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rainbowfic2025-10-18 03:06 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-10-18 03:06 pm
Entry tags:
Light Black #16 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Quantification of Time Travel
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Light Black #16: Rush
Styles and Supplies: Brushes (October 18, 2025: Muse)
Word Count: 2898
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Sapfita, Peatäro
In-Universe Date: 1912.3.5.3
Summary: Qhoroali measures the speed of time travel; Sapfita gives Setsiana an idea.
Note: I just realized I had missed posting the in-universe date on a number of recent entries, whoops. They should all be there now.
A couple days later, she found Qhoroali pacing very intentionally around the living room. She would walk a few steps, adjust her stride and do so again, the stop and break into a short run. As she did this, she checked some device that was attached to her wrist.
“What on Celyira are you doing?” Setsiana asked her.
Qhoroali looked up. “I’ve got a fascinating new device from the 23rd century,” she said. “Look, you put it on, and it measures how far you’ve walked. But you can fool it, if you pretend well enough. It’s not tracking your actual position in physical space, it’s measuring the movements of your body.”
“Huh,” said Setsiana. “What’s the purpose of that?”
“Apparently people in the future use it to record how much exercise they’re actually getting. But I’m more interested in what it can tell us about time travel.” She returned to her desk and picked up another device. “This is an incredibly long-lasting and accurate clock. The battery in it won’t actually last for a century, but it should make it to 70 or 80 years or so. I figure, we put this down outside, next to the time travel circle, and just let it sit there for a very long time, and time travel next to it. Then, we can use this,” she tapped the device on her wrist, “to measure how ‘far’ along the timeline we’ve moved relative to how much time has actually passed. With this level of accuracy, we should be able to calculate precisely how much walking it takes to go, say, 100 years. I could then use this device to help Cyaru be more accurate.”
“But when we time travel, we cover 100 years very quickly,” said Setsiana. “And you said the clock will not last 100 years on its battery.”
“Right. That’s where you come in. I need you to time travel next to the clock, and change out the battery every 60 years or so, for, oh, maybe about a thousand years should be good enough for our purposes. It’s made of very high quality material; it should last that long, or so I’ve been told. It’s just the battery that needs to be changed. I can’t manage the fiddly bits of this thing to swap out the battery while on enough qoire to Guide, so it would be a very annoying process if I tried to do it on my own. But you can do it, because you can time travel on just three drops. And because you’d be having Sapfita Guide for you, I don’t even have to come, for the battery-changing part of this.”
“There will be a ton of branching timelines during those one thousand years, right?” said Setsiana, uncertainly. “I can’t change out the battery in all of them.”
“We just need one uninterrupted timeline. When we do the actual experiments, you can just have Sapfita Guide us down the exact same path. I’m going to be doing math anyway, I shouldn’t get that high. All of the Guiding can be left to you, and Her. She’ll do that for us, right?”
“Well, I can ask,” said Setsiana. “No promises.”
“It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? Let’s go outside.”
Qhoroali gathered a couple qoire bottles, her devices, a bag full of the small battery cylinders, and some sheets of paper. They went down the stairs and out of the building to the circle at the base of the hill. There Qhoroali stopped, and considered for a moment.
“I want a thousand years of runway for experimentation,” she said, “but there aren’t a thousand years of history in the future from now, not without crossing the 2307 barrier, and I would like to avoid that. So we’ll have to go back to at least 1300 or so, first. That’ll be before the road and the buildings here were built, so we’ll have to hide the clock carefully, so that no one notices or disturbs it in all that time.” She looked around, carefully. “If we do wind up doing this successfully, and plant the clock in 1300, it should already be here somewhere.” She began to slowly circle the hill, along the side nearest the road.
Setsiana began moving around the other side of the hill, curious if she would find the clock there somewhere. Around the back, out of sight of the road, there was a steep, more rocky incline, with small crevasses in the rock. Taking a deep breath and praying that she wouldn’t find a centipede instead, Setsiana poked her fingers into several of them. On the third try, she ran into something whose color matched the blackness of the crevasse, but whose surface was unnaturally and perfectly smooth. She brushed dirt and small rocks away from it, but nothing else of interest was revealed.
Qhoroali’s footsteps as she came around the other side of the hill made her look up. “Did you find it?”
“I’m not sure.” Setsiana peered at the thing, and tried to see if she could pry it loose.
Qhoroali came up behind her. “Yes,” she said, “that’s it. It looks like the battery is dead in this timeline, probably not that surprising. Can you get it out?”
Setsiana wedged both of her hands in the crack and pulled, and the thing did finally come out. She brushed off the flood of dirt that had come with it. It was very short, with only a few inches of length and width. It did look exactly like the device that Qhoroali was holding out to her for comparison, except that Qhoroali’s device featured bright red numbers shining on the smooth black face. There were switches and buttons along the sides.
“You’ll need to be able to take it out, change the battery, and put it back in,” said Qhoroali. “I’ll show you how to change the battery now. Turn it over,” she demonstrated with the working one that she was holding, “and open this compartment.” She did something to the underside of the device and was suddenly holding a piece of its black shell.
“Wait,” said Setsiana. “I didn’t see that.”
Qhoroali replaced the piece and held the thing up for more careful consideration. “Push this,” she said, indicating a small latch that was almost completely sunken into the base, “and it comes off.” She demonstrated again.
Setsiana turned over the one she was holding, and looked for the latch. After a bit of searching, she saw it, pushed it, and the same piece came off in her hand. Underneath sat two of the battery cylinders. Without prompting, she pried those out, too, and held them in her other hand. “We replace these with those?” she asked, indicating Qhoroali’s bag.
“Yes, but the position matters. Look at those symbols.” She pointed at the empty space the batteries had occupied, which had two white marks painted on the bottom, and then grabbed a battery out of her bag. “This side goes on the side with the plus, and this side on the side with the minus. Here.” She pulled out another battery. “See if you can make that one work.”
Setsiana put the two old batteries on the grass by her feet and accepted the new ones, one at a time, and managed to fit them into the space according to Qhoroali’s instructions, after a couple tries. After fitting both batteries in, glowing numbers did indeed appear on the front, blinking. Setsiana looked back at Qhoroali’s clock, which wasn’t blinking. “Did I mess it up?”
“No, that’s fine, it’s blinking because it knows it lost power, so the time is wrong. When you replace the batteries that haven’t run all the way out yet, it’ll retain enough power to continue working for the time it takes you to put the new batteries in, and it won’t do this. All you need to do now is replace the cover.” She indicated the smooth piece of shell Setsiana was still holding onto. Qhoroali popped the one she was holding open again and then angled the side opposite the latch into the hole before bringing the other side down with a click.
Setsiana copied her motions, and after a couple tries, the piece snapped back into place.
“Right,” said Qhoroali. “That’s what you’ll need to do to change the batteries. Then you just stick it back in there so that it’ll be there displaying the time for us.”
“What time is it displaying?” Setsiana asked. She could see now that the numbers on the device she held indicated a date — one in 2215 — but the remaining numbers did not make sense as a time to her; they were all zeros.
“Oh, they had changed the way time is indicated to a new system that is supposedly easier to learn, by that point,” said Qhoroali. “They’ve changed all the units for measuring distance, too, so I’ll have to do a lot of conversions to get things back into familiar measurements. Don’t worry about it too much.”
Setsiana practiced wedging the clock back into the space in the rock, and then they went back to the circle. Qhoroali handed her a bottle of qoire. “See if Sapfita will take us back to 1300,” she said. “I’m pretty sure She does, since the clock is already there.”
Setsiana sat on the grass next to the circle and took a few minutes to relax into a meditative state. Then she took the three drops of qoire, and handed the bottle back. Just as had happened back in Qhoroali’s secret time, the world seemed to transform into a waking dream, half in and half out of reality, and she felt Sapfita’s presence at the edges of her awareness. Is this really something You would spend Your time with? she asked. It was somewhere in between speech and a thought.
I am outside of Time, Sapfita reminded her. I have infinite Time to “spend” on things like this. I do not run out.
You don’t think this is trivial?
No pursuit of knowledge is trivial, however small. But you will learn more today than just the details of this method of time travel.
That seemed to be all Sapfita would say on it for the time being, and as it was relayed, another version of Setsiana and Qhoroali left the circle on the other side. Setsiana rose, and took Qhoroali’s hand, facing the circle. Tell us where to go.
Setsiana relayed the directions that Sapfita gave her, and they walked along the timelines for a bit. At length, the instruction to stop came, and they left the circle again. As in the time that Qhoroali had taken her to to learn to Guide, the familiar buildings and the road were gone, though others could be seen in the distance.
They walked around behind the hill, and Qhoroali put the clock into the position they had found it in back in 1912. “The batteries are fresh right now,” she said. “It should be good here for sixty years.” She handed the qoire bottle and the bag of batteries to Setsiana and sat down with her back against the steep side of the hill.
Setsiana walked back to the circle, and as she did, she passed the other version of herself that she expected to see, carrying the now empty bag, and they exchanged a nod. She paused briefly at the circle again, and then entered it as Sapfita provided the first direction.
The first few battery exchanges consumed all of her attention, but pretty soon, the process became rote and she no longer had to think very hard about it. Her mind drifted back to the dream she’d had a few days ago.
The substance you gave me to bring back, she said to Sapfita, It changed color after I woke up. How come?
It looks different to you when you are under the influence of qoire, Sapfita said. Snowflake, corn snake, bubble. Stop.
Setsiana followed the direction and then exited the circle again. But I didn’t take any qoire to go to sleep that night.
When I pull you into a dream, it is much the same as when you take qoire. It has similar effects on your mind.
You said that substance was the stuff that the timelines were made of, Setsiana said, carefully, mulling over her words as she changed another set of batteries. But the timelines don’t look that color to me, here, now, when I am under the influence of qoire.
Yes. They look different when you are still inside them. I told you that I had to make some changes to the substance for it to be contained to three dimensions, but the timelines would look the same to you, if you could see them from my vantage point.
Is there a way that I can do that? Setsiana replaced the clock back into the crack, and returned to the circle.
Yes.
Setsiana waited for an elaboration, but Sapfita only provided the next set of directions for her to walk. She tried a different angle. If we looked at that substance using qoire, would it be that color?
Yes. It will look very different to you in that circumstance. Hazelnut, riverbed. Stop.
She was consumed with curiosity, now; she was dying to get back to 1912 and look at that substance while under the effects of qoire. But she’d promised to help Qhoroali with this, first. She left the circle and did the final battery exchange, distracted. That’s the last one, right?
Yes. I’ll take you back to her now.
Setsiana returned to where Qhoroali was waiting in 1300, her mind on the conversation. Fortunately, Qhoroali did not seem to want to talk as she did her experiments, traveling to and fro along the timeline of continuously battery-powered clocks that Setsiana had created, stopping to check the clock, then her wrist device, and then scribble numbers and calculations onto her papers. At last, she tapped a figure with the end of her pen, and announced, “Thirty-two centimeters.”
“‘Centimeters’?” Setsiana asked, uncertainly.
“Yes, sorry, that’s one of the new units they use for this thing,” she tapped the wrist device. “I’ll have to convert it back into inches. But that’s the amount of ‘space’ it estimates we travel when we travel one year. So we should be able to estimate the amount of walking it takes to go 100 years with that.”
“Can we go back to 1912 now?” Setsiana asked. The results of the experiment were the last thing on her mind, currently. “I talked with Sapfita a bit. She seemed think that the substance I gave you two days ago would look very different if we looked at it under the influence of qoire.”
“Did she?” Qhoroali turned away from the paper for the first time in a while and peered at Setsiana curiously. “By all means.”
Sapfita Guided them back to 1912, and they went upstairs, where Qhoroali approached another door and pounded on it. After a moment, Peatäro appeared. “We need to get into the lab,” Qhoroali explained.
Peatäro shrugged, seeming to find this kind of arbitrary request normal, gathered the supplies for the lab experimentation, and returned with them to Qhoroali’s apartment. There, Qhoroali retrieved the vial of ghostly threading substance from her room. Only, Sapfita had been right. Now, with both of them under the effects of the three drops of qoire needed to conduct Qhoroali’s time travel experiment, it glowed yellow-green, just as it had in Setsiana’s dream.
In the lab, Peatäro set up the table and dome again, and Qhoroali poured the substance into it. As it spread out, it looked very different than it had before. Rather than threads that came and went, full paths and tunnels formed, and stayed, only cutting off at the edges of the dome. And they were familiar; there, laid out on the table, was the exact same chaotic yarn pile that Setsiana remembered from the times she had taken enough qoire to be able to Guide. It was subtly different, but only in the way that a scale model is different from the thing that it represents. Setsiana could point out the individual twists and turns that she’d managed to learn of the timeline Tree from when she had practiced Guiding. She could point to the twist that represented her home timeline in 1647 that Qhoroali had pointed out to her.
“Fascinating,” said Qhoroali, “so it always takes the same form then, that must just be part of the fundamental nature of Time. I had assumed there must have been some randomness at work to explain why the Tree looks the way it does, but there must be some underlying logic to it that I can’t see. So when we kill Sapfita and remove all of the timelines She was part of, completely analogous ones should naturally spring up to replace them. Very good.”
Peatäro was watching them somewhat quizzically, but didn’t question any of this. Presumably she was still seeing the same thing they had seen the last time they had brought this substance out. “Is that all for today?” she asked.
“Yes, I think so,” said Qhoroali. “This has actually been very informative.” They gathered the substance back up, put away the table, and locked the lab back up again.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Light Black #16: Rush
Styles and Supplies: Brushes (October 18, 2025: Muse)
Word Count: 2898
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Sapfita, Peatäro
In-Universe Date: 1912.3.5.3
Summary: Qhoroali measures the speed of time travel; Sapfita gives Setsiana an idea.
Note: I just realized I had missed posting the in-universe date on a number of recent entries, whoops. They should all be there now.
A couple days later, she found Qhoroali pacing very intentionally around the living room. She would walk a few steps, adjust her stride and do so again, the stop and break into a short run. As she did this, she checked some device that was attached to her wrist.
“What on Celyira are you doing?” Setsiana asked her.
Qhoroali looked up. “I’ve got a fascinating new device from the 23rd century,” she said. “Look, you put it on, and it measures how far you’ve walked. But you can fool it, if you pretend well enough. It’s not tracking your actual position in physical space, it’s measuring the movements of your body.”
“Huh,” said Setsiana. “What’s the purpose of that?”
“Apparently people in the future use it to record how much exercise they’re actually getting. But I’m more interested in what it can tell us about time travel.” She returned to her desk and picked up another device. “This is an incredibly long-lasting and accurate clock. The battery in it won’t actually last for a century, but it should make it to 70 or 80 years or so. I figure, we put this down outside, next to the time travel circle, and just let it sit there for a very long time, and time travel next to it. Then, we can use this,” she tapped the device on her wrist, “to measure how ‘far’ along the timeline we’ve moved relative to how much time has actually passed. With this level of accuracy, we should be able to calculate precisely how much walking it takes to go, say, 100 years. I could then use this device to help Cyaru be more accurate.”
“But when we time travel, we cover 100 years very quickly,” said Setsiana. “And you said the clock will not last 100 years on its battery.”
“Right. That’s where you come in. I need you to time travel next to the clock, and change out the battery every 60 years or so, for, oh, maybe about a thousand years should be good enough for our purposes. It’s made of very high quality material; it should last that long, or so I’ve been told. It’s just the battery that needs to be changed. I can’t manage the fiddly bits of this thing to swap out the battery while on enough qoire to Guide, so it would be a very annoying process if I tried to do it on my own. But you can do it, because you can time travel on just three drops. And because you’d be having Sapfita Guide for you, I don’t even have to come, for the battery-changing part of this.”
“There will be a ton of branching timelines during those one thousand years, right?” said Setsiana, uncertainly. “I can’t change out the battery in all of them.”
“We just need one uninterrupted timeline. When we do the actual experiments, you can just have Sapfita Guide us down the exact same path. I’m going to be doing math anyway, I shouldn’t get that high. All of the Guiding can be left to you, and Her. She’ll do that for us, right?”
“Well, I can ask,” said Setsiana. “No promises.”
“It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? Let’s go outside.”
Qhoroali gathered a couple qoire bottles, her devices, a bag full of the small battery cylinders, and some sheets of paper. They went down the stairs and out of the building to the circle at the base of the hill. There Qhoroali stopped, and considered for a moment.
“I want a thousand years of runway for experimentation,” she said, “but there aren’t a thousand years of history in the future from now, not without crossing the 2307 barrier, and I would like to avoid that. So we’ll have to go back to at least 1300 or so, first. That’ll be before the road and the buildings here were built, so we’ll have to hide the clock carefully, so that no one notices or disturbs it in all that time.” She looked around, carefully. “If we do wind up doing this successfully, and plant the clock in 1300, it should already be here somewhere.” She began to slowly circle the hill, along the side nearest the road.
Setsiana began moving around the other side of the hill, curious if she would find the clock there somewhere. Around the back, out of sight of the road, there was a steep, more rocky incline, with small crevasses in the rock. Taking a deep breath and praying that she wouldn’t find a centipede instead, Setsiana poked her fingers into several of them. On the third try, she ran into something whose color matched the blackness of the crevasse, but whose surface was unnaturally and perfectly smooth. She brushed dirt and small rocks away from it, but nothing else of interest was revealed.
Qhoroali’s footsteps as she came around the other side of the hill made her look up. “Did you find it?”
“I’m not sure.” Setsiana peered at the thing, and tried to see if she could pry it loose.
Qhoroali came up behind her. “Yes,” she said, “that’s it. It looks like the battery is dead in this timeline, probably not that surprising. Can you get it out?”
Setsiana wedged both of her hands in the crack and pulled, and the thing did finally come out. She brushed off the flood of dirt that had come with it. It was very short, with only a few inches of length and width. It did look exactly like the device that Qhoroali was holding out to her for comparison, except that Qhoroali’s device featured bright red numbers shining on the smooth black face. There were switches and buttons along the sides.
“You’ll need to be able to take it out, change the battery, and put it back in,” said Qhoroali. “I’ll show you how to change the battery now. Turn it over,” she demonstrated with the working one that she was holding, “and open this compartment.” She did something to the underside of the device and was suddenly holding a piece of its black shell.
“Wait,” said Setsiana. “I didn’t see that.”
Qhoroali replaced the piece and held the thing up for more careful consideration. “Push this,” she said, indicating a small latch that was almost completely sunken into the base, “and it comes off.” She demonstrated again.
Setsiana turned over the one she was holding, and looked for the latch. After a bit of searching, she saw it, pushed it, and the same piece came off in her hand. Underneath sat two of the battery cylinders. Without prompting, she pried those out, too, and held them in her other hand. “We replace these with those?” she asked, indicating Qhoroali’s bag.
“Yes, but the position matters. Look at those symbols.” She pointed at the empty space the batteries had occupied, which had two white marks painted on the bottom, and then grabbed a battery out of her bag. “This side goes on the side with the plus, and this side on the side with the minus. Here.” She pulled out another battery. “See if you can make that one work.”
Setsiana put the two old batteries on the grass by her feet and accepted the new ones, one at a time, and managed to fit them into the space according to Qhoroali’s instructions, after a couple tries. After fitting both batteries in, glowing numbers did indeed appear on the front, blinking. Setsiana looked back at Qhoroali’s clock, which wasn’t blinking. “Did I mess it up?”
“No, that’s fine, it’s blinking because it knows it lost power, so the time is wrong. When you replace the batteries that haven’t run all the way out yet, it’ll retain enough power to continue working for the time it takes you to put the new batteries in, and it won’t do this. All you need to do now is replace the cover.” She indicated the smooth piece of shell Setsiana was still holding onto. Qhoroali popped the one she was holding open again and then angled the side opposite the latch into the hole before bringing the other side down with a click.
Setsiana copied her motions, and after a couple tries, the piece snapped back into place.
“Right,” said Qhoroali. “That’s what you’ll need to do to change the batteries. Then you just stick it back in there so that it’ll be there displaying the time for us.”
“What time is it displaying?” Setsiana asked. She could see now that the numbers on the device she held indicated a date — one in 2215 — but the remaining numbers did not make sense as a time to her; they were all zeros.
“Oh, they had changed the way time is indicated to a new system that is supposedly easier to learn, by that point,” said Qhoroali. “They’ve changed all the units for measuring distance, too, so I’ll have to do a lot of conversions to get things back into familiar measurements. Don’t worry about it too much.”
Setsiana practiced wedging the clock back into the space in the rock, and then they went back to the circle. Qhoroali handed her a bottle of qoire. “See if Sapfita will take us back to 1300,” she said. “I’m pretty sure She does, since the clock is already there.”
Setsiana sat on the grass next to the circle and took a few minutes to relax into a meditative state. Then she took the three drops of qoire, and handed the bottle back. Just as had happened back in Qhoroali’s secret time, the world seemed to transform into a waking dream, half in and half out of reality, and she felt Sapfita’s presence at the edges of her awareness. Is this really something You would spend Your time with? she asked. It was somewhere in between speech and a thought.
I am outside of Time, Sapfita reminded her. I have infinite Time to “spend” on things like this. I do not run out.
You don’t think this is trivial?
No pursuit of knowledge is trivial, however small. But you will learn more today than just the details of this method of time travel.
That seemed to be all Sapfita would say on it for the time being, and as it was relayed, another version of Setsiana and Qhoroali left the circle on the other side. Setsiana rose, and took Qhoroali’s hand, facing the circle. Tell us where to go.
Setsiana relayed the directions that Sapfita gave her, and they walked along the timelines for a bit. At length, the instruction to stop came, and they left the circle again. As in the time that Qhoroali had taken her to to learn to Guide, the familiar buildings and the road were gone, though others could be seen in the distance.
They walked around behind the hill, and Qhoroali put the clock into the position they had found it in back in 1912. “The batteries are fresh right now,” she said. “It should be good here for sixty years.” She handed the qoire bottle and the bag of batteries to Setsiana and sat down with her back against the steep side of the hill.
Setsiana walked back to the circle, and as she did, she passed the other version of herself that she expected to see, carrying the now empty bag, and they exchanged a nod. She paused briefly at the circle again, and then entered it as Sapfita provided the first direction.
The first few battery exchanges consumed all of her attention, but pretty soon, the process became rote and she no longer had to think very hard about it. Her mind drifted back to the dream she’d had a few days ago.
The substance you gave me to bring back, she said to Sapfita, It changed color after I woke up. How come?
It looks different to you when you are under the influence of qoire, Sapfita said. Snowflake, corn snake, bubble. Stop.
Setsiana followed the direction and then exited the circle again. But I didn’t take any qoire to go to sleep that night.
When I pull you into a dream, it is much the same as when you take qoire. It has similar effects on your mind.
You said that substance was the stuff that the timelines were made of, Setsiana said, carefully, mulling over her words as she changed another set of batteries. But the timelines don’t look that color to me, here, now, when I am under the influence of qoire.
Yes. They look different when you are still inside them. I told you that I had to make some changes to the substance for it to be contained to three dimensions, but the timelines would look the same to you, if you could see them from my vantage point.
Is there a way that I can do that? Setsiana replaced the clock back into the crack, and returned to the circle.
Yes.
Setsiana waited for an elaboration, but Sapfita only provided the next set of directions for her to walk. She tried a different angle. If we looked at that substance using qoire, would it be that color?
Yes. It will look very different to you in that circumstance. Hazelnut, riverbed. Stop.
She was consumed with curiosity, now; she was dying to get back to 1912 and look at that substance while under the effects of qoire. But she’d promised to help Qhoroali with this, first. She left the circle and did the final battery exchange, distracted. That’s the last one, right?
Yes. I’ll take you back to her now.
Setsiana returned to where Qhoroali was waiting in 1300, her mind on the conversation. Fortunately, Qhoroali did not seem to want to talk as she did her experiments, traveling to and fro along the timeline of continuously battery-powered clocks that Setsiana had created, stopping to check the clock, then her wrist device, and then scribble numbers and calculations onto her papers. At last, she tapped a figure with the end of her pen, and announced, “Thirty-two centimeters.”
“‘Centimeters’?” Setsiana asked, uncertainly.
“Yes, sorry, that’s one of the new units they use for this thing,” she tapped the wrist device. “I’ll have to convert it back into inches. But that’s the amount of ‘space’ it estimates we travel when we travel one year. So we should be able to estimate the amount of walking it takes to go 100 years with that.”
“Can we go back to 1912 now?” Setsiana asked. The results of the experiment were the last thing on her mind, currently. “I talked with Sapfita a bit. She seemed think that the substance I gave you two days ago would look very different if we looked at it under the influence of qoire.”
“Did she?” Qhoroali turned away from the paper for the first time in a while and peered at Setsiana curiously. “By all means.”
Sapfita Guided them back to 1912, and they went upstairs, where Qhoroali approached another door and pounded on it. After a moment, Peatäro appeared. “We need to get into the lab,” Qhoroali explained.
Peatäro shrugged, seeming to find this kind of arbitrary request normal, gathered the supplies for the lab experimentation, and returned with them to Qhoroali’s apartment. There, Qhoroali retrieved the vial of ghostly threading substance from her room. Only, Sapfita had been right. Now, with both of them under the effects of the three drops of qoire needed to conduct Qhoroali’s time travel experiment, it glowed yellow-green, just as it had in Setsiana’s dream.
In the lab, Peatäro set up the table and dome again, and Qhoroali poured the substance into it. As it spread out, it looked very different than it had before. Rather than threads that came and went, full paths and tunnels formed, and stayed, only cutting off at the edges of the dome. And they were familiar; there, laid out on the table, was the exact same chaotic yarn pile that Setsiana remembered from the times she had taken enough qoire to be able to Guide. It was subtly different, but only in the way that a scale model is different from the thing that it represents. Setsiana could point out the individual twists and turns that she’d managed to learn of the timeline Tree from when she had practiced Guiding. She could point to the twist that represented her home timeline in 1647 that Qhoroali had pointed out to her.
“Fascinating,” said Qhoroali, “so it always takes the same form then, that must just be part of the fundamental nature of Time. I had assumed there must have been some randomness at work to explain why the Tree looks the way it does, but there must be some underlying logic to it that I can’t see. So when we kill Sapfita and remove all of the timelines She was part of, completely analogous ones should naturally spring up to replace them. Very good.”
Peatäro was watching them somewhat quizzically, but didn’t question any of this. Presumably she was still seeing the same thing they had seen the last time they had brought this substance out. “Is that all for today?” she asked.
“Yes, I think so,” said Qhoroali. “This has actually been very informative.” They gathered the substance back up, put away the table, and locked the lab back up again.
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Thank you! I hope all of these do seem to be leading to something.
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Thank you! I don't remember when I got the idea for it, but I thought it would be a fun thing to include.
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Thank you! I planned to have Qhoroali do this experiment a long time ago, but I had to figure out how to integrate it into the actual plot, haha.