Now that there were more than eleven mages to protect the humans living on
Durus, some people decided it was time to expand. When Springfield came
through the Deathfall, it landed in a random spot on the rogue planet.
Perhaps due to rotation, or just because the universe is chaos, it didn’t
even end up in the same place as other people who fell through the portal
previously. They were fortunate to be as close to the only water source,
Watershed, but they still wished they were closer. It took a lot of work,
piping all that water all the way to Springfield and Splitsville. Since
there was no longer anything holding them back, some in the population
decided it was time to move closer, and live easier. The process of getting
to this point wasn’t going to be easy, though. Building an entirely new town
from scratch without the plentiful resources that could be found on Earth
was going to be a very involved ordeal. Fortunately, there was someone who
could help. For the last ten years since the Mage Games, Madoc Raptis had
been selecting one person on his own to be transformed into a mage. These
people were mostly there to keep the peace within Springfield’s borders, but
there were plenty of other possible applications for their powers. One in
particular would be useful to them. He could make their new town faster. He
couldn’t make it easier, but it would at least get done in a fraction of the
time. He created a time bubble over a massive area of land, nearer to
Watershed, where workers could build the infrastructure at extremely high
speeds. Those inside the bubble would feel as if time was moving at a normal
rate, but as they looked outside, everything else would appear to be frozen
in place. In total, the construction workers spent ten years in the bubble,
building everything they would need to support a significant population,
before anyone else even moved there. They didn’t need to be protected from
the time monsters, because the bubble itself was impenetrable while it was
standing. Once they were finished, it was taken down, and the people were
able to reenter normal time, of which only ten months had passed.
They called this new place Parade, inspired by the idiom
rain on one’s parade. That didn’t mean that it rained there.
Watershed, though flush with clean water, was an inhospitable place to
actually live inside. The rain never stopped, so the soil was unstable, and
the excess moisture prevented crops from growing. Water always had to be
taken out, and transported elsewhere. The point of Parade was to just
make that easier. While the workers were proud of what they had
accomplished, it was not without sacrifice. They were ten years older, even
though they should have aged less than one, and they had been away from
their families for months. Fortunately, there was a way to remedy this. All
it took was a little bit of de-aging, and a timeloop. There were some issues
with this. First, no human had ever been granted the power to make someone
young again. It was certainly possible, and some people on Earth were
capable of it, but no one had received this gift after the Mage Games, and
Madoc always randomized his sources, to remain honorable and honest. To undo
all the aging the workers had experienced, they needed to strike a deal with
the retroverters, and the verters would not agree to do it for free. They
were intelligent, and reasonable, but not altruistic. Still, what they asked
for was a price they were willing to pay, in order to repay the
workers for their hard work. Even after this, however, they had still missed
out on time they could have spent with their loved ones, but there was a
solution for that as well. Madoc had managed to source someone with the
ability to travel back in time. Now, a long time ago, the source mages
secretly gave backwards time travel to one of the townsfolk. This person
attempted to go back in time, and undo all the heartache the Springfielders
had experienced. He was completely unsuccessful, and ultimately suffered
under Smith in the early years. The source mages knew this man from their
past, but hadn’t realized he was the same person until it was too late.
There appeared to be no way of undoing the Deathfall altogether, and
altering the past afterwards was just too dangerous. So it was outlawed. Any
mage who ended up with this ability was charged never to use it. But Madoc’s
associate was exempt from this rule, and was free to create another time
loop, especially since the time bubble was cut off from the rest of the
world anyway, so there was little risk of screwing up the future. So the
workers jumped back in time, and lived their lives as they would have if the
bubble had never been created. Once their Past!Selves had completed their
jobs, they all moved to this new town, and enjoyed the fruits of their
efforts.
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