Microstory 1407: I Of the Portalcane

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After defeating Effigy for the upteenth time, and solidifying themselves as a loyal and true Triumvirate, things seemed to be going okay. They developed a nice system of defeating the time monsters that came through the broken portal. Escher would steal power from the monsters themselves to use against them. He would donate this power to Rothko, who would destroy them anyway necessary. Savitri would supply a boost of energy as well. It didn’t last very long, though, as the consequences of their actions would eventually catch up to them. Time travel, and other forms of temporal manipulation, was tricky. It was usually pretty safe to do, because it was usually fairly controlled, and minimal. A teleportation jump here, a seer making a prediction there; the energy used in these interactions with time dissipated so easily that no one had to make sure it happened. But it was possible for all this to get out of hand. Had the time monsters been allowed to exit the portal, and go on their merry way, things would have been all right. It would have all been structured and safe, at least on the grander scale. But the Triumvirate always wanted to destroy them, and they used a lot of temporal energy to do this. Since they were acting in such close quarters, this constant transfer of power started to do some real damage. Reality was going haywire around them, causing the past, present, and future to be layered upon each other. They saw things that would not come to pass for decades, but it was all so chaotic that there was no way to gather any real information from it. Either way, it needed to be stopped, and there was seemingly no way to do that. They spent days trying to work the problem, but with every attempt, the problem only grew worse, because they were simply adding more and more energy to the convergence. There was one particular incident that kept coming back and seemed to be at the heart of the matter. They were witnessing a future event, wherein another small group of people were trying to fix their own energy problem. It generated a massive explosion that vibrated all across the globe, and when it was finally over, the portal was finally closed for good. They figured, if there was any way to stop their problems today, it involved somehow tapping into this future moment. What they didn’t realize was that the moment they were watching actually took place over the course of decades alone, and they were simply watching it on fast-forward. It took a long time for that portal to close completely, and a lot of people were taken in by it before that would happen, whether they wanted to go, or not. The Triumvirate paid their own price when they got too close. Savitri was pulled in to what was later called the portalcane, and dispatched to the universe where the monsters originated. This should have only been accessible any time after the event occurred. Even with time travel, the portalcane generally only had an impact on the future. As far as anyone knew, Savitri was the only exception to this. Her friends would never see her again. And they would never forgive themselves for it. Savitri, however, did fine without them. She lived a decent life—though, not without heartbreak. She just did it somewhere else.