OKAY, WE HAVE DILLY-DALLIED LONG ENOUGH, IT IS TIME FOR THE TIME TRAVEL NONSENSE TO ACTUALLY START HAPPENING.

Here's how it's going to go down.

On August 2nd (this Wednesday/Thursday IRL) a group of scuffed n gritty looking future versions of characters already in the game will emerge from a time hole in the middle of LA. In their timeline, the death of Celestia on August 7th 2014 at the hand of a mystery assailant resulted in the collapse of Alpha Force, which allowed various supervillains to rise unchecked, eventually plunging the world into a horrific dystopia, ruled in part by the sinister Sovereign and in other part by the equally sinister (no, really) Princess Unikitty. This band of rebels has come from ten years in the future to try to stop the assassination of Celestia, and in doing so hope to prevent their timeline from coming to pass.

However, they have likely been followed into the past by some less than savoury characters who are intent on stopping them from achieving this – or simply on using the time portal to their own advantage. The time travellers will need to convince their past counterparts of their good intentions at the same time as trying to stop any ne'er-do-wells who followed them into 2014 from disrupting the timeline in any negative ways.

On August 7th (February 14th/15th IRL), the time travellers will see to it that Celestia is not murdered while she making a public appearance at a local school – they anticipate that her assassin, a mysterious figure known only as 'Wyoming', is planning to plant a power-destabilising field in the venue and are able to thwart it, preventing her death. However, the assassin will instead succeed in stealing the Sun Medallion, the source of Celestia's powers and eternal youth, and escape back into the future, resulting in a dystopia just as dystopian as the one the time travellers were trying to prevent.

After this, the time travellers will have to follow Wyoming into the future to attempt to retrieve the medallion – with the assistance of some characters from the present. We'll probably give folks a week or two to have their characters run around in the future before the Medallion is finally retrieved and everybody returns to their rightful time period.

(Or doesn't – if anybody does actually want to keep around their future character, they're welcome to submit an app. Similarly, if you feel like this would be a good excuse to app in a character From The Future who you don't already play, you can absolutely use this as an entry point to introduce them.)

We'll be putting up an open log for the future characters to enter through the TIME PORTAL on Wednesday; in the meantime, everyone is encouraged to finalise what's going to be going on with their characters for this event.

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LA Times’s Miko Nakadai accompanies young heroes to thwart Nightforce survivor Swansong
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Heather Hernandez
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The musical mystery that confounded LA’s boldest heroes for most of May was finally brought to a halt this week by an intrepid group of young vigilantes including heavy hitters Starbreaker and Hulkling, telekinetic newcomer Psych, and young clairvoyant Silvertongue, whose divination abilities reportedly guided the team to the source of the disturbance where all others had failed.

The LA Times’s own Miko Nakadai was on the scene alongside the intrepid teenage heroes to provide us with an exclusive first-hand account of the showdown, and we can reveal that the perpetrator of the musical plague was none other than Swansong, the last surviving member of the unregistered vigilante group Nightforce. As we reported in March, Swansong filed a missing persons report for the rest of her team after they disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Nightforce are today believed to have been victims of the possibly alien artificial intelligence that terrorised the city later in March with an army of cybernetically engineered animals.

Swansong, from a viral publicity photo shoot circulated late last year.

Swansong had apparently been hiding out in a warehouse on the edge of town, using her probability-manipulating song powers to effect the weeks-long citywide songfest – but there may be more to this story than the simple case of a mourning heroine letting her probability-manipulating euology get out of hand. According to Miko Nakadai’s exclusive eyewitness account of Swansong’s capture, the warehouse was encrusted with strange crystals of an unknown composition, which not only seemed to have rooted Swansong to the floor, but also attacked the young heroes who arrived to bring an end to her musical assault on the city.

Eyewitness accounts from Nakadai and the vigilantes likened the crystals to the still unidentified substance that was found in the aftermath of the two mysterious sinkholes that opened up in and around LA earlier this year, even going so far as to claim that they were attacked by ‘crystal creatures’ similar to the ones that were reported to ‘hatch’ from crystals retrieved from the UCLA sinkhole in March.


After Swansong herself was freed from the crystals binding her to the floor of the warehouse, though, every crystal in the building crumbled to dust. “Boom,” said Nakadai, describing the event. “It was like they were never even there.”

No trace of the substance has been found by investigators at the time of reporting, but the warehouse has been isolated for further study by CONDOR.

“Honestly I don’t know about this crystal story,” said one CONDOR representative, who asked to remain unnamed. “The stuff our guys have been studying from the sinkholes is harder than diamond, and these kids are talking about being able to punch through it – super strength or no super strength, they’d never manage that with the sinkhole crystals. We still haven’t found a trace of these supposed crystals anywhere in the area, either. Honestly, these kids are vigilantes, Swansong’s a vigilante – and everybody knows she was blaming CONDOR for what happened to her teammates. You want my opinion? They’re making something up to try to cover her back.”

After being freed Swansong fell silent and into what has been reported as a coma, and has yet to recover. The motives for her weeks-long attack on the city – if it can be called that – remain unknown.

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