Sunday, February 25th, 2001 #317
A Bad Time Lost in More Than One Way
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Time travel is a messy business and can raise all sorts of confusing mental paradoxes if you really stop to think about it. For example, why did this X show up?

Think about it. That temporal inversion wave X mentions in the second panel moved forward through the entire time stream, right? So why did it only send the X from that particular moment back in time? Why not an X from five minutes before or five minutes after? Why didn't fifty quadrillion X's show up from every second of his existance?

The only thing I can think of is that multiple parallel timelines run concurrently. Imagine, if you will, that when Bass traveled into the past, it created two separate simultaneous timelines, one in the present with Mega Man and Dr. Light and one in the past with Bass, with time passing at the same rate in both of them. The shockwave took time to reach the future, partly because it took time for Bass to alter the past in his timeline, giving the characters in the present time to prepare. It's like two rooms, where the events in one room affect events in the second room, though time passes in each room at the same rate, so if Bass takes five minutes to mess up the past, the effects won't be felt in the present until at least five minutes after Bass left... Does that make any sense?

Further, if Mega Man goes into the past and spends two weeks there, then when he returns to the present, he will have been missing for two weeks. Granted, you'd think you should be able to return to the present at any point you'd like, but I'm just gonna wave my hands and talk about conversation of temporal energy or something.

So the idea, then, is that the future timeline that X came from is a third simultaneous timeline, and time was passing there too. So when the time ripple hit the "future", and we're specifically talking about that future parallel timeline, it hit it at the same "time" as it did in the present. Of course, when that future timeline started, or what started it, is a whole other issue.
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