==>

Rose gestures about the lab, the vats of our ectobiological triumphs and failures, blasé and almost weary in a way I haven't seen from her in a while. It calls to mind the exhaustion she felt before ascending, what must feel like a lifetime for her ago, and rings faintly of mortality in a way that concerns me.

It'll actually be incredibly easy for me.

Just time traveling forward is a no-go; at the frantic rate our pursuers are hurtling towards us, they'd catch up to Deltritus far before it had a chance to birth any sort of civilization at all, and that'd be a mess, especially with us only due to pop in millennia after the fact. We'd probably return to a planet totally unfit for Game candidacy.

Localized time travel, while technically possible, tends to get pretty fucked even in the most ideal of circumstances, to say nothing of the fact that it's way outside my wheelhouse as a Heart player. The concept works pretty well for my purposes, though, and as a burgeoning omnipotent narrative god, I can mimic it in a way that's functionally identical. The move here is that I'm going to envelop the local galaxy group in a pocket of my influence and narratively accelerate it via Bullshit so that whatever's going on in here goes on faster, so we can get to the good shit faster, so we can get on with our jobs, and so you gawking voyeurs have more of our lives to guzzle greedily down.

Why the galaxy group? Why not just the solar system, or even just the planet? My answer to that question is twofold.

Firstly, I want the Deltritan societies to have a convincing view of their place in the cosmos, at least locally. What kind of civilization worth its soul-searching salt doesn't look to the night sky with wonder and curiosity in their hearts? It wouldn't do for them to exist in a world where the sun never sank below the horizon, or where the stars didn't dance tellingly across the sky, revealing the kind of hard-hitting secrets only astronomy can.

Secondly, I'm showing off. I've been really coming into my own, powers-wise, and it's not just my Heart abilities that have shot up a few exponentially longer echeladders.

Of course, Rose isn't talking about the mechanics of the timeskip. She's talking about the reasoning behind it, and the lack of precise control over Deltritus' development that will result as a consequence of it. I just figured I'd take the time to address the "how" factor to you all before the fucking pedants among you started making a fuss, acting like I haven't thought all this shit out. Yeah, you. You know who you are.

Also, I'm stalling. Uncharacteristic of me, I know.