[center][h3]Time Shredded to Shadows[/h3]
[i]A Galaxor Turn Post![/i][/center]

[hr]

With little more than a snap, the almighty Galaxor had thrust knowledge and thoughts right into the minds of goblinkind, but with those revelations had not come a full understanding. Could the mysteries of time magic ever be fully understood? Still, with the way illuminated to them, there was an itch to discover more and attain mastery over this new art.

Unfortunately, for all the understanding and divine intellect that Galaxor had imparted unto a generation of goblins, it’d taken only a singular mundane rock to undo it all for Gemless Gerry. See, he’d been a bright young goblin lad bound for the Library, but after the Dominion was consecrated and the earthquakes came, some rubble landed upon his head and he’d never been quite the same after that. The rubble rolled right off his noggin and then he was fine afterward, except sometimes his memories also rolled right off his noggin. Usually he was fine afterward, in a sense, but it was enough to keep him from every earning any gems. He’d tried every trade there was, and then tried most a second or third time because he couldn’t remember his first, but forgetting everything made it too much to even earn so much as a sapphire in any field of import. He had a few quartz crystals and maybe an opal to show for his efforts, or so he sometimes said, but he’d forgotten where those things went. Or what they’d been awarded to him for!

Gerry was an aging goblin now. A perpetual state of amnesia lended him to a forgiving nature (for he couldn’t hold onto any grudges better than he could put names to faces, grasp skills, or remember anything important) and he never did mature out of his boyish state, so he was at least amicable enough to be liked rather than just pitied. Healers tried to un-rock his noggin, but it always seemed to serve no avail. This was just the way that Gemless Gerry was meant to be. Fortunately there was no crime in the Dominion, so nobody sought to take advantage of his forgetful nature, and a place was found for him in a laboratory. Though he wasn’t of any real help researching, even if he sometimes thought that he too was a diamond-ranked scientist just like the rest of them, he was always happy to help his colleagues and fellow geniuses whenever instruments needed cleaning or moving. Provided it wasn’t anything that took too long, he could usually remember what he was doing long enough to do it!  

“...are we really the first to discover anything? Perhaps we are wrong to think in such ways,” echoed the voice of one of his esteemed colleagues–though if Gerry remembered right, that one might not be the shiniest diamond of the bunch–from down the corridor. Gerry shuffled towards their voices, eager to join in the scholarly debate.

“Time, being cyclical, could lend to the hypothesis that there is no state of being first. Properly compressed and twisted, any innovation could perhaps be sent backward, so who can truly claim to be the ‘first’ to uncover some truth when it will inevitably be shared with ancestors and predecessors? And then only Galaxor can untwist the timeline that follows when the original inventor needn’t invent anything at all, and is taught his own revelation in the Library…” another philosophized.

“But,” chimed in Gerry, who’d at last entered the room, “not everyone can compress time!”

There was an awkward lull in the conversation as Gerry’s genius stupefied them. Finally, one came to grasps with that revelation, but then gasped dramatically. “Gerry, you must’ve misplaced your diamond! You’d best go find it before it’s lost!”

Gerry looked down, and indeed saw that he was gemless. “Oh Galaxor, I’ve done it again! Any idea where it could have gone?”

“It probably fell off in the testing room,” that other scientist offered helpfully.

“Wait, why are you sending him in there? Marvin is still taking measurements from the latest–”

“Thanks, I’ll go find it,” Gerry promised, surprisingly choosing the right hallway to go down this time. He barged into another chamber, startling a hunched over figure who’d squinted into the scintillating depths of some enchanted jewel. “Oh, there is it is! Melvin, do you like my diamond? I think I earned it from mastering the skill of, uh….”

 Brushing past the fourth scientist called Marvin, Gerry reached out for the jewel where it was socketed on a table. “No, wait!” Marvin cried, trying to stand in the way, but Gerry barreled right past him cackling, “Time never waits!”

He seized the jewel and yanked at it. It was stuck in the socket pretty good, so Gerry twisted and pried. He twisted really hard, hard enough to where the oversized gem’s facets dug into his skin and he pulled his hand off to wince and contemplate his next move even as Marvin dove as if to take cover beneath another table–what a silly guy. Melvin was probably the dullest diamond of the lot, on second thought. But as Gerry thought that, strange things happened. The iron socket holding the jewel rusted and broke apart; the gem came out free.

Gerry reached towards the jewel, but before his elbow could even flex, he saw his hand touching the gleaming surface. Then he saw it release its hold, and move backward towards his side. Marvin [i]flew[/i] up from under the desk, and was standing upright and talking backwards like a lunatic. Then Gerry was suddenly flying backward down the hall. Time was rewinding. He was remembering everything! Every lecture, every lesson from every discipline he’d studied in the Library, from every failed apprenticeship, every tidbit that had gone in one ear and out the other was now flying back in and [i]sticking[/i]. Yet Gerry felt like he was caught soaring backwards. He kept on falling into his bedchamber full of energy and going to sleep full of energy, and then falling back out as though waking up exhausted. He was exhausted, but then he toiled at menial labor and chores and found his vigor renewed. He felt himself suddenly feeling different, and realized that he was young. TIME WAS MOVING BACKWARDS! 

He felt all sorts of sudden aches and pains that grew sharper and worse with each passing moment, until there came the sweet relief of the moment that he received the injury. The worst of these was when he felt a rock jumping off the ground, skipping up to his head, bouncing off his noggin and back up to the cavern’s ceiling above.

He scrambled, willing himself to grab onto something, but time was not some river that you could simply swim through or oppose if you grabbed onto something. His will was powerless. The river flowed harder, faster, inexorably dragging him back to the beginning. The Dominion was no more, this was the Goblin Union again, seen through the eyes of a goblin toddler. He could no longer walk, now he was crawling backwards. Everything blurred.

There was a bright flash of light, then an all-encompassing darkness that not even goblin eyes could discern anything through. He wasn’t sure his eyes were even open. All that he felt was a feeling of warmth, but also of suffocation, of being unable to move. He couldn’t breathe, but then he didn’t have to.

He was suddenly an adult again, cognizant of how his hand was touching the jewel powering this time compressor device–he understood everything in this experiment now. What was this?! A second chance? An alternative timeline? 

Then there was a blinding flash of light, and the flakes of iron that surrounded the entropic-catalyst time accelerator jewel disappeared. He only had a split second to ponder his peril before there was another blindingly bright flash. Even his newly-repaired mind didn’t have time to register what happened before his body was shredded into oblivion at an atomic level, the entire laboratory blown to smithereens as the compressed time expanded into space and ripped everything apart, stretching matter tortuously at an atomic level, shredding molecules.

[hr]

Inexplicably, Gerry opened his eyes, and he still saw something. Another timeline? Was he doomed to be trapped in a loop of endless death..?

No, this was something new. Something he’d definitely never seen before, that no goblin had ever seen before…that was, if time chicanery even permitted such concepts as ‘never’...

This was a very dark place. The air was oppressive and stagnant, but not in the ways of the caverns. This air here was thinner, with less weight bearing down on it, as if they were on the surface instead of in the bowels of Galbar–not like any of them knew or could describe such a difference in sensation.

Them? Why did he speak in plural? Oh yes, because he looked to his side and saw Marvin–of was it Melvin?--as well as Tarm and Elmo (those two philosopher-scientists that had been debating the nature of time in the laboratory’s other room) right there beside him. Immediately, the four goblin researchers were relieved to have the company of one another, but terrified of their new surroundings.

The darkness of this place was not one that their cave-adapted eyes could pierce.

Yet it was not totally devoid of light. Like tiny little distant light-jewels, there were twinkling glows. Almost like the stars, which were a legend down in the caverns. But these were not stars, because they were not merely overhead but also set into the crevices and recesses of this place, and this place was not even Galbar per se, certainly not a place with a sky and clouds and stars. 

“What has he done?!” a bewildered Elmo demanded, balefully glaring at a distracted Gerry. “You didn’t stop him from touching the time compressor?!”

“I couldn’t, he just pushed me out of the way, and it was unstable, I was, was, was afraid to get close once he was reaching for it–” Marvin stammered.

Tarm paid neither of them any mind, too bewildered by this strange plane. “Where are we?” 

Gerry at least had an idea, and began to answer Tarm, “Could it be that our time-compression field failed, and during the rupturing event we had a sudden expansion of time that resulted in a backwards flow until the resulting distortionary waves weakened enough to match the current flow and result in destructive interference. Do you understand the implications of that? Our localized time moving backward at the exact same rate as time elsewhere moving forward could result in a total [b]cancellation[/b], with the effect of essentially deleting us from reality. Except, as we are demonstrably still sapient in some state, could it be that we were expelled from our native plane of reality? It is possible that we ripped through the fabric of time so thoroughly that we created a hole, and fell through it and into some lower–” he stopped to think for a moment. That was perhaps a poor choice of word, [i]‘lower’[/i]. It assumed too much, some sort of hierarchical ordering or even general proximity of planes, when such metaphysical constructs were only hypotheticals and had yet to be rigorously proven–bah, this whole idea seemed awfully flimsy, and now Gerry regretted opening his mouth so prematurely, but he felt compelled to at least finish his thought. “--erm, maybe not lower, so much as a [i]distinct, foreign[/i] plane? In other words, could we have tunneled from one reality into another one altogether, not merely some variant along a different timeline?”

The others looked at Gerry, dumbfounded that the Gemless scientist could vocalize something so sophisticated, even if it went above their heads to the point that they still dismissed it as the garbled nonsense that he was wont to usually spit out. Gerry, meanwhile, was deep in contemplation. After a few long moments, he concluded, “No, it seems more likely that we’re all just very dead and this is some sort of afterlife.”

[hider=Summary]For Galaxor [s]Week[/s] Turn, I present a post wherein some goblin is tragically subject to some sort of severe concussion or other head injury as a child, courtesy of the earthquakes that came due to Galaxor’s renovations. The result is that this goblin, named Gemless Gerry, isn’t really good at anything despite having tried many skills, and ends up just doing menial labor inside a laboratory (labor in a laboratory, totally fitting and makes sense right?) working on time compression technologies. All his colleagues are very dismissive of Gerry, but his amnesia makes him good-natured and oblivious even if he’s a goon and a clutz. 

Gerry accidentally tampers with a magical gem that’s part of an ongoing experiment in time compression, and weird shiz happens. Time moves backwards, Gerry’s head is un-borked, he’s now a genius because he remembers everything from every lesson he’s ever forgotten, and oh yeah–the lab is totally blown to pieces and the four goblins are maybe in another plane of existence. Or maybe just really dead. Genius Gerry hasn’t figured it out yet.

If there’s interest maybe I’ll continue with a followup post about these four intrepid chronomancer-philosopher-Goblin-scientists.[/hider]