Chapter 191: Crossover Episode
While the volcanic eruption made it pretty easy to know where he was in the timeline, Simon was surprised how quickly things got back to normal. People still talked about it in the days and weeks after it had happened, and there was a resurgence of interest after that when there were whispers that a brave hero had died fighting a terrible stone giant.
After that, though, things calmed down surprisingly quickly. Life, it would seem, went on, as long as the world was in no immediate danger of ending. That surprised Simon a little bit, but he supposed that he’d seen similar things happen in the aftermath of Schwarzenbruck’s zombie apocalypse.
After that, keeping track of the slow sequence of events that made up his past life wasn’t hard, not even a day's ride from the city. The rumors about what had really happened the night the volcano had erupted came and went whenever a new trade ship would dock for a night or two. However, more and more, those stories were eclipsed by a new one: the Queen of Ionia had taken a consort. If rumors were to be believed, he was an ugly foreigner, but most doubted that could possibly be the case for someone as radiant and dignified as the queen.
Sometime after that, Simon started making monthly trips to the city just to try to catch a glimpse of himself. He even used stealth and a little magic to climb the palace walls a few times and just watched his own recovery. It was an interesting sensation, and he wondered what would happen if he took out the past version of himself.
That would be a paradox, for sure, his brain told him. He believed it mostly, too, but with magic in play, he honestly had no idea. I’m not him, right? I mean, he was me, but he died, and I’m me now, so if he ceased to exist, nothing about me would change, but the future of this level certainly would…
He obviously had no intention of killing himself, but as a thought experiment, it crept into his mind again and again when he observed himself in the garden or the library as past Simon made his slow recovery. It was only when he saw himself with Elthena that those positive memories pushed aside his darker thoughts.
Still, all of that came to an end when the war started. Simon knew that little would come of it beyond the spread of disease, but during that time, the normally lax atmosphere around the palace transformed, and sneaking in without killing one or two people became effectively impossible.
“Past me would probably notice if future me started dropping bodies,” he told himself one day as he walked back to Olven’s Narrows with his mule, which was heavily loaded with the various supplies he’d purchased on this trip. “But would that cause a paradox? How much can I change the circumstances of past me before future me ceases to exist, if it even really works like that? What do you think, Daisy Two.”
The mule, of course, had no answers. Really, he should probably do an experiment to figure this out, but he had no idea how to do something like that without causing catastrophic consequences if he was wrong. “Do I bring someone else through a portal with me, solve a level, and then kill them in the past to see how that ripples out through the future?”