Omar goes for a leg grab, his body quickly sweeping underneath and to the side of his opponent. Unfortunately for Omar, Steve was much faster than him, and Omar got a hard punch to the top of his head, which made a loud 'Thock', for his miss. The punch didn't do any damage, but was a reminder that he could be hit.

Omar rolled to the side to avoid another blow, and rose to his feet. Already, Steve was upon him, throwing a flurry of blows.

Punch, evade to the right. Punch, evade to the right. Punch, evade to the right. Punch, evade to the right. A sound like a sledgehammer being used on a tree issued with every blow.

As Steve circled to his right trying to get behind Omar, Omar circled to prevent him and continued to try to grab him. Finally Omar succeeded and grabbed Steve's left arm. Omar had more than 12 inches and 120 pounds on Steve, at that point logically the fight should have ended.

Steve's right hand grabbed Omar's left shoulder, he stepped out of his crouch and in an impossible move launched both of them straight up in the air. Omar's head collided with the ceiling in a sound like a car crash and both men lost their grips and fell separately.

He wasn't sure if he dented Lorien, or if his head was dented, but at impact with the ceiling, Omar saw a bright flash. Obviously, his brain had been jarred by the impact. If Omar had not been a Nova, his skull would have been crushed.

Fortunately, Omar's vision had returned by the time he landed, with a loud thud, on the ground. Omar rolled up to his feet and saw Steve rising as well. Before Steve could get his bearings, Omar lept at his opponent. Once again, Steve proved to be the quicker of the two, and deftly rolled underneath Omar. When Omar landed, and rolled back up to a standing position, a large barbell was already rocketing towards him. He had barely enough time to get his hands up to protect his face, which now left the rest of his body exposed.

Andrew winces visibly as Omar smacks into the ceiling, "Damn! That's gonna leave a mark," he comments. Unconsciously he stretches and then grimaces, "You'd think I'd be used to no having joints to pop.

Andrew remarks to Morgan, "I think I need to rethink my mental image of 'sparring' when working with Omar ... next time maybe I will just go for the gusto."

The barbell bounced off Omar’s hands, then a 25-kg weight slammed into Omar’s exposed stomach. Two more 25kg weights rocketed in and impacted him as well. One of them broke into pieces which sprayed Lorean’s wall like knives.

A quick leap had taken Steve out of Omar’s immediate reach and next to a weight bench. Using the same speed and precision he’d used to stack gold bars Steve unstacked the disk weights next to the bench and launched them at Omar like Frisbees. Running out of the 25kg weights, he turned to the tens.

Ok, this is getting ridiculous! Omar thought to himself in exasperation, as he cracked one of the flying weights in half, with his forearm. He looked over to where Steve was throwing the weights, and rushed, at full speed, towards him. As he charged, the weights impacted on his armored hide, leaving red welts where they bounced off.

Omar reached Steve, just as he was launching another, smaller weight. This time, Steve's arm, with the weight still in it, smashed into Omar's left arm. To Steve, it must have felt like he was punching a brick wall. With his right arm, Omar backhanded Steve away from the bench, full of weights.

*Ow* Steve thought. *No, wait. That didn’t hurt near as much as it should have. Hmm… OK, the weights didn’t work as well as the hand to hand, let’s let him close then finish this.*

Steve flows from rolling on the ground to standing, assumes another martial pose and closes with Omar again.

Omar sees Steve closing with him, and he claps both his hands together and then rubs them. Omar wanted to make sure that he would hold onto Steve this time. As Steve came inside, to land several blows, Omar swung his arms together and grabbed him in a bear hug. Omar then proceeded to squeeze as he lifted him off the ground.

Everything was great for about ten seconds, until Steve, for some inexplicable reason, was able to squirt free. Steve immediately began his assault on Omar's midsection. Unswayed by the punches, Omar brought his arms together and raised them skyward. Like a giant sledgehammer, Omar smashed his fists downwards onto Steve's upper back. As Steve staggered back from the quantum enhanced blow, Omar charged and threw his shoulder into Steve's sternum. As they both slammed into the mat, Omar could feel the ship shudder underneath their impact. Omar grabbed Steve again, this time, to finish him off.

Steve gasps out,

"Enough. I'm done."

Morgan speaks up, "Ok guys, I think that's enough for today. Good job all of you." He walks around to each and sends a little of his quantum into each and heals the bruises and strains. "So lets get some lunch and discuss what our next move should be."

Once everyone has seated themselves in the galley and had the chance to dig into some tasty nurishment Lorean asks, "So, we had talked about jumping forward a year and talk to Mercer when he returns, and there was also mention of jumping forward 150 years or so to see if the war occurs. If I might suggest though, I don't know if there will be a paradox or not since we don't seem to be able to jump sideways. It might be better if we try to do things as much in chronological order as possible." She pauses for a moment to gather her thoughts.
"So if we jump forward 125 years without first talking to Mercer, will the war occur? Probably so. But what if we then go back and talk to Mercer once we know the war is going to happen. Does that make the war not happen, in which case it wouldn't have happened when we jumped forward the first time, or would history prevent a change from happening since we already know the war is going to happen?" She looks at the expressions on everyones faces and smiles. "See, time can get very messy, and I honestly don't know what will happen since things have changed."

"That's why I'm suggesting we try to think ahead and attempt to do things in a logical order, that will help to avoid paradox."

"I don't think I am qualified to comment. I realy should catch up on my 'history' if I am going to be much help in this way."
At the next available 'downtime' (when everyone is sleeping?), Phillip will request a catch up on his 'history' from Lorean.

Andrew listens to Lorean as he consumes a massive grinder. Despite his shapeshifting powers allowing him to gain or shed mass on a temporary basis he finds it humorous that he must still eat to put any mass onto his "normal" form.

"Why don't we try a simple experiment? All we need to do is find somebody who is going to die within the next few days. We travel forward a year and see what effects their death has. Then we go back, prevent them from dying and see what happens.

"If we're worried we can scale down and use a smaller timescale and or an event which will cause less changes. This will at least allow us to determine if a paradox is possible and what the effects will be. "

Morgan looks thoughtful, "Hmm... had the sudden urge to kill Hitler there for a sec, but I think the consequences of that would be too massive to contemplate." After taking another bite he continues, "Easiest way to check for paradox is to go back and talk to our earlier selves and ask ourselves politely to not go anywhere near the Hammersmith event. If paradox is possible we create one, if not then poof we cease to exist and things go back to normal."

Before: Just after the fight:

Morgan heals Steve, and he gets to his feet, more or less without pain. Steve says, “Thank you, I needed that” to Morgan and bows to Omar. He says, “the better man won” and it’s unclear if he’s congratulating Omar or just stating a fact. As he walks past Andrew he remarks,

“That’s just a taste of what nova level combat is like. Thing to remember is that’s 90%, maybe 95% of my total capability… but it’s only about 10% of Omar’s, maybe less.”


Now:

Steve says,

“It’s that ‘poof’ that concerns me. We try to do it, we know historically that we didn’t, obviously something must have prevented us. Maybe we changed our minds, maybe Lorean blew up, maybe the guy trying to plan it died or succumbed to taint. Another way to phrase the issue is that as far as we know, no one who is still alive has caused or tried to cause a paradox.”

"That's a valid point Steve, but my rolodex is pretty thin on time travelers so it is hardly condemming. That said we always have the option of only moving forward ... It's certainly the safest thing to do."

Andrew grabs a double handfull of cookies and a glass which would better be described as a tub full of milk. He begins to chow down a goofy grin on his face as he dunks the cookies and consumes them.

"Hell the only problem is that in order to observe the outcome of the paradox experiment one of us needs to actually be the one to create the paradox. And very likely only that person would be affected by it... what a pain in the arse."

Steve says,

"We can also change our minds later about it. Let's give it a good try going the safe route. Then if we find we've made things worse and humanity goes under, we can still risk paradox later."

Immediately after the combat:

He walks over to the now healed Steve and pats him on the back. "You had me going there for a moment. I was having a hard time getting hold of you. Good Job!"

After Steve speaks to Andrew, Omar adds: "You see, as Nova, we can take a lot more punishment than normal people. We also can do a lot more damage. I slammed you against the bulkhead because as a nova, you should be able to handle it." Omar looks down at his bruises and then to the weights strewn about the room. "You need to let go of everything you once thought about fighting. Besides, I can handle it." With that final sentence, Omar smiles, and you see his bruises heal before your eyes.

Later:

After a shower, Omar goes to dry storage and grabs some dried meats and several oranges. Omar listens to the others and the ideas put forth. finally he speaks while noisily chewing on some jerkey. "I like the idea of jumping into the future to see how the timeline was changed. Then we can start experimenting with paradox."

Steve smiles and says,

“Let me put it this way, when we make decisions, we created alternative universes. Someone turns left rather than right and Hitler gets hit by a car and never goes into politics. That’s fine for us, but as I understand it, that doesn’t happen with Lorean. I could be wrong about this” Steve glances at Lorean for confirmation, “but she doesn’t have an infinite number of alternates out there. She is unique.”

“So what happens if we go back in time and try to make her split in half temporally? End that uniqueness? Try to make a timeline where she did one thing and another where she did something else? I don’t know, but the forces at work are very large and I don’t want to point them at me.”

Lorean considers Steve's words for a bit then says, "Actually, it's not that I, or rather we, don't split off just like anyone else, its just that I can sense other timelines on which we exist and avoid them in order to prevent possible paradox. Of course right at the moment I can't sense any other timelines at all. They may still be there, I just can't feel them. In fact, I think this timeline is cutoff from the rest of the multiverse, which is why I believe it would be possible to cause paradox now. I think the Watchers made it part of my 'programming' to avoid paradox under normal circumstances, which leads me to believe the consequences could be unfortunate if we did the wrong thing."

Steve says,

"So paradox is either really bad or just potentially bad."

"Moving on for the moment, there is another consideration that needs to be brought up. Telling Max and then going to the future is the minimalist approach."

"At the other extreme, we could go all out. With future information, advanced technology and thinking, and nova powers on top of that, we could attempt to create a society that will tolerate novas. Of course considering Project Utopia and Eon already exist, and that’s what they’re trying to do, maybe we could just hook up with them. Or we could pick a government and back them."

"Call it a go for broke option."

Morgan looks thoughtful, "That's an interesting idea. Start right now in the 1920s and work forward setting things up and changing history in a maximum effort toward solving the root problems." He falls silent for a moment considering.

"I like it. If we are stuck on this timeline anyway we might as well go allout. We can still be trying to figure out how to put things back to normal as far as Lorean's jumping abilities are concerned and it would make a great baseline to compare other timelines against assuming we ever do regain the ability to jump."

He falls quiet for just a second before busting out laughing. A few seconds of full belly laughter later he recovers enough to share his thought, "Hey we don't have to kill Hitler, or Saddam. We've got a telepath who could rewire them and make them the greatest and most humane rulers of all times, or if that offends peoples sensibilities of violating free will, we could kill them at an opportune moment and replace them with our shapechanging friend here." He give Andrew a grin. "How would you like to rule Germany or Iran?"

He sobers quickly and continues, "I do think that we need to discuss this and make a plan. If we are gonna do it we all need to be onboard with it fully. Anyone have any outright objections to this course of action? If not then we can begin to discuss exactly how we are going to go about it and what we want to accomplish." He looks at all of the novas present to guage their reactions. This is the most animated you have ever seen Morgan, he doesn't have the slightly distant look that he has had since the beginning.

Steve says,

"Saddam won't be born for another 16 years, Thetis in 18. If we do this we'll change the situation so drastically they'd be common citizens. Hitler is alive but he won't take power until 1933. Fix Germany's problems and he'll just be a crank. The root causes for Germany's mess started in 1919-ish. Right now Germany is trying to establish a liberal democracy. They'll fail rather badly but haven't done so yet. Japan is in a similar situation."

"Many of the world's problems and the rush to fascism will come from the great depression which will officially start in 1929, we can probably head it off. Debt forgiveness by the US of the WWI loans, elimination of the gold standard, creation of the FDIC..."

"Lenin is still alive, Stalin hasn't taken power and certainly hasn't tried to remake himself into a god yet. Basically Stalin is just getting started, he's right now forming the tools of terror he's going to use to such ill effect later. If we're going to mind control someone he and Lenin would be big targets."

Omar was still confusd about paradox. While in college he studied history, and not physics. To Omar, avoiding paradox was as easy as them not being in the same time as other versions of themselves.

"Why can't we just go ahead in time 100 years and look at how things change? Then we go another 100 years. Since we are not influencing any events, and only observing, could we not avoid a paradox?"

Omar then put forth his own opinions about influencing the world events. "I would not be adverse to stopping Saddam Hussein from coming to power. My only concern is how would that affect me. Saddam tortured me. Yes. But what he did, made me who I am. In fact, I'd enjoy making the world a better place." Almost jokingly, but also with a tone of seriousness in his voice, Omar continues. "Being seen as the ones who change the world, sounds great."

"Lorien, would anything we do in this universe create a paradox with our future selves, causing us to vanish or change?"

Morgan nods at Steve's comments, "You're right I hadn't even thought of the danger in Russia. I'm still so used to thinking of them as cold war enemies, it didn't occur to me that they don't have to be."

*****

Lorean responds to Omar, "We aren't from this timeline so anything we do should not effect us. However, what we do could easily effect your local selves, but hopefully it will be in a good way."

"I do have some good news to add. I've been tinkering with that teleporter we recovered that Thetis used to jump to Mars. I think I have it working so that I can teleport anyone to or from Earth while in orbit. I might be able to push the distance all the way out to the moon, but I wouldn't want to trust anyone on a longer distance than that except in emergency." She smiles broadly, "You and the crew will be able to go to and from the surface at will. All you have to do is request transport through the communicators. As long as I'm not time-jumping there should be plenty of quantum to power it without worry, although, I would request that it not be use frivolously. I'll keep tinkering with it and try to improve it's design so that eventually it might take next to no energy to use, but that could take a long time."

She gestures and a holographic screen appears of a blank document with the heading 'Action Items:' at the top of the page. "So, we have a year before Mercer returns from his time-jaunt. What do we plan to do in the meantime?

Steve says,

"I'd like to do something about Russia. Stalin was, is, will be... sorry. Hitler, Mao, Saddam, and others all got their inspiration from Stalin. He showed them how to put together a totally controlling state. Rule by terror, total control of the people by the state, cult of personality, all of that."

"I doubt killing Stalin would be enough. Granted he’s an evil genius and willing to kill hundreds of millions of people to stay in power, but that’s only part of the problem. It’s like working at a used car dealership. The situation creates the ethics.”

“To create a Marxist state, you have to force it on the people at gunpoint. If we could make them accountable to the people, then Communism’s many failures would quickly become apparent and the system would fall apart. It’s just not obvious yet just how evil and bankrupt the Marxist system is in practice.”

Phillip sits listening, slightly confused. His history is as good as the next guy, but that doesn't include the future. He wait to either do his research or be helpfull (ocasionaly snacking on his treasured blowtorch).

Andrew listens to the conversation for a while before finally interjecting. "Guys I think there are a number of things we can do in the here and now but once we start altering things we will be unable to rely on our knowledge of "history" to help us. If we help Germany get back onto it's feet while preventing the rise of Hitler as a military dictator we could stop WW2 from happening. Once we do that we effectively save millions of lives and everything going forward is going to be ... well massively different is a bit of an understatement I think."

Steve notices that Phillip doesn’t understand much of what we’re talking about and says,

“Right, this is future history. Stalin is Lenin’s right hand man and will take over the USSR when Lenin dies in ’24. Stalin rules for 30 years, and proves that he’s an evil genius when it comes to oppressing his own people. He invents the totalitarian state, which is where the state controls everything. He basically attempts to conquer the world, but he’s stopped by the United States and the sheer incompetence of communism’s economic theories. That’s the cold war in a nut shell. He’ll fund the revolutions in various other countries, and other dictators will use his example to make their own totalitarian states.”

“The totalitarian state is perhaps the 2nd most evil thing that mankind has ever created. For example 4 million people are going to die in the USSR in the early 30’s by starvation. And it isn’t that Stalin wanted that to happen, it’s just the state isn’t very good at keeping schedules on complex operations, and food production is complex and rots if you don’t harvest it on time. Famine and starvation are going to be common hallmarks of a communistic country. Stalin is responsible for about 60 million deaths.”

“Hitler on the other hand is in a class by himself. We had to invent new words just to describe how evil the man was. He was elected head of Germany in ’33 and puts Joe Stalin’s lessons into operation although he wasn’t a communist. Economically he turned his country around. Then he tried to conquer the world through shear brutal force and came close to succeeding.”

“So far he sounds a lot like Joe, but where Joe took 30 years to kill 60 million people, Hitler did the same thing in roughly five. He also did it deliberately. Where Joe Stalin would have a purge and kill tens of thousands of people, Hitler killed tens of millions with his murder factories.”

“The new word is ‘genocide’, the deliberate and systematic attempt to murder an entire people. By the end of World War Two in ’45 there are very few Jews left in Europe. 6 million entered his factories and didn’t come out. He also did the same with some others, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill or physically handicapped, etc.”

Phillip goes pale.
"60 million dead per badguy! And that is the SMALL stuff!?!? I don't want to make it worse (hard to belive that is posible), but if at all posible, it has to be stopped! So many people, so much suffering, it is beond comprehension."

Omar, who had been listening intently, spoke with a blank expression on his face. "Yes, Small stuff. The reason we have come to the past, is to stop the Aberrant War. If we don't, 95% of the earth's population...over 5 billion, might perish."

Omar turns to the others, and cryptically says. "Of course we will have to do something about the 'others' as well. I don't take kindly, to having asteroids hurled at my planet."

Lorean nods. "Agreed. Now that this is our 'home' timeline we need to do what we can to make it better." She looks over at Phillip, "Until we came here our choices didn't really matter much. What we did didn't change things it only made more splits in the time continuum. I'll explain that later, but suffice it to say that we want to make things better and we are glad you are with us on that."

"Our assets include knowledge of what will happen if we don't act, and what could happen. Our own considerable powers. We also know of other threats to humanity than those from within. We can prevent at least the beginnings of those threats and by the time they become a real threat, we hope that humanity will have the wearwithal to defend itself." She smiles.

"All in all, I think we can make a very positive difference here. The only downside is that we don't have the ability to jump to other timelines at the moment to view the consequence of our actions and finetune our choices, but we will just have to make do."

She looks at each of you and asks, "So what do we do first? I think we've had enough time to rest and we've got a year before Mercer returns, what should we do right now?"

Steve says,

“There’s a third bad guy in there, Mao is China’s answer to Stalin. Same sort of deal, but he doesn’t die till ’76. It’s unclear how large his body count is, China is much more isolationist and much less expansionist than the USSR. But the key point is China is still a repressive totalitarian communistic country when novas start showing up.”

“Omar is correct, our big purpose here is to stop the aberrant war. To do that, I think we have to look at which countries dealt with novas successfully. China didn’t, they were expelled or drafted into the army from day one. Actually I’ll go further than that, I don’t think any of the totalitarian states were flexible enough to deal with novas. Novas are a threat to the general order and create a lack of stability, this is a threat to whatever small group of rulers are in charge. Similarly, the Cold War forced both the USSR and the USA to prop up fairly dysfunctional countries and we were still dealing with that when novas showed up. Dysfunctional countries eventually lead to novas being used in various wars which won’t be a good thing for them or us.”

“The USSR has already been created, but Nazi Germany and Japan were results of the Great Depression. Similarly I think the Great Depression let Stalin do bad things for his country.”

“Moving on, the so-called curse of oil is also something that creates dysfunctional governments. Basically the oil producing countries generate so much money from oil that they don’t need their citizens. Once again we end up with repressive governments where the people in charge will do anything to stay in charge. Added to that mess oil gives them tremendous money to do so, this money is then often put to irrational or counter productive ends such as religious fundamentalism.”

“Speaking of religious fundamentalism, the fundamentalists largely decide novas are demons. Much of the social opposition to novas came from that quarter.”

“Largely I think we need to try to bring about a more open and tolerate world. This specifically includes dealing with racism. I think the way to address this is via the media and education. Increasing levels of education increase tolerance. The media lets national lights shine on dark corners.”

“I’m also not sure that we should allow the world to go nuclear. Nuclear weapons are one of the big threats to life on this planet... but I'm not sure how to prevent it other than preventing the big wars.”

“OK, we have a year here before Max shows up, and we don’t really have the time to wait. The good news is he may be able to give us clues on what needs to happen next, the bad news is he may not agree with what we’re trying.”

“I suggesting the following:
1) Prevent the invention of the totalitarian state and try to set things up so that communism falls apart much earlier here. Lenin, Stalin, and a few others including Mao need to have their minds adjusted so the system they create is more accountable to the people. No secret police, elections without the communist party calling the shots, that sort of thing.
2) Prevent the curse of oil by introducing non-oil technologies for generating energy.
3) Prevent the Great Depression and World War 2. The world’s economies need to be taken off the gold standard and the US needs to forgive it’s European debts, hopefully with the rest of Europe forgiving theirs. The only way I see to do this is to go public, or at least reveal ourselves to the President, and offer to trade some technologies. The obvious technologies to offer are ones for non-oil sources of energy, and ones that enhance the media.”