Lore Book Revelations

Well, yes, time and space are essentially the same thing. That's why they're commonly referred to as "spacetime;" moving forward through time is essentially stopping your own movement through space while the rest of the universe continues on, and moving backward through time is stopping your movement through space while rewinding the rest of the universe's. (So every time machine is also a space machine. Think about it - if the DeLorean from Back to the Future really just moved through time, the chances of them ending up in the cold vacuum of space after every time jump is extremely high since the Earth would more than likely be in a different space.) A person with super speed isn't really faster, they're just able to reduce the relative space between them and wherever they're trying to get or otherwise slow the advancement of space relative to them. Any faster-than-light travel we could ever hope to accomplish runs on this principle - don't move faster, just reduce the space between points A and B.

For the purposes of a layman's explanation of a time loop's origin, though... best to just stick with the "who knows?"

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Originally Posted by Fenral

But she didn't die at twenty and six, unless it was birthing an entire clan of lizard babies all at once that got her in the end...

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Time is relative. From our perspective the first time we met Mide, she had already died... in our past, which is her future. Unless we gain the ability to move through [space]time ourselves we'll never meet her again, because she is born, lives, and dies as a cog in Alexander's temporal loops.

Mide didn't die at 26, but from our perspective she has been dead a long, long time. Time travel is wonky like that.

EDIT
Humor can be hard to convey through pure text...

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Originally Posted by Cilia

Time is relative. From our perspective the first time we met Mide, she had already died... in our past, which is her future. Unless we gain the ability to move through [space]time ourselves we'll never meet her again, because she is born, lives, and dies as a cog in Alexander's temporal loops.

Mide didn't die at 26, but from our perspective she has been dead a long, long time. Time travel is wonky like that.

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I do understand that, but I was making a joke about how her lore book obituary indeed says she died at 26.

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Originally Posted by Fenral

I do understand that, but I was making a joke about how her lore book obituary indeed says she died at 26.

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Well, she was absorbed into the core, and lost her mortal form. That's death in a nutshell. Alexander kept her soul, and then remade her (a) body in the past.

That's what I get from the whole thing.

Well if one thinks of time as having two axis of travel instead of just the one, a lot of paradoxes dissappear so long as the second axis cannot be rewound upon (though it could be rewound if there was a third axis that couldn't be rewound but thought experiments beyond this get kinda hard) thus even in the context of time travel, there is still a 'past' that happened that created the events of the time travel in the first place, it also makes an explanation for people not being effected by changes they make as they've gone away from their original timeline (though if you traveled forward by the exact same amount you previously went backwards in, then you would actually return to your own timeline without any of the changes you made.


That said, not all of what happened this time around in Alexander needed to happen the first time around, all that needed to happen is for Alexander to be summoned, view the possible futures, come to his conclusion and then create the sequence of events that lead to the paradox. For all we know it was originally built by the Sharlayans but Alex determined that Mide's clan and the goblins would allow for a more favourable outcome.