thoughtfully. "Say...have you seen Orvus?"
The Fongoid glanced around before whispering conspiratorially, "We're not supposed to talk about it, but he's inside. Can you imagine what those two have to talk about? Dr. Nefarious is brilliant!"
"How can we fix the bridge?" Twilight demanded. "We need to get inside now!"
"Nothing we can do," the Fongoid offered apologetically. "We'll just have to wait for them to finish building the oil derrick first."
Ratchet glanced at the structure in question. "Hmm...that was complete on the other side of the Gate...we could run back through, fill our Omni-soakers with oil, come back, oil the winch, and make the bridge."
"But that might take too long!" Twilight insisted worriedly.
"Well, if you're in that much of a hurry, you do have wings," the Fongoid pointed out reasonably. "The water's pretty warm, so there should be good thermals."
Twilight blinked for a time, then facehoofed. "I can't believe I forgot I could fly for a bit," she groaned.
"Especially since you're currently flying?" Ratchet added teasingly to the hovering young mare.
"Don't you start," Twilight grumbled as she flew over the gap.
Ratchet waited until she was halfway out, then locked onto her Swingshot with his to swing across. Inside the outpost a Grummel-net vendor was visible...but Ratchet and Twilight carefully stayed away from it. If it wasn't somehow quantumly entangled with their current endeavor to be receiving data from their present, they could cause a paradox by trying to buy ammo for weapons that hadn't been invented yet. And neither of them really wanted to think about what it could mean if it was so entangled.
Thankfully, the robotic defenders within the tower weren't that numerous or that durable, and the pair were able to take them all down without expending their ammunition completely, leaving plenty for what would come next. Bracing themselves, they rode an elevator to the top of the tower.
As they stepped off, they could hear Nefarious shouting. "You twit!" he yelled. "You told me this would work!"
"I-I don't know what's happening," an unfamiliar Terrachnoid replied. "We should have found it by now!"
As Ratchet and Twilight approached, they made out the scene. Nefarious, Lawrence, and the unknown Terrachnoid were in discussion of some sort in front of a clear tube filled with a beam of light. At the moment, neither Ratchet nor Twilight could see inside the tube clearly. However, it wasn't long before they could clearly make out the wizened figure of a Zoni inside the capsule.
"He must have erased his own memory!" the Terrachnoid gasped out, somewhere between anger and desperation.
"Time...is a gift," the Zoni stated, his voice weak but firm, "and...not to be tampered with."
Ratchet and Twilight leapt into position behind the group as Nefarious spoke again. "This is your last chance, Orvus. How do I get into the chamber?"
"You are making a mistake," Orvus insisted weakly. "The clock is not a time machine."
Growling, Nefarious gestured to a mechanical soldier nearby, which began firing energy at Orvus.
"There is only one who will enter my chamber," Orvus managed to growl through the pain. "And he is safe; far from you."
A blaze of white light blinded everyone...but Ratchet's keen eyes caught a brief flare of pale purple behind the light, and he could have sworn he heard Twilight shouting "Close it!" over and over...but Twilight was standing right beside him, her mouth closed, her eyes covered, and no glow around her horn. Perhaps he was seeing things.
However, when the light faded, Orvus was gone. "Where is he?" Nefarious demanded. "Where did he go?"
"I don't know, sir," the Terrachnoid replied. "I'm pulling up a residual image from his data banks. We scanned it before he...vanished." An image of Clank appeared on a holographic screen.
"Clank?" Ratchet gasped out in confusion.
"Mommy?" Twilight called worriedly.
"You!" Nefarious snarled as he spun to face them.
Ratchet quickly hurled the bomb he'd been priming, using it as a distraction to help himself and Twilight escape. Despite their best efforts to rescue Orvus...they had not made it there in time...
Or did we? Ratchet wondered as they made their way back to the Time Gate, leaving Nefarious to deal with the new gouge the bomb had left on his faceplate.
another great chapter. cant wait for nefarious to once more get his. also first
Er... isn't Clank on the Clock?
Hmm, so Twilights from the future in the same place? Please refer to my previous statement concerning time travel.
6944079 *Goes and buys a twelve pack of beer*
Oh.. So in the future, they're going to open a brief time window in order to grab Orvus, which Ratchet knows they need to do because he just saw it happen. Simple enough with a bit of bootstrap logic. Just like Harry and the patronus.
6944093 Nothing personal, but aspirin would be better.
Somewhere, in a distant time, Dr. Nefarious is screaming out his frustration for a certain lombax, and knows not why. Looking forward to more.
Keep up the good work. Deus tecum.
6944110 Well, yes, but the joke is that time travel shouldn't be contemplated sober. I was trying to play off that.
6944074
Maybe he's taking his lunch break.
6944177 Hey. Insanity is a perfectly valid exclusion from that rule.
Contemplating the nature of time and space is something that I do sober all the time. ... but I'm also not 100% sure on whether everything really exists or not, and whether the shadows are talking with me, at me, or about me. So.
Anyway, you have to remember that Twilight originally came from another dimension, as is, technically, the Great Clock. And that time isn't strictly either linear or parallel across dimensional boundaries, which is why Orvus can observe it in it's entirety from outside. It's likely they'll find that they simply pulled him several years into the future to save him.
His being pulled from one point in the timeline to another explains his disappearance easily, as he literally did not exist for the time he skipped.
So they will have rolled a Mulligan for their current missed attempt, which is itself technically a Mulligan? 6944177 has the right idea. I'm too sober for this.
6944289 Again, it was just a joke. A joke that fell flat, but still. I understand that stuff just fine.
Here, I'll prove it.
Time travel really isn't hard to understand, it's just a matter of having the right frame of reference.
| /
| /
| /
| /
| /
A B
It's like a bar that's standing straight up. That's time as it's meant to be. The past is the bottom, and the top is the future. But then you tilt it when you change the past. The point of divergence isn't all that different from the original, but the further along the bar you go, the further away from the original timeline you get, with more and more changes, until eventually you don't recognize the future anymore. That's called a cascading butterfly effect.......Or, as I have recently been wanting to call it, the Starlight Glimmer Effect.
See? Easy.
*Not actually offended, just taking the chance to geek out*
6944400 THANK you! Here, on the house. *Hoofs over a beer*
You forgot to add, 'and his right optic unit loose.'
6944177 Ah, okay then
6944421 I actually ran across a Tumblr a while ago that did a really good job explaining Time/Space/Dimensional mechanics... Let me see if I can dig it up...
Ah, here it is: http://nyx-contacts.tumblr.com/
Links Redacted due to Imgur
Images recompiled and dirrected Here > 6948043
This has basically become my basic model for anything Space/Time related. So far as this model would apply to This story, what the Great Clock would basically do is allow an individual to view the "Fifth Dimension" in its entirety from any "point" along its progression, in addition to locking out unaccounted for direct fifth dimensional travel, which basically means anything that would cause a cascading Paradox Loop Collapse. "Self Fulfilling Prophecy" paradoxes, such as the one that just occurred with Ratchet and Twilight are "accounted" for, as "They went back, so they had to go back, so they could go back" (And I am aware that that only makes sense if your thought process resembles a pretzel) in order to fulfill the conditions met in the present (Nefarious' new "Scar"). A "Chrono Trigger Time Egg" gambit (traveling back to a specific moment frozen in time in order to swap someone for a simulacrum in order to save their life) also falls under the purview of "Accounted Travel" because as of the moment the rescuer went back in time, the person being rescued is basically Schrodinger's Cat.
Edit: Changed Images to Links... Because Imgur...
Edit 2: Links Redacted/Redirected due to Imgur's obsessive need to make content unshareable...
6944927
...the Lombaxes look a lot like cats, don't they?
6944964
6944927 You do know imgur blacklisted fimfiction right? None of those links work in the slightest.
Yeah.... it's all a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff. Time Travel makes my head hurt when there are multiple time lines intersecting at one point, which is what I feel happened here.
6944421 Of course, that's strictly time travel divergence.
Also, that only comes into play if predestination isn't a thing.
Some people think that 'big' events are impossible to prevent. Things like the World Wars, or the Crusades, or ...
Huh. Actually, most of the really important turning points in history have pivoted around conflict. Our species is seriously messed up.
But yeah. WW II for instance. With a large enough divergence, you might instead see Poland invade Germany before going on a genocide and trying to conquer the world, but it's unlikely that you could avoid the war entirely, at least according to that.
And then there's absolute predestination, in which aside from minor choices like what you had for breakfast, your life is written in stone, and even trying to fight it is part and parcel of your life. ... of course, according to Multiverse theory, absolute predestination is a thing only because every choice you make, and the effect on your life by the choices of others, will all be explored in different universes.
Of course, I bring up Predestination because Tats tends to use a very limited divergence from the original plot of the games. The reasoning behind it is clearly to avoid a large divergence where noone knows what happens next, but the point remains.
6945317 I realized that after the fact, though they can still be found by going through the link to the Tumblr. It's one of the prologues. I'd consider making copies of the images to my Photobucket and linking them through that, but I don't know how much trouble I might be getting myself into for something like that...
Seriously though, it's one of the most concise and easy to understand breakdowns of the dimensional multi/omni-verse that I've ever run across and I highly recommend to anyone reading this that they check it out.
Edit: Also, the image links seem to be working just fine for me for some reason... weird...
Another enjoyable chapter. Good job.
6946716 Because they were changed from image links, to standard hyperlinks. Since they're no longer embedded within fimfiction's webpage, but entirely separate pages on their own, they 'work'. Also I was aware of the tumblr blog, so I'm already familiar with the explanation. Pity it has been dead for so long.
6946716
Clicking the links take me to blank pages that don't load beyond that.
6947105
Too bad I made that switch after I posted...
Not blaming anyone, but it is what it is...
6947131 Have you tried opening them in a new tab or wind-... No wait... Just tried doing that on a different device I have and the page said "This immage contains Errors" at the top... Grrr...
Fine! They want to make it impossible to share content, I'll just work around them! /Incoherent grumbling...
(Click Immage to expand to full size.)
i1107.photobucket.com/albums/h397/Almech_Alfarion/Nyx%20Contacts%20Dimensional%20Explination.pngoriginal.png~original
6948043
Very interesting.
...but what does all that have to do with time travel?
6948091 The whole thing? not all that much. The relevant parts, however are the sections explaining the interactions of the "Fourth", "Fifth" and "Sixth" dimensions. I simply felt that cutting off the explanation at those places would leave a few people scratching their heads.
Some, Like The Doctor, are able to bypass most of the pitfalls of Time Travel because their means of traveling through time/space allows them to move through the Sixth Dimension, thus being able to more-or-less ignore causality most of the time. The most common mode of Time Travel that I can figure (if we're using this model as a guideline), however, is when someone finds a way to travel directly along the "Fifth" dimension (Doc Brown, Marty McFly and Starlight Glimmer, for example). Because of this, they're still affected by the laws of Causality, which tend to fight such interference, and therefore have a high potential to cause Catastrophic Paradox Collapse events such as the one that necessitated the creation of the Great Clock. There are varying degrees of "Time Travelers Immunity" involved in some cases, thus negating some of the dangers, and at other times the time travel was already accounted for in that particular "Fifth Dimensional Branch" in Causality, but that's neither here nor there so far as this conversation is going at the moment.
The reason I decided to go so far in sharing this is that some people in the comments seemed to be having difficulty visualizing how a sixth dimensional system could work. I understand perfectly. The First time I independently conceived of the idea was about Seven years ago, Long before I'd even Heard of Friendship Is Magic, and I think I spent maybe an hour staring at the wall of my Dorm trying to come to grips with what I'd just "Seen"...
6948193
Ah, I see. Very nice.
6948193
If that is the type of 'Independent Thinking' you do in your off time YEARS ago- I am slightly terrified of what you do in your off time NOW.
Also- I rather like this Explanation of Time Travel, since I happen to write a few Doctor Whooves stories. Would you mind if I incorporated it into a possible Future work? Or just referred to it on occasion? I will admit- it's rather ingenious.
6948439
Sanity is overrated.
And no, I don't really mind. It's just an idea, and not one I even own so feel free.
So that's how it happened.
6948781
Oddly hilarious.
6948896
What is it?
6948921 what if he actually got anthro-unicornified? And they just reworked the movie around that.
6949290 look back at the other things he's done in this fic. Are you really saying he wouldn't or couldn't do that if he thought twilight would like it?
6949948 plus I like the idea of him having a unicorn horn that's horribly oversized and sparkly.
The crack on his face was my favorite scene! He's just lounging then suddenly his face and eye updates to Ratchet's bomb.
7147117
I couldn't stop laughing when that crack appeared and his eye drooped down.