Disclaimer: The PPC is the brainchild of Jay and Acacia. The original Sundering arc belongs to Huinesoron. Agents Skeet and Amy as well as the DTOM arc belong to the Irish Samurai and are used with his permission. Blizzard Entertainment owns StarCraft and Nintendo owns The Legend of Zelda. World One belongs to itself, as usual.
I’d like to thank the Irish Samurai and Huinesoron for beta-reading this piece.
Prologue: Entanglement
December 2012, PPC HQ
It had been a very long day for Gaspard De Grasse.
He had spent all morning on double Sorting detail, trawling through an endless tide of badfic from the newly discovered Quotev website. Lunch was quick and rather bland-- a peanut butter sandwich at his Sorting terminal-- and the rest of the afternoon was taken up by guessing whether a horribly urple youfic was a troll or an actual badfic. Once his shift was over, he ate supper alone in New Caledonia before returning to his Response Centre where he filed reports, reviewed his notes on canon details, showered, filed more reports, and went to bed.
At around two time partitions in the morning (whatever that was) he was woken up by a bunch of people having a loud conversation right outside his door. Gaspard shuffled out into the corridor-- bathrobe, pyjamas, slippers and all-- to investigate.
He had walked into a crowd composed of present and future agents. The latter, who called themselves the Paladins, had stumbled through a plothole to their past and had soon struck up a conversation with the agents from the present.
From what Gaspard could gather, the future didn’t look too good. There was going to be a war in 2038 that would tear the PPC apart: the not-yet-founded Departments of Efficiency and Author Correction would have warped the PPC beyond recognition by imposing a Big Brother-esque regime on HQ. The PPC’s mission had also been changed: long gone were the days where agent teams carefully judged badfic before acting. “Kill And Scram” had become the future Organization’s modus operandi.
There was resistance, however. Something catalyzed a counter-movement (the Paladins didn’t say anything about it) sometime in early 2038 and two opposing factions were formed: the Loyalists under the Sub Rosa and the Efficient under the DoE.
The fourth civil war lasted less than a year, but it was an intense and desperate fight to the bitter end. When the dust had settled, the Loyalists were victorious but the remnants of the PPC were scattered to the four corners of the multiverse, and Headquarters was all but abandoned after it was nearly obliterated by a great cataclysm. Hundreds had died and so had most of the Flowers-- the only one that still had authority over anything was the Sub Rosa.
There were also mentions of him being some big-time general. Nobody had given him the exact details, but Gaspard suspected he wouldn’t have liked what would have been said anyways. In his mind, he wasn’t much of an inspirational leader or a skilled fighter. Holding that position meant becoming both— or at least being very good at faking confidence. The Spy reeled from the thought. Who in their right mind would put him in charge of other peoples’ lives? He could barely convince others to sit through a lecture on Hylian history, let alone order people around.
But wait! If he sent a report to the Sub Rosa describing the situation, she would be able to use this to block the formation of the DoE! She needed to be warned! He could give destiny a poke in the eye and have someone else deal with the problem.
Neat.
Before he could do so much as turn towards his RC’s door, somebody came up behind him and roughly clapped a hand over his eyes just before someone else said: “My friends! How nice to see you again!”
FLASH
Normally, he would already be halfway down the corridor by now, but something was holding him back. It might have been how the woman who had called out to her “friends” was very gently explaining to the dazed group that they hadn’t heard or talked about the Sundering. She said things such as “You’ve been visited by the Paladins and they’ve told you a bit about their future”, “You don’t remember them saying anything about the Sundering or the Departments of Efficiency and Author Correction”, and “Paladins, all you’ve done here is swapped stories and traded technology. You never told them anything about the civil war.”
On second thought, it wasn’t the woman’s voice that made him hold his ground; it was the solid grip on his face and bathrobe that kept him in place.
“Time travel plan number two: in the event that I cannot personally warn my past self of a grave danger, I will delegate the task to a trusted friend,” recited a voice behind Gaspard.
The grip on the junior agent’s clothing eased and the hand was lifted from his face. Gaspard slowly turned around to face the speaker. A goateed man with his hair tied back into a ponytail looked back at him with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “That trusted friend will be taught a password that will be easily recognizable to my younger self,” the man continued.
Gaspard relaxed somewhat. “Word-for-word from my secret notebook. I presume you have come to deliver the message?” He was still on guard, though: the notebook could easily have been stolen and read by someone with malicious intentions. “Password, if you please, mister...?”
“Skeet,” said the man. “The notebook had a list of passwords we could use. We know that there is no password, however.” Skeet then proceeded to gently bite his thumb.
“Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?” asked Gaspard, looking slightly offended.
“I do bite my thumb, sir!” answered Skeet, crossing his arms.
“Do you bite my thumb at me, sir?” repeated Gaspard.
“The law is not on my side. I do not bite my thumb at you sir; but I bite my thumb, sir,” said Skeet defiantly, as if biting thumbs in front of people was now a perfectly respectable thing to do.
“Do you quarrel, sir?”
“Quarrel sir? No sir.”
“If you do, sir, I am for you: I serve as good a man as you.”
“No better,” finished Skeet with a smug smirk.
The two men stared at each other for a moment, then Gaspard straightened himself and offered his hand to Skeet. “You have my full attention, sir,” he said.
The agent from the future shook the Spy’s hand. “Interesting choice, Shakespeare. Most agents go for Monty Python. Like I said, I’m Agent Skeet, sometime from after 2038. My partner, Amy, is over there dealing with everyone else. Sorry about the hand over your face, I forgot my sunglasses in my pockets. Okay, first things first.”
“Hang on a minute!” said Amy as she was ushering a Paladin through a portal. “You said you kept your sunglasses in your bandolier for--and I quote-- ‘ease of access!’”
Skeet was silent for a second. “No I didn’t,” he said flatly.
“Don’t lie to me, I see them right there! They’re right next to your RA!”
“What, this thing? No, it’s a... flare. Emergency flare.”
Amy glared at her partner. “Do we need to go over the I-won’t-use-unnecessary-roughness talk again?”
“No,” grumbled Skeet. “Look, I won’t do it again, I promise. Besides, we’ve got a job to do, so let’s get on with it.” He turned back to Gaspard as Amy rolled her eyes and got back to directing agents away from the scene. “As I was saying, first things first.”
The time traveller handed a triangle-shaped device to Gaspard. It was composed of three golden metal petals joined together by a green triangular gem. The Spy recognised the item immediately: it was the casing of a StarCraft-verse ihan crystal, a memory receptacle not unlike the Potterverse Pensieve. It looked like his future self wanted to do a lot of showing and telling.
“Memory storage device with a psychic interface,” said Skeet. “The General said that it’s a matter of ‘pointing and thinking,’ whatever that means. By the way, have I mentioned that you’re looking pretty young? Hang on, we’re in late 2012 , right? So that makes you... seventeen.” The agent from the future facepalmed. “Okay, this entire ‘trusted friend’ business must be really confusing right now, especially since I know you as ‘the General’ and you haven’t even met me yet.”
Gaspard merely shrugged. “This is a time-travel event, sir. It’s bound to be complicated: everything is relative to the various observers.”
Skeet grinned. “Nice to see you’ve had that unflappable attitude since the start. It’s going to come in handy in twenty-five years.” The time traveller glanced at his watch, which had started beeping loudly.
“Oh, for crying out loud. Why is it that time travellers never have the time to explain their mission to others?” he hissed, swatting at his watch to shut off the alarm. “Amy! Three minutes, we need to hurry! Okay, old friend. Your message will explain your situation very clearly, but I need you to promise me something before we go. Ready?”
“Yessir?”
“You must never reveal the existence of the DoE or DAC to any Flower, or person who could pass this information to them. We’re almost certain that the Board of Department Heads’ choice to block the formation of these departments is sort of a—how would you explain it? Critical point? Juncture?”
“Trousers of Time, sir?” ventured Gaspard.
Skeet shrugged. “If that’s what you want to call it, sure. Anyway, we think the timelines diverge here. Long story short: our future, the ‘informed Flowers’ future, is an absolute bloodbath. The Paladin future, where the Flowers never saw the DoE coming, is comparatively less bad. Once again, check your memories to see how we know all of this.
“If you keep the information secret, you’ll nudge this reality closer to the Prime Timeline, the one the Paladins came from. Our future will become an AU fully independent of yours and you’ll have control over your fate thanks to your older self’s memories. If you leak the information, you’ll consolidate our future as the ‘canon’ choice and create a stable time loop where the mistakes we made will be repeated. The memories in that ihan crystal will vanish because they technically haven’t happened yet. Paradoxes, see. Do you understand?”
“It’s not so much a promise as a direct order, sir,” said Gaspard quietly, “but I understand. You can count on me, sir.”
Skeet’s heels clacked together and he pulled off a perfect salute. “Thank you, General. You’ve just saved a lot of lives.” The goateed man glanced at his watch again. “I need to help Amy over there. I’m afraid the only words of advice I can give you now are ‘good luck’. Goodbye, General De Grasse. It has been an honour--”
“Will be an honour, Skeet: this is the past. Use the time travel tenses,” quipped Amy.
“Oh, the time travel tenses. Do you know what I think of the time travel tenses?”
“I think that you think it’s a good idea to use them,” said Amy flatly.
“Fine,” huffed Skeet. “It was, is, and will be an honour to serve with you. Is that grammatically and temporally correct enough, or do I need to go on?”
Amy brought a hand to her chin in a gesture of mock contemplation. “I don’t know. What do you think? Nah, just kidding. C’mon, let’s get out of here before the timelines collapse. Be safe!” she called to Gaspard.
With that, Skeet left Gaspard to help Amy sort the last few agents into plotholes or down the corridor. When the task was done, the time travellers spared Gaspard a final look and a wave goodbye and disappeared into a nearby RC.
The distinctive noise of a TARDIS taking off echoed down the corridor moments later.
* * *
Gaspard sat at the kitchen table in his Response Centre, staring at the grey, club-shaped ihan crystal deployed in front of him. It hovered silently a few centimetres above its base and glowed with a pale green light. When the Spy looked at it, he felt as if it was watching him, asking him for orders.
The doors were locked, the console was silenced with a hefty wad of Glopsnerch gel, the lights were dimmed, and work started in seven hours. Gaspard figured that one more all-nighter reviewing data couldn’t hurt; it wasn’t like anyone actually wanted him around anyways.
Just as he had done to deploy the crystal, the agent pictured it in his mind and thought an order. View preface memory intended for me.
The memory receptacle started glowing and Gaspard found that he couldn’t take his eyes off of it. Everything seemed to stretch and go dark and slide past the corner of his eyes andeverythingwas shadowsandwhispersandslippingawayand…
and…
* * *
He was seated in a squishy armchair in the corner of a small apartment’s living room. Immediately to his right was a large window that overlooked an illuminated boulevard at night. Gaspard couldn’t recognize the city, but something about the architecture reminded him of Europe. To his left was the rest of the living room. Despite the dim lighting, he could make out objects such as a Hylian shield on the wall above the TV, a collection of blocky living room furniture, a miniature set of katanas, and a doll-sized CMC 400 powered armour suit standing in a bookcase. Future Gaspard sat in an armchair in front of him, bathed in the pool of light given off by a floor lamp. Even if it was him, Gaspard felt as if he was looking at a different person. Everything about the man was sharp: his ironed clothing, polished shoes, clean-shaved face, posture, and hardened gaze. It was sort of like having a very nicely dressed falcon stare you down .
The General looked up from the notes he kept on his lap and spoke.
“As per protocol agreed upon in the ‘Big-o-notebook of time travel’ I have, this preface is designed to give past me a quick summary of events to come. I’m going to cover the nature of PPC time, what I want you to do, and go through the war’s epilogue.”
“Right-o: time and how it affects the PPC. The engineers down in what’s left of DoSAT can explain the phenomenon better than me, but I might as well try. PPC time behaves a bit like a river: it flows in a certain direction and bunches up at fixed points in time. The Paladins’ intervention ‘dammed up’ a segment of the river at a very important flux point, causing it to spill out of its bed. The overflow was redirected into new streams, all moving in the same direction but shaped by different temporal ‘terrain.’ These split timelines are still going to regroup at the same fixed points as the Primeline, but in radically different manners. The separation and merging of these timelines as they approach the fixed points produce a nearly infinite number of potential futures.
“If my past self is viewing this message, then Skeet and Amelia have gone back and neuralyzed all other witnesses to the Paladins’ visit. If Skeet didn’t have time to explain the situation to you, the most important thing for you to know is that we come from a future where the Board of Department Heads vetoed the formation of the Department of Efficiency. We believe that this choice provoked a chain reaction of events that culminated in a much more destructive Sundering compared to the Primeline. You must make sure that future never sees the light of day. There is enough knowledge in this crystal to give you a solid background on all of the important actors and events that will be tied to the war. It’s up to you to decide what must be done to salvage this timeline. I’ve pieced together a list of people and events you should investigate and things you should do under a memory labelled ‘critical points’. Consult that file before acting on any plan you concoct.”
Future Gaspard paused and reached into his shirt’s breast pocket and pulled out folded-up sheets of paper. “Now for the last part. This is how it ends,” he said as he unfolded the documents. “Are you ready?”
He read through the narrative, occasionally pausing to add context or to keep a tremor out of his voice. He described the intense skirmishes in the hallways that almost inevitably turned into stalemates. He identified friendly and enemy commanders and explained their roles and their motivations. He went over statistics such as food supplies, fuel and ammunition levels, and casualty lists.
He even revealed a list of family and coworkers who survived the war. “Mom. Dad. Grandma. Angus. Sophie. That’s it.” He paused, his face ashen. The Future Gaspard was silent for the better part of a minute and then resumed his speech, summarizing the postwar period.
When he finished, he folded the list with a single hand and tucked it back into his pocket.
“You know everything now. Who lives, who dies, who betrays who, and who redeems themselves. I trust you understand why this must be kept a secret from the Flowers: too many divergent timelines hinge on this moment. Oh yes, I have one final piece of advice I’d like to cram into this segment.” Future Gaspard leaned forward. “Even if you’re to keep the DoE a secret from the Board, find people you can trust and tell them the truth. You can’t do this alone. Good luck.”
The vision faded to complete darkness.
* * *
Gaspard blinked. He was back at the kitchen table, staring at the ihan crystal. The agent rubbed his eyes, got to his feet, and slowly made his way to the RC’s living room. He held his head in his hands as he paced up and down the room. Crud, crud, crud. This wasn’t right. He didn’t want to do this. Why him? Why did future him think he’d be a good person to go to for help? What made him so special, anyways-- oh right. He was going to become General De Grasse. Of course giving him the information was the logical thing to do: he’d be able to set his pieces on the chessboard years in advance. No, scratch that, he’d be able to choose what chessboard he wanted to play on and cripple his opponent’s pieces before they even set foot on the battlefield. It was the perfect plan, but that didn’t mean that he had to like it.
The Spy knew that he should be thankful for the warning, but he felt as though he was going to burst into tears. He was in way over his head. Did his future self really expect him change the course of an entire timeline? This was a problem that needed to be solved by Upstairs. Gaspard turned to the console. He thought about meeting the Sub Rosa in person to explain the situation but decided against it. She’s a Flower: she’d spread the word to her own kind. It’s what we’d do if the roles were switched, reasoned Gaspard. There is no authority I can turn to. No higher powers that can help me.
He stopped in his tracks. Idiot! How could he have forgotten them? Of course there is an authority higher than the Flowers. They always were. He would tell them what happened and they would help. Yes. Everything would be all right.
Gaspard made his way to the console unit and opened his ICEP messenger.
* * *
From: [gdegrasse.console223450as000987av000013.rc22.DOI]
To: [console.719990as657489av491032.cblock64.ficpsych]
Maman, Papa,
J’ai besoin de vous rencontrer. J’ai quelque chose à vous dire.
xoxox
Gaspard