Tai ended up inviting all the characters I’d pulled from the story over to her house to consider the exact nature of how to save the kingdom. One problem was that some of the king’s bodyguards came from lands that had fallen to the long imperial advance. If we rebooted the timeline and defeated the empire a decade ago, their lands would never have fallen. Which would be good for the lands, but would remove their reason for joining the king. I suggested that we make that a feature, not a bug. They looked at me like I’d grown two heads. So I said that since we were basically working with time travel, why not just lean on it? Make them time travelers, come from a dark future to save their world from falling. They loved the idea.