The Week in Stories: Strange Attractors

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Episode 5: "Forking Paths"

Don't drink the frog juice! Or do, I'm not your mother.

Yes, I missed Episode 4. I tried to sit down and write it, but it was a hell of a summer, and by the time I sat down to take a crack, I'd forgotten half of the session. Highlights: Gerald was erased from most people's memories, and took a trip to Libertalia, met an older Peter-turned-pirate, and drank some golden frog juice that took him on a trip to alternate timelines. And when threatened with "recalibration" by TimeWatch, Jack and Peter said "fuck no" and took off, pursued by Millie.

(Below is likely all out of order, as we kept skipping from story to story, and I know I've combined some scenes.)

The episode opened with Walter walking through Greenwich Village in the middle of the day, and, apparently on a whim, entering a gay bar. It was quiet, but when he approached the bartender, the man told him that the person he was meeting was already over in one of the booths. This surprised Walter, as he had never been in this bar before.

Waiting for him in the booth was Robert Heinlein, with two glasses of whatever Walter had been about to order sitting in front of him. Heinlein observed that when he'd joined up, a place like this would have been seen as a security risk. But now it was the safest place to meet up. Heinlein disclosed some doubts about what the Admonitories overseeing TimeWatch from the future wanted.

Walter tried to pump Heinlein for information about his parents and what had happened to his father, Heinrich. Heinlein admitted that he'd been the one who reported Heinrich, and pulled out a few photos of Walter meeting with Heinrich in 1943. Couldn't Walter have at least cut his hair when he went back to meet with his father? At the time, Heinlein had only seen a man with bushy hair and long sideburns, and assumed he was a Communist agent, and that Heinrich had been compromised.

Heinlein also dropped some hints that might seem to suggest that Heinrich was hard at work on Project Rainbow around the time Walter was supposed to have been conceived, and Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard were around his mother an awful lot more....

Heinlein and his wife recalibrating something, I figure

In the meantime, they needed to discuss the fact that TimeWatch wanted to recalibrate Walter, and we got a little more detail as to what that means. When paradox mounted up too far, TimeWatch would go back to a version of Walter from this time period, and use that to replace the present Walter. The question was whether or not the deletion of the present Walter was incidental, due to changing the timeline, or active. Like, murder.

(I am sort of terrified by how much this would not bother Millie. Doesn't say good things for her emotional state, if having her present self and part of her memories deleted doesn't sound like the worst idea in the world.)

At any rate, Heinlein proposed that they could either pretend to have recalibrated Walter, or actually create the alternate Walter and have two Walters running around time. Walter seemed to prefer the first option, and they continued planning. Heinlein thought he could send Walter to the Royal timeline, to track down this Gerald person that Heinlein had no memory of.

Meanwhile, we moved to where Jack, Peter, and Millie had jumped. It was Chiba City, 2052, and the world around the three looked like a cross between Neuromancer and Blade Runner. Small stalls, people cooking their own circuit boards, bad smells, and a giant billboard with L. Ron Hubbard/The Comte de St. Germain on it advertising emigration via "Clear."  Just about the first thing Jack noticed was a RazorGirl on a motorcycle. And just about that time, the RazorGirl noticed him, too.

Jack dashed through the stalls, trying to get away, only to find another RazorGirl waiting for him. As he looked for a way out, a small bubble car pulled up beside him, and a man leaned out and told Jack to jump in. Jack took the driver's side, and found that the controls were similar to an NES. The man urged him to drive them away, pronto. Jack realized that the man was an older version of himself, dressed pretty much exactly the same.

Meanwhile, the first RazorGirl came right at Peter and Millie with her motorbike. Peter managed to catch her in the stomach with his fist, while Millie grabbed a piece of metal and stuck it in the spokes of the front wheel, sending the woman and her bike flying. Jack finally got the basic hang of the car, and backed it up to where Millie and Peter were, urging them to get in. There really wasn't enough room, but they all got very snug.

However, Jack didn't manage to find the forward button, and they continued to rocket backwards through the market, mowing down stalls as they went. Eventually, he got control, found forward, and off they went.

We then jumped to where Gerald was, in Egypt in the shadow of the Sphinx. A huge zeppelin with the Union Jack on its side darkened the sky above him. This all looked remarkably like his own lost timeline (codename: Royal). He stumbled into the city, finding a hotel and entering. A dog ran up to him, ecstatic. It was his old dog, Balthazar. Suddenly, he remembered this day. It was the day he'd met his older self, and his older self had stolen his time machine and his dog!

And at that moment, his younger self came around the corner, and the dog went back and forth in an ecstasy of delight and confusion. After recognizing what was happening, the older Gerald began to exhort the younger Gerald to give up time travel altogether, saying it was far too dangerous. The younger Gerald agreed, saying that it needed to be kept in the strict control of the British Empire, and that he'd already started an organization of trustworthy blokes to control it: TimeWatch.

Gerald shouted at his younger self not to be a fool. He had no idea the lizard people he was risking letting lose on the world! His younger self stared at him, evidently convinced his older self had lost it. That was not helped as Gerald tried to tell younger self about his golden frog juice experiences.

Younger Gerald suggested that Gerald make the timeline-hopping changes to his time machine, then go home to Britain for a long rest cure, leaving the multiverse in the capable hands of good, solid Brits. Gerald was furious at the obtuseness of his younger self, and abruptly knocked himself out. He called Balthazar and headed for the time machine.

Meanwhile, back in Chiba City, the group had pulled up to a houseboat in the harbour. The air was rank and the water sullied by cadmium slicks. Jack went down into the houseboat with his younger self, while Millie and Peter stayed abovedecks. Downstairs, older Jack tried to talk to Jack about the choices he was going to make, and that he remembered this meeting.

Abovedecks, Millie wanted to know what Peter was going to do now, her hand hovering near her lasergun. He said that he didn't know, but he wasn't up for "recalibration," whatever that was. Millie asked him why not, wondering why he didn't trust TimeWatch. Why would he?, Peter retorted. No one knew why they were doing what they were doing. Making history a better place, Millie asserted.

Peter tried to shake Millie's blind (and somewhat unreasonable) faith in TimeWatch, but she dug in her heels. He said that TimeWatch must have promised her something pretty good, to get this kind of loyalty. Or to her brother. Millie was struck speechless as the memory of the first time she'd lost Miles in a murder-suicide hit her again, and the knowledge that she had found a new version of Miles, but couldn't risk talking to him. When she found her voice, she said that she hadn't gotten anything from TimeWatch. That was why she trusted them - they hadn't promised her anything good, or given her any false promises. They'd asked her to do things that hurt, and not sugarcoated them.

She accused Peter of only looking out for himself, and Peter seemed nonplussed that she thought there was another way that made any sense. He wasn't out to hurt people, but you had to look out for yourself at the end of the day. Millie disagreed. Peter promised not to mention her brother to anyone, and Millie hesitated before demanding Peter's autochron. He could do whatever he wanted to himself in 2052, but she wasn't going to let him run amok through history. He gave it to her without hesitation (but the audience could see that he gave her a fake and kept the real one.)

Just then, an expensive yacht pulled up through the nasty waters of the harbour, another older Jack on the prow, dressed much more slickly and surrounded by armed RazorGirls. He shouted for Jack and Jack to come out. Downstairs, older grubby Jack pulled out a gun and said that he'd intended to shoot younger Jack, but he remembered this meeting, and wasn't able to make himself do it. Younger Jack went above decks, and a couple of the RazorGirls hauled older grubby Jack away. Older slick Jack greeted his younger self, saying this was the world they'd built, and that it was all Peter's plan, the long con. Older Jack pointed at the poster of L. Ron Hubbard/Comte de St. Germain, saying it was all about power.

Younger Jack talked to his older slick self, and older slick Jack kept showing off his lifestyle, inviting younger Jack to join him. Jack demurred, and that's when older slick Jack also pulled out a gun and said that he didn't remember this meeting, so he was free to kill younger Jack without affecting this timeline they'd created.

Millie, having been stewing about her argument with Peter and her own need to believe she was doing the right thing, grabbed Peter's arm, saying that if he didn't believe TimeWatch was doing everything for a reason, she'd show him. They'd go to the far future and see what the future the Admonitories was building was. She invited Jack to come along, and he agreed quickly, not really wanting to get shot. They jumped away....

The Week in Stories: Strange Attractors

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Episode 3: "Nulla Mundo Fides" 

The evening opened with a flashback to Peter playing hooky from school as a 12-year-old on Coney Island. On a beautiful September day, he watched a grifter play three-card monte, then stepped up to try his luck, finding the red queen twice in a row. The conman invited him to play again, but Peter said he could keep the money if he showed his moves. Thus started a wonderful day (from Peter's perspective) of learning to con people, being shown different ways of drawing in a mark, and separating them from their money.

At the end of the day, the grifter told Peter that when the young man got home, he was going to get some bad news. But his dad would be okay for a while - just long enough to rack up hospital bills. And that Peter should remember, when his father died, and his mother had to sell the house to deal with the debt, that that was what happened when you played by the rules. Peter was shocked, and then realized that the man never had paid him the money he'd said he was going to.

Back in 1976, it was the day of the bicentennial, a hot and hazy July 4th. Millie asked Peter to help her find someone in the Bronx, and after some hilarity about phone books, which Peter described as a kind of computer, which led her to asking Jack for help with the phone book, and also having some problem with two-dimensional maps, they came up with an address.

The Count - also the grifter from the flashback

Meanwhile, Gerald, Jack, and Walter were questioning the Comte de St. Germain, whom they found not in a cell but in a hot tub, surrounded by other giggling TimeWatch employees. After dropping some hints that he'd known Jesus, the Comte also said that his enemies in the Black Chamber were after him, and that this meeting would probably ever happen - when you had time travel, you always had to assume the other side had already won, because what had been could always be erased.

Jack scribbled some math on the back of an envelope that had weirded Millie out a bit, and the Comte seemed to get some of it, but did not offer a lot of insight into what it meant about strange attractors, and pieces of history that recurred despite all the changes. (It had weirded Millie out because it suggested her brother/lover Miles that she was trying to find was such a strange attractor - there was no way he should have been born again.)

New York proper was hot and very hazy, and while Peter and Millie caught some side-eye for their extreme whiteness while walking through the Bronx, they made it to the address without incident. Behind the apartment building was a vacant lot, bounded on the far side by empty buildings. One of them had a mural on it that took Millie's breath away - it looked exactly like the world she had come from, the world she had amputated, the world in which Miles had died in an unprecedented murder-suicide. It was signed "Nommo."

They went inside and found the apartment that Miles lived in with his mother and younger siblings. (I sort of feel like Millie should find the idea of siblings with a variety of ages strange.) He wasn't home, but by giving some bafflegab about Miles having won a scholarship, they managed to get a picture. Miles in the picture was just as Millie remembered him from that point in their lives (he'd be 8 years younger than she was now), except with a large Afro. She emotionally said that perhaps they should go.

But as they left the apartment, she came face to face with this timeline's version of her brother. (It seems weird to keep typing brother/lover every time, so can we just take it for granted that when Millie says brother she uses the word in a way that includes sex and romantic love with her non-biologically related crechemates?) He was skeptical about the idea of having won a scholarship, but played along, then took them into his bedroom to ask what the hell was going on. The walls were filled with Afrofuturist posters. Peter left the two of them alone, and Millie asked about the mural, which Miles said had been inspired by an album cover, which it was, but still startlingly and exactly like their former timeline. (Miles showed absolutely no sign of recognizing Millie.) Millie asked what Nommo meant, and Miles told her about an alternate timeline where Black people were in charge, that had been altered by white people with time travel.

Millie asked where he'd travel if he were a time traveller, and he said back to that place where the change had happened. (Internally, this was to some degree her trying to ask without being able to ask what had driven the alternate him to murder.) She couldn't answer his questions about why she was there, but told him to keep the "scholarship" money Peter had given him, and that she hoped that he was happy.

After that, she met Peter's girlfriend Fran, a tall Black punk woman, and rode with them back to Manhattan, before leaving to go back to Montauk. In the meantime, the Comte had almost convinced Gerald to give him a time machine, possibly Gerald's old prototype or maybe an Autochron. Just then, Millie entered the room, saying she wanted to speak to the Comte alone. Gerald, cued by the Comte's insistence that someone would likely try to kill him, immediately accused her of assassination. (Which very likely may have been true, but we don't know when this Millie was from or why she was there.)

She went off to call Commander Heinlein, intent on following if the others took the Comte to his own time machine, or possibly ducking further back in time and assassinating him before they'd met. Heinlein told her to stop the Comte leaving by any means necessary, including killing him if needed. She came back into the room just as Gerald was reaching for his own Autochron, but she pulled a laser, and light-speed wins every time. However, her aim was a little off, and she winged Gerald instead of hitting the Comte, as she'd been intending. The Comte grabbed for the Autochron, and she took another shot. Both Gerald and the Comte disappeared in time.

We cut from then to Millie arriving back at Montauk and meeting Einstein, the female Admonitory who she'd known in her own timeline. The woman warned her that she shouldn't have done what she'd just done. Millie tried to come up with a lie, but failed utterly, saying miserably that she'd just wanted to see him. The Admonitory told her that she'd put Miles in danger, but that there was something she could do.....

And there we ended.

Character Thoughts

Playing all the bits with finding Miles' address was funny, but also gave the opportunity to explore what were the base assumptions she shared with the others, and which she didn't, leading to one moment where someone talked about family, and she jumped on that, but then a few minutes later had to fake that yes, she'd totally had a mother. Of course.

This gave a chance to get some of the chipper on the table, which is her default mode, and that was a lot of fun. And then we went right into the tense character drama that was Millie coming face to face with someone she'd lost - and someone she'd lost even before she made her choice to sacrifice everyone she loved to save them greater pain later. Knowing that there were answers she needed that she couldn't get, but also that love and attraction and connection that was there and not there with this younger version of her brother.

But the biggest thing I discovered is how very shit Millie is at lying. I've played a lot of glib, smooth characters, and I think Millie can lie okay when it's something she doesn't care about, but bring emotion into it, and she just falls to pieces, more likely to stand there with her mouth opening trying to find words than anything else. She can't do it, and really, really can't hide it.

Of course, now she's maybe trying to kill the Comte, but I'm sure she thinks she's doing it for good reason - because she always thinks she's doing things for good reasons. Or more precisely, she's been told very persuasively why what she's doing is going to be the right thing, and she believes that, because she needs to.

That's what I'm finding most interesting about this character - it's fascinating to play someone who I think is a good person, but who is so blinded by belief that she is doing bad things. And doing them believing they are right. It's not a religious ideology, but it's pernicious and dangerous nonetheless. Having her judgment blurred by grief and loss got her into this mess, but she still doesn't realize it. Yet.

The Week in Stories: Strange Attractors - April 28

In Search Of...The Amber Room

By jeanyfan - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4062702

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 After opening with a scene that was about my character's backstory, we moved on to the main mission. (I'll discuss that scene in more depth at the end, because it works nicely into my character musings.)  The Admonitories, those behind TimeWatch from the far future, gave the group the mission of rescuing the Amber Room on the night it was likely consumed by fire during aerial bombing of the Nazis in Konigsberg.

We popped into the Amber Room itself just as the bombing started, which seemed safest, rather than trying to infiltrate the castle in more conventional ways. Of course, that sounded like a good idea until we got there and the reverberations inside the room drove our resident audio expert to his knees in a rush of sadness and despair. Two others of the group were similarly affected, while Millie and Peter hung on (Millie by repeated one of her affirmations to herself over and over - more about that later.)

They were able to set up the equipment they needed to steal the room and get the hell out of there with the Amber Room to 1976, but once there, TimeWatch was in upheaval, because the removed Amber Room was leaking temporal energy all over the place, polluting the timeline. The Admonitories recommended amputating this timeline to prevent contamination, but ranking officer of the present, Heinlein, said that the team would make one attempt first to go back and figure out what had corrupted the fabric of the Amber Room and caused the weird and destructive harmonics. 

Out of several options of when to go, the team opted for just before the first time the Amber Room was connected to violence, which means we ended up passing up a nifty opportunity for Walter to share trade secrets with Theremin. We also missed meeting Rasputin, in favour of visiting the court of Catherine the Great, around the time the Comte de St.-Germain was helping her perfect the Amber Room. If the Room was still resonating bad time energy then, we could probably recalibrate it to mute it in the future.

We gained entry to the court when Peter used his conman skills to establish himself as the Comte de St.-Germain, and Walter set to work on the Room. The negative energy was there but much fainter, and he was able to trace the source of the energy, not to the war and the Nazis, but to 2024. It seems that the energy had been radiating backwards (maybe forwards too) through time, and might have contributed to some of the worst aspects of Russian history over the previous couple hundred of years.

Just then, the real Comte de St.-Germain arrived. Peter blustered off to expose him as a con, and discovered that the "real" Comte was another time traveller - and not only that, a man who had schooled him in the rudiments of being a conman in his own timeline. They fenced verbally for a while, then Peter signalled to Gerald to take the "Comte" away on his mark, making him disappear as if Peter's Comte had performed magic.

Once Gerald had the Comte on his way to TimeWatch jail, the "real" Comte warned Gerald against letting the TimeWatch have the Amber Room, telling him that he was there to defang it himself to make sure TimeWatch couldn't corrupt it. Gerald was already ready to believe the worst of TimeWatch, which is going to get interesting when that comes up against Millie's True Believerness.

Back in Catherine the Great's court, they fixed the room, discovering as they did that putting it out of tune conformed to the "real" Comte's plans - he'd been telling at least part of the truth after all, or so it seemed.

At the very end, we flashed forward to 2024, where Vladimir Putin was trying to activate the room (it hadn't been destroyed apparently, just hidden until it was unveiled as the "new" version.) The alterations having worked, the room did nothing. Putin was furious - and it seemed that our young compatriot Jack, there and many years older, was disappointed as well.

Character Thoughts

The episode opened up with a little glimpse of a pivotal moment in Millie's life, the moment where she acted to help end her timeline (using, as it turned out, a nifty bit of Nikola Tesla lore) after one of her siblings had committed a murder-suicide, a term that was so foreign to her timeline it didn't exist anymore. He'd worked for their version of TimeWatch, and the rest of their siblings were starting to worry that Millie was beginning to sound as erratic as him.

Millie, in her World of Tomorrow-type timeline, lived with her six creche/podmates - none of them were biologically related, but these were the people who were both her siblings and lovers, without any clear distinction between the two categories. We saw the bed she was leaving with her five other siblings all tangled up, with a soft computer voice waking them up by telling them each that they were loved and today was going to be a great day.


This was a fantastic moment of the GM building on something I'd written down during character creation, and then me being able to build on top of that in return. I'd mentioned something about how she started her days after having helped destroy her own timeline by saying affirmations to herself in the mirror before going out the door, fully convinced (or so she thinks) of the goodness of TimeWatch and the necessity of what she did. Rob built on that to root those affirmations back in the timeline she'd come from, and gave me specific words that she'd heard.

And then, although I don't know if this would have been apparent, when we were rolling to see if we'd crumple under the crushing sadness of the Amber Room, and I succeeded in fighting it off, I kept mouthing "today is going to be another great day" to myself to keep her fighting and relatively upbeat.

I think she does say these things to herself every morning. But I wonder if she can ever bear to add one of the other lines: "You are loved."

The Week in Stories: Strange Attractors - March 25

Last night, we finished our first mission as members of TimeWatch, played using Cortex Plus rules. It was a great deal of fun, and then afterwards, Rob reminded us to regard what we'd just played as a pilot episode, complete with the freedom to alter things about our characters before the next session. He then asked a lot of very good questions aimed at both uncovering the things our characters can't walk away from, (AKA buttons to push for drama) and to develop connections between the PCs.

This is going to be a mission-based game, but with still trying to incorporate some of the character interaction and drama so dearly beloved by our group. Without, hopefully, overloading two new players (to the hobby as well as the table.)

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The Mission, Part Two

Our characters relocated to the NY Public Library in 1937, trying to find the earliest divergence that had led to this grubbier, more fascist U.S. with Charles Lindbergh as president. The most obvious divergence was the assassination of FDR in 1932 or 1933, although we also found about six total assassinations/faked suicides, including Winston Churchill and Alan Turing.

However, given that TimeWatch protocol is to find the earliest divergence and address that, we were led to the marriage of Amelia Otis to Gunter Frank in 1893, and the birth of, not Amelia Earhart, but Greta Frank in 1897. Followed by the disappearance of father and daughter in 1912.

A visit to the 1937 Amelia Otis Frank led to at least one hint of paradox, as she seemed to remember Peter and Millie (my character). But we found out enough that, with the research done by Gerald and Walter, we could come up with more than one plan to interfere in Gunter Frank going to Kansas, setting himself up as an inventor (of the mousetrap and zipper, among others), and marrying Amelia Otis.

We went back a year before he was supposed to arrive and interjected ourselves into the lives of the small town in various ways - Walter, with his CIA music background, got himself hired as a piano teacher to the town's young women, injecting a little Philip Glass into their lives. Gerald tried to ingratiate himself with Judge Otis, Amelia's father, but failed miserably at it, getting tossed out on the street and using that to great effect later. Millie started volunteering at the same orphanage as Amelia, while Peter made friend with Sam Earhart, encouraging him in his courtship.

When Gunter Frank showed up, all the plans went off at once, more or less. Peter, Walter, and Gerald intercepted him on the way to mess with Sam Earhart, getting him drunk and taking him wagon racing, then sending him to church in front of Amelia and her father. At the church, Frank seemed to become aware something was wrong and called in the time coordinates for a hit in blue energy that Peter only narrowly dodged when Millie tackled him to the ground, then restrained Frank. Gerald showed up and told Frank the jig was up, get in the carriage, thus further ruining him in the eyes of Judge Otis.

Gerald caught a glimpse of the time assassin, and we're pretty sure it's Greta, the Nazi version of Amelia Earhart.

After Frank was remanded to TimeWatch custody, the rest of the timeline seemed to sort itself out, and we recruited Amelia Earhart, partly with the promise that she'd get to fly rocket planes. (Frank Noonan was recruited as well.)

Character Thoughts

It is often only in retrospect that I notice that I'm playing a streak of characters with something in common - often the characters are all dramatically different from each other, but there will be a theme or trait that keeps coming up. I haven't had a ton of gaming recently, but just from the characters I played at the convention a couple of weeks ago, I think Millie is a more complete examination of one of the themes that two of my one-shot characters fell into.

That is to say, I think I'm in the middle of a streak of characters who are faking it. Not characters who are fakes, but characters who, for one reason or another, are having to fake it - in at least one case, so well that she herself believes it. (That would be Millie.) At the con, I played a character in The Veil who was part of a religious faith that believed in serenely intervening in dangerous situations, but was never serene about it. She was always terrified, so she put on a show of serenity and bravery in order to do what she truly believed needed to be done.

Then, in The Watch, I was playing a new officer with nowhere near enough training to be in charge of anyone - but in desperate times, sometimes there isn't anyone with the experience. She made major mistakes, partly trying to hide her inexperience and uncertainty.

Now there's Millie, and it's a little different - it's not that she's faking who she is, it's that she is working so hard to be okay with her own actions that it's led to her faking it to an extreme degree. She helped terminate her own timeline, losing all the people who were important to her, because she truly believed it was the right thing to do. Or, at least, that's what she's trying to tell herself. As a result, she comes off as the ultimate True Believer, and would even agree with that if you used it to describe her. The doubts, the faking it to get through the day are buried pretty far down, but they're there.

On the mechanical level, it's part of why it was important to me to have history as the lowest stat for Millie. Part of why it was possible to convince her is that, although she's very good at many things (punching Nazis being high on the list), she doesn't and didn't know enough about the timeline to really able to evaluate what she was told about why her timeline was doomed. It's very possible that the reasons for destroying her timeline were not what she was told.

(I was asked that by another player, if the TimeWatch operative had been lying to me, and replied that that was entirely up to Rob. Coming up with backstory and ideas for a character arc are important, but holding them lightly are part of sharing authorial control and approaching this as a collaboration.)

All in all, I'm looking forward to more missions and to getting to start integrating personal character issues into what happens. I'm a little worried that my character is a little off, tonally, from the rest - I've certainly gone whole hog for the angst, even though in daily life, Millie comes across as cheery and lost in a different timeline in a humourous way. We'll find a middle ground, I have confidence.

The other part of this is figuring out what she wants from the other characters that might be difficult to obtain, and to develop relationships that will lead to good play with them. I have some preliminary ideas, but I think all of them will change as we go on. Because Millie is from such a dramatically different place and time, she's a bit of an outsider character, but she's also gregarious and lonely.

The Week in Stories - February 27th (Strange Attractors)

Wow. It's been almost exactly a year since I've written a Week in Stories. Partly this is because our roleplaying life has been a little bit spotty since the fall, but also because life got busy, and stressful, and I missed out on writing about a good deal of my husband's awesome game of reincarnation and purpose, Not Fade Away. I regret that a lot, but it was what it was.

Last night, Rob started running a new campaign, a time travel romp-with-some-seriousness-but-definitely-also-punching-Nazis called Strange Attractors. We did character creation and played a short session, and wow, am I glad to get back to roleplaying. Because it was a short session, I don't know that I have a lot to say yet, but I would like to get back to recording at least small things about our sessions, so here goes: (For those who would like to know, we're playing using Cortex Plus as the base system.)

What We Know:

It's the 1970s, 1976 to be precise. We work for an organization called TimeWatch. We're trying to keep history on the right track, guided sparingly by people from the future called Admonitories, who try not to tell us too much, so as to avoid paradox. Obviously they're on the up and up. I mean, right?

Who We Are: 

Codename: Swift. Swift is from the 1970s, an antiquarian and expert in the field of artifacts and material history. He's also got a rather loose moral code, as likely to steal an artifact from the past and sell it in the present for big bucks as to turn it over to someone more responsible and reputable. Despite the TimeWatch regulation to cut contact with our former lives, he still has a girlfriend he sees from time to time.

Codename: Butler.  (Me!) Butler is from a world that's not around anymore, codenamed Cerulean. (The Earth as we're trying to preserve it is Navy, I think.) Her world was very much like a World! Of! Tomorrow! complete with lasers and personal rocketships. It seemed to be a utopia, but a few small things had started to go wrong when TimeWatch agents showed up and recruited her, convincing her in the process that her world was about to go down toxic and deadly paths, requiring that it be amputated and erased rather than left to fester. She's a true believer in the TimeWatch cause, and I see her as astonishingly chipper. Whether TimeWatch will live up to her faith that they are doing things for the best is left to be seen.

Codename: Pythagoras. A musician/sound artist, Pythagoras was recruited by the CIA for his expertise in mind-altering sounds, later seconded to TimeWatch. He's incredibly acute in anything to do with sound, but perhaps not quite as perceptive when it's visual.

Codename: Wells. A Victorian time traveller, he has criss-crossed his own timeline so much it is almost unidentifiable (and may now include dinosaurs with lasers). He carries a bit of a grudge against TimeWatch for not interfering with his rampage through time and the consequences.


The Mission

Meet Amelia Earhart on the island that she crashed nearby shortly after the last recorded (and contested) radio transmission, and recruit her (and her navigator Fred Noonan) into the organization.

The Complication

When we arrived on the island one day after the last radio transmission, the bodies of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were face down on the beach with bullet holes in their heads. The bullets had been removed, and a German cigarette butt was in the grass on the small amount of high ground.  We jumped back again to a day before Earhart was due, and created a hideout and waited. A few hours before, a diving bell contraption/time machine appeared on the beach, and four Nazis (but not Nazis from our timeline) piled out. One of them recognized my character from a previous encounter, which was not the same as the previous encounter she remembered him from, as a wizened old man in a cybermech trying to shoot up Studio 54.

There was a fight, the Nazis were dispatched, and we waited for Earhart and Noonan to arrive.  They didn't. In fact, on doing some investigation, no one even seemed to know of her anymore - and at any rate, President Lindbergh and Secretary of State Henry Ford were promising "peace in our time."

The Paradox 

Well, we'd met Earhart before, but now we have to figure out how this Nazi time travel got Lindbergh elected, and then try to recruit her. Having met her as a seasoned TimeWatch operative in the 1970s, that was a little weird.

Also, my character and Gunter Frank the Nazi seem to be meeting each other in reverse order of meetings. If that makes sense. Grammar is not good at this.

What's Next? 

It was a fun first session, but I'm hankering for some more connections between character and/or recurring NPCs, which I know will come. First, we needed to nail down who the characters were, and then we can start building in backstory and reasons we know each other, what we might need from each other and why we can't give it. (To steal from the wonderful Hillfolk mechanic.)

But I'm pleased with the character I created and have ideas of what to do with her. I need to find the chipper a bit more, or change my ideas and figure out how else she might present herself. Also, I think she needs a ponytail.