Okay Proj. Here's something you could give me some advice on. I've been unable to sleep all night and eventually I got jotting and I've got a little piece of back and forth that's mainly just monologue, but it's the wedge that's supposed to explain the time travel element in a story. Give me some criticism. Edit it. I was going to post it up as a thread of its own, but it's really too short for that.
Anyway, the setup. Jack is a post-modern saboteur who's fairly green talking to his handler. In the present, Bugsy Siegel's secret vault has been discovered in the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas, and as a big television event, this douchebag television personality who's sort of a mix of Ryan Seacrest and Geraldo Riviera is going to open it up and see what's inside, on national television! *gasp* And upstairs, a big obnoxious MTV-style party. The thing is, there's nothing in the vault. Bugsy was broke. He pumped all of his money as well as huge sums of money from other investors, into what seemed like a sinking ship. And then he was shot in the head for it at his girlfriend's house, and some of the bullets ended up shattering a Bacchus statue. And then the casino went to make countless dollars. The casino changed ownership before Bugsy's actual murder and underwent renovations. So the main line is, Jack goes back in time, steals the statue before the murder and then plants it in the vault shortly before the renovations start which cover up the vault (and therefore before Bugsy's murder). And this is the handler explaining it to Jack (leaving out a few fine details).
"Time travel's a funny thing, Jack.
You've created a hypothetical reality.
And sure, there's.... Well, countless, Jack, infinite variations of these.
I mean, there's the West. And then there's the Wild West. and the Wild, Wild West. The Spaghetti West. The Paperback West. The Brokeback West. The True Grit West. There's probably a few Vampire Wests floating around. There's Vampire Everythings floating around.
There's men in caps and men in space and men in gnawing gnostic cages.
But that's beside the point. Those hypotheticals are chained to different orbits. Too large, too divergent. Mostly...
The point, is the presence of sentient life at a place where it is not intended to be creates a suggestion that must be tested. Since the divergence is witnessed by sentient life, it must be; at first a pebble caught in our metaphysical orbit, the divergences in timelines minor on a global scale, but as you start to...."
"Biff it up?"
"Hm? Sure, sure. As you start to monkey with the timeliness, the divergences grow and the new time line is big as a baseball then a watermelon then a moon, and suddenly these timelines are tangoing neck to neck the same way a meteor tangos with a planet."
"Sounds apocalyptic."
"No. Reality's good at mending itself. When they merge back together, they'll find a comfortable median of the deviations..."
"Mostly."
"Mostly. Some moments have more gravity than others. The truly mythic ones--"
"Hitler murdered! Dinosaurs saved from extinction! Bruce Lee hired as Kwai Chang Caine!"
"Yes...... They'll find a way to reconcile. But there will be jagged edges. Ghost stories. Things generally not fitting together the way they should, as reality insures that the myth is properly fulfilled. Reality will rebend itself, if required."
"And those little shreds of orbiting hypothetical come plummeting down"
"Like shrapnel from heaven."
Anyway, the idea is that the legend of Bugsy Siegel that cannot be altered is that nine shots ripped through Bugsy's body while he sat in Virginia Hill's home, and four of those bullets shattered the marble Bacchus statue that set atop her piano. But the Bacchus statue wasn't there because of Jack. So, the four bullets that should have shattered the statue have been waiting in limbo, waiting for a witness to step in front of the statue and finish the circuit. So our douchebag reporter opens up the vault and finishes the sequence. Four bullets from nowhere in time, hammering through him and busting their way right through the statue, finishing the circuit, fixing the legend. Ninja time travel assassination, *****es.
Does that make any sense?
