Shifted EXTRA: Causality

Some time before Epilogue:Redemption

Crim sat weak and unfocused in a normal cell. All of his magic had been drained, and the only power left to him was his immortality. He'd lost track of the days, and wouldn't be surprised if the universe had aged a hundred years or more in his absence. It mattered not. His cell wasn't even locked. He posed no threat. His connection to the Cauldron, the source of all magic in the universe, had been severed. He couldn't even Shift anymore.

And he could feel that he'd aged. He had no mirror, though they would probably provide him with one if he ever asked. His once pitch black hair had grown long and grey during his time here. His body was thinner, and he could see the bones in his body poking at his skin. He just didn't have the energy to do anything. No, that's wrong. He could get up and do something, but he didn't have the drive. Nothing mattered anymore.

His thoughts drifted to the days long since passed, and a faint smile spread across his lips. He remembered all those years ago when he and seven other Shifters masked their existences and hid themselves away from Eudelus Nacht and his Salvation. Crim had cleverly manipulated the other seven into serving him, and none of them were any the wiser until Lia Merca's forces overran then at Purgatory. Even after they discovered his covert and ancient betrayal, he still adored them. They were the closest things he'd ever had to a family.

Criston Marr was strong and determined. He held an air of authority about himself, and his thunder magic was nearly unrivaled until he met the great Nik Stoll. The Battle for Purgatory lasted for several days, and every second was that Marr and Nik fought was a terrifying display of destructive beauty. Thunder had rolled across the battlefield, frightening both armies, and the lightning was so mighty that it cracked the ancient angelic ruins of Paradise that rested below the false moon Purgatory.

Althea Vollz terrified everyone. She had been cursed over ten thousand years ago with a strange case of eternal youth. While her body remained young and beautiful, her mind and soul would age horribly. Even her voice was hoarse and distasteful, making her sound like a very old woman. She had been forced to live alone until she awakened as a Shifter, and then she sought the same goals as Crim; the destruction of all magic to avenge the curse placed upon her. He almost regretted sacrificing her. Almost.

Xeno Crius, the sword master. Crim was very fond of him. He was the first piece to move in their game against Salvation. He snuck onto the world of Eden, and seemingly crippled a group of mortals who served Salvation. Darkstar, Cyril, and Aqua were three of the mightiest to serve the organization, and Xeno effectively destroyed their spirits. He murdered Aqua, who was married to Cyril and thus eliminated the two of them in one fell swoop. Darkstar proved more difficult, but he ultimately cut the scythe user's eyes out and rendered him useless. The War of Dogma was started, and three pawns were removed from play it seemed. Sadly, this was not the case. The two mean had a strong determination for revenge, and they found Xeno on the battlefield. Darkstar died in the battle, but Cyril ultimately put a bullet though Xeno's skull.

Atra Miles, Aevitus, and Blossom held little value sadly. Atra felt no ambition, and he defected as soon as the tides of war shifted against him. Aevitus was too ambitious, and she destroyed herself in the pursuit of power. Blossom was the most tragic. Solstice, the half-elf servent of Arletha, has a strong resentment for vampires, and when Blossom revealed herself, she sealed her doom. He hunted her down for sport before the war was concluded.

Then his thoughts drifted to the seventh and final member of his motley crew; Calm. He never gave his real name, but his name had special meaning. He could control whether a person was emotional or not, and he generally preferred everyone to feel calm. "It gives little distraction on the battlefield when your mind isn't clouded by anger or sorrow," he'd said once. Crim saw Calm as his closest ally. He even loved the man in a way he'd never thought he could love. So when Calm's betrayal became apparent, Crim was heartbroken. But he couldn't be angry. He wanted so badly to hate Crim and be angry with him, but that bastard wouldn't let him. He kept calming Crim down.

Calm now works for Salvation. As does Marr. The two saw opportunities to meet their own personal goals as soon as Crim's goals failed, and they took those chances. He didn't blame the two men, but he did feel responsible. Five of Dogma's eight were dead, one was a prisoner, and two were turn cloaks. Some war I waged, he thought.

The sound of footsteps on the stone floor of the Thoughtspire dragged him back to the present. He glanced up to the open door of his cell and waited. Who is it today? Lucia? Arletha? Marr?

"Are you sure about this?" came the voice of...he smiled; Rose Gordon. What an unexpected surprise. "He's a bit...unpleasent."

"I don't mind, Ms. Gordon." came a voice that he actually didn't fully recognize at first. "I've been meaning to do this for the last hundred years. It's about time I stop procrastinating."

The two individuals rounded the corner, and Crim saw the two women before him. Rose opened the door and stepped in first. "Hello, Crim."

"Hello, Black Rose," he said mockingly. "Love the nick name."

Her eyes narrowed. "I earned it in your war," she shot back.

"How quaint. Was it because you picked up your lover's scythe and continued fighting after Xeno had killed him?"

Anger shot across her face. She kicked him in the ribs, and Crim coughed in pain before chuckling a little. "Don't you dare mention Darkstar."

"Ms. Gordon," the other woman said. "Please."

Rose nodded. "Sorry. Go ahead." She stepped aside, and the other woman approached.

Crim looked up and swore he recognized her. That dress...the orange hair and green eyes...ah, I see. "You're the android from the Longest Night possibility, aren't you?" He smiled. "Well, you wouldn't know about anything from that possibility, I suppose, since it didn't actually happen. Not in this universe at least. So, you've gone and grown up on old Mama Remnant, have you? Now you're an eternal protector. Good for you."

Her eyes narrowed. "He is unpleasant," she said flatly. "You...you cursed my friend, didn't you?"

Crim frowned. "I don't know if Ms. Black Rose has told you, but my connection the Cauldron was ripped from me quite some time ago. I couldn't curse a fly."

"Not recently," the girl added. "It was well over a hundred years ago. In fact, it's the reason that your magic was taken from you."

"Ah, so you were friends with that little girl. Ruby Rose was her name, correct?"

The girl glared at him. "You don't have the right to say her name."

He laughed. "Between her and Darkstar, I've got a whole plethora of taboo names on me, don't I?" He met her gaze. "So, what do you want?"

"Penny," Rose said. "It's not worth your time. He's just a shell now. You don't need to do this."

"I do," Penny said. She knelt down in front of Crim and stared into his eyes. "Why? Why did you curse her?"

"Didn't Black Rose tell you? For fun! I was stuck in sealed cell with no windows. Not even a bucket to shit in."

"You're immortal. You don't eat, so you don't shit," Rose retorted.

"Semantics! The important part of the story is that I got bored. I needed something to pass the time."

Penny nodded. "Explain to me what the curse was."

"Penny!" Rose exclaimed.

Crim smiled. "Why? Looking to learn it?"

Penny smiled a cruel smile. "Maybe."

He laughed. "The commoners that work here, and even my former collegues called it the Cycle, but I had a better name for it: Temporal Causality of Predetermined Phenomenon."

"So, Cycle for short," Penny jabbed. Rose smiled; Penny had gotten more human as she got older. Crime was annoyed by the insult.

"Basically, you set a time frame, and create a temporal reoccurrence...a time loop. But with each loop, a randomized algorithm changed things ever so slightly. Not enough to matter initially, but the small changes give way to much larger variations. A Butterfly Effect."

"What sort of changes."

"Oh, it could be anything. What shoes you put on, what cereal you eat for breakfast, which route you took to get to work, who you spoke too. Small changes on the first day that ultimately create large ripples in time space later down the line. In the case of Ruby Rose, she would make little changes in her efforts to save lives, ultimately leading everyone down a path that could destroy everything. In almost every Causality, she died."

Penny raised an eyebrow. "And what happened in the end?"

"Nik broke the Law of No Interference and destroyed the Harbinger comet, completely preventing the next Longest Night Causality. Then Valentine broke the curse, and my magic was stripped. The world of Remnant returned to a world of absolutes, and there have been no temporal distortions in the universe since...presumably."

"You broke that law first," Rose added.

"I didn't alter the fate of the world like he did. I just made poor Ruby Rose live though the same crisis over and over again."

Penny was lost in thought before she posed the next question. "How many times?"

"Pardon?"

"How many iterations did Ruby live through?"

He smiled. "One hundred fifteen thousand four hundred and fifty two."

Penny's eyes went wide. "Mother of God," she whispered.

"And she wasn't even cursed for all of them!" Crim yelled.

"What?!" the two women shouted.

"I was exhausted for two reasons. Yes, the anti-magic barrier was masking me, but I had alot of pent up Magicae that I had been saving up. I've successfully cast the Temporal Causality of Predetermined Phenominon three times, and partially cast it once. The once was for Ruby, thus why she could only remember the most recent iteration. A successful casting allows the target to remember every iteration. One of the successes was on myself, where I waited for Fear to be destroyed. He destroyed this universe one billion, four hundred thirty-six million, two hundred six thousand, seven hundred twenty-nine times before Lia stopped him. The second was on Lia herself. She's still cursed, and can't be cured, but she hasn't died yet so she's only physically seen this one timeline, but in tandem with her power of foresight, she can no longer predict the future because she can see every single possible outcome, and still not know which one to expect. The third..." he smiled. "Is still in place as well."

"Who did you curse, Crim!" Rose yelled.

His smile widened as he looked at Penny. "When my magic was stripped of me, I lost the ability to see her timelines. But rest assured, she's still caught in her Causality Loop. This timeline, the one we're currently in, is the only one where her life wasn't in a great deal of danger. Well, not like the other loops at least."

"Who did you curse, damn it!" Rose yelled again.

Staring deep into Penny's mechanical eyes, he whispered a name. A name that only Penny knew. "Weiss Schnee."

Her eyes widened. She stood to her feet and turned to leave. "I have a mission I must attend to," she said flatly.

Rose gasped. "But, Penny! You're friend is still caught in a time loop!"

"She's already dead in this timeline!" Penny snapped. "She died of a hereditary cancer when she was seventy-eight years old! I can't help her now. Now here."

"There must be something we can do!"

Penny stopped and turned around, staring straight into Crim's dark, insane eyes. She raised a hand and pointed it at him. "Connection to the Cauldron established. Performing mathematical determination: code word LAMBDA. Creating new file: Temporal Causality of Predetermined Phenomenon. Equations found and processed. Establishing barrier."

Rose jumped back, startled as a transparent green sphere erupted around Crim; it was covered in magic circles and mathematical symbols. "Hey! What the hell are you doing?" He studied the barrier and recognized the algorythm: it was his Causality spell. "You're going to trap me in a time loop? Ha! You'll never do it! Look!" He pointed at some of the equations on the barrier. "You don't even have the formula right!"

"I assure you," Penny said coldly. "I already know your method. I've simply improved upon it."

He spat. "So what? I put myself under a timeloop before, remember? I lived through the same ten thousand years over a billion times! That means I've seen ove-"

"Over 1.4362067e+13 times. I'm a machine, remember? I did the math in point-zero-zero-three seconds. But now its different. You have no way to control it, as I'm the caster. And I've mixed magic with science: something no other shifter has ever done before. My Causality curse is unbreakable by anyone but me. And, I'm going to send you to a separate plane of existence." She smiled. "You might like it. It's a mixture of reality and virtual reality. I have several digital copies of myself waiting for you there, ready to let you find out what it means to be in Hell."

Crim's face went pale with fear. "You wouldn't?"

"And I'll be standing here in your cell after every death you experience, completely oblivious to the timeloop that you're in. You'll beg me to break the curse, but I won't listen. I'll let you suffer for all of time." She smiled once again. "Goodbye." A rainbow flame enveloped Crim, and space popped as it was ripped asunder. When the flames died away, he was gone.

"Penny..." Rose began. "What have you done?"

"Nothing that Lia doesn't already know about," she said. Pausing for a moment, she added, "It's almost that time of year. I can't tell Ruby what I've done. I know she wouldn't approve. She'd have wanted me to forgive Crim. I'll tell her that he was so pitiful that I couldn't raise my hand to him. I'll say...that he's been punished enough." She nodded, turning to leave as she finished speaking. "I'm sorry for the trouble I've caused you, Rose."

"No...its...fine, I suppose." She sighed. If Lady Lia approved of this action, then I suppose I can't really say anything. "Where are you off to?"

"To Anima. Fortis should be waiting for me. Arletha is sending us to eliminate an outbreak of Wraiths. It's to be a covert mission."

"Ah, so its a mission for the Agents of Nacht." Rose nodded. "I understand. And tell Rune that I still want to join."

"If I see him, I'll let him know." With those parting words, she Shifted away to the world of Anima. The day after, she'd finish her mission, report to Lia, and then visit Remnant to see the graves of team RWBY. It was her tradition.

But on top of all that, she had a new delimma. Weiss is stuck in a time loop, she thought. I need to find a way to break her out of it, but first...

"I need to find her."