The BLTS Archive - The Sea of Time by Apocalypse (beth.tereno@gmail.com) --- Disclaimer: These people don't belong to me, although I'm not convinced TPTB know at all what to do with them. A/N: This was written kind of at random as a gift for Xandri. --- He sails the sea of time in a skiff made of science. He doesn't pretend to understand the inner workings of the devices he uses to ride the temporal currents. He moves from then to then, occasionally buffeted by the winds of chance but for the most part in complete control of destination. He fights a war through time, sending spinning paths and different futures off in multiple directions with every tiny alteration. He crushes ants that shouldn't be crushed beneath his booted feet to watch the ripples of temporal distortion in the waters of fate. He is not alone. There is another sailor on the seas. Adversaries. Opposites. Fighting back and forth, almost like a game of chess with real people for the knights and pawns. And real ships for the rooks. He's not sure it's actually possible to win. For every timeline his opposite number "restores" or "corrects" he can spin off a thousand more, realities crashing against each other like waves breaking against the craggy shores of consciousness. Meanwhile, his opposite must constantly guard his steps to keep from spinning off more new realities of his own. But he does pretty well. Because most of the realities aren't self-supporting. Their frames of inherent logic can collapse easily back into the centered, source reality from which both he and his adversary originate ... or conjoin with other spinning alternate universes amidst the multidimensional currents of time, running together and becoming identical. A day is difficult to define in this line of work. When a fixed number of subjective hours have passed, he hops a time current back to his own century. He changes out of his uniform into comfortable civvies, loose black trousers and a shirt of deep purple silk to complement his mottled bronze-green complexion, and beams himself home. The guards all down, his ship of time put away for the evening, he can finally relax. He ducks into the bedroom, a smile turning up the corners of his mouth at the sight that greets him there. His erstwhile adversary, lounging on the bed. "Welcome home, Silik," Daniels murmurs. --- END