Tales From the Shadows Updated (SPOILERS ABOUND)

[LineageRazor]

I think I prefer that one, 'cause I'm gonna be frank: I don't think the way the Alexander raid incorporates time travel (namely, its use of causal loops) was particularly well written or consistent to begin with.

Working from a single-timeline perspective, if you assume that multiple realities and branching timelines are impossible, then the only way time travel can work is if time travel doesn't change anything - the most it can do is ensure events proceed as they have already proceeded. When time travel is used in this way, it is clean and not messy at all. There are no paradoxes (bootstrap paradox is a misnomer). There is no "before the time travel happened, things actually happened this way", because time travel has ALWAYS been a part of the timeline. It's like a roller coaster with a loop in it - the roller coaster didn't used to be flat and they added the loop later. The loop was always part of the design.

G'raha's time travel basically threw what we knew about time travel out the window. Or, at the very least, it introduced more things that it can do. I think that we can still assume that self-perpetuating time loops like Alexander's still exist, and do not spin off additional timelines since they do not introduce paradoxes. But now we know time travel CAN effect change, and when it does then a new timeline is generated, branching off the original but leaving the original intact.

Honestly, I think this was a bad genie to let out of the bottle. It takes a lot of the tension out of things if we know that, no matter how terrible things get short of total planetary destruction (and maybe even then), we can just wait until folks figure out time travel and then go back and fix things. Never mind that the way they managed it this time was nothing short of a miracle of merged technologies and circumstances - the fact that it's possible at all means that, in the fullness of time, someone can figure out how to do it again.

Introducing multiple worlds also runs into the problem of trivializing our own accomplishiments. Particularly true in the scenario of an infinite multiverse (what does it matter if we won here, if we failed in ten billion other timelines?), but even in this case where there's only two timelines: All of our work to stop the Ascians? Great for us - but in the "bad future" their plan is apparently still right on track, given that life on the Source is apparently NOT going to be extinguished (and it's debatable whether that would have stopped the Ascians' plan even if it was), and civilization is slowly beginning to recover (just as it has for all of the Ascians' previous Calamities).

I see the point that Alexander as a deux ex machina isn't much better - if he's playing us all like puppets, then what's the point of anything we do? Where is our free will if everything we do was determined by Alexander? That's a philosophical debate centuries old (just replace "Alexander" with "the Christians' omniscient and omnipotent God"). But if we treat a single timeline as a future we forge for ourselves as we move toward it, we have to bear in mind that there are other people forging it right along with us. These people interfere with each other and us all the time, and we do not always have full control of our destiny as a result. Alexander is just one other such person, and while he had capabilities that gave him a great deal of ability to interfere, ultimately his interference came to an end. So, Mide was not wrong - the future is something we choose. But you have to remember that Alexander is part of the "we" doing the choosing.

[Rosenstrauch]

Working from a single-timeline perspective, if you assume that multiple realities and branching timelines are impossible, then the only way time travel can work is if time travel doesn't change anything - the most it can do is ensure events proceed as they have already proceeded.

The problem with this line of thinking is that this isn't how time travel works even in the Alexander raid.

DAYAN
...Their fate was not mine to change, Mide. All that came to pass did so for a reason. History is as it was─as it should be─free of the paradoxes that spelled its undoing.
From this place─unfettered by the mortal construct of time─Alexander looks out upon past, present, and future, seeing infinite possibilities. I see what it sees, and feel what it feels─this perfect machine, born from yearnings for an ideal world.
Oh, if you could see the worlds we have seen! A world in which the Illuminati rule history with an iron fist, every nation brought under their yoke. A world in which Alexander spread wide the wings of time and swept the lesser moon from the heavens, averting the Calamity...
Alexander dreamed all the realities imaginable─all the realities mathematically computable─and in the end, reached a single, logical conclusion. It would change nothing, and erase itself from existence.

DAYAN
Alexander possesses the power to travel through time and space, and reshape history for the better─but such power comes at great cost. The sheer quantity of aether consumed in the process means that Alexander itself would─mayhap not immediately, but inevitably─bring ruin to this world. This perfect machine, this supreme manifestation of logic and science, deemed its own existence a threat.
And so it chose to do nothing. To leave history untouched, and the future in the hands of man, with all his imperfections. Such was Alexander's divine judgment.
A time will come when the fate of this world is placed in the hands of one warrior. For reasons hidden to me, the future from that day forth remains shrouded in mystery─beyond even the colossus's ability to calculate. And yet Alexander chose to believe in that woman, and the light within her.

DAYAN
There was but a single time Alexander was spurred to action─not to change history, but to preserve it. The summoning of the colossus, and the events that followed, had potentially disastrous consequence for our reality. Its fabric strained to accommodate an infinite number of potential futures separated by nary a thread.
Were the wings of time to fall into the hands of the Illuminati, the repercussions would be dire indeed. History would be rewritten over and over again, each time bleeding the land of aether. And in the end, the colossus would usher in another calamity.
To prevent this tragedy─to preserve the circle of time as it had already been set in motion─Alexander sent forth a humble servant to do its bidding.
A clockwork coeurl, an eternal child, to gently nudge history back onto its proper path.

If this is supposed to be a story in which there's a single, immutable timeline which can never be changed by time travel, then Alexander's own observations are impossible. From its position outside of time, it should only see a single, unbroken line. A past that always was, a present that always is, and a future that always will be. But it doesn't—it sees infinite possibilities and recognizes its own power to alter the course of time at any point of its choosing. It also recognizes that there are paths time can take that don't make logical sense—it instead results in paradoxes. And finally, it recognizes that failure to act would invariably result in the Illuminati screwing up everything to the point of ushering in a Calamity. This should not be possible if the timeline is immutable—it should instead only be able to perceive the Illuminati's failure.

Alexander also, apparently, has a massive blind spot when it comes to any possible future involving the WoL where they don't die before arriving at an unspecified point of time in the future. From that point forward, Alexander's ability to perceive the future stops working entirely. It can't see infinite possibilities. It can't see one. It can't see none. What it sees is undefinable—and despite this completely unknowable future being at the apparent end of the path in time it chose to preserve, it does not deviate from this course out of faith in the WoL.

... the same WoL it tried to kill by stopping them in time, only to fail because the WoL traveled back in time to prevent it from changing the past, which it should have known would happen because it's trying to preserve this exact timeline, but it didn't know would happen because... reasons? Or maybe Alexander was just lying about being confused by its own failure to alter the past, for... reasons?

As an addendum, to use your own roller coaster analogy to demonstrate causal loops and why they result in the bootstrap paradox: Imagine that a roller coaster with a loop is built one day. You go to ride it and, while waiting in line, notice something odd about it. There are two carts on the track: One that goes around the full track, and one that never leaves the loop. At the point where the first cart enters the loop, it and the second cart appear to become one, and at the point where it leaves the track, they appear to separate back into two carts. At the moment in which the carts appear to be one, the riders from both carts can be observed interacting with each other.

You stop and ask "How long have they been stuck in that loop?", and the ride's manager says "I've been here since the coaster was built, and I've never seen them outside of that loop." This is the perspective outside the roller coaster, and outside of time.

You get on the roller coaster when the first cart comes to a stop. You approach the loop, and notice that there is no second cart. The loop ahead looks perfectly normal from your perspective. You go into the loop, and become capable of perceiving the second cart. The passengers are sitting right next to you. You exit the loop, and they're gone, cart and all. When the ride ends, you never return to this roller coaster again. This is the perspective of someone inside the roller coaster, but in the linear time of a "straight" timeline.

While you were in the loop, you asked one of the passengers from the second cart what it looks like to them. They say "You've always been right next to me, but every time we complete a lap in the loop, you ask me that question. Every time, I give the same answer. The loop doesn't have an entrance or an exit. We just keep going around in it." That is the perspective of someone on the roller coaster, but in the nonlinear time of a causal loop.

Now to apply that to Alexander: The WoL's past begins before the loop, and their future ends ahead of the loop. If this were to be observed outside of time, then the WoL would appear to enter the loop at its earliest apparent point, and exit the loop at its latest apparent point. But Mide is different: She exists entirely within the causal loop. If one were to observe the past and the future from Mide's perspective, they would come to the conclusion that they are one and the same: A chain of events with no beginning nor end. This is the Bootstrap Paradox.

This is gonna be my last post on the matter. I wasn't kidding when I said my previous post on the subject gave me a headache. Time travel is just that frustrating.

[LineageRazor]

The problem with this line of thinking is that this isn't how time travel works even in the Alexander raid.

I... get the impression you read my first paragraph, and ignored the rest. Yes, I acknowledged later on that this is not how it works, and in the final paragraph acknolwedged this is not how it works even in the Alexander raid.

And while you said you'd said your last on the matter, there was one thing you mentioned that I had to address:

Now to apply that to Alexander: The WoL's past begins before the loop, and their future ends ahead of the loop. If this were to be observed outside of time, then the WoL would appear to enter the loop at its earliest apparent point, and exit the loop at its latest apparent point. But Mide is different: She exists entirely within the causal loop. If one were to observe the past and the future from Mide's perspective, they would come to the conclusion that they are one and the same: A chain of events with no beginning nor end. This is the Bootstrap Paradox.

No, Mide's treatment is NO DIFFERENT than the WoL's with the exception that, in the end, she is transported to the past and lives out her life there. Her life follows a single timeline. She' is born, she grows up, she has time travel shenanigans with Alexander, she travels to the past, grows old, and dies. The WoL is born, grows up, has time travel shenanigans with Alexander, then in the future presumably grows old and dies, though that future is not yet written.

Mide does not go through the loop over and over. She goes through it once. An observer outside of time watching her would not see her go around the loop over and over. If they were to follow her life, they'd see her loop one time, and that's all. Just like someone watching a roller coaster will see the car go through the loop one time.

This is true for all of the actors in this scenario. Discworld has an example of the "endless loop" that you postulate in the book "Pyramids":

In that book Dios, the high priest of the Egypt-analogue kingdom, has been high priest for as long as he or anyone else can remember. At the end of the book he's sent back in time, where he helps to found the kingdom and immediately becomes its high priest. He was never born, never dies, and has always been and always will be an old man acting as high priest over and over for the first eight hundred years of his kingdom's history. From his personal perspective it would be an endless eternity - or would, if, as a mercy, his limited memory prevented him from realizing his fate.

THIS would be a case where an observer outside of time could truly say the cart is going around the loop endlessly. Mide's case is different. Only a segment of her life is spent in the loop, goes through it once, and that's it. A segment of her life exists before the loop, and after - it just happens that the segment that occurs after takes place chronologically in the past. To her, though, and to an outside observer watching her life from start to finish, though, it's a single, unbroken path.

BOTH of these examples are Bootstrap Paradoxes, in that actors in the loop take actions that lead to them going to the past and setting things up so that they will take those actions, but you can hopefully see how they're different: in one the actor has no existence outside of the loop and rides around it over and over, in the other the actor has an existence before entering the loop, and an existence after leaving it.

[Veloran]

No, Mide's treatment is NO DIFFERENT than the WoL's with the exception that, in the end, she is transported to the past and lives out her life there. Her life follows a single timeline. She' is born, she grows up, she has time travel shenanigans with Alexander, she travels to the past, grows old, and dies. The WoL is born, grows up, has time travel shenanigans with Alexander, then in the future presumably grows old and dies, though that future is not yet written.

Mide does not go through the loop over and over. She goes through it once. An observer outside of time watching her would not see her go around the loop over and over. If they were to follow her life, they'd see her loop one time, and that's all. Just like someone watching a roller coaster will see the car go through the loop one time.

This isn't exactly what happens. At the end of the Alex raid series, Mide and Dayan are sealed within Alexander's stasis bubble, before it's revealed that in the ancient past two Au Ra children emerged from Alexander bearing the Enigma Codex to found the tribe that Mide and Dayan originally came from. Meaning, Mide and Dayan, or at least their genetic material and the Enigma Codex, are indeed part of a neverending timeloop.

[Iscah]

So, something else that should be considered when we battle Alexander Prime is the fact that the battle itself takes place within a singularity.

Even if that has a bearing on how time works in that particular instance, we still have the other time-travel event which happens in "real time" and - as I think on it now - is every bit as reliant on time travel not automatically creating a split timeline.

If our trip to three years ago only has us affecting a copied timeline and not the original, there is no possible way for Quickthinx be in possession of of Backrix's journal-from-the-future in the original timeline.

Therefore, as far as I can see it, if the rules of time travel are constant between the two stories (and I certainly hope that they are) then I think it is impossible for G'raha to have created a second timeline simply by arriving in Lakeland. Something had to happen after that point to cause the divergence, and I think it can't happen until he is interacting with history as he knows it, which only occurs once he is interfering with events in the Source.



To use the "three years ago" incident as an explanation point, my thinking is that time would only split if we did something that young Mide saw and couldn't possibly forget or misremember - but also something that present-day Mide knows didn't happen to her, and (unlike the reveal that the goblins were responsible for her friends' deaths) isn't just a reframing of the existing facts.

So if we'd acted to protect or heal her friends who got shot, that would be a change that made events play out differently to how present Mide remembers them because she saw her friends die.

On the other hand, if we were somehow able to rescue Dayan after young Mide lost sight of him but before he was actually pulled into the core, that would not have split the timeline. It would just mean that events turned out differently in that single version of the story and the one we saw never existed, because it doesn't have to.

If anything, I'd speculate it's the fact that G'raha comes from that other timeline that prevents it from being shut down as a once-possible future that didn't happen.

Catboi Sage Deluxe

It was kind of funny the first time but calling him that every time just makes your argument harder for me to process.

For one, as of yet, Alexander is still in stasis in the Thaliak river as far as we know it in both the Bad and Good Timelines, meaning that any splits that occur from him going back in time won't begin until after G'raha and the Bad Future Ironworks already split the timeline. This means that G'raha's time shenanigans are still in line with the rest of the story.

I'm not understanding your point here. If Alexander got brought out of stasis in either timeline and travelled back to drop off Mide and Dayan in the far past, it would end up at a point before the timelines ever split in the first place.

Even if the timelines split apart as soon as G'raha arrived in the past, by Source time the absolute earliest point it happened was in 3.4 after Minfilia departed to the First. Alexander is going to have to go back a lot further than that.

This isn't exactly what happens. At the end of the Alex raid series, Mide and Dayan are sealed within Alexander's stasis bubble, before it's revealed that in the ancient past two Au Ra children emerged from Alexander bearing the Enigma Codex to found the tribe that Mide and Dayan originally came from. Meaning, Mide and Dayan, or at least their genetic material and the Enigma Codex, are indeed part of a neverending timeloop.

You could handwave the genetic material thing as that somehow by random chance, their descendents managed to acquire the exact same configuration of genes... assuming that's even in play in this world and it's not some kind of weird aetherial equivalent.

As for the codex itself, I understood it that the concept of what was recorded in the codex might be cycling through the time loop, where ancestor-Mide creates the codex based on her past reading of it, but I don't think the physical object is the same one going around and around.

[Veloran]

I thought it was heavily implied to literally be the two of them that step out in the past, just deaged somehow.

Also, it could be the discrepancies between the two time situations we have here simply has to do with the nature of who was doing it and what it entailed. Alex basically calculated the perfect set of events to create a timeline that he would not actually directly affect. If there was ever a "split" it would have occured when he first established the events of that timeline, not when he was reemacting it.

Meanwhile, G'raha time travels as a last-ditch hail mary, interdimensionally, with Omega's tech added in, with active disregard for the ramifications.

[Iscah]

I thought it was heavily implied to literally be the two of them that step out in the past, just deaged somehow.

Yeah, it's them - the question is what happens next. It's "Mide's ancestor" who created the codex a hundred years ago, not 26-year-old Mide as we know her. She is still born, lives and dies, except that from an external view of the timeline, the second half of her life happens earlier in time than her birth.

Present-day Mide is carrying on her family's legacy, unaware that her elderly relative is/was an older version of herself.

[Vyrerus]

Don't call G'raha, Catboi Sage Deluxe more than once, please.

My heart is broken T_T

As for the real world time travel that I forgot about... well, let's put on our thinking caps about what's different between it and between G'raha's time travel. For starters, Alexander takes us back to a point where he had been summoned using the Enigma Codex. Rather than materializing beside a newly summoned version of himself, he assumes the same exact spacetime as his earlier self, meaning that either time travel as Alex does it has selfsame entities replace themselves when they travel or that summoning him merely calls him to a point in time, rather than creating him out of a vast quantity of aether.

Obviously it doesn't replace people, though Alexander did stand in for himself. This travel was also brief, did not try to change events, though that was the reason given from Roundrox as to why she manipulated Alexander to travel back to then. In G'raha's case he goes back in time with the intent to change history, and to stay in the past for as long as it takes. Yet, why does the intent matter or the duration? Well...

How the story views time is not that there are timelines. Quickthinx states that time is a, "flat round shape." A circle. This is how he's presented with time from Alexander as well, given that Alexander shows time in the control room as a spinning aetherial gear, which spins clockwise normally as seconds pass, but then counterclockwise when they go back in time. If that's the idea of how they want to pictorially represent time, then as long as you stay within the same, "time circle" then you don't create any paradoxes or changes. Even if we'd had the knowledge to try and act to help Mide or Dayan in the past, we weren't given the time to act. Alexander appears, the Goblins swoop and shoot, Alexander starts the vacuum, and Dayan pushes Mide out of the way and is sucked in. Then Alexander and every being associated with it are immediately flushed back to the present.

So what we have to consider aside from the briefness and personal intent is the fact that, Alexander's time travel as it is shown does not have Alexander change spatial coordinates. While I'm sure he can move spatially, we're never shown just how well he can move nor how fast nor if he can time travel to different spatial coordinates at all. This is a huge deal, because G'raha Tia Deluxe not only goes back in time, he leapfrogs from the Source to the First, and the First is at an unspecified spatial coordinates (with, apparently, a wibbly wobbly timezone flow of its own). In the bad future it doesn't even actually exist anymore, save as aetherial vestiges that have been rejoined into the Source. So by moving back in time to the First, the spatial jump took him and the Crystal Tower to the First in another, identical "time circle." Only, it was no longer identical once the tower boomtubed into being on The First.

So, basically, it was an accident that G'raha winds up in our, "time circle." The timelines were always separate.

Also, in regards to my cheekiness, I'm not living or dying by what I'm saying here. Just sharing my thoughts, and I'm trying to be lighthearted. The word deluxe comes to mind when I think of G'raha Tia because he makes us sandwiches. I often order deluxe sandwiches when I go to sandwich shops. He's a cat boy and a sage. Need I say more?

[Iscah]

Alexander takes us back to a point where he had been summoned using the Enigma Codex. Rather than materializing beside a newly summoned version of himself, he assumes the same exact spacetime as his earlier self, meaning that either time travel as Alex does it has selfsame entities replace themselves when they travel or that summoning him merely calls him to a point in time, rather than creating him out of a vast quantity of aether.

I don't think that's what happened at all. I don't think Mide ever successfully summoned Alexander three years ago.

She thinks she did it, of course - but then she also thinks her friends died because they got hit by shrapnel from the exploding codex.

They are midway through the summoning when Alexander drops out of a time portal in front of them. From the information she has at that time, Mide naturally assumes that it appeared because they summoned it, but it was only ever there because of the time travel. It appeared, stuff happened, it warped away again and Mide is left looking at an empty river.

As for the codex, we're told that the two founders of the tribe did emerge from Alexander carrying it. In fact it's specifically said that the fragment you give to Alex's coeurl just a few moments before discovering it's existence in an ancient legend is an absurd paradox. Basically, we're given every reason to believe it's the same object in a time loop, and and zero reasons to think it's some recreation at a later date.

The exact quote is that they are carrying a "small stone", and the context additionally points to this being the fragment and not the full codex. Roundrox has just given her treasured glowstone to Alexander's cat in the hope that it will reach Mide somehow - and here is the proof that she received it.

("Absurd paradox" is overstating the forcefulness of what was said, too. Wedge doesn't think it sounds possible, but that doesn't make it a paradox.)

So as I'm reading it, she carried the glowstone into the past, but created the full codex separately. So there's only physical matter looping infinitely if she re-integrates the glowstone into the newly made codex... and if she doesn't, that glowstone is still out there somewhere to be found.

May not even be her own relative. She started the clan, certainly, but within any group of people, family lines sometimes die out. [...] There may be no direct lineage between Mide of the past and Mide of the present.

Mide specifically says the author of the codex was her ancestor in 'The Folly of Youth'.

If I were to ever build a time machine, the first thing I'd do is go back in time and teach myself how to build a time machine. The fact that I have not already done so indicates to me that, sadly, I likely will never build a time machine.

(Or if I did, what the heck am I waiting for, future me??? Geez.)

Maybe waiting for you to learn advanced physics so you don't just stare at them blankly when they try to explain how it works?

I think you could have a lot of fun with a story where someone planned around stable time loops to achieve stuff. "I think I need some help with this... oh, hi Future Self, thanks for coming."

Would be a challenge to keep everything straight and you'd have to have some kind of limit on how often they can pull stunts like that, but it would be interesting.

[Jandor]

They did whack some Omega-tech in the time travelling tower, right? It wasn't purely Alex based? Or am I misremembering?