Future Thorn (whispering): How are Acai’s anti-STAD wards?
WiB (whispering): Best on the planet. Her anti-immortal-depression wards, though . . .
Acai: I’ve tried to train a successor. A dozen times, over the centuries. Someone who could give me a proper vacation. None of them could pick up more than the simplest time magic.
. . . except the one who, just my luck, took it and turned into a full-blown supervillain.
WiB: . . . seriously? Feels like that should’ve come up more in history class.
Acai: It most certainly should not. You want to be properly rid of a Time Villain, you don’t leave them faffing about in history.
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Family resemblance comin’ in STRONG today! (also is she implying she like, made it so Time Villain’s parents never met or something?)
Considering reincarnation is a thing, I feel like it’d have to be both more subtle and more extreme than just making sure a specific person wasn’t born to specific parents at a specific time.
You wouldn’t even need to get that extreme, just slip a letter saying “They’re not the one. — Acai” to yourself before you ever started training them.
Unless they’re already full-on bootstrap paradoxing and completely integrated into history – so if you don’t train them they’ll train their own past self instead, and even if you *can* erase them, it also erases your whole timeline and leaves you in the void. *That* would be a pain to sort out.
Even without the risk of bootstrap paradox she might not want to risk letting them live. Or … maybe live but in jail.
Wait. Is she considering training Kale?
… excellent point, Acai
Uh-oh, time villain!
“her anti-immortal-depression wards, though…” Yeah same WiB
Well, at least Acai knows what to do when it needs to be done.
The question is how many tries it took.
I think she’s going to be VERY interested on knowing who sent Thorn back in time. I was doubting between Kale and Holly.
Good point. I was thinking he just used (technically stolen) technology, but if you need actual time mage to do it …
… aaaaand I’m not going to spoil anything but apparently I forgot that we got this already: https://leifandthorn.com/comic/hi-unmemorable-im-12-12/
Which explicitly says there is enchantment involved which was NOT done by Acai.
Oh boy, time to go trawling through the archive for breadcrumbs to support my crack theories again!
Okay, so. It’s possible that we don’t know this mysterious Time Villain because Acai time-blasted them out of existence or something, but people have pointed out that souls and reincarnation are real in this universe, so it may not be as easy as ensuring their parents never meet. If this Time Villain is someone we know, a dark horse candidate: Cedar Oseille (hear me out).
– Cedar’s been noted to have a weird number of parallels to Kudzu–strong magical potential even as a child, discouraged from pursuing it, magic emerged anyways under great stress. There’s a Q&A on the tumblr that has Cedar bring up the comparison himself which is…strange, for a character who so far has been nothing but wholesome?
– He’s one of the mages D10 is observing for future signs of evil. The storyline is about Dex’s paranoia, sure, but there is one frame with Cedar centered that could be ominous foreshadowing.
-If your theoretical future time villain can’t just be killed/never born because their reincarnations will all have the same magical potential, how do you make sure they can’t master dangerous time magic? You push them to master something else. There’s a Thorn Explains that specifically talks about reincarnations and magic, and uses “becoming a world-class singer” as something that takes time away from re-learning powerful magic. (And who is the example used in that panel? Cedar Oseille.)
There’s other small things, but this comment is long enough. It’s a wild theory, to be sure, but it makes a *weird* amount of sense, all things considered.
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