Twelve years after she was born, Jayde Kovac was ready to take on the world,
and prove herself at the fourth Mage Selection Games. Unfortunately,
something went screwy with the spacetime continuum, and she was unable to
make it to the competition. It would ultimately not matter, however, as she
was born with time powers of her own, and never needed one of the source
mages to give them to her. Once she learned this about herself, she went on
a little adventure. She met friends and enemies, got a more detailed
diagnosis about what specific powers she possessed, and unwillingly got
proverted. When the source mages first asked the proverters to make them
look older, the proverters had some stipulations, and one of these was that
every person born like them would also find themselves in their debt. This
was one of the reasons the source mages chose to not have children, because
they didn’t want to impose that burden on anyone else. Of course, Jayde
didn’t know anything about this, but she did go looking for answers about
who she was, and where she came from. While she was indisposed, hell broke
loose for the rest of the planet. The truth was that this was all a very
unlikely coincidence, but it was indeed a coincidence. It just so happened
that Jayde manifested her powers as the final battles of the war with the
time monsters were beginning. Poorly researched history books would
attribute her actions to the influx of enemy activity, but she didn’t have
anything to do with it, and without her, the human race on Durus would have
surely fallen, and Earth would have gone down next. That didn’t mean she
made the best choices. While she looked like an adult, she was still only
twelve years old, and could not foresee the consequences of her actions.
Still, even though a lot of people got hurt, she did end the war once and
for all, and she deserved to be commended for her bravery.
With the intact Maramon as their leader, the monsters came out in full
force, and hit the towns hard. He was smart enough to get past their
defenses, and go for the weakest points first, instead of just running
around aimlessly, as the other monsters usually did. They leveled Forts
Salient and Frontline on the first day. Then they went after the other
towns, knocking them down pretty much simultaneously, so the humans couldn’t
concentrate their forces. Even Hidden Depths wasn’t protected enough to
avoid detection. While there had never been more mages alive at the same
time before, most of them were either new, or retired. This being just after
the Mage Games meant that the newbies didn’t know everything about how the
military operated, and they didn’t understand the scope of their abilities
yet. Many of the older retirees were called back into action, but they were
out of practice, because they never thought they would have to work again.
It was up to the recent retirees, from the 2070 Games, to step up, and
suffer the majority of the weight of the war, but even they weren’t enough
to go against the monsters. Seeing what they believed to be the writing on
the wall, the source mages retreated to another dimension. They had already
been living there for some time, but now they closed the gates, and kept
everybody out. There were enough people inside to restart civilization, but
thousands would still die if no one could do anything about it. Enter Jayde
Kovac, who ultimately had to realize that she was the only person who could
handle this, and she would essentially have to do it alone.
After a failed attempt at being trained by the source mages, including her
parents, Jayde was told that she had a very rare power. Like Escher Bradley
before her, she was capable of harnessing temporal energy itself. She had
many specialized powers of her own, but she could also absorb the energy
that other people had, and use it to boost her abilities. This wasn’t,
strictly speaking, illegal, but the source mages decided long ago to never
allow anyone else to have this ability. They figured the most altruistic of
candidates could still be corrupted with this amount of power, and they
didn’t want to risk it. Even Madoc Raptis agreed to make sure he never
sourced anybody energy absorption. Jayde was the child of two source mages,
though, and no one had any control over what powers she ended up with.
Nonetheless, this was arguably the best thing that ever happened to them.
Seeing no other options, Jayde left the hidden dimension, and returned to
normal space. The monsters had defeated all the mages by now, and were
primed to go after the rest of the humans if they didn’t agree to serve the
Maramon. Fortunately, the one Maramon there didn’t want to kill anyone,
because he assumed someone on this planet would be able to repair the portal
ring, and bring the rest of his people there. They never found out whether
this was true or not, because Jayde didn’t give them a chance. She absorbed
the temporal energy from everyone in the whole world. She waited to release
this energy until she traveled to the center of the portal ring. The
resulting explosion quickly turned into an implosion, and sucked everything
in its path into the portal. She effectively switched the portal’s
directions, so anyone could travel through it to the monster universe, but
none of the monsters would be able to come to Durus. Without the constant
energy from the ring, most of the monsters still around were left without
any powers. Unfortunately, the same went for all the humans. And thus began
the four year period known as the Interstitial Chaos.
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