Canon Backstory For The Time Lords In The Once Upon A Time Story [SPOILERS]

[riseofthekumquat]

So this seems to be the biggest stumbling block in moving forward with the story. We don’t need all of this information to be stated in the story (in fact, it would be preferable that we don’t spend long sections on backstory because out characters haven’t actually done that much for a while), we just need to solidify what happened with the Time Lords and the Butterfly Apocalypse so that we can write the story going forward.

Again SPOILERS, do not read unless you’re planning on writing a section.

[riseofthekumquat]

We’re definitely going to need Kristen and Chris’s take, they apparently had a plan for their characters’ backstory.

[riseofthekumquat]

So we for sure established that Kristen became the Eldest Time Lord after secretly murdering her father and initiated the Butterfly Apocalypse. What I added with my ((((((((HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL))))))) segment was that Kristen had a curse put on her in the form of a red butterfly scar, which prevented her from using her full *Elder Powers as well as from being able to absorb any **valdras. There were select points in time where the curse would be able to be lifted, but only by beings that crossed a certain threshold of mental power. These windows of opportunity would only last for a few minutes and leave Kristen in excruciating pain from the glowing/burning scar.

In the version that I initially wrote, it was Chris who assisted in putting the curse on Kristen. This is why Lord Kumquat (who in that version *was* Chris) had to defeat a past version of himself and felt such anger at what he had done. If the identities changed and we decide that Chris shouldn’t be a villain, then I’ll find a different way to write that scene.

*Still not quite sure what special powers the Eldest Time Lord would have, but not having these does not mean that she doesn’t have powers.

**Valdra translates to “Inferno Spirit” in the Ancient Time Lord language. These are power sources that corrupt the user’s soul but in return grant incredible power. Lord Kumquat himself meditates on the Valdra Pen Sáma (“Inferno Of One Mind”) to gain incredible telekinetic power and other mental abilities. In my entry (currently non-canon) Lord Kumquat ordered for an operation to begin where Kristen would be given Valdra Muinthel (“Inferno Of The Queen”) while in her sleep state. Valdra are highly forbidden by Time Lords not only because they corrupt the soul and draw many to madness but also because attempting to take such power into your body while conscious often leads to crippling injuries and, in extreme cases, lobotomy.

[riseofthekumquat]

Is Mason the only human left in the group? Or is he a Time Lord too? And how many characters do we have that were there for the Butterfly Apocalypse? And where does TOPHAT come into this?

[Poulet Frit]

The back story of Chris and Kristen…we haven’t worked out all the details. Just major things. But…it would spoil…everything.

[riseofthekumquat]

Okay, so if I did everything from that entry that made Chris a villain, except Lord Kumquat was formerly a Time Lord named Troy who was a friend of Douglas/Doc and everything else stayed the same, would that still ruin your story or would that be fine?

[Dawn]

Mason is a TimeLord. Anyone who contributes to the story is a TimeLord, but some, like Manalive Smith, Mason, Dawn and probably a few others have had their Essences drained away by Kristen. So basically Kristen is the most powerful person alive right now..

As Attorney General, Mason was assigned guarding of the Eldest in the Power Bracelet in Hyrule.

*Mason saw stars. Thousands of dim lights danced in front of him. Slowly, feeling returned and he saw the remains of a boulder surrounding him. His body felt shattered, and Mason gasped with pain. He glanced up and…
Saw Brooke, the bright new member of TOPHAT and one of those sanctioned to use the Power Bracelet, undoing the spells that held the Eldest hostage. “Brooke, what are you doing!?” Mason cried out.
Brooke faced Mason. “I’m setting my friend free,” she responded. Her face clouded over. “She told me everything. How she just wanted to find love. And how you prevented her. How you bound her without trial. How…how DARE YOU!” She turned back to her task angrily.
Though his body screamed with pain, Mason struggled to at least sit upright. Through his gritted teeth he gasped, “Don’t listen to her! Don’t you realize—”
Then the world crashed and Kristen emerged. “MASON. YOU TRAITOR! YOU HELPED BIND YOUR ELDEST! I WILL BIND YOU AS TOPHAT BOUND ME. ” She pointed a condemning finger at him “RHADOPHOBIA!”
Mason suddenly felt his Time Lord power drain away. Without it, he couldn’t retain consciousness, and slide away…
And darkness. deep darkness…*

Josiah set Mason free a while back. However, while Mason recognized Josiah as his releaser, it also made him feel like he was forgetting something and ran away before Josiah could ask any questions. Time moves much slower when you’re alone, so Mason thinks he’s been in the cave for a long time.
GUYS WAIT WHAT IF THE ELDEST IS THE ONE WHO CAN REMOVE TIME LORD POWERS?!?! (that kinda makes sense, she’d be the only one who could cast Rhadophobia)

[Poulet Frit]

Troy, I must be honest. The last few pages of part 1 confused me so much that I gave up trying to understand. But…

Chris isn’t a villain. Heck, he’s trying to stop Kristen.
Kristen is…messed up in the head. Like…dude, she murdered her father all because some guy left and she blamed her dad. Murdered him. Cold blood. She got issues…but she’s just looking for the guy she loves. She’s looking for Chris. Chris is trying to probe that he doesn’t love her. Kristen is basically a murderous stalker.

[riseofthekumquat]

Okay, so if Kristen was freed by Mason, how did the whole group end up in the possession of the ACCU?

[DScott]

I think Kristen was freed by Brooke. I have no clue how everyone found themselves at the ACCU.

[riseofthekumquat]

By the time this thread is all said and done, I may have to do a video on the official timeline just so that we can have this all put together.

[DScott]

No way! That’s amazing.

[Dawn]

Brooke freed Kristen.

Brooke was allowed to use the Power Bracelet and Kristen manipulated Brooke to set her free. Then Kristen bound Mason in that Power Bracelet, went to the TOPHAT meeting, and cast a spell.

I don’t know how the whole group got to the ACCU but SuperChris tried to beam them all to different places to prevent Kristen’s unsaid plan from succeeding. Definitely Peter is trapped in the ACCU…However I’m not entirely sure what happened to the other members. I switched Dawn and Manalive from being in the Wood to being in the ACCU in a simulation because I thought that was where the story was headed but we can switch that part out.

[riseofthekumquat]

I interpreted it that somewhere along the line the entire group was captured by the ACCU and most of the adventure was then in a shared dream thing.

Also what does the Power Bracelet do?

[Josiah the Carrot Stick]

I think we’re destroying the purpose here. This is not one person’s vision for the whole thing, it’s a conglomeration of many people adding multiple things. I thought Kumquat’s lengthy segment was brilliant, and I don’t see any issue with Chris becoming a villain.

[Dawn]

The Power Bracelet is a thing found in Hyrule? I don’t remember what it does off the top of my head (I think it has teleportation powers), but I thought “hey need powerful object to hold Kristen let’s use this.”

In response to Carrot, I definitely agree. It’s not supposed to be one person’s vision for the whole thing and by all means don’t take my word as canon. While Kumquat’s section was indeed brilliant (LIKE HOLY SNAP I LOVED IT), it completely went against everything we had amalagated thus far about Chris. It upturned everything we had known without enough explanation. And when you don’t know what happened, well, you can’t really write much about that can you?

[Dawn]

HOLY SNAP I WASN’T DONE COME BACK WORDS COME BACK

…they’re gone.

[Josiah the Carrot Stick]

It completely went against what we thought we knew about Chris, but it didn’t necessarily go against him.

[Awkward Potato]

Didn’t Kristen say that Chris wasn’t a villain though? Not that we can’t change that, but I don’t know what her plans were for that.
(Also I think this story is absolutely amazing despite its flaws and deserves to be written well.)

[Josiah the Carrot Stick]

Was it stated within the story? Otherwise I don’t believe it’s canon.

[Awkward Potato]

I don’t remember off the top of my head. But she did say it in this thread.

[Wileycoyote]

I don’t think it would make any sense if we said that most of the story was just a dream that would be soooo confusing

[Poulet Frit]

If you look at the facts that are canon in the story. Chris saying that he’s not Kristen’s lover. Kristen being obsessed with Chris. Chris separated everyone so Kristen couldn’t do whatever with them. Kristen is clearly not a protagonist. And Chris is not on Kristen’s side…therefore he’s not an antagonist…right? I mean, yeah there are different levels of protagonist and antagonist…but he’s very clearly trying to ruin her plans

[Josiah the Carrot Stick]

True, Chris said that, but in Kumquat’s segment it was pretty obvious that Chris was having some substantial inner conflict on the subject.
There can be multiple antagonist parties. For example, Jabba the Hutt is not working for the Empire, but he’s pretty obviously evil.

[Poulet Frit]

I know I have said it, but I had gotten so confused during the last few pages of part 1 that I gave up trying to read or understand.

[Josiah the Carrot Stick]

I can check later, I need to catch up anyway.

[riseofthekumquat]

Whenever Mason introduced the concept of Peter waking up in the real world and finding out that he was in some kind of Matrix thing, I saw that as an opportunity to do an in-continuity soft reboot. By going in that direction, we could keep all of the character development while filtering out some of the fluff that came from the early stages of trying to figure out where the story was going. We had a villain, intriguing lore, and a healthy amount of characters that got buried under 14 pages of “and then there was a giant bunny and then Link showed up and then the talking Llama turned to Doc and said ‘get in the Delorean,’ etc.” That’s totally fine, because this started out as a game and we were all just throwing out absurd ideas for the sake of amusement, but the continuity needed a clean slate in order to move forward. So from the point where Peter is introduced to the ACCU onward, it would be up to us to decide what was in the simulation and what had happened in the real world. Big details, like the main characters’ back stories and Kristen’s first defeat, would remain untouched, but smaller, more forgettable details would be re-established/re-introduced in light of the new revelations of the story.

One of the bigger principles of interesting storytelling is that you want the villain(s) to hold some kind of power over the hero(s) for most of the story so that there’s tension as the story progresses. Introducing Lord Kumquat into the story created a situation where there was a villain that held even more power over the heroes, because they didn’t know they were in a simulation. But the character wouldn’t have as much of a purpose in the story if it was just my own self insert and we would quickly go back to “but then this character showed up” type segments all over again. I didn’t want to introduce a new, completely unrelated character this late in the story. So I thought about how I could tie that character back into the story and I thought that I would have to write some sort of Darth Vader-esque reveal. So when I looked back through and saw that someone had written that Peter was created by Kristen to be like Chris, I thought that it would be extremely interesting to see one of the villains be the original version of one of the heroes. And when I saw Chris’s line “I will prove to you that I am not your lover,” it came across a little clunky and didn’t quite make sense for someone to say out loud. Or at least it wouldn’t make sense unless it was all for show. So much of Chris’s rejection of Kristen seemed to be over-projected, which would make sense if there was outside pressure for him to reject her. Which led to him hating himself for choosing the whole of his community over her. I expected that a lot of the continuity issues with saying that Chris’s “I’ll prove I’m not your lover scene” was a flashback would be chalked up to issues with the simulation and that we could move forward with that.

With the langoliers thing, I wrote in a much harder reboot to undo what I wrote and give us the chance sort through what we want to keep about this story and put that in with the next draft of the story. I can understand the frustration of having the story completely get away from what you were planning (I wasn’t a fan of how Kristen’s character immediately knew what was going on with the simulation in the section right after the Chris reveal), but, as I’ve said probably way too many times now, I wrote what I wrote at the expense of both Chris and myself (I erased my own character to make him an extension of a different character) to make the story as a whole more interesting. Every entry that I made was for the sake of either cleaning up the timeline or connecting things together to tighten up the focus of the story and streamline stuff.

Who’s this new villain?
Oh, it’s Chris.

Who’s Valdra Muinthriel?
Oh, it’s some kind of spirit thing that they’re gonna put in Kristen to give her more power.

Why’s the pacing all over the place and why are new characters and new locations and all of this stuff coming at us at rapid fire (besides the fact that we were making all of this up as we were going along)?
Oh, because they were in dream simulations and stuff sometimes gets crazy when you’re in dreams.

What’s this crazy hotel place?
A different simulation (designed specifically to ensnare Peter, so it’s not too different from the thing that Mason was going for)

My mindset was that I wanted to make things simpler specifically so that we wouldn’t end up in a position like this, where everything is so dense and hard to follow that nobody wants to write anything, but I clearly failed there. So sorry about that.

[riseofthekumquat]

The whole purpose of this thread and the other thread is not just to figure out what happened, but what should have happened and what should happen down the line so that all these creative people can have their ideas come together to make something worth reading (or listening to, if that audio drama idea comes to fruition).

[Masøn M.]

Man, you’re so articulate…

[Poulet Frit]

I am not as articulate as you, so…prepare yourself for not college-level words (unless I through in tax law lingo).

Isn’t this still a game? Isn’t this still just friends having fun on a forum?
I still see it that way…adding rules and abrupt twists that add new rules can make someone not wanna add on.

Yes, everyone should have the chance to add on. That’s wonderful. I mean rules as in…”well this happened and it’s fact…oops…killed some people in the process. Your whole thing that you have been somewhat planning for 2 months is crushed”. But that’s what happens in these kinds of games. I don’t think Matthew expected it to go this long and this far, but there are extremely intelligent and creative people on this forum…like everyone.

I’m not saying that what you added is bad. I’m not saying that I’m upset or anything. You should not feel bad by my words, because that’s just where your creative mind went.

I do agree that we need to come together and decided what’s what. But…again, when everyone is being creative and such, it’ll be hard to get everyone to agree on what’s canon and what’s not. There will have to be compromise on all ends.

This is for fun…we can’t forget that. Yes, it’s good that we crave for it to be more than just a game…but it is just a game to help us be more active on the forum and have fun and become better friends.

THE FOLLOWING IS RANDOM TAX WORDS, IT’S NOT IMPORTANT (mostly acronyms):
ACA, ACTC, C Corporation, CODI, AOC, PTC, Casualty loss (have insurance or you don’t get the opportunity to get that), EITC, hobby loss rule.

Oh that makes me happy (no sarcasm). I recently learned more about CODI and hobby loss rule and casualty loss…and business taxes. It’s so amazing.

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