With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

It's nice to see a story finally fully exploit that time travel paradox loophole in a temporal system that makes logical sense.
As long as the changes you make don't alter the course of events until your own present, you can make whatever changes you like.
The SNES game Chrono Trigger used the same "swap in a fake at the moment of death" trick to bring the main character back to life.

 

Interesting. An alternate Paul who has had a very odd path to where he is now. Hopefully he can lay down some sage advice to the rookie time-traveller. Like, 'don't try to rewrite the entire timeline, you dolt.'

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

Yes, that's never a good sign. Especially in a clearly magical library.

Ah, Mandated Paul. I'd thought he got sent home, but evidently not.

Always fun when you can channel Obi-wan Kenobi.

That's one way of putting it. Not having seen 'What If?', I rather suspect I',m missing some details on who's who. Evidently there's some differences.

"Oh, we're using made-up names?"

Though in Maul's case, he really can't introduce himself using his real name...

So, not injured by a car accident? I take it that was the divergence involved? <reads ahead.> Okay, yes.

And as the Ancient One would tell you, time is not something to be played with.

Ah, yes, one of the places where English breaks down so easily... Temporal Mechanics...

Not that the rookie sorcerer would recognise the name. Given that unless this is some form of Amalgam universe, Maltus did not exist here...

Especially after you got through with it...

Good. Always better to explain things with a cup of something warm in your hands. If only so you can't throw a punch as easily.

Unless he thinks things work by Bill & Ted rules or similar, where time passes concurrently whenever you are.

I mean, certainly there might be an anthropomorphic embodiment of the concept, but they generally play no central part in the actual functioning of it.

When all you have is an infinity stone, everything looks like a glove... Also, nice Discworld reference.

Assuming it isn't bolted to the floor or something of the like, I suppose... Might prove necessary for some of the more lively books...

...Does copying yourself count? Never underestimate the craftiness (or foolishness) of a desperate man.

Truer words have never been spoken...

Not an uncommon reaction when dealing with any empowered Paul...

"Ook, do thing, other thing happen..."

Excellent, getting right to the heart of the matter. Or would it be a matter of the heart?

Now, when you say 'save', be precise. There;s no room for ambiguity in these things.

At least Strange is smart enough to recognise the bootstrap paradox he would be invoking...

Reality is merely a state of mind. Change a mind, you change their reality...

Or even replace her at the moment of her fatal injury with a perfect quantum replica cadaver. Bam, person saved, dead body left behind. Though it leads to all other manner of complications...

Honestly, that works as one reason why so many 'What If?' tales in the comics ended up with lots of dead characters...

...Okay, let's step back a bit here, Mr former Time Trapper... Deleting universes should be a last resort, not the first.

Good to see Maul has learnt his lesson about these things.

Well, yes, I suppose you could. But that's rather a lot of work.

...What?

Well, if future you is taking her with you...

Well, there weren't before you suggested this...

I guess things work out for the best, then? The joy of not being able to keep up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe now... But from the sound of things, all he needed was someone to say, "Stop. Think about what you're planning to do. This is how it won't work." And he got that in this timeline...

 

Here we have a Paul that doesn't actually understand the rules of Time Travel in the Marvel verse trying to pretend that he does.

Hint, there's no cheating an MCU fixed point.

 

Instead of a street think of it like a bridge. If the bridge behind you gets moved so that it's pointing in a different direction then that'll cause all the rest of the bridge to swing over as well. At that point your only choice is to move along with the bridge or go for a swim when suddenly there's nothing underneath you.

 

He did get sent home.

I think this is just his future.

Most languages would break down trying to explain this.

Mandated Paul would know that.

Like legal complications, as well as her family and friends thinking she's dead.

The same is true in the animated series.

Lots of dark endings.

Even a Paul is able to learn.

It's rare, but it happens.

 

Ir depends on whether the fixed point is the death or the perception of the death.

 

It was confirmed by the Ancient One and Watcher to be her actual death.

Even the universe itself confirmed it by falling apart the moment she was brought back, instead of the moment the Doctor Strange in the car regained consciousnesses and realized she was dead.

So yea, either that Paul's just flat out wrong, or this is a massive AU that has no real connection to the MCU.

 

So in this universe he had someone in the car with him?

 

I just like the idea that Christine's been killing time by training with the Ancient One alongside Strange this whole time, but his self-induced mental blindspot keeps him from seeing her.

And now I'm wondering what her sorceress outfit would look like.

 

I'd have responded by calling him Hugo and followed that with "What's up Doc?". Mostly because I'd find both amusing and who wouldn't take the chance to channel Bugs Bunny?

 

Ahhhh, mental partitions! I like when stories use those. Best examples I’ve seen are in Pokemon: Origin of Species (not everyone’s cup of tea, that) and Alchemical Solutions (Worm/Exalted setting fusion(ish) Quest). The webcomic Namesake had something along those lines too, but we didn’t get a ton of detail.


So! Paul is managing a magical/supernatural library (thank goodness this Paul isn’t in the SCP universe!). I wonder if anyone will discover a “lost section” of the library during Paul’s stay.

 

Is there a Paul in Doctor Who? Zoat's probably answered this at some point but I haven't come across it.
I know Paragon or maybe another Paul talked about time being a process, not a person, back in the DC multiverse, but I'm assuming he was partially incorrect since Sandman/Vertigo stuff is canon and Time is actually a guy and the father of the Endless. Again, this was probably brought up before during all the time travel episodes, but I don't really reread those episodes because of the temporal stuff I struggle to wrap my head around.
In the MCU or the comics Marvel multiverse, I'm not sure if Time has a personification, unless it's Infinity or Eternity.

 

That's because you're operating on a flawed premise that you stop being part of your universe at some point when you time travel.

In fiction You already changed the past infers that there is only one time line and any time travel that occurs has already happened and always will happen. Branching Timelines effectively operates as a multiverse, with each change branching into a whole new reality, the previous one continuing on as you left it while you exist in the altered version. The former shuffles you around within your reality, while the latter removes you from one reality and places you in another. The former violates the conservation of matter and energy LOCALLY, but doesn't violate it overall, as it averages out over the sum total of all existence. The Latter says 'screw you' to conservation for singular universes, but the net for the greater multiverse goes unchanged.

The issue in the real world is that due to the observed properties of the universe around us, time travel backwards is impossible under our understanding of physics. While you can alter the effective rate of change relative to an observer, the math for stopping time, or rewinding it simply stops working. Not only with objects with mass, but also with anything without mass that would allow information to pass from one frame of reference to an earlier point.

But here's the thing with what we know looking at hypothetical time travel. At no point do you 'leave' the known universe. You can't 'pick yourself up' from reality, move to some place 'beyond time' and then go back and put yourself back into the universe at some other point in the timeline.

While you can twist and squish space time, you can't cut a chunk of it out.

There is no break in your continuity because you can't break it. You don't exist IN the Universe as a discrete element. Your past, present and future are a functional structure OF the Universe as a whole. Your existence is part of what Defines what the Universe IS in the first place.

Spoiler: Further Ramblings about Relativity and Thermodynamics

Simply put the speed of light in vacuum ( C ) is a constant in ALL frames of reference, and thus any attempt to violate light speed fail. Current physics that would suggest that approaching that limit time would slow relative to an outside observer. However as you accelerate you need more and more energy. At equal to the speed of light you would need Infinite Energy (and interestingly you would also have Infinite Mass too). Needless to say you'd require more energy then what exists in the universe to even try. Oddly the numbers, once you get past lightspeed start working somewhat sanely, in that they aren't infinite anymore, they're just backwards. Due to that factoid, a lot of folks try to come up with crackpot ways to either bypass the point where you need to hit C, or redefine the shape of the universe itself to try and get around it.

Which is where things get crazy with ideas for 'wormholes', 'negative mass' and 'virtual particles' get really interesting. And Complicated. Head Hurtingly complicated.

Even without relativistic stuff, removing matter from the universe and adding it to either that universe at a different point in existence (or an alternate universe completely) messes with the laws of thermodynamics. You've effectively Created and Destroyed Matter and Energy. That might not seem like a huge thing to you, 'it's just one more human being' after all, but if time travel is possible you've opened reality up to huge violations of entropy on a macro scale. (for the gamers reading this, you've discovered the mother of all dupe glitches).

 

No.

If so, he doesn't remember doing it.

I did not know that.

 

Nah this should work. The Ancient One only said her death was a fixed point because of its impact on Strange. As long as the impact and resulting consequences are there, her death shouldn't be necessary.

Specifically, the Ancient One said that the paradox is caused by Strange removing his motivation to become a sorcerer. If we consider the need for that motivation to be the Fixed Point, then faking her death should be perfectly fine.

It'd probably work more reliably if someone else faked it for Strange, but I have no idea how it's complicated by Stranger's twin anyways. The twin was split off before the crash, so Strange would still have to convince his twin that faking her death is okay. But since faking her death shouldn't end the world, twin-Strange shouldn't have any reason to see the world disintegrating and need to stop Strange anyways...

 

I don't agree with this argument. By definition "The Universe" is everything that exists. If you "leave the universe" then it just turns out that what you thought was the universe is actually just a single plane of existence within a larger universe. Conservation laws deal with closed systems. If you don't live in a closed system...

 

I was assuming Paul would jump to necromancy as a resolution to the fixed point, considering his history. Dr. Strange has to believe she died - in at least one of the timelines the episode shows it looks like she died of a heart attack while dancing. He’s a freaking neurosurgeon - why can’t he he just resuscitate her later? or make it look like a heart attack when in reality it was just her getting drugged with something that made her look dead? Or in the extreme case just go to the spirit world and get her soul back or something?

 

But you aren't on that bridge. You already crossed it.

What? Of course you can just say your time machine leaves the ubiverse. It's all fictional after all.

And of course you can violate thermodynamics in fiction.

 

Yeah that whole episode could have been avoided if he had seen Stein's:Gate.

 

Zoat, part of your explanation doesn’t work. In the original movie, and early in the episode we see Strange battle dormamu in a universe with different rules of how time works. However, his original universe isn’t destroyed, despite him clearly leaving it.

 

Some of them are bad because we haven’t seen all of the episodes, since we know from trailers that there is going to be crossover between the ‘If’s.

 

Because he hadn't changed the past of the universe he left in a way which created a paradox.

 

This was a fun chapter. One of my D&D campaigns dealt a lot with time travel and time loops. My wizard Wulfric and I got really good at causing and undoing these kinda things. Hell, this exact situation actually occurred to my character and I even resolved it in the same manner.

Sadly & funnily Wulfric developed a phobia to anything time travel related. Every time it comes up now, he’ll drink himself into a stupor to deal with the stress.

 

I had the exact same reaction to that what if episode.

The Ancient One even said the problem was the paradox. So no paradox, no problem.

Strange was treating the symptom and not the underlying condition.

 

Loved this!

Tenet actually explores time travel pretty well. The Temporal Pincer Attack is a very novel interesting mechanism. Your sentence brought that to mind.

 

Haha. Reminds me of the little used theory of time travel from Gargoyles. Time cannot be altered as it tends to correct itself when people try, BUT stable time loops that alter perception can and do happen. The Archmagnus apparently died twice and had two of himself running around for awhile because his future self rescued his past self, then past AM became the future who rescues himself.

 

If you're still on that street when it goes, you might fall through the world though.

 

You're always on that bridge. It's infinitely long. It bridges from the past to the future. That bridge is... (pause for dramatic effect) Time.

 

There is one sound hypothetical means by which backwards time travel would be possible without resorting to superluminal velocities or nonphysical objects. It's similar to a wormhole, but it's not quite the same thing as the formal definition of "wormhole."

Basically... Nothing compels our universe to only have a single path along the temporal dimension. You can only go one direction along that axis, sure, but topologically that axis doesn't HAVE to be a straight line -- indeed, we know for a fact that it is not, but to date the only place we know of where it gets redirected far enough from straight to redefine where the future is... is inside the event horizon of a black hole.

But just because we've never seen it doesn't mean there CAN'T be a place in the universe where the path to the future intersects with the path from the past. We don't know of any mechanism -- not even hypothetically -- to create these circumstances, but it could exist naturally. This wouldn't exactly be practical time travel, because you might have to travel billions of light-years to get there, or you might have to wait a very long time. These are equivalent; time is just a kind of distance. The easiest case to describe would be the hypothetical case of a cyclic universe: it starts in a Big Bang, it ends in a Big Crunch, and if you could somehow survive through that whole thing you would see the exact same history repeat (but of course this means you were there last time to watch it happen then too).

 

I guess it's more of a meta reason really. Can't have any of the alternate universes ending all that well otherwise people would want to see more of it and complain that the canon MCU isn't going that way. Best to ensure it all goes somewhat badly and the canon remains the preferred option for the majority