PROLOGUE
Orion's feet, always the first to materialize in a time-jump, touch down in a stark white room. His head aches, ears ringing from both the blow to the head and the disorientation from the jump he was not prepared for - the jump she pushed him into with a sort of recklessness he's grown to reluctantly admire. Habitually - warily - his eyes travel around the room, trying to get his bearings.
It's hard. Everything is fuzzy, blurry around the edges. Is that from the head injury or the gouge in his side? He's bleeding a lot, the silvery-red blood of his people. Even placing pressure on the wound isn't doing much to stop it - once he figures out where he is, when he is, it will have to be his first task. Stop the bleeding, make a plan, save his - his - whatever she is to him.
There is a gasp behind him. He turns, eyes locking in on the girl - teenager, really - who is locked onto a medical bed in this sterile room. Literally locked, strapped down and very much appearing to be confined against her will even at first glance. The girl has wide grey eyes tinged with yellow-gold, but something about her strikes him as familiar. Even if he's never seen his - companion, travel partner, would-be ward if she would just let herself be protected, even once - with eyes in the same shade of blatant fear and surprise, the shape of the eyes themselves are damnably recognizable.
Orion coughs and curses. He eyes the room again, this time with greater urgency.
Damn her, Orion thinks with a tinge of panic. The damn girl - the damn genius - had sent him right into the line of a potential paradox, knowing that she wouldn't be able to cross it without undoing her own future. Orion doesn't doubt for a second that it was calculated. He puts nothing past his companion. It would be so very like her to jet him off to a place where he couldn't follow just to give him time to regroup, even if it would put her own life in danger. He wouldn't put it past her to factor in the risk and decide to take it anyway. She's pragmatic to a fault and again, he is helpless but to admire her for it.
But of all the places he sends her, it's to her mother.
Her teenage mother. Her teenage mother who is, from what Orion recalls in his research, already pregnant with his companion's older brother.
Orion hates all paradoxes - too messy, too complicated to fix, too much that can go wrong - but he hates the grandfather paradox the most. One wrong move, one wrong word, and Orion can potentially interfere with the very events that lead to the creation of his own moment in time, not to mention the very conception of his companion. It's a lot of pressure. He can't get it wrong.
Damn her, he thinks again. Why did she send me here, of all places? Anywhere and anywhen else would have been better.
But here he is and he's already been seen. There's nothing for it. If he does create a paradox, and he hopes he doesn't, at least he'll know right away. And then he can fix it, just like he was trained to do. He has enough charge on the time-jumper to fix any mistakes, at least. Well. Enough charge to fix one mistake, should it happen. He hopes it doesn't. He would like to use the remaining charge to get back to his companion - and then get them out of immediate danger.
Orion straightens, wincing in pain at the hot gush of fresh blood that spills over the hand holding his side together, and stares Astra, the future Chief Xenolinguist of the United Federation cum Alliance who was responsible for chartering the negotiations between three new planets, including his own, and does his best to make his voice even as he speaks. Even as he does, he scans the room again, searching for any obvious recording device or sign that an enemy may be watching. None. Things are clear, for now.
"You need to escape," he says, resolute. At the wide-eyed look of astonishment he receives, Orion can't help but compare Astra to his companion - can't help but compare Astra to her daughter. He is admittedly biased, but he thinks it isn't entirely undeserved when his face twists up with derision. "This is pitiful," he decides aloud. "She inherited your telekinesis. Why haven't you used it?"
Astra appears utterly baffled. "Sorry," she says blandly. "Who inherited what?"
Ah, Orion realizes, barely withholding a wince. His head throbs and a wave of dizziness threatens to send him crashing down to the floor. He really is losing a lot of blood - and he might have just said too much.
Orion summons his most blank expression. "I can't tell you that," he says bluntly.
He knows it's not enough - it wouldn't be enough for his companion - before Astra appears even more stupefied.
"What -"
"An entire future relies on you getting out of here," Orion says, swiftly cutting Astra off. His mind is a frantic whirl as he tries to salvage this blunder. If he was still in his training days, he would have already been pulled and booted. This is such a common mistake and Orion hadn't clawed his way to the top of the ranks by being so damn stupid. He really must have a concussion.
"If you don't escape, a number of indescribably horrible things will happen. Hell, they may happen anyway," he says, wincing as he presses against the gash in his side. Woozy, panic-stricken humor tumbles through him. He can't believe he just said something so ridiculous, so hypocritical - as if his own presence here wasn't a herald for indescribably horrible things that are already happening.
Fuck. Time travel can be so very confusing.
Astra's damnably familiar eyes are still glinting in unabashed curiosity, the shade shifting orange.
"I can't stay any longer," Orion mutters, already pressing trembling, blood-stained fingers to the time-jump device strapped onto his arm. "She needed me five seconds ago, that stupid girl. How did she even figure out how to use this?" he wonders, although he isn't truly surprised. Even malfunctioning, even outdated, even in a language not her own, his companion had managed to figure out a device that he had only used within her range of vision only a handful of times. Remarkable. Annoying, but remarkable. "Can't believe she sent me here against-"
Astra is straining on the table, clearly trying to sit up. "Who are you?" she asks, almost polite.
He pauses, weighing his options. He's already here, isn't he? How much worse could it get if he gave out his name? It isn't as if his former organization uses true names, anyway, and they would be the ones looking. "Orion," he answers, glancing down at the jumper as he inputs the coordinates that would hopefully take him back to his companion.
"And where are you from?" Astra tries.
"That's not important," he tells her, the time-jumper already blinking in a bright array of lights. He looks up at her sharply, summoning every edge his military training had ever given him. "Do whatever it takes to get out of here," he urges, gaze challenging as the vibration of his atoms makes him shiver, the familiar swoop of his stomach almost enough to distract from the throb in his head, in his side. "You have to be just as stubborn as she is - she probably got it from you. You'll have to shed blood. But she's worth it. And so is the future."
Astra looks fit to ask more questions - but Orion can already feel the surge of energy and the shimmering, swirling static of the world around him as the jumper activates, this time with a worrying beep warning of a low charge.
Between one second and the next, Orion is gone - and he returns, finding his feet once more in a smoke-filled hallway with the high-pitched blast of lasers searing through metal not too far in the distance. He allows himself one orienting moment before he shifts on his feet, the feeling of sinewy danger spreading through his muscles.
I'm coming for you, Eden, he thinks, mind already tumbling with the tactics required to make it out of this shitshow alive. You better have a plan.
A/N: Hello and welcome to EDEN. This sequel will feature cameos of the NOVA crew, but the focus is very much on the adventures of Eden and Orion. You may recognize this prologue from one scene in the later chapters of NOVA; that will probably be the only official crossover from the original story. I have other post-NOVA crossovers planned and a sizeable plot. If you're a Dr Who fan or an Umbrella Academy, then the way any of this story works may seem familiar - in other words, the only people who will know about any changes will be the time travelers themselves. It's going to be...interesting (read: a nightmare) to write. Buckle up.
So, how does time travel work? Theoretically, according to physicists, it's possible, which is why we have so many theories. Probably the best-known theory is the grandfather paradox, which is a consistency paradox that says going back in time to change a thing would undo something in the present. There are also causal loops, which suggests that the timeline can't be changed because the events of the past will always lead to the events of the future as we know it, even if a time traveler tries to change the past (their actions merely shape the present that we know). Both are very good theories of time travel and are used extensively in fiction. There is also a third form of time travel called quantum time travel that resolves the grandfather paradox by way of suggesting that the physics of time are self-healing and have a self-consistency principle, so no matter what is changed, events that should unfold will unfold. The downside with this theory is that the guy who thought it up, Novikov, also said that changes to one timeline causes a divergence and creates an alternate timeline to resolve changes. Given what I have planned for this story, I'll be adopting a modified quantum time travel that focuses on ontological principles (i.e., no alternate timelines) and still holds the potential to create a grandfather paradox under the right circumstances.
However, I am not a physicist. I studied psychology. My understanding of time travel is elementary at best. I know as much about time travel as anyone who has watched Back to the Future, which is to say I know enough to understand that Marty McFly should not kiss his own mother or he might not exist. For that reason, I'll be making most of it up as I go (see: above) and you should absolutely not take the way it works seriously. If you are reading this and you happen to be a physicist who understands time travel, I apologize. But also let me bullshit my way through this!
As of right now, I plan to update on the 1st of each month. There will be another update on April 1st, 2021. This story has been years in the making, but it's also a beast to get my head around so the writing will be slower than previous stories. Stay with me. I will finish it (because I always do).
Now, enjoy the mess I have made.
As always, be honest. I can take it.
Rae