[Time Travel] Idea: party short-ranged amnesiac time-travellers

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

For many months I'm carrying this vague idea that I'm in no position to realize anytime soon. Inspired somewhat by - Timeshift, but intended to be Darker And Edgier (brutal and short).

A group of characters wake up, obviously after some sort of explosion on a large sealed vehicle (preferably a divergent-tech one to add to the confusion, net TL around 7 to 8, and preferably with a reactor onboard). They are all clothed in futuristic enviro-suits with HUDs, obviously experimental. With minimal effort, they find out that:

• Unsealing the suits will break the isolation from the current timestream, is highly dangerous until the circumstances change, and for safety reasons disabled by the onboard computer.
• The suit has intuitive controls for activating one of its abilities (each of which requires some amount of a limited chrono-resource).
• The resource is slowly 'leaking', and if it reaches zero, effects will be equal to unsealing the suit.

[vicky_molokh]

Suit's abilities all consume a limited and diminishing chrono-resource, and work in a timeframe from -30 to +10 minutes from the moment of awakening. They include:

• ATR 1/DTR.
• Time-Spanning Vision.
• Time-Spanning Telecommunication with ONE other suit at a time (optionally one-way and/or limited to only future/only past).
• Jumper (Time)
• Bullet Time (at an enormous resource cost)
• (Easy Mode) Enhanced Time Sense with trivial usage cost.
• (Very easy mode) Enhanced Time Sense and ultrafast communication only with other suited PCs in the same vicinity and same time (not through time or space).
• (Very, very easy Mode) As above, but with no resource cost.
• (Easy mode) The suit comes with a PDW that time-jumps with it if holstered at the time of the jump.

Changes to the relative past 'reach' relative future in 'ripples' moving at a meta-temporal speed of 60. I.e. if you ask some suit in your relative past (30 minutes ago) to change stuff, you'll see the world change in your present roughly 30 seconds you opened the communication channel.
PCs retain memories of the way stuff was in the timeline without any ripple modifications; they do NOT remember the way things reached the way they are in the ripple-altered timeline. The good news is that they're sealed off from the timeline's ripple, i.e. they won't disappear due to a Grandfather Paradox.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

.
PCs retain memories of the way stuff was before the ripple reached them, but NOT how stuff IS in their recent part with the new timeline.

Easier to deal with than the opposite.

[vicky_molokh]

All suits look identical, and there is no way to see who's inside a helmet. The only difference between them is the amount of chrono-resource and ablative shield charge left. The shield? It's another non-replenishable resource. If it reaches zero, temporal isolation breaks down too. The good news is that it is infinitely Hardened, and blocks anything up to and including gamma and weird-science radiation.

While in the timeframe of the adventure it is impossible to repeat, it is probably a reasonable suspicion that some or all PCs are the same character from different timelines. The impossibility is due to Jumper not working into periods already occupied by the same PC (so you can either jump into and out of some period before the 'awakening', OR into the future). It helps that there is no limit on time-watching.

By now it's probably obvious that the idea is about a temporal operation/experiment Gone Wrong, the adventure timeframe is isolated from the rest of time by it, and that T+10 is deadly unless Fixed.

[vicky_molokh]

Also, it's not hard to conclude that before the isolation, PCs predicted this isolation, suited-up, randomly found (by time-sight) a relatively safe spot in the future after the explosion but before the second, ultra-nasty part of the catastrophe. Whether both did it from the same time and/or the same timeLINE should be unclear (aside from hidden faces, the comm systems mile their voices unrecognizable).

The process of Setting Things Right should probably include some repair work, bomb disposal, and shooting either the original crew or some remaining temporal terrorists, either of which should seen to blame for the event. All within the period from T-30 to T+10 minutes.

The culmination should have at least three possible outcomes, including: Rocks Fall Everybody Dies, a Heroic Sacrifice on the part of the PC(s), or a (mostly) Happy Ending (for everyone except temporal clones from 'vanished' timelines, if any).

[vicky_molokh]

(Deleted obsolete data. Placeholder post for describing temporal physics.)