The Story So Far...

Started by Callum603, March 15, 2018, 11:11:35 PM

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Callum603

Just a warning, this is a long one.  This contains the full story of season one of TL written in a creative writing style.  I hope this helps to explain what happened during season one as we head into season 2.

Temporal Leaps story so far...

Their story begins like many that have gone before, a brand new crew with a brand new ship.  Only their fate has already been sealed, no matter what they do, they cannot undo that which must happen.

By order of Fleet Admiral Callum Jackson, Captain Oscar Savage has spent that last four years aboard various starbases and the legendary Enterprise, working has the Echo Fleet commanders right hand man.  Savage, a man with aspirations to one day be where Jackson is now, must deal with it, as the Admiral often says, for the time being, his chance will come, Jackson always says.  So for four years, he carries out his duties, rarely getting the opportunity to sit in the centre chair, which is rank permits him to do.

Savage finally gets the break he's been so desperately waiting for when the Ariana, a new special class of starship, specifically designed for one mission and one purpose.  Ariana's crew will be stationed in the 24th Century, their purpose, to maintain the timeline.  Captain Savage, unaware he's just been transferred to Echo Fleet's brand new Department of Temporal Investigations (DTI), accepts the job as Captain, not that Jackson gave him much choice.


His first officer is from the mid 24th century, an agent of the original DTI, Marion Dulmur, who was stranded in the future after a temporal accident in his own time.

Before Ariana's mission can get underway the ship must undertake a full shakedown, starting with a standard shakedown before rendezvousing with their mission specialist, only known as Daniels to the crew.  This is where things got a little, odd to say the least.  Only a short while away from their rendezvous, Ariana receives, what will be their final transmission from Starfleet Command, a fleet wide yellow alert and caution of an ion storm heading their way.  Ariana is ordered to pickup their specialist at once and then stand their ground and weather the storm.

Captain Savage feels confident the ship can survive the storm, however he is increasingly concerned when the Echo Fleet communication relays go offline, he knows these relays were built to withstand almost anything, the ion storm heading their way, alarmingly quickly, shouldn't have damaged them that bad.

Before he can worry about this too much and after briefing his new Executive Officer, Marion Dulmur, this very quickly take a turn for the worse.  Working through paper work in his office, he hears the computer call for his command codes to initiate the startup sequence of the ships experimental AI, named TIA – Temporal Investigations Assistant, this is shortly followed by the computing announcing it's acceptance of his command code, one he did not enter.

Upon arriving on the Bridge, Savage quickly realises Dulmur had used his codes to activate TIA, shortly after her activation she activates her own version of the prime directive – TIA Directive One.  This directive essentially transfers command of the starship, to her.  She can countermand any order given to her or the ships systems, only Captain Savage can release the directive with a special command code, one that he was never issued with and cannot override.  Several attempts to take her offline were made, but all failed.

As the ion storm grew closer, TIA activated Ariana's temporal core and shielding.  This began to worry Savage and his crew, while he and Dulmur collectively had been fully trained, neither of them had sufficient knowledge of the systems, their mission specialist was tasked with providing them with their final training and certifying them to command a Temporal Investigations Starship, the TISS Ariana.

Shortly before the ion storm hit, TIA announced they were to jump, there and then.  No one aboard knew where or why.

With no idea where or when they where, they can only sit and wait for TIA to 'read them in'.  After a few minutes of confusion, TIA calls a meeting.  The crew find they have been jumped to 2151, the exact day the Enterprise – NX01 was being launched.  TIA informs the crew that they must investigate a temporal distortion in this region of the time stream and correct it and to top it all off, they had a timer.  The mission must be completed within 12 hours.  This timer was for two reasons, the temporal core that powers the temporal drive must cooldown between jumps, otherwise the crew risk damaging the core, but something more imminently deadly was approaching them, while the Ariana is equipped the sophisticated temporal shielding and phase cloaking, it would be no match for the temporal shockwave heading their way, they would have to be out of that region of time before it hits or they risk annihilation.

The crew discover that Earth was being run by a nation known as the Alumerak.  This nation had ruled over Earth for over 500 years, they had changed almost all of Earth's history.  The Enterprise, not being commanded by Archer, but instead Captain Forest ends up wiping out the Vulcan homeworld.  Savage and Okane, the ships Chief of Tactical and Security, narrowly escape the Enterprise to bring this information home, with only mere seconds left on the clock, TIA jumps Ariana once more.

The crew now find themselves in the year 644, Savage and Okane just barely make it back onboard with Okane in near critical condition after a forcefully being re-phased aboard the Enterprise.  Savage calls an emergency meeting of being brought up to speed.  Discussions of attempting to override TIA are tabled shortly before Savage reports all findings from the Enterprise to his senior staff.  In this universe, there is no Federation or Starfleet. Or for that matter Amercia or either of the world wars.
The world is ruled by the Alumerak. Their current technology is around a 23rd century level, but much of their culture maintains medieval norms. During the 1930s they colonised much of the sol system and they've had warp drive since 1939.  First contact with Vulcans was made in the 1950s, but they were fired upon as the Vulcans believed them to be disguised Andorian Ships, this lead to an Earth-Andor alliance and the downfall of Vulcan.

Dulmur suggests that they must fix the timeline here, as jumping back would be useless, the Alumerak shouldn't be this powerful in 644, in fact, normal history never even mentioned them, from what was known that is. Dulmur and ops officer Cook beam down to a large castle in a large city. They witness a celebration over the destruction of the 'Yarmin.' They also discover that the Alumerak's success is down to alien assistance, with an alien named 'Kajan' present at the celebration.
As they discover this, Ariana reports that two alien craft are in orbit and the Alumerak are getting ready to march on Londonium of Britannia with their assistance. They return to the ship.
After much debate and TIA's suggestion, Captain Savage must break from the normal Starfleet stance and order a mass genocide, he orders Okane to ready a full volley of Photon Torpedoes at maximum yield, locked onto the Alumerak Capital. Try as they might to come up with a better solution, they cannot.

As Ariana slowly moves into position, they realise they left it too late, they do not have enough time to get into position and fire, TIA jumps the ship, but this time with suggestions from the crew she performs one of the most dangerous manoeuvres, The Duplex manoeuvre.  This manoeuvre has Ariana fly against the normal flow of time, she is able to position herself ready to fire on Earth and get the shots of before having to break out of the Duplex.  TIA reports the that the timeline is repairing itself, but Ariana has taken a substantial amount of time.

While jumping, the Ariana travels through the time stream, a magnificent sight, but an endless maze of paths to take.  She could be anywhere anywhen at the drop of a hat, this is the only place the temporal shockwave cannot get them, but they cannot stay in the time stream indefinitely, the temporal core must remain fully operational and at full power or temporal shielding fails and the ship and crew will end up lost to time or, kicked out of the time stream randomly.  Savage makes a plea to TIA to allow them 72 hours to repair the ship, TIA agrees and sets a course for their next destination, unknown to the crew or Captain.

72 hours later, the Ariana finds herself in 1912, April 10th to be exact.  TIA fails upon the drop and leaves the crew with no information.  Over the past 72 hours, Captain Savage had grown obessed with a level 10 encrypted transmission he had received from Starfleet command moments before losing contact and was adamant he would crack it open.  He ordered Dulmur to figure the mission out.

After reviewing the history files, Dulmur and the crew make an educated guess on what they might need to do and beam aboard a sea faring vessel, the RMS Titanic.  The away team maintains a constant COMM link with Ariana, as TIA went offline shortly after the drop, no countdown to their next jump was setup, but long range sensors also weren't picking up the temporal shockwave.

The away team find vital members of the Titanics crew dead, who did this and why, they couldn't determine, but they did notice the crew members dead shared a very similar appearance with some of Ariana's crew, they decided to have their own crew take their places, Okane taking the place of Captain Smith and Dulmur taking the place of Mr. Murdoch.  Together, they ensured the Titanic was travelling too fast to miss an impending berg in the ocean, with no other clues on what their mission was, they ensured what the history books told, happened.

Shortly before completing the mission, Savage was drawn away from his file, something else had now taken precedence, while TIA was still offline, a countdown had begun.  A Temporal distortion, later to be revealed the temporal shockwave, was heading right for them.  The temporal core was running in emergency operation only, without direct control of the core, they couldn't shut it down, or bring it online fully to jump away, Oscar Savage faced his very first command decision, what should he do?

Captain Savage had no choice but to regain manual control of the core, such a task required the core to be brought to full power manually, he could then input a course and jump the ship, but to do this the core controls would need to be switched to manual mode and this can only be done from inside the core to manually manipulate the core controls and bypass the computer.  Such a task was a one way trip for whoever entered the crawl space, the radiation inside was at deadly levels the entire time the core was online, even in emergency mode.

Savage orders Okane to perform the task.  Knowing he and several other officers had security training, but very few had Engineering training, unfortunately put Okane in a disposable position at that moment in time.  Luckily for Okane, the TIA bugs were resolved moments before his solo mission began, TIA was able to correct the issues with the core, with the TIA systems still rebooting though, Savage noticed the directive lockout was not currently engaged, he took the opportunity to jump them home.

Arriving back in 2436, but in deep space an extremely long way away from Federation Space, they believe they are home, however, Dulmur has bad news and reports they are out of phase with universe still.

They are suddenly brought to their senses when their sensors regain full operational capacity and they have a near miss with a stray torpedo, a Starfleet station is under attack by some 200 ships.  TIA finally comes back online completely and orders another briefing.  The crew learn that they are 2 months ahead of where they should be and they are witnessing an attack on a station named Asteria.

Savage knows of Asteria, by name and that it's a Starfleet research facility located in deep space, but he nor TIA knows whats contained within.

TIA reports that the battle will be a bloody one, with many loses on both sides.  However, Echo Fleet have a ship similar to Ariana named the 'Echelon' and and they are attempting to use it's phasing abilities to get a team on board. The crew learn that they must stop this team getting aboard to preserve the timeline.

Savage and Okane are beamed aboard the Echelon, as they beam aboard their version of TIA, the ships commander, Admiral Archer, seals them in and knows exactly who they are.

TIA from Echelon and TIA from Ariana network and agree on one course of action, Echelon TIA overrides Archer and beams Savage and Okane aboard Asteria.

The Ariana team and Echelon team now working together, witness the complete destruction of Asteria by the Shedai, a species being held captive by the Asteria team for research.  The two teams part ways and return to their own ships moments before Asteria is completed destroyed.

TIA activates a jump, again the crew are unaware of where they are going, but this time, neither is TIA.  Without warning the Ariana is dragged out of the timestream as she hits a temporal lock.  Due to the sudden and massive deceleration, the temporal core enters an emergency cooldown period, they have only the time it takes the core to cool down to fix the mess they have got themselves in before the core tries to complete the jump.

With only 2 hours to discover why they dropped, Savage orders a full away team to beam down to a nearby planet where they are picking up strange readings, here they find a device that is generating a temporal field around the planet and Ariana, it is creating a temporal lock.  Savage tries touching the device to learn more, but triggers a defence that resets time.

They repeat this several times, but soon their temporal shields compensate and allow them to remember each loop.  After a short while searching the nearby area, they find away to release the lock, it would require two people to activate two dead man switches, so long as a very specific procedure is followed and those two switches activated at the same time and remain active, the lock will temporarily release, but this would require two members to stay behind.

Captain Savage and the senior staff discuss their choices, he has TIA pick two officers for a temporal five mission, this is a mission where they will not return and be lost to the time stream, however, Savage promises he will return for them when he is able.  The two crew members of Ariana study the procedure and head to the planet to allow their ship to escape.

TIA resumes the jump.

The Ariana drops out in the year 75 million BC.  Ariana takes scans as nearly nothing is known about this era, TIA informs the crew that they must cause a disaster that will lead to the inhabitants of a nearby planet leaving and cause the establishment of homo-sapiens on Earth.

Dulmur questions this mission, but TIA is unable to provide anymore information other than they need to head for Earth.

As they arrive in the Sol system, Dulmur reports strange readings coming from Mars, flowing water and large oceans, life signs, an atmosphere like Earth's.  The life signs have a 97% DNA match to modern homo-sapiens.  Captain Savage orders an away team to beam down and take a look.

While exploring the team come into contact with an unknown entity, who very quickly tries to kill them.  Managing to narrowly escape with their lives, Savage tries to order the teams immediate evacuation, but the Ariana is unable to get a lock, their final message reporting a second temporal distortion.

Savage gets corned by their unknown foe, who reveals himself to be Kajan - the same alien who assisted the Alumerak.
Okane is injured and unable to help Savage and Kajan fight.  Kajan reveals he is here to stop Savage from commiting the atrocity of Jaja IV, with Savage insistent he doesn't know what Jaja IV is, Kajan laughs, and speaking as though he knows Savage, raises his weapon while telling him "You still don't get it do you? Time travel.  I'm here to stop you BEFORE you can do it", Savage tries to reply but Kajan cuts him off, telling him to make peace with whatever god he believes in.

Ariana is able to regain a transporter lock, but only one at a time, they take Okane first, this distracts Kajan long enough for Savage to escape.

The planet begins to shake, but not like an earth quake.  The caverns they are in begin to crumble and collapse.  Savage runs into one of the planets inhabitants, who very quickly learns Savage is not from Mars, they both help each other to escape on the planets evacuation ships.  Savage was unable to request a beam out as TIA had locked down the transporters shortly after beaming Okane aboard due to Kajan performing a temporal transport and destabilising the Martian atmosphere, the planet now had mere minutes left before it become a lifeless desolate planet.

Savage is beamed aboard Ariana after the evacuation ships leaves the Martian planet.

With Savage back aboard, Kajan moves to intercept and opens fire, quickly taking down Arianas weapons.  The evacuees of Mars enter Earth's atmosphere while Savage uses a code he decrypted earlier to initiate a manual override of the TIA temporal drive controls and jump the ship to safety, wherever that may be.

Thinking they are now safe, Ariana finds herself barely holding together and in the distant future.

The crew quickly learn of a fate the entire Galaxy has fallen to.  Investigating, they find a crashed Federation Sovereign Class starship, a highly modified and advanced Sovereign class, but a Sovereign class it was.  The explore the ship trying to find it's black box and learn what happened.  They find the black box and a device with it.

The learn that the device, that they now possess, holds a destructive force so powerful, it can destroy an entire galaxy.

After a lot of research the crew learn that the Sovereign class vessel was transporting the device back to Earth, but were conducting tests of their own, during one of these tests they accidentally activated the device, resulting in the near destruction of the galaxy.

With help from TIA the Ariana is able to interface the device with their temporal core and restore the galaxy using a galaxy wide scan the device made before the destruction.  Savage orders the device to be destroyed once the backup is completed, but unbeknownst to him, Dulmur hides it rather than destroying it.


After completing some repairs, TIA just the ship again back in to the past. This time the mission briefing is given is private, as they will be infiltrating a still classified USAF facility named Dreamland - Area 51. Except Area 51 was actually a cover for Facility 31 and the 'Majestic-12', a group of USAF agents who's job it is to collect and reverse engineer alien technology and form a plan to protect Earth from an alien invasion. They are a precursor to level 31 of the Pentagon (which eventually develops into Section 31 of the Federation.)
The crew's mission is to infiltrate the facility and recover any technology that is in breach of the Temporal Prime Directive. However, whilst the phase cloak will make them invisible, the security measures on the surface will be able to detect them. Due to the sensitive nature of this mission, only Dulmur and Savage will form the away team.
As they beam down, they observe a crashed UFO being delivered to the base.
Meanwhile, a USAF scientist investigates a device brought in from the crash site. He is killed by Kajan, who steals the device and a captured spaceship.
The commotion causes Dulmur and Savage to be discovered and they end up in a firefight in as Kajan's craft escapes from the facility.They try to escape the facility and Savage orders Ariana to destroy Kajan's ship.
This turns out to be a coverup by Kajan, who has instead located Ariana on the facility's monitoring station.
The head of the Majestic-12, Daniel Wheeler is shot by Kajan just before he escapes another way. Dulmur knows Wheeler cannot die, a fact confirmed by TIA but he is too badly injured for 1950s medicine to save him. Savage makes his decision and then Dulmur and Savage are beamed aboard just as they are arrested by the base's personnel.
Unfortunately all is not over, Ariana is now being targeted by Thermo-Nuclear warheads, but TIA jumps the ship before they can fire.

TIA jumps the ship once more, but gives them very little preparation time for the next mission.  The continuous jumping is now causing problems aboard Ariana, without proper servicing, her systems are begging to fail and glitch.

If a temporal system failed now, it would be all over for the crew.

They are diverted to a point in their own history once again, shortly after dropping out, they witness the complete destruction of the Ariana, something they themselves know all to well is not what should happen.

The Ariana is impacted by the temporal shockwave and completely destroyed, why didn't she jump like she should have, where was their shielding?

TIA wasn't of much use, due to a limitation in her programming, she couldn't operate in a region where another version of herself was running.

Savage talks with Dulmur over the morning they first jumped, how did Dulmur know Savages command codes, they were changed only thirty minutes before they were used, something Savage did regularly to ensure his codes were always secure.  There is no way anyone could have sent them to Dulmur, unless they were sent from after they were changed.

Dulmur and Savage hatched a plan, they would use the temporal communications array, something that was designed to allow Ariana to keep in contact with their present day superiors during missions.  They sent a message backwards in time to a then Commodore Jackson, at the time of Jackson receiving the encoded message, he could do nothing with it, but in time he would learn what it meant.

Contained inside that encoded message were instructions, alone they were complete nonsense, but when included with another file Jackson had received, they would paint a picture, one that would have Fleet Admiral Jackson contact Marion Dulmur on the morning of the Ariana's disappearance, to send him Savages latest command codes, thus enabling him to activate TIA and TIA to jump the Ariana.

With the time line repaired, the crew of Ariana were looking forward to some much needed RnR, TIA was finally in a position to give them their 72 hour break.  The Ariana crew had been up for almost two straight days and the Ariana was falling apart, systems where failing all over the ship.

A crew members was almost killed in the mess as the temporal shielding dropped for a microsecond, Ariana was in a bad way and needed servicing immediately.  Savage was debating using the manual override once again, which would have consequences (the code was limited to 3 uses and then would be reset based on a pre-determined algorithm, of which Savage did not know, so on the third use he would lose his ability to manually jump the ship), but he could jump the ship back to 2436 or somewhere he could get their ship repaired.

Before he was able to enact his plan however, TIA failed again.  Before she went offline completely she performed an emergency stop of the ship.

The crew battle to get her back online but find one of her co-processors, vital to her operation was damaged, they would need pure silicon to repair the co-processor, a material they did not have.

Unable to jump and barely holding together, Ariana began searching the region of space they were in, desperately needing Silicon.  If they could find some, they could refine it aboard and repair the TIA systems.

Luck was on their side, they stumbled across Silicon deep inside a planet, carefully they extracted the raw silicon and brought it back onboard the Ariana for refining.  The Chief Engineer had to be careful, if there were any impurities in the silicon, it could damage TIA even more, potentially making it impossible to ever bring her back online.  The TIA Protocols contained within the main computer were unfortunately still online, meaning they had no control of the ship even though the TIA systems were offline.

The Chief Engineer refined the silicon and repaired the co-processor, TIA rebooted and resumed the jump, however, mere seconds in to the jump she failed again, bringing the entire TIA network down with here, the crew of the Ariana were now facing the worst possible situation.  TIA had failed in a devastating way, taking several system with her, other systems were following suit, they were losing their ship and still in the time stream.

Quickly, Savage ran over to the TIA console and accessed the main computer, no longer just an option, it was a requirement that he manually control the temporal core and get them somewhere safe, now.  The main computer failed before he was able to input the code, the temporal core entered emergency mode before failing, the temporal shielding dropped, the Ariana and the crew were now exposed to the time stream.

Shortly before passing out, Captain Oscar Savage made one last attempt to save his crew, as he collapsed into the command chair, he fumbled with his COMM badge, the crews last hope of survival.

Whether he was successful, is unknown, he and his crew passed out due to temporal aphasia.  Whether they will ever wake up again is all down to Oscar's last second plan.

Join us for season two of Temporal Leap, to find out what might happen next...