Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides

Game Kings in the frigid darkness


The frosty November edition of Game Night finds the Kings in contemplation of a pair of well known conundrums: how should a super villain balance the success of his evil schemes against the satisfaction of gloating before his adversary and just how much can a time traveller allow himself to change history by altering its pivotal events? The case against gloating is well known and hardly requires repetition in "Renamed". Although I may have been distracted by the shapely, redheaded scuba spy.

Scuba


By taking a time out for expostion of his plan the criminal mastermind commits two errors. He reveals that which absolutely depends on secrecy for success and he grants, without being compelled, essential time to his adversary who has otherwise run out of just that.

Criminal Mastermind


But, surely, in punishing the gloat so decisively (only one bad guy got away with one miserable gloat) "Totally Renamed" misses the point. What does it profit a prince of malice to conceive and carry out in total silence a plot to rule the world, or, at a minimum, make off with a criminal million or so? If that were his ambition he had only to attend the right business school and get a position in investment banking, a thing completely lacking in glory. A true mastermind must capture and taunt a worthy adversary. It is the very crown of his career, what he has been striving for since rocking in his evil cradle. It is better to gloat and be destroyed than keep one's peace and rule a world where no one gives a rat's ass about your brilliant plan.

Ok, there were a bunch a redheaded spies. Is that a requirement?

Redhead Spy


Chrononauts


Now we step from our evil lairs into our time machines. As with any new toy we took our chronowhatevers in hand more in the spirit of fun and adventure than with any thought to the responsible use of our ability to alter the course of history. Naturally everybody's first thought is something along the lines of "Let's kill Hitler".



But all we were really accomplishing was to generate a bunch of time paradoxes along with a pair of quick and heedless winners.



The hard lessons of time travel, at last, led us to the wisdom of patching our paradoxes and thus to an era of responsible and productive manipulation of history.

Remember, only you can prevent contradictions in your time line!