I'm thinking of making a Super Hero (of sorts) fic where the antagonist has the power to travel through time. Sort of like an inbuilt time turner that goes both ways.

The way I've invisioned this is that everything is a closed timeloop (ie, he recieves a sword from himself then goes back in time to give it to himself).

Of course he goes into the future to gain clinical immortality because that's what kind of character he is, sso no death by old age for him.

Whenever I try to envision a fight scene that would result in his death, his future self would jump in and save him because he has already lived through it.

Him and the two protagonists (Telekinesis and Teleportation respectively) are the only three supers in the story.

 

Time Travel before he gets roasted.

 

Well if you can't target him directly couldn't you target the power that's protecting him somehow and nullify that?

 

There are a number of ways to manipulate this, and at the moment these are just general ideas off the top of my head;

One way is that the time travel is not truly a self containing/closed loop, or that it only became that way as a result of another figure's actions, and thus it can be changed away from a loop if certain conditions are met.


Alternatively you could made the power vary - perhaps it has a certain threshold for how many times it can successfully induce a closed loop and/or static cycle within a set period(an hour, a day, a week, whatever) before it breaks down and needs to recharge.


If the future-self is always going to arrive at the correct moment, have the other two set up a trap accordingly- kill the future looper every time he arrives as he arrives. Use Telekinesis to capture, use Teleportation to warp.

If all of these loopers are drawing from the same singular source of power to keep time traveling, perhaps it becomes strained to the point of failure.

EDIT: Also, this page should help you get a good idea of all of the ways the issue can be handled.

 

I should have mentioned that his ultimate goal is a utopia, he just goes about it by slaughtering. Past Antagonist is originally against it, but his older self eventually shows up and gives him Determinism 101 which completly fucks him over mentally.

It's meant to be like the sword metaphor I used earlier. He gets the sword then travels back to give himself the sword; where did the sword come from?

I've actually designed the whole plot around the universe being a closed loop, so that would be a rather disheartening back to the drawing board.

The future version of the antagonist is meant to be dangerously genre savvy. I can see just going back and telling himself to be conservative in the use of his powers on 'insert date here'.

The way I've planned it out is that mid future him shows past him his moment of death. The only reason he dies is because he meant to. I need a way to justify it though.

It's meant to be inbuilt within himself. And I don't really like this, even if it's a perfectly valid limiter.

 

Perhaps you could have a further-future version decide this has all gone to hell in a hand basket and that utopia is never going to arise, regardless of how many alterations or events he tries to establish(like giving that sword because he was always given the sword).

To put it all to an end, this farther-future version drags the younger versions to the future in the hope to limit their interactions, or perhaps has somehow come to understand their ability enough to suppress it in the past, and thus allow only the farthest-future version to influence things the way he remembers them?


Maybe when the oldest version dies in the future, his powers go into overdrive and the death-effect travels like a ripple backward in time to erase his younger versions altogether - if they don't exist, they can not be a part of the timeloop to influence anything?


I'm sure better minds than mine have tackled the issue somewhere, so just keep searching until you can hit on a solution, guy.

 

Maybe as he's slaughtering all of these people and everything is just getting more and more fucked, the future version of himself comes back in time to a) either kill himself, or b) give a pep talk

Why don't you have it end with the antagonist realizing that his method of getting a utopia sucks and that the only way to truly realize his goal is to let the protagonists take over and use their defeat of the villain as a means of setting up a better society.

Edit: Hell, you could have the antagonist's plan have been that the whole time. i.e. to cause so much destruction and death, that his own death would rally the population together to form a better society.

 

Closed loop is kind of boring, though. Whenever you have an unlimited sort of time traveler, this always comes up, because you might as well give a determined warrior true immortality and set him loose on everything.

I personally prefer the sort of time travel I saw in the Pathfinder series by Orson Scott Card. No spoilers, but an example is that two characters went to rob a bank. They prepared plan beforehand, and waited in a specific area beforehand. If their plan failed, their future selves would come back and tell them, then disappear again; that future would no longer happen, and they would simply create a new plan instead.

The only limiter I can think of that could help you is space. Traveling time is important, but if you can't also move through space at the same time, you have to be in the right spot. Setting a trap for this would be fairly easy for a telekinetics user. This would also accomplish your idea of showing him his death, perhaps by having him go back in time to tell himself something and at that exact moment he dies in front of his own eyes. If they know it's a closed-loop universe, this could build in him the knowledge of his forecoming death. It would have to be a layered trap, one that would kill the present-antagonist if the future-antagonist didn't try to interfere.

 

For some reason, I'm thinking of the end of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

Spoiler alert for a movie older than God: while the Big Bad of the movie has been using time travel for his purposes, the final reveal is that only the winners of the final show down are going to be able to actually control things: the heroes allowed the villain to cause certain events, in order to preserve the timeline (and the plot) but ultimately, they screwed him over.

 

You could Doctor Who it.

That is, have fixed points in the timeline that are unchangeable, that have to happen, no matter what. In these cases, it would be impossible for future self to cross the timeline and intervene - you make up the reason why, such as paradox, being a part of events resulting in catastrophe, or something.

Or, you could have the hero/protagonist anticipate that future self is going to intervene, and kill of future self in the past - kind of like (SPOILER ALERT) what they did in Looper. Force the antagonists hand. There are holes here, sure, but some nifty writing could fix them.

Or, a third option, have this battle waged across time - hero v. villain for decades, and have the future villain always show up, until one time he doesn't, because this is the last battle.

Eh, time travel. Same old mistakes.

 

You could force him into a spot where even time travel couldn't save him, like if the protagonists managed to teleport him ten miles down or into space. That way even if he does travel in time he'd just end up in the ground/space again and be unable to do anything to stop it. After all, you're pitting the master of time against the dual masters of space here. In pretty much any scenario where the telekinetic is aware of possible danger it should be all but impossible to kill him, especially if he has time to warn the teleporter.

You don't have to kill a time traveller, only make his power impotent to help.

Alternately you could have the protagonists understand the antagonist well enough to predict how he would change time in a given scenario, then plan around that. Of course this runs into the problem of the time traveller bringing back an increasingly large number of his future selves (or even past selves, which would be fun for the plot) to help out.

 

Maybe you could have the hero wait for the baddie's future self to show up then draw him off somewhere else so the baddie doesn't know what happens and then have the hero kill the future guy. Then all he has to do is wait for his baddie to go back in time and then whoosh! His past self has already taken care of it.

 

Try this:
Hero promises to not interfere for one month, the bad guy has unlimited freedom to act for that period of time, in exchange for one question answered truthfully.

The question: "When and where does you future self come from."
Then spend a month creating a cult that will live on for generations whose job it is to burn that place to the ground in holy fire. (See Oz's comment)

Then at the end of the month, when Heroes go afer past-self, a burned and broken future self is in little shape to make it more than an even 2 on 2 fight.

 

If it is a true closed loop, and the time traveler is in a position to time travel in the unspecified future, then as far as I understand it it is impossible to stop him without breaking time. In this situation, the future is unchangable - predetermined - and so if the time traveler in the future can go back in time, and is willing to go back in time, then your heroes have already failed to stop him doing so.

In this scenario, there are very few solutions. Number one, the protagonists persuade the villain that his cause of action is the wrong one, and he agrees. However, it must be noted that the villain is always going to have to go back in time and render assistance in precisely the same way he did the 'first' time, despite his views on it. This doesn't rule out the possibility of the villain becoming good - the villain may do it merely for continuity's sake, and have no investment in it - but it does complicate it, as the (former) villain has to be willing to lie to his past self.

Number two, the heroes defeat the villain, and somehow orchestrate the seeming time travel of the villain's nonexistent future self with body doubles and acting. This has a massive potential for blowing up in their faces, and is very difficult, but has a tremendous application for comedy purposes.

It must also be noted that both these situations require that the time traveler from the future is somehow working against his past self, and this is for a very simple reason: it would be impossible otherwise. Imagine a gamer save-scumming. Even if it takes a thousand do-overs, if he truly wants to win he has a million and one chances to do so, and can't help but find a way. Time travel such as this is so very easily broken if used properly, and your system has very few limitations to it's power. My best suggestion would be to manipulate the perspectives of the characters so the timeline remains unbroken from their perspective, but is in fact radically different in reality.

I don't know, I might be misremembering everything completely, but it seems to make sense.

TL;DR: The timeline has to appear to stay the same, but can be massively different underneath. Clever use of perspective and exposition can achieve this.

 

If I travel back in time and kill my grandfather, do I die because I never existed? If I never existed, who killed my grandfather?

This is what you're trying to crack. You know, just so you get an idea of how hard it is...

Anyway, this is the only thing I can think of: failing memory.

Your protagonist knows what happened because it already happened. But in order to warn his past self, he needs to remember what happened. Assuming your antagonist doesn't have a prodigious memory, he will have to keep track of some details in paper (or just memory charm the bastard if this is HP fanfiction). If there's a journal, burn the journal, replace it with a fake and have the antagonist leap back with misleading notes.

At the final battle, the past self is knocked out with a blow to the head, making his memory of exactly what happened a bit hazy. His future self is killed. Naturally, he wants to go back and change this, to warn his past self that something could go wrong in this battle. But his journal is fake and his memory hazy, so the fake journal puts him on the exact same path that led to the final battle and his hazy memory gets him killed, as he can't remember how his future self had died, and thus you come full circle.

Bit of a mindfuck and terribly twisted, but it's the best I can do. Despite my best efforts, I can't think of a way to kill the past self and future self at the same time. Doing so would completely shatter the continuum. As a result, the future self will always die in the past, allowing for the past self to survive and thus ensuring that there is a future self that dies in the past.

Good luck with this. It's been fun.

 

Do something breathtakingly original and have him killed accidentally, in some entirely arbitrary way.

If written right it'd be an anticlimax worthy of Deadwood.

 

Destroy the universe and flee to a parallel dimension.

Then live with the guilt of killing billions of lives.

 

Kill the most future self, without the original knowing it. Considering time is fricked up, he might not notice it. That way, you can defeat his plan.

 

I've been heavily contemplating this story and am considering simply scrapping the Teleporter and telekinetic and just having the Time Traveller (younger version) as the protagonist and their older self the antagonist.

He only becomes an evil bastard because the only option (he believes) would be too heavily infuenced by the concept of determinism (the general theme of the story will be determinism in the eyes of a time traveller) and to go against it would be to destroy the space time continuum. It also ties up the loose end of finding a way to kill him since he would have already done it.

I do realise it is my story and I'm free to do what I want, but I would like some imput if that's alright with you guys.