Time is Running Out for the Ascian's Plan?

[Iscah]

Yes but how? The first is gone, no one could ever have learned of the light wardens, even the different flow in time should have been a suprise, or at least they would have no way to track down a exact moment, as its pace was random...

I get it was the last desperate act to save a doomed world, but still... quite risky. Ofc we could argue they failed many times and the loop kept on till they hit the right time lol

[...]

Most likely we really can settle for, they had 0 clue about the weird flow of time and he was lucky that it was still close, not 1000 years too early.

Good point, so I started thinking over how that might work without being just "they didn't think this through" - 'they' being either the writers or the characters, though at least the characters have the excuse that they were kind of desperate and jumping in without a real plan was the only option they had.

So perhaps - and I'd have to review exactly what G'raha said about it in the game to be sure, but - maybe they weren't aiming for him to arrive a particular point in time relative to the deadline, but rather at the earliest possible time they could arrive.

Note that I am running on the assumption that G'raha's arrival in the First does not split the timeline, because he has no prior knowledge of events there. There is simply never a timeline in which he does not travel there. (Compare our time-travel trip during Alexander - there is never a timeline where we didn't warp back and appear before Mide three years earlier, because that is part of the chain of events that leads to us being there in the first place.)

I assume that the timeline will only split at the point where G'raha's original future can no longer come to pass, and anything that happens prior to this point, even if it involved time travel, is simply incorporated into a single flow of time. Otherwise we broke the timeline already, possibly twice, and Alexander seems to think everything is fine.

SO. If I was a Future Ironworks engineer trying to calculate "when" we need to send the tower...

1. At what point should we try to contact the WoL? We don't want to somehow jeopardise our ability to invent the time machine in the first place, so to be safe we should wait until after they've finished dealing with Omega and Cid has that information. (I need to check but I believe Alphascape was released in 4.4, the same patch in which G'raha started trying to summon us.)

2. Having decided on that time, we need to decide the earliest time to travel to. We can't interfere with anything that the WoL knows to be true at the point when we contact them, or we might disrupt the timeline prior to the point where we're trying to split it. That means no stopping the flood or arriving on the First before Minfilia travels there to save it.

3. So we need to arrive after Minfilia departs for the First, and would like to get as close to that as possible so G'raha has as much time as he can to work out what he needs to do.

Of course, "soon after Minfilia departed" in Source time translates to a few years since she arrived in the First.

Somethin i cant get into my head either... he needed his device to actually grab us, it was the bridge he needed. ok. so... why dont we let our friends bodies touch it and summen them over, thus giving em the ability to just port forward and back? Even Thancred should be able to use that mirror gate at Grahas room, right?

I get we need a story to happen but it feels like they're making it overly complicated - heck he summoned 7 other warriors against hades, yet cant grab our firends? It should be even easier with them helping him...

We don't know how summoning mechanisms work. Maybe there's some weird thing with bodies and souls, and it can't work with a soulless body. I think it's safe to assume that there's something preventing it, or they would have done it by now.

I don't think Thancred can use normal teleportation devices at all though, so maybe he wouldn't be able to use that one either.

And I really don't know whether to count the "summoning warriors from beyond the rift" as something that actually happened in the story or not. It's a really cool moment at the time, but it's just weird on so many other levels. Doesn't add up with the difficulty of summoning the rest of the time, and what happened from their perspective? Pulled out of nowhere, fight this monster they've been thrown up against, then snap back to their own world without an explanation?

To us it surely started to change the moment we started having his calls. To the first... it sure instandly changed things, for 100 years less deaths and a force against the chaos, lots of wisdom that didnt get lost, either... it might have bought some days or weeks before the flood, just from slowing down lord fatty... ofc we cant tell, but still.

As I was saying earlier, there's no proof that there was a "before" to be changed by the tower's arrival. It could simply always have been the case that it happened.

That's one of the weird things with time travel stories. It's partly perspective-based - if you go back in time to deliberately change something, you've got to contend with the paradox of "but how did you stop it if it never happened" (not that this has stopped the overall premise of the game's plot) and even if you do succeed, there must have been a timeline where it happened for you to be aware of it.

But if you simply time-travel with no idea what's going to be there when you arrive, there's no previous knowledge for you to clash with. You simply become part of that timeline as it is. We accidentally appeared before Mide and accidentally dropped the journal that would be mistaken for a book of prophecy. (Well, it was deliberate on the part of the cat who knew what it was doing.) With no expectations, we simply became part of that point in time, with the ability to influence our own past.

And of course the other time-travel instance in Alexander, where we save our earlier self... well, it's going to be a lot less straining on reality if you act to ensure something happens the way you remember it happening, rather than trying to prevent it.

And i wanna know more about the time travel, see more of the tower... ik that wont happen but still >_>

Definitely not happening. We specifically broke the time machine's core in the Twinning.

As already said, we might have had severaly loops already.

I disagree on the possibility of multiple loops. There's been no suggestion of it, and it would spawn new "bad" timelines every time he failed.

Everything points to him regarding this as a single chance to succeed. If there was ever going to be a second loop, he's not on it yet.

if the pull a DBZ cell time machine thing with Emet Im unsubbing

You seem to have dropped the "begin quote" code from the start of your post.

[Gojin]

It wouldnt let me post all the quote had to cut some of it post limits

[Kuroka]

Good point, so I started thinking over how that might work without being just "they didn't think this through" - 'they' being either the writers or the characters, though at least the characters have the excuse that they were kind of desperate and jumping in without a real plan was the only option they had.

We dont know what exactly was planned by Cid and Nero and what the others made themselfs, thats a pitty too... IF we get another lore book it'll be surely interresting.

So perhaps - and I'd have to review exactly what G'raha said about it in the game to be sure, but - maybe they weren't aiming for him to arrive a particular point in time relative to the deadline, but rather at the earliest possible time they could arrive.

It might fit, even if its close. But from when he got thancred and us... it seems as it really was right after Tsuko was done and Omega, ofc the later is its own small time bubble as we could finish the story long before Tsuko, right after Zenos.

As someone already said we have that Sequence of G'raha looking through the heavensward book, at the ruins of Ishgard, wondering if he should take us after the dragonwar, but then saying it was too early and after ala mhigo would be better. Atm we have no point where anyone from the future mentioned Mifilia, but i guess we can assume they knew...

I assume that the timeline will only split at the point where G'raha's original future can no longer come to pass, and anything that happens prior to this point, even if it involved time travel, is simply incorporated into a single flow of time. Otherwise we broke the timeline already, possibly twice, and Alexander seems to think everything is fine.

On alex it was different due him having his cat do the work behind the scenes... Its true there might be a breaking point from which on his future cant happen anymore, MAYBE his plan cant even work as planned and time will try to fix itself, maybe the future just vanishes once its no longer possible to happen - maybe it forces itself to become the future we create...

Idk if you player Prince of persia - the sands of time trillogy.
There was a Monster, trying to kill the player bc he changed the future, which is payed with your life. There might be some backlash comming to us or G'raha.

Or if we look closer, the FF13-2.
Time corrects itself, if we changed the relative future, its past corrected itself, including its ppl... there was no split then, it was changed like it always was like that and only ppl with special powers would remember the old timeline.

It might be we havent reached the breaking point yet, or, G'raha was sent adrift and exists without time, but the fact that neither he nor the tower made *poof* yet feels fishy and leaves a bad feeling without any further information.

(I need to check but I believe Alphascape was released in 4.4, the same patch in which G'raha started trying to summon us.)

It was, te trailer openened wiht his distant calls underlayed by "from the heavens" Omegas final theme^^

Of course, "soon after Minfilia departed" in Source time translates to a few years since she arrived in the First.

Its that weird flow of time, it seems to be rather sync when the wod came over and mifinlia went back and then got really fast until it finally slowed down again... He was really lucky he didnt have like 5 min till the flood or had to wait 2-3000 years lol

We don't know how summoning mechanisms work. Maybe there's some weird thing with bodies and souls, and it can't work with a soulless body. I think it's safe to assume that there's something preventing it, or they would have done it by now.

Maybe, but not even adressing it is frustrating... And there should be still aether in their body - its made of it, heck, as they are lifeless we might be able to just grab em and take em over xD

...i guess thats too easy, but still. Gettin their bodies over might be the easier task for now and would prevent em to die xD

It just feels we look for the most complicated way possible. And ye we neither reach out for Cid or Nero, or dunno, blackmages to summon em like voidsent or anything...

I don't think Thancred can use normal teleportation devices at all though, so maybe he wouldn't be able to use that one either.

Idk he has aether, he just cant use it. Normally you do the teleport, but that mirror(?) seems to be different, so it might be enough to "ship" him lol

...there still is the chance that gettin him over isnt possible. I feel its weird he could not use aether at the first neither as it was a "new" body - its weird that his and Y'shtolas damage seems to be at their very soul.

Pulled out of nowhere, fight this monster they've been thrown up against, then snap back to their own world without an explanation?

Just to imagine... "well now youre friends are back, lets see how we get those guys to their different shards!" xD

It was cool but not really a smart thing to do.. the weird flow of time, the stuff they had to deal with.... lol

Definitely not happening. We specifically broke the time machine's core in the Twinning.

But i do wonder why it already fell apart when we got there...

[Iscah]

I forgot to reply to this previously...

There was a point during the MSQ where they were deciding on a time frame. While our character was sleeping at the Inn after the run we had through the Malikah's well and the pain attack we had from the nascent light breaking free, we got visited by G'raha and we had an echo dream (at the time we didnt know it was him in the future) of him at House Fortemps closing Edmont's book. He basically said that after the dragon song war that was too early to summon us and would it possibly be better if it was after freeing Ala Mhigo. They just needed to figure out exactly when after that.

As someone already said we have that Sequence of G'raha looking through the heavensward book, at the ruins of Ishgard, wondering if he should take us after the dragonwar, but then saying it was too early and after ala mhigo would be better. Atm we have no point where anyone from the future mentioned Mifilia, but i guess we can assume they knew...

I'm really dubious about when or how that scene is supposed to fit. I feel like it may have been something they created early on as a "guiding concept" kind of thing but then the rest of the story shifted around it and they weren't willing to change it for whatever reason. I have to wonder if it's the only reason they stuck with the nonsensical "endless age of war" thing because they'd portrayed Ishgard in chaos there. (A better setup for the "dying world" idea seems to be the other implication that everything is simply falling into silence and the few survivors still might succumb to the aether-halting sickness of Black Rose. Everything in the world is inescapably fading and to "unwrite" it is simply to cut short those last hopeless moments with the promise that elsewhere things will be better.)

In any case, we're stuck with that. G'raha and Biggs are so desperately trying to research the historical records of the WoL's activities that they had to venture into wartorn Ishgard in search of Edmont's diary which is conveniently still in his intact study 200 years later. It lines up very well that G'raha is a historian and fully used to piecing together the past from various records. I assume they're gathering all the facts they can before deciding exactly when they need to set their target time.

On alex it was different due him having his cat do the work behind the scenes... Its true there might be a breaking point from which on his future cant happen anymore, MAYBE his plan cant even work as planned and time will try to fix itself, maybe the future just vanishes once its no longer possible to happen - maybe it forces itself to become the future we create...

Idk if you player Prince of persia - the sands of time trillogy.
There was a Monster, trying to kill the player bc he changed the future, which is payed with your life. There might be some backlash comming to us or G'raha.

Or if we look closer, the FF13-2.
Time corrects itself, if we changed the relative future, its past corrected itself, including its ppl... there was no split then, it was changed like it always was like that and only ppl with special powers would remember the old timeline.

It might be we havent reached the breaking point yet, or, G'raha was sent adrift and exists without time, but the fact that neither he nor the tower made *poof* yet feels fishy and leaves a bad feeling without any further information.

I don't think Alexander "getting the cat to do the work behind the scenes" has any bearing on whether our actions there could damage the timeline or not.

We travelled to "three years ago" and - if you want to suppose that time travel inherently creates a different version of time to the original - created a "new" version of what happened to Mide where Backrix dropped his book for Quickthinx to pick up... which is a logical impossibility because Quickthinx already has that book before we travel to the past. Therefore there has to be one circular version of events - there can't be a version that happened without him possessing the book in the first place.

Yes, the cat is the reason that he acquires the book. But that's not the reason why we are already in the timeline where he has acquired the book, prior to travelling back in time to 'give' it to him. This is a plot absolutely relying on a single consistent time loop, therefore time travel cannot automatically split the timeline or the plot cannot work.


As for comparisons to other stories... I don't see any reason to assume there's some kind of "time-correcting monster" coming after us until it happens. It would seem very out of nowhere.

The suggestion or expectation was that at the point where the dark timeline is averted, G'raha and the tower's existence would simply unravel. Though of course it's entirely speculative as to what would actually happen, what such a thing would look like, and what remains vs what reverts to how it was. Raha goes, of course, and the tower because he brought it there... but what about the rest of the Crystarium? Does the city fall apart as parts of their building materials vanish into thin air? What about their memories of him being there?

It's simply a lot less messy from a writing standpoint to make his presence here permanent, whatever exactly you want to say happened to the timeline he came from. Still not impossible though.

But i do wonder why [the time machine] already fell apart when we got there...

Are you talking about the general area of the Twinning being in disarray? I assume everything got thrown around when it teleported... at least that's my best invented explanation for how the thing is full of uncaged Allagan beasts. Maybe they were all down there in their stasis pods while the Ironworks were (rather nervously) building the time machine, and warping across time and space leads some of them to not get put back exactly where they were... say, a few metres to the left, just outside of the pod. (And one S-rank chimera just outside the sealed main door, judging from the hunt mark description...)

It wouldnt let me post all the quote had to cut some of it post limits

If you're going to delete part of a post, you have to be careful about what you cut out, though. You need to leave the initial "(QUOTE=Name;12345)" bracket intact and only delete the stuff that comes after that. Otherwise the system doesn't recognise it as a quote and can't apply the correct formatting for it.

Beyond that, as long as the initial and ending (QUOTE)(/QUOTE) tags are left intact, you can easily delete what you want out of a quoted post, especially if you just want to respond to a particular part of it.

[Kuroka]

I forgot to reply to this previously...

I just realized that xD

In any case, we're stuck with that. G'raha and Biggs are so desperately trying to research the historical records of the WoL's activities that they had to venture into wartorn Ishgard in search of Edmont's diary which is conveniently still in his intact study 200 years later.

Well we do know from the tailes of the shadows that most what we've done was already told to them, as basically everyone who ever received our help, helped the Ironworks to fulfill that plan... it seems they knew what we did, just the exact timing was needed... yet the fact the book stayed there, this well, lol....

We travelled to "three years ago" and - if you want to suppose that time travel inherently creates a different version of time to the original - created a "new" version of what happened to Mide where Backrix dropped his book for Quickthinx to pick up... which is a logical impossibility because Quickthinx already has that book before we travel to the past.

No my point was Alex was special as he wanted to create that loop as everything else lead to doom, so he know what needed to happen when to get the full circle, unlike G'raha who's plan was to smash destiny right from the beginning.

Alex could close that loop as everything that happened has always happened that way, as paradox it might be, it was a loop, with no open end - yet G'raha has a present with an changed future and a future with an changed past...

As for comparisons to other stories... I don't see any reason to assume there's some kind of "time-correcting monster" coming after us until it happens. It would seem very out of nowhere.

I absolutely agree - but so was "a friend from long ago who we might not even know yet (if you havent done the raid) worked with everyone we even knew or their children to travel to the past to change our fate and the fate of a world, which we though was already saved".

As ppl always say, two things easily ruin good stories, time travel and reviving the death - we got both.

Raha goes, of course, and the tower because he brought it there... but what about the rest of the Crystarium? Does the city fall apart as parts of their building materials vanish into thin air? What about their memories of him being there?

The closest example would be ff13-2, the Paradox vanishes, the world adapts so everything went as it did, just with them never being part of it, which might be the Crystarium build from ppl that fled anyways - or it just never existed.

To dive more into that, in ff13-2 Hope and some girl (forgot her name) traveled into the future to fulfill a plan to save mankind, but over time we learn that, despite her best intentions and help, that girl was a paradox, resulting from a changed timeline, originally she died, long before... after some sheningans we solve that paradox, resulting in her fading away, including all memory of her, as she was never there.

Are you talking about the general area of the Twinning being in disarray? I assume everything got thrown around when it teleported... at least that's my best invented explanation for how the thing is full of uncaged Allagan beasts.

Yes. Just imagine... "hey boss, should we turn off the life support for those uncontrollable beasts here? Nah just leave em, they surely will never escape..." xD

Maybe they were left there to guard the time machine, some were as we saw magitek stuff, but some surely werent...

Ik its kinda silly/nerdy, but i really wished wed got more information there... >_>

[Jandor]

And I really don't know whether to count the "summoning warriors from beyond the rift" as something that actually happened in the story or not. It's a really cool moment at the time, but it's just weird on so many other levels. Doesn't add up with the difficulty of summoning the rest of the time, and what happened from their perspective? Pulled out of nowhere, fight this monster they've been thrown up against, then snap back to their own world without an explanation?

I think we have to assume it actually happened in the story, it was a major cut-scene before facing the big main bad guy of the MSQ up to that point.

As to how it was done, I don't really know. If I had to guess at magical mumbo-jumbo I'd say he used you as a gate or conduit or whatever and called out to anyone vaguely "attuned" to you to come help out for a bit. Intending it to be temporary, a pre-existing link to the WoL, and the WoL's own massive reserve of TP-juice (anima), should all add up to make the summoning easier.

It is one of those things I wish the characters thought to ask though, leaving aside the coming and going from the first for a moment, it'd just be a really useful trick to be able to pull off in general.

Villain: Oh ho ho, I have you now WoL!
WoL: Oi lads, come give us a hand with this joker would ya.
/7 equally powerful mates pop out of nowhere/