With art by Omeow Comics!

 

Timeliner the Multitude Man

 

“My name comes from timeline, an orderly series of events arranged on a simple line. I love timelines. Point follows point follows point. The best ones tell a story. What I try to do is unravel the confusing mess that is time into timelines. I’m no different from any other historian in that regard. I look for causes and effects and draw my lines. I’m a timeliner.”

 

In 1991, Isaac Blau was sleeping in his car after his girlfriend threw him out of his house when he felt the sun rise outside. Opening the door, he was greeted by a flat disc as orange and rosey as the dawn. An X as black as night slowly turned on the disc and as Isaac watched it turn, he understood.

 

In 1941, Isaac Blau was working late processing recruit applications for the Black Terror Division when suddenly light streamed through the window. Knowing that Axis saboteurs were inside the country since the raid on ARGO’s Groom Lake facility, he drew his gun and carefully peaked through the window. He immediately holstered his weapon. The X outside was strangely familiar and comforting. It would never harm him.

 

In 2020, Isaac Blau learned he was an Isaac Blau when his vacation to the Mainline City Museum of Robots was interrupted by a blazing circle. The MS guide and other tourists noticed it first, and Isaac wondered if they weren’t looking at him for some reason. Then he turned around and he knew. He knew everything. His parents changed his name hoping it would save him from this fate. But someone on his dad’s side was a Blau, and the name Isaac popped into her mother’s head when she first held him. That was who he was. That was who he had always been.

 

In 1912, Isaac Blau was shot down over France. Crashing into a barn, his Gabriel suit was a smoldering wreck. Twisted, burning metal pressed down on his chest and he waited for death to end his pain. But it was life instead that delivered him. A black X ringed with the sunset appeared in front of his eyes and he knew everything was going to be alright. He was recorded as as casualty of war and never bothered to correct the record, he had more important things to do.

 

Time traveling, which ARGO recognizes as traveling the multiverse through a series of causally-linked universes, is a very complicated phenomena and time travelers are some of the most complicated people in existence.

 

“I don’t know which ones make me more nervous,” ARGO Commander Victory once said, “the ones that keep several watches on their arms or the ones that keep only one.”

 

But Timeliner, for all the paradoxical complexities of his existence, is not someone that causes people anxiety. Even Commander Victory admits that he likes seeing him. “He’s disarmingly polite. That X of his shows up before he does so you know he’s coming, and if you’re very particular about your time, like I am, he’ll schedule an appointment with you through the proper channels like a normal person. Other time travelers like Foreshadow, they show up behind you breathing down your neck and tell you that the apocalypse is scheduled to happen before dinner–that’s another point in Timeliner’s favor, no predictions. You have any idea how refreshing that is? Time travelers usually tell you how history goes, not the other way around. They’re usually content to observe you like cosmic stalkers. But not Timeliner. He wants to know how you think, how you feel. He wants to interview you. Other time travelers, they’re like scientists out inspecting their specimens. You’re nothing to them but a collection of data points on their time graph, a constellation of moments, and if I can be frank about it, it makes them callous. What’s one erased line if the constellation still stands? That kind of thinking is dangerous, but I’ve never so much as seen a hint of that thinking from Timeliner.”

 

Timeliner is sometimes called the Multitude Man because he isn’t one man with one history but several men with several histories. This is how it works–there are men named Isaac Blau. Sometime, somewhere, a glowing disk named the aeon disk will appear before them. When it does, they know who they truly are for the first time in their life. They join the multitude and feel the thoughts of every other Isaac Blau in the multiverse similarly to how homo fabula feel the thoughts of all their diverse syncretics. 

 

If you’ve ever met an Isaac Blau, you might have met an Isaac Blau from 1941, or an Isaac Blau who met the aeon disk yesterday, but they all will remember meeting you, even the ones that haven’t been born yet.

 

They all tend to homogenize in personality and appearance following their encounter with the aeon disk. They all tend to end up looking like old men with long white hair and beards inside a suit of stellar judge armor–something that would eventually get them in trouble. They all tend to have the aeon disk follow at their backs like a loyal shadow. They all tend to wear blue glasses.

 

They all tend to look, a Gold Star once said, “Like techno-Zeus.”

 

Their personalities tend to be very grandfatherly. They’re polite, sweet, and highly curious about the goings-on of younger people, which according to a certain theory, means everyone else in the multiverse.

 

But there are exceptions. One Isaac Blau goes by the name Timefall, dresses like a Roman gladiator, and carries his aeon disk on his back. While other Isaac Blaus want to meet people to talk to them, Timefall wants to meet people to fight them. Another Isaac Blau calls himself the Eternaut and dresses, in the words of Gold Star “Like a cowboy Christmas elf.” Eternaut walks on the aeon disk, his eternal spotlight, and seeks to be the greatest artist in the multiverse. More specifically, he seeks a time where his aesthetics are appreciated (his artwork has been compared charitably to melting rainbows and uncharitably to mess make manifest and his music has been compared charitably to shrieking thunderstorms and uncharitably to noise incarnate). Another Isaac Blau named Observer, who bucks the trend for Isaacs to interact with people in their travels, is his archfoe and tries his hardest to keep him out of the timelines in the belief that because Eternaut can’t find an appreciative artist that this makes him the ultimate avant-garde. Appreciation would spoil Eternaut’s artistic merit.

 

Yet another Isaac Blau was the notorious time thief (though he called himself a time preserver) Framer, who put the most beautiful moments in history between the frames of his aeon disk as living, repeating pictures. Free from history, reinterpretation, and skepticism, he believes that these stolen moments are only free in his captivity. As most Isaac Blaus are historians, this puts him at odds with the Multitude. As he knows what they’re thinking and they know what he’s thinking their chases through time can get very convoluted and strange. One chase involved a potted cactus, a tyrannosaurus rex, a blizzard burger, a chihuahua named Donut, and a Vril crystal.

 

Every Isaac Blau is a Blau by their father, and it is their mother that thinks to name them Isaac. This “Isaac Blau phenomena” has been known to the public since the early 1950’s leading to great care to be taken with the name. Some men with the name Blau have taken steps to erase their name, some even going as far as to mystically erase it like Spectro the Hanged Man did to his own. They don’t want people to fear falling in love with them because their child might become a time traveler, nor do they want people to fall in love with them for the purpose of having a time traveler child. Other men of the name Blau see their situation differently. They want the fame of having a son who is king of the second and god of the hours.

 

One Blau has had no less than 300 sexual partners but has yet to produce a time traveler.

 

There is a man whose parents deeply wanted to be an Isaac Blau named–first name Isaac Blau, last name Isaac Blau, for Isaac Blau Isaac Blau. It was as if they were begging the fates to turn their son into a time traveler. IB2, as he’s commonly known, has yet to see the aeon disk and likely never will, but lives a comfortable, if banal, existence as a moderately popular celebrity.

 

There are several theories as to what the Multitude Man is and how the Multitude began, if such a group even had a beginning. One theory is that the aeon disk and the Multitude are a self-generating hyperstasis, a malpirgi with time as its chosen substance instead of matter. Timeliner is to time what the God Sculptors are to rock. Another theory is that, somewhere along the timelines, the aeon disk was created, possibly by the ‘first” Isaac Blau. Then something went wrong. Instead of transporting the man Isaac Blau through time, it transported the concept Isaac Blau. It altered history so that Isaac Blau would be periodically born. The aeon disk is now trying to correct its mistake by uniting the memories and thoughts of all Isaac Blaus.

 

Another theory is that Isaac Blau is a Form Master experiment. It does seem like something they would do. Form Masters love life and seek to master its many forms. Not all of them are like Form Master Gora who mastered the art of shapeshifting and now passes it down to students at Martin’s School. Some Form Masters use more esoteric means to explore form. Isaac Blau might be one of them.

 

Still another theory ties into the cosmological theory that humans are gradually developing into homo fabula through the noosphere. The noosphere uses telepathy to share thoughts not just between people but between the various facets of a person. Where once the Abramelin operation, which is used to converse with one’s own soul, was an occult secret shared only between masters it is now something anyone can perform with enough effort and willpower. Homo fabula are marked by the syncretic principle. Every Thor is known to every other Thor. They dream of each other’s lives and hear their thoughts in the back of their minds. As for Thor, so to for Isaac Blau, and the distribution of Isaac Blaus within the Multitude mirrors that of gods within their god clusters–a homogenous core around a central element with a few variations like Timefall off at the extremes. For confirmation of this theory, scientists are looking for a transitional Isaac Blau–one that connects to the Multitude and to another group of time travelers similar to how homo fabula connect across names. Pele connects to all the Peles in the multiverse, but also distantly to other deities associated with fire, earth, and abandonment. If the theory holds, there should be an Isaac Blau not named Isaac Blau, someone that breaks the pattern even more so than Eternaut.

 

But whether a mistake, or a malpirgian, or an evolution, Isaac Blau, Timeliner and Multitude Man, is one thing above all else–a historian.

 

History as Therapy

 

Timeliner spends his time (and as a time traveler, he’s not running out of it anytime soon) helping the multiverse. He’s helped ARGO explore causally-linked universes, more commonly known as timelines, since the 1950’s and has been given the prestigious title of Vector 3. Less commonly, he’s worked with

 

But what he spends the most time on by far is history. He travels throughout time interviewing people and learning their thoughts and feelings preceding and following historical events. He has asked a young Gold Star about one day working with FDR. He has asked Julius Caesar to comment on his impending assassination. He has shown Shakespeare The Chimes at Midnight and asked him to record his feelings on the matter.

 

He calls this approach to history “destiny interrogation.” 

 

“The truest essence of a man comes when he confronts his destiny.” Blau once wrote, “Or to speak with more accuracy from the perspective of a time traveler, when he confronts events that are extremely likely to happen to them. Does he show disbelief? Acceptance? Anger? Pride? If you truly want to know a man, tell him how he dies.”

 

To prevent the complications from arising by giving the past knowledge of the future, he typically erases the memory of his visitation following an interview.

 

All of Timeliner’s interviews and observations are collected in the massive (truly massive, it’s text can only be contained on supercomputers with infinite memory) book Time and Space. Time and Space, in edited form, is often used in schools both for history classes and for predictive speculation classes, commonly known as “timeline classes,” which analyzes how similar events play out differently across the multiverse and potential futures of our own world.

 

The entirety of Time and Space is contained within the Last and First Library, an infinite fortress-computer built in the near Astral. Situation outside time and space, the Last and First Library is a place with murky origins. Isaac has memories of building it, but also of discovering it, and also of being invited to it, and his circumstance is similar to other time travelers. The Last and First Library seems to be a probabilistic nexus–it is and isn’t, was and will be.

 

Though its origins are unknown, its purpose is known to all. The Last and First Library provides free information to all. There are no secrets within its halls, and all answers lie within–if they can be found, for there is no end to the space inside. Isaac works as one of innumerable librarians within the Last and First Library. He has memories of the Library that no other being has, and though he doesn’t know all the rooms of the Library (no being or god does), he is familiar with quite a few.

 

Isaac loves history. It is his true passion in life. Every Isaac loves history. Whatever their profession was before they encountered the aeon disk, they developed a voracious passion for history soon after receiving the memories of all other Isaac Blaus. Isaac sees history as self-therapy. His existence is a tangled mess of cause and effect. Normal people live lives that look like spider webs. What they do, who they interact with, it all forms a harmonious construct like a snowflake. But Isaac’s life is like a tumbleweed. Effects happen for no reason. Causes are inconsequential. A sunset colored circle changes a man’s life forever. There’s no reason for any of it. There are events, strands of rationality, but they aren’t connected. They’re just twisted together into a mess.

 

History is the art of studying cause and effect, of drawing lines of influence and meaning between events. Isaac can’t straighten out the tangle that is his life. He’s tried. He will try. He is trying. But he doesn’t make a bit of progress. But he can with Earth, and in drawing lines in time he feels as if he’s untangling a little bit of his life as well. He is, after all, a human. Human history belongs to him as much as it does any other man.

 

The Aeon Disk

 

“Aeon is my favorite word. Do you know what an aeon is? That’s alright, no one does. It’s not a unit of measure. It just means a very large stretch of time. That’s why I like it. I go this direction in time, I got that direction in time. Oh, so many numbers to keep track of. It makes my head hurt. But I can say I moved an aeon and then moved an aeon and then moved another aeon and I’m correct. I like that simplicity. It comforts me.”

 

No one knows what the aeon disc is, exactly. It’s as mysterious an object as the cosmic key from Universe 161. Simply put, the aeon disc is a time machine, and a very good one going by Warp Authority scans of it. It has no apparent limitations. When Isaac wants to go somewhere, the aeon disk moves from his back and engulfs him, stopping about a foot away where his body stood. The glowing portions of the disk then vanish leaving a black X suspended in the air which shortly vanishes. Somewhere in the multiverse, a black X appears followed by four sunset colored cones in its four angles. Then from out of this disk walks the Timeliner. 

 

Because of the black X that lingers when he vanishes and appears right before he materializes, Gold Star gave Timeliner the nickname “Captain Pirate Map.”

 

The disc covers Isaac when he wants to leave a place and Isacc walks out of the disc when he wants to enter a place, but this is by Isaac’s preference. The disc doesn’t need to make contact with a person to send them through time. “It’s just how I like things.” Isaac explains, “When I want to go somewhere, my disk takes me away like a gust of wind at my back buffeting me through colorless skies of time. When I want to arrive, I walk in through a door. It makes sense to me that way.”

 

The X is also another of Isaac’s preferences. “I think of it as waving goodbye when I’m leaving and knocking when I’m arriving. It also helps get people’s attention. A man in armor is fairly common depending on the location. If I appeared without my X heralding my arrival in, so say, Joyous Harbor, no one would bat an eye. They’d think I was just another superhero. But a floating X? That makes everyone take notice! It never fails!”

 

The exact range of the aeon disk is unknown. Isaac believes it to be infinite in potential and limited only by his understanding. ARGO certainly holds it in high regards. Back in the 1950’s when Timeliner was recruited by ARGO as a vector, a superhuman with considerable access to the multiverse, he was given the prestigious title of Vector 3. Though Vector numbers don’t mean anything nowadays, back in the 50’s they were a rank of a Vector’s usefulness and ability. That ARGO considered only two Vectors to be more useful than Timeliner speaks volumes on the power of the aeon disk.

 

Isaac can increase or decrease the size of the aeon disc. He can make it large enough to swallow a star and send it into the future to collide with itself, a trick he’s used to add fuel to red giants and stabilize them back to yellow stars. Conversely, he can make it small enough to send individual particles backward and forwards in time to study quantum effects–though he only does so as a favor to ARGO. He finds physics mind-numbingly dull compared to history. A popular quote of, one that’s often used by teachers in Martin’s liberal arts department as a friendly jab against the science department, is “Science is the story of objects. I prefer history, the story of human beings.”

 

Isaac can make the aeon disk selectively permeable. If it passes over a person, it doesn’t have to teleport everything on that person. He’s used this fact to disarm belligerents encountered in his time travelling. Nothing diffuses a conflict like a person finding their weapon was sent several million years into the future.

 

The aeon disk, for its power, has a limitation–it travels through time, not space. However, the aeon disk knows a way around this limitation. The universe is always in motion. As an example, if Isaac wants to move to the other side of the planet, the aeon disk holds his position in space constant while the Earth rotates. By varying how much or how little Isaac’s temporal position obeys gravitational effects and the like, the aeon disk can move him anywhere.

 

In practical terms, the aeon disk can freely travel throughout time and space, but from the perspective of a Warp Authority engineer, it’s an unoptimized time machine–powerful, but unoptimized. It wastes a lot of energy not using principles of spatial engineering, essentially brute-forcing its method of spatial travel. This contributes to the theory that the aeon disk is a broken machine–and many engineers wonder what’ll happen if it had a tune-up.

 

Stellar Judge Armor

 

Isaac, somehow, owns a suit of stellar judge armor. Stellar judges are the famed executives of the Star Unity, a loose confederation of Yarven states that range across the universe. The Star Unity is devoted to the universal flourishing of life and is known as a neutral peacekeeping force. The Unity swiftly puts an end to any conflict that grows beyond a planet’s borders while refusing to intervene in planetary matters. Space is their domain and they guarantee safe and free passage for all. This safe and free passage is protected by the Unity’s stellar judges, Yarven assigned to a star and given a powerful suit of armor bonded to that star. Stellar judges become one with their stars and see all that their star sees. 

 

The signature feature of stellar judge armor is the power circuit. Power circuits connect the stellar judge’s thoughts to a source of energy, placing that energy under the control of the judge’s will. Judges use their power circuits to exercise precise control over stellar bodies. They can interface with gravity to safely move planets without their inhabitants noticing a thing, so long as they don’t look up. They can interface with sunlight and concentrate its energy into a weapon without the sun burning out.

 

Isaac’s power circuit is different. It doesn’t interface with energy, but with time through tapping the power of the aeon disk. What his ciruit interfaces with is different, but it gives Isaac no less a precise control. Isaac can pause time around a person’s thoughts so that they can linger on a particular memory without it degrading. He can speed up time around a sapling and make it explode into a tree. He can rewind a mountain into a flat plain, a desert into a sea, or a bullet back into its gun.

 

To maintain their neutrality, stellar judges are all Yarven. For there to be a stellar judge that isn’t a Yarven would risk prejudicing the Unity. If an Earthman was made a stellar judge with all its rights and privileges, all the other races of the universe would cry foul and rightly demand judges of their own. The Unity would be flooded with countless new recruits each with their own biases.

 

However, there are “alien judges,” recruits that work under stellar judges. These alien judges have armor of their own but function as subordinates of the Yarven judges and swear an oath of loyalty to the Unity, forsaking any previous ties to blood and country they might have had. Alien judges function as middle-men for the Unity, smoothing relationships with civilizations outside the Unity.

 

The Star Unity has no record of ever recruiting Isaac or ever creating his armor. The star it is bonded to does not exist, but corresponds to the V838 nebula. Apparently, he will one day be recruited and bonded to the star that forms from the nebula’s gasses.

 

While it somewhat bothers them that a non-recruit is out and about in time and space using stellar judge armor, they can’t really do anything by their own rules. Isaac isn’t a recruit and isn’t subject to their laws, and while his armor is certainly the armor of a stellar judge, it doesn’t match any armor in their registry. It’s not their property. 

 

Master Judge Wahsah, who is in charge of the Milky Way and its more than 100 thousand million stellar judges, couldn’t accept that Isaac was allowed to break rules that applied to so many loyal judges and worked tirelessly to find a reason to send stellar judges to capture him. He found one after studying long and hard at, amusingly enough, the Unity law section of the Last and First Library.

 

You have no idea how perturbed Wahsah was to find that his helpful librarian was none other than Isaac himself who didn’t seem at all worried that Wahsah was looking up rulings on armor possession and arresting judges.

 

Wahsah learned that recall switches inside armors, which are used to track and shut off armors in case of an emergency, are considered separate devices from what constitutes the systems of an armor. They are, legally speaking, additions to the armor, and tampering with them or removing them is a huge crime against the Unity.

 

Wahsah’s argument was strange from a rational standpoint but sound from a legal one–Isaac’s armor was, because it wasn’t on any record, not legally a star judge armor. But there are no records for recall switches. Why would there be? It’s assumed that every armor has a recall switch, and every does have a recall switch. It would be like keeping a separate registry for life support systems.

 

So, legally speaking, Isaac was running around in a non-star judge armor with a star judge recall switch inside. Legally speaking, that recall switch was not where it was supposed to be. Legally peaking, he Wahsah was in his power to arrest Isaac and confiscate his armor. 

 

And that is exactly what Wahsah did. He tasked Houh, the star judge of Sol, and Ard, the star judge of Alpha Centauri, along with the alien judge John Kane with arresting Timeliner.

 

The three didn’t want to arrest Isaac. They liked Isaac. He was kooky, but he was kooky in a loveable way, and he had helped them in a couple of missions. They thought of him as the Uncle Dudley of their Marvel family. 

 

They thought it was funny–Wahsah said he wanted to bring in Isaac because he dishonored the average star judge in the field, but they were average star judges in the field and they didn’t have any problem with Isaac. They concluded that Wahsah probably missed field work more than he let on and probably resented how Isaac got to fly around the multiverse with more freedom than a Master Judge could ever have.

 

But their hands were tied. Orders were orders, and they brought him into custody after one of those “misunderstanding fights’ with the Monster League of the 1940’s (Isaac was interviewing them at the time).

 

ARGO wasn’t happy that their Vector 3 got arrested over a suit of armor more common than humans and went over Wahsah’s head and filed a complaint with the Star Arbiter of the Virgo Supercluster, Awtary. Awtary called a trial at the Great Attractor, a cloaked Yarven star castle which serves a neutral ground for all Yarven states in the Laniakea supercluster.

 

For a month, it was the talk of the superhero community. Awtary eventually ruled in favor of Isaac, and much to Wahsah’s frustration, ruled that Isaac hand over the recall switch but keep the armor. He was now not only free to do whatever he wanted in a suit of stellar judge armor but do it without a recall switch.

 

Wahsah was not pleased, as you can imagine, with the results of the trial. In his judgement, Awtary stated delivered something of a consolation to the Master Judge–if Isaac was to be a persistent problem, then he should find a way to make peace with him.

The implications of Awtary telling him this about a time traveler who helped him in his research as if he knew it would do him no good was not lost on Wahsah. He fears that one day, he will accept Timeliner…or even worse, befriend him. He now does his best to ignore Timeliner…but in ignoring Timeliner, he found that his disgust for him became…blunted.

 

Sometimes, things change little-by-little.