7148/Time Magic is Big Magic

Time Magic is Big Magic
Date of Scene:	31 July 2021
Location:	Carter-Sousa Home - Long Island
Synopsis:	Lily and Abcde come up with a plan to save Daniel from a fate as mundane as pre-existing death.
Cast of Characters:	Abcde Prescelta, Melinda May

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Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    What a weird day. Abcde had spent much of it in her apartment in Queens reading books. It was the strange but beautiful song that came from somewhere in New York that made her wander out to her balcony and enjoy the clear blue skies and beautiful weather.

    Today was the day she was to meet this 'Lily' person, someone who might be able to fill in the missing gaps needed to keep Daniel here in the 21st century. Her backpack was full of books and she was flying there by broom. It wasn't the longest of trips by the crow flies.

    By the time she got there it was dark. Landing in the backyard of the Carter-Sousa home, she props her broom up against the wall and then knocks on the patio doors which lead to the kitchen, "Hello, is anybody home?" Of course, the only person home is Lily who looks exactly like May. "Melinda!," she exclaims with delight, "Is the dagger still working for you?"

Melinda May has posed:
Lily turns as she hears the knock on the glass. Her head cants some at the query about the dagger, though the fact the young woman beyond the glass prefaced it with Melinda's name is telling enough. "You must be Abcde." She chuckles softly as she pulls the screen open to let her in. "I'm Lily Chen. Melinda is my... twin, after a fashion."

She steps back and gestures lightly toward the kitchen. "Come in, please. I've set the kettle on, if you care for a cup of tea. We can sit on the deck, if you'd like, though it's less buggy inside." She doesn't particularly care for mosquitoes, for some reason.

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde's look of confusion is just what Lily has come to expect and then there's a nod, "Lily." Her smile blossoms again and she offers a hand, "That's right. Abcde." The backpack filled with books is taken off and put in the corner.

    "Oh inside definitely. Mosquito's love me too much," she says with bad memories of too many bug bites. "I'd love some tea thank you." She adds and peers at Lily for a moment long. Identical twins definitely. Though now that Lily is talking and moving in front of her she can see they're not the same person. She doubts even May could pull off this level of acting.

    "I admit Daniel didn't really explain much except that I needed to meet you. So, I'm all kinds of curious," she says. Her Appalachian accent is quite telling. West Virginia born and raised. That good ol' country gal vibe is strong with this one. Except that she's wearing a wand on her hip like some sort of magical cowgirl.

Melinda May has posed:
May carries considerably more anger and grief with her than Lily does, who has been forced to become somewhat more philosophical about such things over the 80 or so years she's been alive. But, no. She really can't pull off the same level of relaxed confidence Lily exudes. It's the smile, really. May's smile hasn't been so ready or free since before Bahrain. And, while Lily carries those memories and that pain, she has also realized over the years it's not her burden to bear.

That's remarkably freeing.

She moves to the counter to place tea strainers in two mugs, now that she knows for sure the witch will drink with her. "Did Melinda or Peggy ever tell you how Melinda went back in time to the late forties?" she asks as she prepares the tea. "Technically, it's highly classified, but it will be helpful to the purposes of our discussion, this evening."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde takes a seat at the kitchen table and then shakes her head. "No. I knew there was something time related that had happened to them before, but what it was exactly they didn't go into any details with. Highly classified and all that," she echos with a grin.

    "And given I might actually end up joining their spy club to help from time to time, I reckon I should play by the rules. But if you think it's pertinent let's have it. What happened?" unzips her jacket but doesn't take it off. Flying high can get hot and cold fast. There's no shade and the night air gets cooler up higher. She has to rug up for evening trips like this one was.

Melinda May has posed:
Lily chuckles again, turning to the stove as the kettle begins to whistle. "You should play by their rules," she agrees. "But, in this case, we'll consider you need-to-know." She pours the water over the leaves and brings the cups over to the table, where she sets one before Abcde and the other at a chair nearby. "Do you take milk or sugar? I suspect I can find them somewhere..."

If she needs to, she will. Otherwise, she settles into the chair beside Abcde and continues. "The short version of the story is that when Melinda returned to the present, HYDRA attacked both sides of the temporal bridge. She returned to 2021. I appeared in 1949. Since then I've made it my business to understand how temporal phenomena and chronal energies work. Daniel mentioned you were instrumental in his arrival here. Hence, I'm hoping to learn what you know about what happened -- and how it happened. If anything."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    "Oh heck no, no sugar or milk thank you." Abcde laughs a moment. The young witch likes real tea. She sniffs the air and says, "Smells delightful." Then it's story time and she listens. When Lily gets to the part about her appearing in 1949 as May returned to 2021 she looks somewhat startled or perhaps fascinated.

    "Wow. That's a spin I hadn't heard of before. Okay. Well it's not too much of a tail to be honest. I was antique shopping for my apartment when I felt a strange draw to a mirror. Horrible thing, the frame is covered in faces posed in positions of agony. Very weird."

    She frowns, "Then it spoke to me. The mirror, it wouldn't let me go and started to show me these two men. One from ye olde times and one from even more ye olde times. Daniel and Arturo. It showed me how they die.. over and over and over 'til I couldn't take it anymore."

    She rests her elbows on the table and says, "So I begged the mirror to make it stop. It was at that point I realised just how monumentally I'd messed up. The damned thing said 'Your wish is granted'. The mirror exploded, cutting me all over with them shards," she gestures over her arms and face.

    "The mirror drew in the blood to fuel its magic. Really, it just wanted an excuse you see. The mirror was acting as a prison for a djinn. It had previously blood bonded with both Arturo and Daniel. I don't know why.. but it used the magic to bring them both to the present day."

Melinda May has posed:
Lily listens quietly to the girl's tale, letting her tea steep as she does. "Assume I know nothing about magic," she tells Abcde as she finishes. "Djinn is another name for 'genie', right? I'm assuming that's why it needed to grant a wish? How does the blood bonding work?"

She gives a wry smile now and leans back in her chair, amusement in her warm brown eyes. "Sorry. I may be moving too fast. I was around in '56 when Daniel died. I know the grief Peggy went through. I hated not being able to do anything to fix it." The amusement has faded to a more sober tone. It really is something she regrets.

"I'm old enough and wise enough now to know that I can't change the past and expect the future to remain intact. However, the fact Daniel is here suggests there's a paradox at work and either he's going to end up snapping back to where he came from, only to end up dead in a swimming pool, or the timeline is going to magically repair itself despite his removal from it." It's clear she doesn't consider the latter terribly likely.

"As I said, I really don't know anything about magic. I have a few hazy memories left over from Melinda concerning some old WAND cases she bumped into, but not enough to consider myself educated by any means. My goal is to determine if or how Daniel and Arturo are linked and just what impact that's having on the timeline. To do that, though, I think I need to understand the magic that caused all this. It's strong enough, alien enough, that my native chronal abilities haven't been able to pierce that moment. I can't get close enough to Daniel in '56 to know what actually happened."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    There's a quick nod, "Yes. Genie. Heh. I guess at some point someone who didn't actually know much about djinn heard the word and wrote it down wrong. Now we have 'good' genies in cartoons. I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a good djinn. As far as I understand it, they were once sorcerers who grew so powerful and so strong that the people had no choice but to trap them in inanimate objects to keep them from doing harm."

    "Something went wrong with that mirror though. It was able to interact with the world in minor ways. Blood bonding. It's a practice of linking your magic to a particular vitae. Don't ask me to explain it scientifically, but once bound only the binding agent can erase the connection."

    She waggles a hand, "Which does bring us to the problem of Daniel and Arturo. There is a connection between them I don't understand. But if you imagine for a moment two particulars orbiting a piece of string, connected by string. Every time they wrap around the string, they are tightening a knot on it until eventually the knot locks in place."

    There's a small frown, "I didn't want to panic anyone, but I think that's what's happening with these two. HYDRA got their hands on the mirror frame before us and the next time we saw it they were trying to use it to open up a gateway through time. Instead, they were squeezing the string.. the timeline, such that the day never progressed. We were trapped in a loop. Thankfully we figured it out and stopped them. I now have the mirror frame. It still has traces of chronomagical echos on it."

    "I'm afraid that if we don't find an answer, a way to cut the bond between them, that the timeline is doomed to stop... just like that. And no one will be able to unstick it. Our version of reality? it'll be gone, over, done. No more future."

Melinda May has posed:
The look on Lily's face suggests she's unsurprised by that piece of information. "I suspected that." Then, she snirks. "I remember the day of the timeloop. God, that was annoying." Yes, one might expect a temporal construct to be aware of timeloops when they happen to her. "It was enough to convince me that HYDRA was involved somehow with the whole thing. Again, though, I couldn't get close enough during the loop to actually see what was going on." Hence her annoyance. She doesn't much like magic -- though that's likely only because she doesn't understand it. Yet.

"We'd already speculated they were linked. My experience suggested as much. Both Peggy and Daniel are adamant that he mustn't return to the past to die. I understand their reaction. Part of me shares it." She smiles over the rim of her cup. "They're my family. I have no intention of letting Daniel die, if I can avoid it. But I also know *someone* or *something* is going to have to take his place convincingly enough that it doesn't disrupt the timeline."

She sets her cup down and gestures lightly, visually describing her words with her hands. "For the most part, I've learned time can handle little bumps along the way. It's like a stream, that way. Toss a few pebbles in, it ripples and rights itself, continuing merrily long. Throw a big enough boulder in, though, or dam it up, and you completely reroute the flow. Those sorts of events -- nexus events -- can make or break realities. I suspect the deaths of two of the founding heads of HYDRA and SHIELD qualify as potential nexus events, regardless of when in history they occur."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde hmms, "I'm not so sure about calling them a nexus event. I'm no expert on time, but that djinn sure was. Even a djinn cannot bend time to its whim with magic along. There are rules.. and I think that's why he took them right before they died."

    She reaches over to her bag and opens it up, taking out a notebook. "Time will catch up to us one way or another. Probably at some sort of time event horizon related to the two of them. But I've been speculating on what might have happened with their disappearances."

    She flicks to a page with divergent lines off of a timeline marked for Daniel's dead and Arturo's death. "Arturo was assassinated by his fellow HYDRA leader out of jealousy and spite. As far as the assassins are concerned he disappeared and was never heard from again. Job done yes?"

    She taps on Daniel's point of supposed death, "And here. Daniel is off doing a secret mission and he disappears. The 'drop' was completely but he never reported back in. Just gone. People would have searched for him. That's a bigger ripple than Arturo, but eventually he'd have been declared missing in action presumed dead."

    "So," she tilts her head, "If we believe the djinn had to balance his magic out in some way. Well, that sort of means something about Daniel and something about Arturo balance things out. One is SHIELD, the other is HYDRA. May be that's all it took. I don't know. Time magic is BIG magic, with a doubly sized capital B."

Melinda May has posed:
Lily shake her head. "No, Daniel was found floating face down in a pool. Cause of death was gunshot. There was an autopsy and a funeral. It damned near killed me." She rubs a spot between her eyes as she says that -- the same spot May often rubs when her empathic feedback is difficult to bear. There's likely a reason for that. "Secret mission, yes. He was handing off a piece of Starktech to a contact, which fortunately he was able to do before he was taken out. We're pretty sure -- we *were* pretty sure it was Leviathan rather than HYDRA, though, that actually killed him. Leviathan were just starting to become serious pains in our asses then."

Still, her expression clears quickly, based little more on a memory. "But, I'll buy that they represent a balance -- HYDRA/SHIELD. And I'll buy that they're linked. We've already speculated that what happens to one necessarily must happen to the other, from a macro perspective. What I really want to know is: Is it possible to sever that link between them? And if so... what's the impact? How can it be done without putting all of our current reality at risk? I have no problem sending Arturo back to die. I have a very big problem with sending Daniel back."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde turns over several pages to a drawing of the mirror frame. "Okay. I believe you.. I know you lived through it and it must have been very hard." She frowns a moment, "But I do have a theory. Unfortunately, not one I currently know how to test."

    "Consider the guillotine," she says and motions to the mirror. "This broken mirror frame is somewhat like that, except it cuts through time instead of space like a regular French Revolutionary one."

    "I propose that it would be possible to cut the tether between Daniel and Arturo using this mirror by having Daniel pass through it when it is powered up. There's a few problems with this though. First, if we cut the connection between the two of them, one will be time relative - Daniel, the other.. well.. I'm not exactly sure. They will have a velocity through time that is abnormal but also..."

    She scrunches up her nose and turns the page to a bunch of fancy looking mathematics and strange occult symbols, "There's two other dimensions in the calculations that exist. Two. They're vectors. Arturo won't just fly off through time, he'll fly off through... whatever these are." She taps her fingers on vG and vH.

    "I could guess. Alternate realities? but that's the biggest arsiest guess I'd have ever made in my life. Whatever it is, it won't be good for Arturo and may not be good for everyone else too."

    "And the second problem is the mirror frame.." She sighs, "Whatever HYDRA did to it they drained away almost all of its temporal magic energy. As I said, Time Magic is BIG magic. I don't have that kind of temporal juice just laying about. No body does. Short of making a wish with the djinn, I don't know anyone who can pull off a good enough Dr. Who impression to power it while I do the ritual to several the connection."

Melinda May has posed:
"Dr. Who impression, huh?" Lily says, a wry smile touching her lips as she does. She glances down at her tea for a moment before taking a sip and eying the girl. "Tell me what you mean. I'm assuming you need chronal energies. Setting aside the djinn, tell me how it works."

She's always found Dr. Who to be highly amusing, for some reason. And, maybe a little poignant, too. Certainly, the irony isn't lost on her.

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde checks the temperature of the tea. Satisfied she takes a sip and then lifts up a finger. "One moment please." She bends over and pulls out a big thick leather tome from her bag and dumps it on to the table top with a thud. A silk book mark is keep track of a page and she opens to it.

    The title says 'Tunc Magica' - "Time is a really tricky concept and the scant few experiences of it doing weird things I've had humbles me by how little I know. So I've been doing some reading to try and fill in some of those gaps. There are too many gaps though..."

    "Time is a matter of perception. Heck Einstein even figured that part out. It's relative he says. But the stuff between moments that glue it all together.. that is called Chromasisata. Well, in this book anyway. With enough of the stuff you can cut and paste time, reorder things from one perspective while maintaining other perspectives. A way to cheat."

    She turns a few pages to a picture of an old wizzened man, "This guy, Giorgio fooled a kind by making gold from nothing. What he really did was pull it out of the future. He made a paradox, a timeloop. The gold he pulled from the future was gifted to him by the king from the gold he.. pulled from the future."

    "Says he died of 'time related incidents' but doesn't specify the how or why of it. Probably too horrific to put down in words," she says with a small little smirk. "What's perculiar is the way he got the stuff - not the gold, the chronal energies. He stole it from between his own breaths. Wild, aged himself by erasing parts of his own existence. Tiny little parts, parts you normally don't pay much attention to.. til they all add up of course. He died aged 27 but he looked over a hundred."

Melinda May has posed:
Lily nods slowly as Abcde speaks, following what she's talking about more easily than the witch might expect, though her terminology differs. "That makes it sound like it boils down to a life for a life, in the grand scheme of things," she notes. She sips her tea slowly, considering it all. "Except he wouldn't necessarily have suffered the same fate if he'd pulled it from across different timelines -- even if he was always only ever pulling from variants of himself."

She rises and moves to the counter to pick up a tea spoon and small juice glass left out from earlier. Bringing them over, she smiles. "A small amount from one cup, you're not going to miss," she says, dipping the clean spoon into Abcde's cup of tea and spilling it into the juice glass. "Nor will I." She pulls some from her own cup. "Do that with enough others, clear across the spectrum, and no one will be harmed, pulling the same level of energy. Or more, if needed."

Then, that amused smile returns, albeit with a thoughtful overlay in her dark eyes. "Alternatively, you'd need someone who can generate a sizable amount of chronal energy, say through a transpatial temporal shift." A time teleporter, in other words. "Hence... Dr. Who." She nods to that. "I think we can make that work. But I'd need to know how you intend to harness it."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde looks somewhat perplexed for a moment and then simply nods, "You know stuff about time then." She smiles, "I'm guessing a lot more than me... but this is what the djinn was doing. He has been stealing the ends of peoples lives for who knows how long. I can only guess at the motives, perhaps it's some weird ploy to achieve eventual freedom. The energy needed to undo what was done is spent. We need another source."

    She raises her eyebrows again, "You have a source??" Excited, she turns a few more pages and there's a drawing of a string wrapped around another string from Arturo to Daniel and then the string continues to wrap tighter and tighter in to the future. There's some failed attempts at mathematics to calculate how long they have left. How long is a piece of string?

    "Channel it in to the mirror to power it up so that it can cut the connection between Daniel and Arturo. Filling in the stolen moments? I don't have an answer for that ...yet, but I figure one step at a time. Save Daniel and save the future first."

    She flicks forward another page to a strange arcane looking diagram. "This is a spell to make bonds between people visible. One of the bonds from Daniel will go off to Arturo. We can then cut it by having Daniel walk through the mirror with that one bond and then we shut it off. Snap, away Arturo goes in to realities unknown. Happy happy times for Daniel and Peggy."

Melinda May has posed:
"I have a *potential* source," Lily stresses. "It really depends on the amount of energy. If the man in your story needed 100 years worth of energy, that's quite a bit. If the djinn spent hundreds of years stealing that energy, that doesn't actually help me quantify it, since I don't know how much energy he stole, nor from how many people or how frequently. Either way, I don't think one Shunt will do it." The capital on the word 'Shunt' is audible. It's obviously a term, in her world.

She settles back in her chair and drums her fingers lightly on the table, clearly in thought. "And I can't say I'd be happy sending Arturo spinning off into god knows where. He needs to be taken out of the equation entirely. Regardless, it still leaves us with the original problem of needing a body of some sort to pass muster at a SHIELD autopsy and funeral." Her head cants faintly. "Also... not so random question: If one dies in the here and now, what happens to the other while the link is in place?"

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    "I mean. I could make up a number for you if that'd help. 1.21 jiggawatts should do the trick," she says nerdily and grins. "I don't know. It's not something I've ever done. A djinn is a much more magical creature than humans though. It could have been pulling this time trick a lot. Heck, it might have been doing it to alter the future to set up things for itself."

    She glances conspiratorially, "I've had time to think on this too much." She takes another sip of the tea and lets out a small sigh, "I suppose it'd be about the equivalent of actually sending a body back to pretend to be Daniel. And heck I'm not even suggesting that kind of time travel. That'd be a huge undertaking."

    "Though I suppose if we had the combined energy of both Daniel and Arturo twice over, we could .. shunt, I was going to use the word shunt but you just used it for something else. Nudge. Nudge the timeline over so that what was meant to happen happens and the origin of both Daniel and Arturo don't technically exist anymore. They'd be time orphaned. Or, like you just said. Variants."

    The question of death and she lowers her gaze a moment, "Hm. Good question. One of three things. The ideal outcome - the bond would be broken. The less ideal outcome - the bond remains connected to a corpse. The extremely bad outcome - the death of one seeps in to the other, necrotic energies rot the other person from the inside out until they are nothing more than a barely living husk." Abcde is all kinds of cheerful when discussing magic.

Melinda May has posed:
Variants, Lily knows instinctively, are dangerous. So, the concern settles in her eyes and across her jaw as Abcde speaks. "When I say 'Shunt', I'm specifically referring to teleporting through time and space a great distance, either through space or through time. Or, possibly, both." She glances toward the window, where a few stars can be seen twinkling in the night sky. Precious few, but there nonetheless. "I *can*, for instance, go from here and now to 1956 in Los Angeles. But if I do, it'll take me a day or two to really recover. That's a Shunt. A Skip happens when I simply span a few seconds. Maybe a handful of minutes. Nothing too far in either time or space. I just kind of... skip from one moment to the next, instead of jumping tracks entirely."

Which, of course, tips the witch off to some of Lily's more esoteric abilities.

"Regardless, it sounds like our first priority needs to be severing the link between Daniel and Arturo. No matter where he gets flung to, he *can* be tracked. There are ways and we can hunt him down, if we need to. The second will be figuring out a way to keep a paradox from occuring." A beat. Her head cants. "Is there a way to create a simulacrum of some sort that could last long enough to get through the funeral? Some sort of physical illusion?" She's just spitballing, now. "An inert clone could work, but getting one of those would quite definitely require both a Shunt and more creds than I think I could come up with on short notice."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde tilts her head for a moment as she considers what Lily is telling her. She can travel through time. And space. She blinks a few times in rapid succession, "Wait are you _actually_ Dr Who?" It's like her brain has been hit with a brick, it's all she can think about for the moment.

    "Da.. ahhh," she says trying to get her brain back in to gear, "I could give you a way to contact my coven back in 1956. They could help you conjure a convincing fake Daniel for the funeral. Short of me going back there with you to do it, my grand aunties would be a good bet. If you can convince them you're in genuine need."

Melinda May has posed:
"I suppose it depends on how they define 'need'," Lily says. But she's not saying no to the idea of enlisting the elder witches' help. No idea is currently off the table.

Even so, she chuckles. "Thirteenth Doctor aside, do I look like Dr. Who?" It's a good natured question. She doesn't have the same sharp edge May would have giving the same retort. "No. I'm... a temporal anomaly, for lack of a better, more humanizing term. It has some advantages." She smiles wryly, perhaps a trifle ruefully. "Great health and dental, mostly." Which translates into the fact she doesn't age and she heals really damned fast when she needs to. "And really flexible control over my timesheet." Yeah. There's a lame attempt at a joke in there somewhere.

Regardless, her smile eventually fades back into that more thoughtful look. "I suppose we have our next steps, regardless. We need to look at your string cutting ritual and see what we need to make it work. It seems our best option."

Abcde Prescelta has posed:
    Abcde chuckles at the terrible jokes and sips the tea. "I'll bring the mirror frame here. We can set up in their basement." She hmms thoughtfully and says, "If you can time travel, then we can siphon that energy in to the mirror. You jump through time and if we've balanced it out properly you won't go anywhere and the mirror will charge up. I'll.. bring supplies."

    "Do you think they'll be happy? that we have a plan? may be we shouldn't mention all the bits of it we don't quite know yet. May be they won't ask pertinent questions." She writes down 'jumper cables' on a new page and 'calavan bowl' underneath it followed by 'oxidising agent'.

Melinda May has posed:
Lily chuckles dryly. "They'll ask," she says, certainty in her tone. "If the plan has holes, they'll ask." She knows her family well. "But yes, they'll be happy we've got some place to start." She flashes a light grin. "Word of advice, probie," for all that Abcde may not officially be a probie just yet. She did say she was going to join the agency. That's close enough. "Don't try to pull the wool over your S.O.'s eyes. They always figure out the truth. Always."

In any case, she knows, despite its holes, despite its flaws, it's the best plan they've got. And she knows Peggy and Daniel will recognize that. They'll fuss, when they figure out Lily intends to be the battery they need to power this... spell. And she'll tell them to can it and get down to business. That's just how they roll.

"It's a Swiss cheese plan, and its risky as hell. So, what else is new? But it's the best we've got. So, we go with it."