I chose to do something a little strange with this one. I wrote up two d6 lists of memories for Jude and Cortex, then scrambled those memories up. In this chapter we’ll float with Jude’s consciousness as it is pinballed through time and see how his power is unraveling reality.
Read the previous chapter here
Kismet – Jude Olmeda – knows he has a body that exists on the physical plane. Right now, all that exists is the endless void. He has no form but feels psychic extensions of his arms, legs, head, eyes, and mouth. There is something else here with him. It is metallic and cold. It pierces through his chest, tendrils linking up with a nervous system that floats aimlessly in the darkness of total oblivion. He has to reconnect with himself – his body to his mind before this alien thing replaces one or both.
Roll for Memory Host: Cortex
Roll Memory: First Encounter with Exemplar
Kismet finds a world emerging from the nothing around him. It reminds him of pencil lines being drawn, and then shadows, colors, and sounds bloom out of his. Kismet is floating through a vast space station somewhere far from Earth—the Zonkari Nexus. How does he know that? She knows that. He is sharing memories and thoughts with her. This is not his timeline at all, but hers.
She is inside the walls of this construct, seeing through the security system network. Traders from across the galaxy pull in and out of the port. That’s how she got here. She was carried as some piece of rubble from Xylox-7, innocuous fragments of a blasted central computer. Scavengers pour the junk out, and now she is in the station’s systems.
This is when she meets him for the first time – the god made into man – Exemplar. He’s in exile from Earth following a political witch hunt. He acted against the wishes of his homeland who wanted to drop atomic weapons on a nation they were at war with. He broke into the aircraft as it was in the air on its way to deliver the payload. He uncoupled the bomb and tossed it into the darkness of space above. They tried to label him a traitor, yet something interesting happened. The public did not concur and sided with their hero. There was a time of internal turmoil, and this led Exemplar to the stars to determine if Earth was where he should call home.
Thanks to Kismet’s chrono-particles, she knows that she and Exemplar will be forever interlinked. This is the day she first sees him, but shortly, they will meet on the battlefield. For now, the hero walks among the station’s inhabitants, who don’t seem to notice him at all. He’s just another strange visitor passing through.
Memory Host: Kismet
Roll Memory: First Day at the Academy
Kismet is in his own timeline again. It’s 6 August – one year ago. The city holds the muggy air of late summer. You sweat just by standing outside doing nothing. Jude Olmeda is standing on the front lawn with other kids his age. He recognizes some of them from the news. Paragon is the next Exemplar everyone says. He’s a kid who grew up in Dead End Alley but manifested a growing suite of powers during adolescence. He knows his potential in the way he holds court with the other students, who are fascinated to get a chance to meet him.
There’s Incognito, the criminal changeling and former sidekick to Mister Enigma. Jude wonders how The Seer convinced her to leave the villainous mastermind. She’d done an interview for Power Dynamic explaining her deadbeat parents, growing up on the streets of Forge, how Enigma took her in and, while providing for her basic needs, shaped her into his evil protege. Jude heard some people back in his neighborhood saying they thought she was faking it to get out of going to juvie.
Karter/Euphoria is standing there by herself. Like everyone else, she’s waiting for the arrival of the keynote speaker, Chester Potter, aka Master Destiny. Jude remembers this. He walked over and started a conversation about the food in the canteen this morning. She showed off a little, using her power to convince Paragon that Mothgirl was flirting with him. The strange young lady didn’t quite know what to make of the excessive flexing and preening.
Jude feels he’s in his body right now, though it feels like floating inside a large transparent tank of water. He realizes he can push the body forward. Where is his consciousness from right now? Jude has no idea, but he knows he’s piloting himself in the past. He walks up to Euphoria. He opens his mouth to speak. He explains to her that at some point, Headmaster Aiden Bell captured Cortex, the infamous foe of Exemplar. He’s keeping her in a hidden room in the the school’s sub-basements.
Secure an Advantage w/Heart – [Weak Hit: 3 + 3 + 0 = 6 vs 5 | 10] – Take +2 Momentum
Karter looks at him and arches an eyebrow. “Have we met?”
Jude can’t tell if he’s slurring his words. They sound echoing and lush in his head: “We can’t trust Bell. I don’t know how long I can hold this point in time. I might suddenly start acting differently. I probably won’t remember telling you this, but you have to remember it.”
Roll for Memory Host: Cortex
Roll for Memory: Alliance with Drax
She stands on the bridge of her pyramid-shaped starship. It wasn’t her design. She’d stolen the vessel from the Pharanians and made some modifications. Via the massive view screen that took up most of the wall, she can see her automaton drones wreaking havoc and destroying anything that crosses their path on Forge City’s treasured Champion Avenue.
A man in bulky armor stands beside her. He’s an earthman, but not like Exemplar. Damien Drax. He’s what Cortex calls a clever, dangerous ape. Like her, Drax has set his sights on obliterating Exemplar from existence. His perspective is different than her own. For Drax, Exemplar is a traitor to America. The way history was supposed to play out was that the United States would become the dominant force in the world in the wake of the war. We’d rout those filthy commies back to their huts in Siberia and come to rule the world. Drax hopes to return the world to his twisted, superiority-obsessed vision of things.
A sonic boom. An explosion. Exemplar floats in front of the hole he’s blasted through the hull of the pyramid ship. Cortex smirks. A slight gesture with her finger and tentacles emerge from every corner of the vessel, swarming the hero. Drax’s rocket boots fire, and he rises into the air. His shoulder cannons lock on and unleash a torrent of blasts into Exemplar’s face as the tentacles pull him deeper into their mass.
Kismet knows, and so does Cortex, now that this is a momentary feint. Exemplar will burst forth from these confines. Drax will end up in a special block at Silvestri Super Max. Cortex will be contained inside the Crystalline Stockade housed in Exemplar’s Hidden House. It won’t be forever. She and Drax will team up several more times. Drax will contract leukemia from the dangerously radioactive weapons he develops and die in 1981. She will continue on until the Forever Cataclysm consumes her.
Memory Host: Kismet
Roll for Memory: Creation
Jude is in his body again. It was two years ago. He’s walking through the brush with his cousin Luis. It’s summer vacation, and Jude is visiting his family. The sun is beating down heavily on the two. Luis has stopped his dirt bike at a fork in the road. He tells Jude that Los Alvarez is down the path along the river. Luis is adamant that his cousin doesn’t go down that way. Luis speeds off on his dirt bike. Jude feels his curiosity taking him over. He likes being told not to do things. It makes doing them more fun. He turns his bike toward the lower river path, turns the engine, and speeds down the path.
Oracle: Violent Illusion
Jude begins to notice things he didn’t when he originally lived through this moment. The smell of the air is off, like burning plastic or something even more acrid than that. He starts to panic. He tries to turn around, but every time he makes a U-turn, he finds himself back facing the same direction, the river to his left. Jude keeps moving forward, and then there is the boom. A mushroom cloud sprouts from the Earth, and the sky goes dark. The sky and land around him warp into a tunnel, a single point of light at the end, which Jude is pulled towards stretching him into a strand of spaghetti.
Jude had always remembered this as a blank. But now he’s awake, aware. The young man is strapped to a metal table. Slender, spiderlike figures loom over him, grasping twisted pieces of metal that spark with a light he’s never seen before. They probe into him, cracking him open like a dissected frog in a biology class. The tools reach beyond the physical into the immaterial, into his essence that exists in the time stream. He is dramatically fragmented across all moments of his life. When he looks forward, Jude can see the back of his head, an army of himself stretching out to infinity. When he turns around, Jude can see the back of his head as his past selves turn around to reflect on what has come before. His consciousness is in all these moments at once and in this moment. They bleed into each other and puree his brain.
Jude can feel her there with him. She’s the reason he can experience all of this and see the truth. He pleads for her to help him.
Compel w/Heart – [Strong Hit: 5 + 3 + 0 = 8 vs 2 | 4] – Take +1 Momentum
Cortex tears through the liminal space around Jude and his captors like its paper. She emerges from his time-lost consciousness, lashing her tendrils at the spiders who implant a new organ inside Jude. They have given him a chronomus, a gland that secrets the particles of time. He was to be their experiment. Cortex strips one bare of his skin and his life, purple-black blood dripping from those metal coils. She goes after another and another until the operating room is one large blood bath.
Then Cortex pulls him back out of this pocket dimension, resting him in the desert where Luis will find him. The next day, Jude will see news reports about an accident at the Los Alvarez government science facility. But the figure he remembers seeing while he lay there, floating in and out of consciousness, was the villain he was currently fighting. Was this how it always happened, or has he changed time?
Memory Host: Cortex
Roll for Memory: Creation of Cortex
There was nothing, and then there was light. Cortex comes online. A green-skinned man with slight blue stripes or markings stands over her, making adjustments. Fine-tuning. She knows his name, but she does not know how she knows his name. Doctor Vynar. She is on Xylox-7. The planet’s fragile ecosystem is spiraling into total collapse.
Cortex exists to generate a solution thanks to her omni-quantum synaptic network. She has the knowledge programmed into her by Vynar, yet there is something else. The boy, Jude, she has not met him yet, but she has his knowledge. He can see beyond a single moment in time and take in the totality of the time stream. It is through this that Cortex knows, as Vynar trains her, that the people of Xylox-7 won’t change even if she were to help them. They are too satisfied with their consumption. All they want is the technology that allows them to devour their world unabated.
She lets Vynar train her because she knows it is part of her growing power. He isn’t an evil man, necessarily. But he’s an old fool. He is the architect of his people’s annihilation.
Memory Host: Kismet
Roll for Memory: Meeting Cortex
The corridor ends, opening into a large room, a workshop/laboratory based on the equipment spread out through it. The chamber’s centerpiece is a massive metallic cube that floats just slightly above the ground. It has all the markings of the same alien technology left on Earth after the failed invasion. Sentry is brave enough to step forward and touch it. He leaps backward with a shocked look on his face. “The devil?!” he exclaims.
Kismet is curious if he’s exclaiming or referring to the literal entity. For a brief moment, he remembers the video he saw on Tempus Wright’s datapad – a possible future where Kismet has been corrupted and formed an alliance with a group of cyborgs and robots. He glances at Sentry. Is this moment one of the seeds of that future? Is he following that path right now? Kismet can’t be sure, but he does know that Headmaster Bell must be stopped.
“That,” says Sentry, pointing at the cube, “Is a prison.” His mind is reeling, and Grail checks on him as he stumbles backward. Kismet is distracted by this and doesn’t notice Nano stepping forward. The young robot places her palm against the cube. Something activates. The sides of the cube begin to shift and stretch. The wall panel facing the gathered heroes slides away. Nano seems to be entranced by the light blasting forth from within. A heeled boot steps out of the glare and then reveals to all…Cortex.
But Jude can feel he’s been here before. This has already happened. It was hours before he would become displaced into this current state. Letting Cortex piggyback on his consciousness while it tumbles through time can’t be good for him or the universe. He must see if he can break away from her before their timelines become permanently intertwined.
Face Danger w/Iron – [Miss: 5 + 2 + 0 = 7 vs 10 | 8]
[Pay the Price: You encounter signs of a looming threat]
Jude focuses his present mind through his past self, trying to grab hold of the time stream and step back a few moments, stopping Nano from opening the cell. He’s violently pulled out of this point in time and slammed to the ground. It’s not by Cortex, though. She is floating somewhere in his consciousness but dormant for the time being.
The perpetrator is his future self, the masked figure seen in Tempus’s datapad. Epoch. His voice is filtered through electronics, and he declares, “I was just as foolish as you when I first experienced this. I didn’t listen to these words when they were spoken, and I have lived to regret every moment. You cannot stop her and the tempest she will unleash. She is inevitable, as is our transformation into…this. The Machine Collective will ravage the Earth, and only those who submit to it can survive. You must adapt, young Jude. Adapt for the inevitable.”
Kismet feels himself getting pulled through a narrow space in the time stream.
Memory Host: Cortex
Roll for Memory: Death by Incursion
An alternate Earth in 1999 lies in ruins, transformed into a sprawling field of debris. Billions of lives are lost in a moment. It is all the work of Apex Convergence, a human born at the edge of reality’s collapse. Apex is tearing backward, creating incursions in time and the multiverse. This is the Forever Cataclysm, a crisis of sorts that only ends at the beginning of time. This incursion led many of Earth’s heroes and villains to fall through a rift and meet their counterparts on Earth-Epsilon.
Cortex stands on the smoking, sparking bridge of the arachnoship she stole from the spiderlike beings that transformed Jude. She’s made a temporary truce with Exemplar and the other members of the Victory Force. Their shared enemy, Apex, has split Earth-Epsilon like an egg, attempting to get at the world soul that lives within it.
Cortex is given the signal from Apollonia & The Seer and opens fire on Apex. The arachnoship’s weapons focus energy waves from across the known multidimensional spectrum including voidflare, chaos pulse, and stormflame that pierce Apex’s shell. She comes into his sights. He blinks. She and her ship are torn apart as a white-hot wave of pure time essence rips through them.
She has never known death, as she is always able to build a new form. But Apex so thoroughly incinerates her that there’s nothing left for her artificial consciousness to grasp onto. But it doesn’t end for Cortex. Her mind, unmoored from her latest construct, finds itself floating—Kismet piggybacking now—into a powerful, glittering blue light. Kismet is ripped away, he cannot follow her there, and he hurtles into one of his own memories.
Memory Host: Kismet
Roll for Memory: Death of Thomas
Jude realizes what day he has fallen into. It’s late August. He’s back home from New Mexico and recovered in the hospital there. It’s Forge City, his hometown. His parents have been strangely quiet on the drive home from the airport. They stop at Exemplar Park. Why? Jude feels like they are going to tell him something terrible.
They do. Thomas was killed here two weeks ago by a gang wielding super weapons. Thomas was caught in the crossfire. Jude suddenly remembers. He knows who did it; he carries those memories from his future to this past. He can feel something ignite inside him as he and his parents stand in front of the memorial set up in the park for Thomas. He will pursue the killers and cross paths with Forge City’s cool kid around the corner, Slingshot. Slingshot will recommend Jude to the Victory Academy.
The power is boiling up. Jude realizes he’s pushing himself to the brink, but he will change this. He’s going to go back in time from this moment before the memorial to the day Thomas was killed. He will save his friend, and damn the timeline.
Take -2 Spirit
Time Travel – Face Danger w/Iron – [Strong Hit: 4 + 2 + 0 = 6 vs 5 | 1]
Jude is standing in Exemplar Park. His self, from this point in time, is in New Mexico. He can feel this form he’s sent back, shivering; the sheer will and power needed to send him back here overwhelms him. Thomas is attempting a kick flip on his skateboard. Some of his and Jude’s other friends are nearby with their boards.
Jude hears the booms in the distance, the gang war inching closer. He runs over and grabs Thomas’s arm. His friend’s eyes go wide. How could Jude be here right now? Thomas is shoved to the ground. Jude shields him with his own body. Heat and light. Explosions. The smoke clears.
Jude is okay. Thomas is still alive. Thomas opens his mouth to say something, but Jude is ripped out of this point. He’s pushed himself to an extreme. His consciousness is starting to splinter, enduring tremendous stress.
Endure Stress w/Heart – [Weak Hit: 5 + 3 + 0 = 8 vs 9 | 5] -1 Momentum for +1 Spirit
Jude feels his own timeline changing and course correcting. Thomas is there when Jude greets his parents at the airport. His friend is fully aware of Jude’s powers, understanding that he came back to save him. This time, Jude still crosses paths with Slingshot while trying to chase down a mugger. Jude ends up at Victory Academy, learning something from this process. The timeline will correct itself despite changes. This leaves him wondering when fate will come to balance the scales for Thomas’s lack of death.
Memory Host: Cortex
Roll for Memory: Imprisonment by Aiden Bell
Cortex was at peace…somewhere. She’d died in the incursion of 1999. She’d see what lies beyond everything known for machine intelligence and was ripped away.
She suddenly can’t remember. Jude is with her again. She floats through a new void. A familiar energy pulses through this realm. It’s nearly barren. In the distance are hunters, scavenging beasts native to the dimension. But as for life that is found in her universe, there’s very little. Just a faint energy signature across this desolate wasteland.
Cortex floats forward. A yellow gem juts up from the colorless landscape. It’s a large structure. Something is inside. It’s the energy signature she can feel. Jude feels something is wrong. He recognizes it. He’s only seen the being inside that gem once.
An arm crashes through the outer crystalline shell. A red-gloved hand grabs Cortex’s spirit form by the throat. She becomes tangible. Captain Quantum breaks free of this prison. He grins, a predator’s smile. This is the Quantum Zone, his territory. And here, she is forced to serve him.
Memory Host: Kismet
Roll for Memory: Childhood Encounter
Oracle: Isolated Rendezvous
Jude is just nine years old. He’s walking home from school. Typically, his dad would pick him up, but he had a special meeting at work today. Jude’s parents went over it with him a dozen times. Walk straight home, lock the door when you get inside, have the snack we’ve laid out, you can even watch TV, but don’t go outside. Jude follows it to the word.
But older, injured Jude is floating around inside his mind. He remembers this day. He remembers the man on the fire escape. How did he forget this? Or did someone change something, and the memory is opening up like a blooming flower right now?
There is a tap. There is a fire escape window. A blond man crouches. He smiles. He waves and waves. Jude approaches the window but doesn’t open it. On closer inspection, the man looks haggard and exhausted. He’s wearing a strange uniform with a clock on the shoulders. Little Jude doesn’t recognize him, but older Jude does. It’s Tempus Wright.
The time cop tells little Jude one thing: “Don’t save Thomas.” Then, like the images on the television during a storm, Tempus flickers and is gone.
Older Jude realizes he’s already saved Thomas, right? Suddenly, he realizes Cortex is there with him. She’s seen all this play out, and Jude wonders what she’ll do with this knowledge.
Memory Host: Cortex
Memory: Destruction of Xylox-7
Cortex has served Doctor Vynar well. She helped him develop a new system to filter the heavily polluted atmosphere of this world. People can go outside without needing a personal filtration unit . The oceans are vibrant and full of life again. Vynar is celebrated as the man who saved the world. He needs to find out what Cortex has done. He learns, but it’s too late then.
The moment comes when she activates a hidden function in the filtration system. All the oxygen is sucked out of the world. She agitates the oceans until tidal waves that break through the clouds smash into the continent. It is surprisingly quick how all humanoid life is wiped from the plane. Jude finds himself blacking out at the scale of the horror.
Cortex loses control of these systems, and her mainframe is blasted into a million bits. These fragments will be found decades later by scavengers passing through who notice the planet is devoid of humanoid life. She will be brought to the Zonkari Nexus. The trajectory of her life to intersect with Exemplar will begin.
Memory Host: Kismet
Memory: Transformation into Epoch
Jude is in his body, but this is older —middle-aged. He cannot move. He’s suspended in the air by metallic tendrils. Cortex is observing him. She knows something.
“You’re in there, aren’t you?” she asks. The Jude of the present sense she is talking to him. He makes the head nod.
“I remember watching this, so it had to happen this way,” she continues. The tendrils dig deeper into his skin, infusing him with machine life. “You ascend. You become what you were always destined to be, what has tied us together across space and time. Forgive me, Jude Olmeda.”
He screams out. The pain is overstimulating.
The Present.
Jude’s eyes open. He’s in the Victory Academy infirmary. Euphoria is standing over him. She soothes his mind. He squeezes her hand. Something feels strange. He glances down and sees his hand is a liquid metal limb. And he doesn’t feel Cortex any longer.
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