You have chosen B and I’m also including the suggestions from Glass and Omada
“So just how sure are you that this Padelheb is behind all this?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s likely that he is!” Celling replies.
David Eborrenial turned back to the mountain valley that he’d shouted into. A procession of men and women of all ages was trudging up the slope toward the temple. “What are we doing now, David?” one girl shouted.
“Everyone break into groups of three, get out Burlew-Glimshaw chronometers and get ready to do a breadth-first whole-timeline initial survey!” he shouted back.
“Why? What are we looking for now?”
By now the other Protinam were at the door. “Lock onto Antarctica,” David replied.
“Antarctica?” a middle-aged bald man asked skeptically.
“I know that it’s excluded! That doesn’t matter anymore! Erin Quill’s been jailed - that means he’s not affecting the timestream anymore - so it’s likely dropped.”
They walked into the door and split off into different corridors, muttering to each other. Celling turned to David. “So what-”
“What’s a Burlew-Glimshaw chronometer?” David interrupted. “It helps determine where you are in the timestream. Neurally interfaces with a Visionary’s mind and provides feedback on certain mental pathways to help us determine how far in the future you’re looking. It’s like a 4th dimensional sextant. You’re still the one making the observations, it just alters your perception to provide you with a reference frame. When we’re doing fine work, we tend to discard them, but for an initial sweep of a timestream section they’re critical.”
“What are you going to do now?” Celling asked. “Find out whether Padelheb is behind this?”
“We’re going to determine the general layout and characteristics of the timelines in Antarctica.”
“With a focus on finding one that averts the plague.”
“Yes. Our first task is to determine if there is even a timeline that dodges the bioweapon. Our second step-”
“Determine how to get it?” asked Celling.
“No,” answered David. “Not by a long shot, no. I probably already told you this, but we can’t just trace a timeline back to its point of divergence. We have to just guess at decisions that might be made. Sometimes it’ll be a point of divergence, sometimes just a random mundane decision, but we can’t tell which is which.”
“So what can you do?”
“Well… see what the timelines without the plague have different from those with it. I mean, just the fact that a decision is available says things about the timeline.”
“Do you need our help narrowing it down? So you can get a better idea?”
“No, we can’t. Not at all.”
“Can’t what?”
“Narrow it down. There’s not enough time before the window closes again.”
“How do you know?”
“I just checked,” David answers. He puts his hand on his chin. “I’m really sorry if I rambled on a bit about chronometers, but I was actually doing a quick run over of the gap in the Zone of Exclusion.”
“Just then? You don’t need to go into a trance or anything?”
“Oh, no no no,” David answered. “We need instrumentation to get real data, but any trained Protinam can take a quick poke around unassisted. And I found that three days from now, Erin Quill is released, shattering the timeline again. And the minimum we can look into the future is one day.”
“And this is fixed?” Celling asked. “And there’s no difference in when he’s released between timelines?”
David shrugged. “Three days is the minimum. Once one timeline shatters it drowns out all others. Also, residual shattering from when Quill was free means that we are dealing with at least 5500 timelines here. There’s just not enough time to set up experimentations and eliminate enough to make actual predictions.”
Celling nodded and asked, “So just what can you do?”
“Only what we can get indirectly, without picking out a certain timeline,” David said. “There are still things we can exploit. Like I said, just the fact that a decision is available tells us a lot. If we find that a certain decision is available in a large amount of timelines, for instance, we know that it alludes to an event that is likely to happen. That way we at least have some idea what’s coming and aren’t caught totally with our pants down.”
“Alright,” Celling said. A thought struck him. “David, I should really get back to Brazil High Command. We have a teleporting parrot there that can go to Antarctica. Quill needs to know what’s about to happen.”
“Sure, then,” David answered. “Just don’t try to break him out ahead of time. I’m not actually sure what happens if you try and deliberately contradict what I can see. I bet it just fails or fulfills itself, but it’s not worth a try.”
“So should I be doing anything to help you verify which timeline we’re in, or…”
“Yeah, yeah,” David replied. “I’ll send my files on the differences between the various timelines, as well as observations that will help decide it. You might want to stay around and see the results of our survey later today, though. Otherwise you could just send that parrot to pick them up as well.”
Your decision?
A: “I need to go now. This information must be reported as soon as possible.”
B: “I’ll stay around to see what you get. No rush.”
Notes:
No costs for this decision. It’s totally up to you.
To understand the ramifications of this, I’ll give you the timeline. It is now afternoon of the second day of Padelheb’s rule. As I’ve mentioned, this is all a flashback, so the rebels were/will be discovered night of the third day and this cannot be changed by any decision you make.
Should you return now, you can make it back by night of the second day. You then have a full day before the rebel conflict pops up - although I’d like you to stay in character and realize that at this point, Celling doesn’t know where the rebels will be. If you delay returning, you’ll have to stay the rest of the day and can only get back afternoon of the third day, i.e. just in time for the rebels.
The thing is that both Brazil High Command and the Protinam Temple might get other events and/or attacks that you have to respond to. You (the players) are not permitted to take control of either Madeline Merrowitz (general) or David Eborrenial (oracle) because they have not yet been briefed on the Fourth Wall. They do think like you, so they’ll probably do what you would do anyway - I haven’t settled on a mechanism for this. However, you have to take into account the chance of missing something.
Tl;dr - Would you rather spend the next 12 hours watching over General Merrowitz or David Eborrenial.
Poll
13 (46.4%)
Author
Topic: (SG) SPAMOVERLORD: Epilogue: Guest Week (Read 289722 times)