[Have one of the new transports, currently residing in the temporary housing. It looks like he already worse for the wear, with bandaids and patches of gauze up and down both arms. You see him scrutinizing a bottle labeled "Rifampin". Guess who got his follow up from the Initiative's clinic?]

Side effects may include reddening or purple colored secretions? What the hell is this stuff? Do I really have to take all of it?

Geez. [He tosses the bottle onto his cot.]

The doctors here really know how to give a guy the once over.

Anyway, it seems like a whole lot of people from a whole lot places get dragged here so I've got a question for anyone listening to this.

Do the words "Grand Line" "Red Line" or "East Blue" mean anything to any one of you? I'm looking to see if any of my Nakama are here.

And if you can't answer that one, I've got another question. Where does a guy go to get supplies around here. But not too expensive. I've gotta watch it in case our navigator's here.

[ If the Initiative ever wanted proof of how well they expanded their network's range, this would be it.

Normally Caesar isn't prone to using video, but this will be one of his few exceptions. He's sitting in a large metal chair, one with all sorts of technical whatzits and doodads that he'll never ever fully understand on his own attached. For those more future-inclined, it looks an awful lot like the captain's chair of, say, a spaceship's bridge. He waits a few beats until he's sure the tablet, either held by someone else or propped up on something across from him, is broadcasting. ]

Good evening, Exsilium.

If someone would be kind enough to go wake the Initiative up for us and let them know we have something large, space-faring, and very high up above the island right now that we'd like to bargain with them for, that would be really great.

( OOC note: Feel free to threadjack! This is totally a threadjackable post. )

[text]
Sorry for the sudden announcement but my tea house, Uji, is now up and running. Please stop by if you have the time!

I'm always looking for hired help and don't forget I have that spicy meal challenge!


[video; private to Lee Chaolan]

Lee, have you seen Margulis since we came back from the mission? He was supposed to show for my tea house's opening but I never saw him. He's not the type to flake out and he would've messaged me if he couldn't make it.

[So Sollux thought it'd be a good idea to see what Earth movies are like. And with Crank as his only basis thus far, he's 1. not impressed, and 2. confused on a few things.]

Hey.

That movie that was shown last night, used a lot of words I don't know. Human vernacular ith really stupid and weird. Tho everyone should tell me all the thwear words they know and what they mean. There were like twenty onesth I didn't know in that movie, and I thtill don't get what they meant. Thith ith for educational purposes, of course.

Seems like a lot of people want to know about time travel - which, given the objectives here, isn't all that surprising. I'm not a mathematician or a physicist - if you want the grounding in temporal mechanics, you're better off asking someone else. I am a time-traveller, though, long before I ever came here. I've timeslid enough to have lost count of the number of times. So while I can't tell you the science, I can tell you the practicalities.

People who don't deal with this sort of thing generally have one of two concepts of how time works. One is that time is perfectly linear and immutable. If you go back and time and change something, you will have always gone back in time in changed it, and therefore nothing has actually changed. It will have always already happened. The other view is that every choice splits the universe, into an infinite multitude of realities in which every choice has happened at least once.

The reality, from what I've learned of the mechanics, and what I've experienced, is somewhere inbetween. What the Initiative seeks to do - it's entirely possible, given the right skills. There are nexus points in time, moments that are important whether or not they seem so at the time. History hinges on those moments, and so does the timestream. If a moment is uncertain enough, two different futures will exist for the same timeline simultaneously - call it timeline 1, futures a and b. 1a and 1b will exist in phase until the nexus point snaps into certainty, at which point one will become the future of timeline 1, and the other will become a different reality, timeline 2. Or something else happens entirely, if things are uncertain enough, and both futures break off into timelines 2 and 3, and something else becomes the future of timeline 1.

I don't know anyone who's actually tried to carry out the grandfather paradox, though I assume if you did, you'd strand yourself in a timeline that was no longer your 'native' one - your reality would continue on without you while you're stuck in the other one.

And, I suppose, the one piece of advice I can give - if all of this seems overwhelming, it's simplest to think of things in terms of your own personal timeline, the chronology you've experienced. Which may be out of order with what people around you experience, but it's easier to keep straight that way. And even if you experienced things in a timeline that later - from your point of view - was broken off and orphaned, that doesn't make those experiences any less real.

[Aaaand now you are free to ask questions, even if he forgot to actually invite them. He's not really a teacher, okay]