Episode 107 of the Letters Page: Temporal Targets

Listen to Christopher mix up names all the time http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/episode-107-temporal-targets-la-comodora-and-time-slinger

C&A were on something that day. XD

I want to see the ridiculous lengths the fandom takes God Guise to.

Also, I can't get Princess Cool's letter out of my head. Envisioning some kind of Disparation comedy issue with Sgt. Steel as the pappy. You could set that up as a one-shot, even! Steel, the other two don't matter, versus Chrono-Ranger, KNYFE and Fanatic as the priest they're trying to get to for marriage, in Champion Studios with Love Interest as the first card. :D

Not bad; I didn't like it as much as the last ep, but the "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?" storyline really nailed it...and the implications are glorious.

Yes, that comic was definitely the highlight of the episode. :D

I think I see where we're going with this. The leftover La Capitan, without her ship and supercharged with chronal energy -- I'mma call her Paradox, after her lost ship -- would be a perfect nemesis for Timeslinger (once the universe-shield is broken).  Both of them have powers that allow them to mess around with the local timestream, and she provides a solution for Timeslinger's problem.  If Con can figure out how to pull all the chronal energy out of Paradox and into Timeslinger's battery, it could both disarm a villain and give Timeslinger a much-needed recharge....

She's also a great candidate to appear in Prime War.  In fact, now that we have three extremely powerful characters related to La Comodora with ambigious fates--the supercharged evil La Capitan, Dark God Guise, and La Comodora herself--I can easily see an expansion that revolves closely around that, as a plotline if not as playable characters or Prime Aspects.

Four: Concorda.

Isn’t that super charged La Capitan the Black Spot La Commodora? I’ve forgotten what her deal is...

Did Concorda survive the Paradoja ramming Oblivaeon?  If that was mentioned I've forgotten it. I had assumed Concorda's story ended with the ship's.

Nah, Black Spot La Comodora became that universe’s version of the Void Guard and spends her time trying to contain leaking void energy.  Some of it got on her.

It wasn’t mentioned, but it sure seems possible. We just learned that La Comodora “picked up” the Concordant Helm somewhere along the way, so it at least once had an existence separate from the ship. Its depiction in the card game also shows it floating around, so I wonder if it’s now integral to the ship, or if it is separate and could have survived…

I didn't really understand who all these La Capitans were. Isn't each La Capitan just Maria Helena at different ages? If La Comodora depowers La Capitan-23-years-old version, doesn't La Comodora negate her own powers in this La Capitan's future? Also, shouldn't La Comodora remember each time she was caught by La Comodora back when she was La Capitan causing all this mischief?

Well, that’s kinda the whole problem – they aren’t just younger versions of La Comodora. Maria Helena paradoxed her own timeline by interacting with herself. All these spare Maria Helenas aren’t part of La Comodora’s past, they’re branches and time loops and other nonlinear elements.

Like, if La Capitan, age 32, goes back in time and does something to change her younger (age 23) self’s history, La Capitan age 32 doesn’t cease to exist, but her younger self now grows up into a different La Capitan, age 32, with different experiences.  So now there’s two Maria Helenas, both age 32, running around with different memories and the same home universe.  The ones Comodora is depowering are the ones whose personal timelines don’t connect to her own; she’s cleaning up all the other selfs she’s been shedding as she went along.

I think La Comodora remembers being the La Capitan that Jim Brooks brought in for a long, serious talk with La Comodora* but the others are extraneous and causing ongoing timeline damage.

*A conversation which set Maria Helena on a more responsible path, and is, yes, an ontological paradox, because it means La Comodora brought herself into existence, but it’s a little late to start complaining about that now.  Her ship is named “The Magnificant Paradox”, after all…

Ah got it! So there's some Hodor-style stuff sometimes but there are some mischievous deviations from the one-timeline rule going on.

Also some of them are straight up alternate reality versions of Maria Helena.  Since they can also cross realities... and mess with other versions of Maria Helena at different points in their own lives... which may or may not be in their own times/realities at the time... which can also cause realities to fork and create more alternate reality versions of themselves... it's just a colossal mess all around.

La Capitán; the person who treats paradox like its no big deal and gets away with it!

People on the train were giving me strange looks while I was listening to that part.

The opposite of bless is bane; the opposite of curse is boon. A hex is a subtype or super type, not sure which, of curse, both of which are black magic, but a jinx isn’t magic, it’s just bad luck.

Loved the digression about the abandoned house. If I were less afraid for my health and the law and other uses for my time (in other words if I become a ghost), I’d love to just explore buildings that are being slowly reclaimed by nature.

An expanded version of this book would be a great place to get into the nature of what a “self” is, where time travel technology is basically the science of the human soul. Arataki is Haka just as Aata is, because they share a soul across multiple worlds, and Rule 63 is part of how the timelines work.

Evil god Guise is No-Joe King.

I think that in the privacy of his own mind, CR probably thought of KNYFE in a way similar to how he’d think of a “saloon girl” if she expressed such gratitude for him, doing something heroic, that a thing she normally does for money, she instead offers to him as a thanks. There wouldn’t be any real judgment with that profession in that era, it was very normalized, and Jim wouldn’t think any less of such a woman, so his encounter with KNYFE would have felt much like that.