Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A young man sits on the floor of his room, disheartedly slumped against the wall. Today is not his birthday. In fact, today just so happens to be the furthest from his birthday a day could possibly be. Today is the day that life as he knew it will end. You’ve taken a liking to him for some mysterious, perhaps even narrative-related reasons. You think you’ll be him for a little while.

As previously mentioned, you sit on the floor of your room, or rather, one of the many duplicates of your room that your dear departed server player created while building up to your first portal. You think you might be on the 30th floor, you don’t really know, or care. You just kind of crashed into your tower of a house while in a stupor of rocket propelled sadness.

There’s no getting around it. This is a Doomed Timeline, you’ve caused enough to know what one looks like. Maybe you should introduce yourself first before you get too into your current predicament.

Your name is Jason Greene. And, as just stated, you are in a Doomed Timeline. You should know as much, being the Page of Time. Your entire quest was basically one big cosmic autopsy experience, picking at the dead remains of a shit ton of Doomed offshoots that branched from the Alpha timeline, eventually culminating in the development of your bomb-ass time powers. Although, you didn’t actually get to use your powers while you were still on your quest, not in any way that mattered, really. And after you ascended, all you really did with them was go back in time to fulfill all the Causal Timeloops your future selves had written you into. That isn’t to say your powers aren’t bomb-ass, because they are indeed; bomb-ass. It’s just that you imagined them being more fun to use, rather than it being more of a responsibility you had to actively tend to.

A thought crosses your mind, and you contemplate using said bomb-ass time powers to retreat to a less utterly depressing timeline. It’s a relatively easy jump to make, from an offshoot back into the main temporal continuity. But you’ve seen first hand what happens to Doomed Jasons that don’t lie in the unwinnable-Sburb-session-bed they made for themselves. Paradox Space dishes out all kinds of uncannybrutal cosmic justice on their asses.

You decide not to go time hopping. It can only lead to more Dead Jasons, and it’s a universal and well known fact that Dead alternate-timeline-selfs are the enemy. Actually, any Dead selfs are the enemy, alternate timeline or not.

It’s a shame that you would be Doomed to an offshoot timeline this far into your quest. You had conquered the grueling task of reaching the top of your echeladder, you brought your consorts the secrets of their past and restored the Land of Rust and Hourglasses, and you even achieved God-Tier status. Everything was finally going your way, then she had to go and mess everything up. At least you can take solace in the fact that she’s Doomed as well. Sinking the ship she’s on to kill the Captain. Classic Rage player move.

You look down at the red sleeves of your God-tier pajamas, only emphasizing the sadness of your current situation. Not the pajamas themselves, though. Being God-tier is actually pretty sweet. It’s the red of the blood that’s seeped into your sleeves that’s making you sad.

You suppose it could be poetic, the red of your friend’s blood being lost to the Red of your Aspect. Maybe it would be poetic, if you were still the Alpha you, and the blood was Doomed offshoot-friend blood. Seeing offshoot timeline versions of friends die is just par for the course for any up and coming Time player, at least you think. But these were your friends, this was your timeline. It’s not poetic… it’s just sad.

You’ve put off dealing with recent events long enough. The recent event being you murdering all your friends in a blind rage. A rage that was not your fault, you might add. A rage that she put you in with that damn magic of hers. There were eight players in your session. You feel kind of dirty thinking about them all, considering their blood hasn’t even finished being magically cleaned from your pajamas yet. These things are supposed to clean themselves fast, but it’s already been a week’s time since the incident, yet the stains still linger, however faint they may be. You do your best not to reminisce about them too much, as to avoid completely breaking down into a tearful mess.

You succeed in repressing the feeling evoked by the realization that you just killed your best friends. Instead you focus on why this all happened.

It was the Maid of Rage. She was the one who sent you into that blind fit. You don’t know why she would do something like this. Sure, she didn’t get along with some of the others, but you never thought she’d go so far as to puppeteer a massacre. Especially not with you as the puppet!

Well, that’s not true. She hated you the most out of the group, but you have no idea why she held such angry feelings for you. You were actually really good friends not too long ago. But she’s made it abundantly clear how she feels about you now, usually by feeding you fake leads about your quest to fuck up your progression or through her constant ridicule and mocking. Ridicule and mocking that, more often than not, consisted of sending you Pesterlog screenshots of her messing with doomed timeline versions of you just before they died. A sort of x2 Mocking Combo, which never failed to get under your skin. It’s her forte.

You suppose it could have angered her when you finally got the hang of all your timeline responsibilities and didn’t have to rely on knowledge from offshoots to figure out your quest. She couldn’t mess with all those doomed versions of you anymore since they stopped jumping to your timeline. So instead of finding some new way to mock you, she went and made you a Doomed version of yourself as revenge. A God-tier Maid of Rage is not something you want to mess with. Not that you ever did in the first place, though.

You considered going back to stop yourself before killing anyone. Doing so would no doubly put you back into the Alpha timeline, and at the same time, onto an inevitable path towards your death. This, however, isn’t what makes going back a difficult decision. You’re rather familiar with the concept of Doomed versions of yourself bringing back help and wisdom from offshoots. In fact, you mentored under quite a few Doomed versions of yourself throughout your campaign, before they died that is. You always said you were prepared to fill the role yourself if and when the time came.

The thing is, entering the Alpha timeline from a Doomed offshoot to prevent the formation of said timeline would erase the offshoot from the flow of temporal reality. Actually, not so much erase, more like… collapse the Doomed timeline back into the Alpha, causing them to merge. Usually the process goes off unnoticed by anyone, but with the amount of damage you caused to this timeline in that rage, different points of the Doomed offshoot would be jutting out of the time flow if they were to be brought back together again.

Paradox Space has a sort of failsafe for events like this, and would iron out all the sharp edges of the Doomed timeline before they could do any real damage to reality. But it’s a rather crude process, crushing events from the Doomed timeline into the Alpha. Essentially shoving the dead remains of your friends into the Alpha timeline’s flow, as well as sending the memories of you killing them straight into their Alpha counterpart’s minds.

The main reason you don’t want to send a trans-temporal corpsplosion into the Alpha timeline is because your entire rampage happened in one spot. Her house. Lexie. The Seer of Space. It was the first time everyone had been together since entering the Medium. Kind of like a reunion party, her idea. She was the only player other than you and the Maid to reach God-tier. She was… you’re not quite sure what she was to you. You’d like to think you were together, it certainly seemed like it, at least to you. At worst, you were close friends. Friends who’d kiss each other’s corpses when they get a little too bold for their own good.

You were okay with just friends. But now… The only way she could be dead, actually dead, was because of a Heroic death. Trying to save her friends from your wrath. Christ… you feel sick just thinking about it.

You can’t do that to her. The bodies, those memories, all dropped on her all at once like that. She isn’t used to seeing dead friends, not like you are. She never seemed to recover from reviving you into your dream self, or from her own Ascension for that matter. You can’t imagine what having five of her dead closest friends And her own corpse thrusted onto her lap like that would do to her psyche. You’re not sure she could take the shock of it all. So you’re just going to stay here, in a null session. So long as you don’t go back and stop the splintering event, the Doomed offshoot will stay a stable Timeline separate from the Alpha.

Your somewhat warranted self wallowing pity-party is interrupted by the sound of your Hovertop alerting you to something.

Someone was messaging you. You open your Pesterchum, but there isn’t any new text in the chat. You type something in, seeing if anyone will respond. A second later, your text jumped up a space. After a moment of confusion you realize that the text coming in is in white.

You stare at the screen of the Hovertop in genuine confusion. Your friend, if you can even still consider her your friend, has never been one for RPing or any general masquerading of her identity. She liked it when people knew it was her messing with them. You suppose the weird white text person could be someone else. Maybe not everything they said was true, but that doesn’t mean all of it was unbelievable.

Jason, get in contact with the Maid.

Your conversations with her are always such fruitful endeavors. Whatever, it seems the white text guy lost interest in you. Maybe it really was Mia messing with you, and you played right into her hands. She’s probably laughing pretty hard at how gullible you are right now. Idiot!

Before you can get too deep into scolding yourself, a very distinct -ify sound comes from behind you. Turning your attention to the noise, you find a small box sitting on the floor. That’s odd. How did that get there? Like you don’t already know. Sendifying and Appearifying things is a rather pedestrian activity compared to the type of time shenanigans you got up to before being Doomed. You open the box.

There’s a small alabaster square and a blank slip of paper inside. No, wait, there appears to be white text printed on the paper. You have to strain your eyes to read it.

“Mr. Greene, kindly press the button on the device enclosed within package received. Doing so will be the first step to accepting our deal.”

You pick up the metal cube. There’s a button on the side, likely the one that the ominous note was referring to. You wonder what the chances are of this thing being a bomb... You give it about 10%.

Pressing in the button, two sides of the cube light up with a purple glow and it begins beeping. The odds of this thing being a bomb have skyrocketed. The initial fear of having an explosive in your hand subsides with the realization that you are, in fact, immortal. You doubt standing around doing nothing in particular could be considered particularly heroic or villainous, but you set the cube down and take a step back anyways.

Much to your surprise, the cube does not explode. Instead, it morphs into a completely purple sphere and begins to float. After a moment of being suspended mid-air, the sphere begins pulsating. This thing is… kinda freaking you out. You take another step back, and the beeps and pulsations quicken. You’re really not comfortable with this thing being in your house, or general vicinity really. 

Suddenly, the sphere erupts with a flash of light and standing in its place is what looks to be a gateway portal. You’re beginning to believe that Mia might not have been the white text guy. Or if she was, she’s very committed to the bit.

No, this is real. It has to be. This is… this is a way out! You’re not quite sure where this will lead, but if there’s a chance of escaping Doom’s cold, heartless clutches, you don’t see the harm in giving it a shot. With a frantic excitement, you scramble together a few possessions and supplies you think you might need before walking up to the portal and placing a hand against it. As you do, your up-beat demeanor is suddenly wracked with an unshakable feeling of dread, like you’ve just made a grave mistake. Before you can take it back, you’re spirited away, removed from this null session.

Jason, arrive already.