In our last article, I was talking about the silly game I played with my Lego men as a boy and the huge, sprawling narrative and lore that spilled out of that. For those who think this is a big waste of everyone's time, this is forming part of a series of loosely-aligned articles I've begun work on, including the Danton series, where I look over my old notes or take another look at a "bad" piece of media and try to parse out something of value. Sure, many of the ideas I had when I was a child or teen lacked subtlety, borrowed directly from other sources or were just overdone, but there are gems in there that I may as well use, rather than discard.
When we last left our protagonist, who, of course, had my name originally, but got rechristened 'Calvin' in a later draft, had just been arrested for illegal time travel and offered the chance to join the organisation that had tracked him down. Calvin is introduced to the Slizer Team, a military organisation set up by, but independent from, the great powers of The Century. The Century is an area of space and time in which advanced societies exist, finding it once they break the time barrier and conquer interstellar flight; think of it like a 'higher' universe, only much smaller. Honestly, I never got that part down, and it doesn't really make sense, it was just a way to justify the "boarders" of the setting. A big shock awaits Calvin, as most of his former crew of time travelers, except the traitorous Richard and deceased Stephen, of course, are present and also part of the Slizer Team. Calvin and his friends, and a few new characters and former antagonists, mostly aliens, form a unique team within the broader organisation, which is more military in focus, using their experience to travel into history and stop rogue time travelers.
Man, I know I was a literal child when I came up with this stuff, but it's giving me major ACAB vibes now. Oh well, it does get better, I promise. Much like Calvin, his friends have spent time in different periods of history, learning new skills that now come in handy on missions. Combined with the new members, the team takes a little while to gel, but becomes pretty effective at their missions, capturing rogue elements and keeping history intact. As some antagonists recur, our heroes begin to see a pattern and start investigating just why so many incursions into the timestream and The Century itself, are happening. Some investigation soon reveals a broad organisation behind much of the time crime happening, not merely come conspiracy, but a whole revolutionary army looking to overthrow the current hierarchy and liberate Time Travel for their own purposes. Now, as much as I love a good people's revolutionary army, The Resistance here is mostly wrong, seeing Time Travel as a resource to exploit rather than a resource to protect, like the Slizer Team tries to do. With the reveal of the Resistance, the conflict moves to The Century itself, with a full-scale guerilla war breaking out.
Whilst there are definitely some cool spaceship battles and the like, most of the conflict is in small raids, spy games and terror attacks, keeping our heroes guessing as to who they can trust and how to even fight such a foe. As the military industrial machinery of The Century starts to fail under the pressure, the Slizer team makes a desperate decision to take on the Resistance leadership directly, assaulting the planet they're hiding on in a sci-fi commando raid complete with plenty of flying lasers, spaceships and, of course, sword fights. Look, I was a kid, I was just getting into 40k and the minifig I used for Calvin came with one of those cavalry sabres, so a big sword fight to round out the story was pretty much a given. Actually, for a long time this fight was meant to be a big deal in Calvin's journey as a character, being the first time he kills someone deliberately and/or without his own life being in danger. We'll see how that plays out later, but for now cutting the head off the snake has worked to a certain degree, and The Resistance surrenders for the most part.
Victory has been achieved, and peace reigns for now, though some Resistance cells are still active, the Slizer force has control of the Timestream once again. Battered but emboldened, the powers that be look at shoring up their defenses for the next threat, revealing a new hybrid weapons platform that is ready for field testing; the Slizers.
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