And slightly impossible...
My party and I have encountered a device for time travel in our game (ref.
Steins; Gate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins_Gate). Through a combination of magic and theoretical physics, the target we were trying to kidnap, has managed to create a device by which he can send simple emails back in time, thus altering the flow of events in his favor (e.g. "You should go visit your parents today" sent to himself causes the target to be nowhere near where we found him in game).
Interestingly, the basic idea is that the magic is actually just enabling the phenomena that allows for the time travel, not the time travel itself (I'm no theoretical physicist, but something about black holes orbiting each other). So the core laws of magic actually aren't violated. Still, this is a rather frightening prospect.
Fortunately, the GM is really playing it to the game/show referenced above, and the guy who created it is actually just as much a student mad scientist as the character from the source material; its a student who made this in his dorm room (he actually didn't even realize magic was involved, he just happened to align certain objects that he had purchased from an antique shop (which unknowingly had magical properties) around his room in exactly the right way). In other words, a mad scientist, through a total fluke, as done the impossible.
The party has also encountered someone from 2098, a world where Saeder-Krupp has managed to monopolize on the time machines, and had won the "temporal arms race," after the targets research had gotten out (i.e. our act of kidnapping the target will cause Lofwyr to take over the world in 26 years). We actually had fought her at one point (she killed my character, broke another's back, and severely injured the last, up until the time machine went off, events alter, and we all were OK, and had just broken into the target's dorm room, but had alerted Knight Errant and were in the middle of a stand off). She is apparently made of pure GM cheese (roughly 14P per punch, and can make melee attacks as a simple action, oh, and did I mention we just thought she was the cashier for the shop downstairs?). Yeah, while epic, that was a pretty brutal fight.
Of note as well, my character does not possess the ability to recall events between timelines. In other words, when the device is used, I am explicitly told by my GM what my character knows (and am expected to act as such OOC as well), due to my familiarity with the "source" material (but hey, it was a nice easy 35 BP negative trait). The other players do possess the ability to recall events, and up until the point the time machine was revealed to the party, were totally confused by certain events (e.g. our Johnson was brutally killed before we got payment, we went home. In the morning our bank accounts were fatter, and the Johnson was ringing us up for another job), and the fact that I was perfectly fine with them.
Most ironically, my character is a mystic adept of the chaos tradition, focusing on being a "magical PI." He has knowledge of magical anomolies, theoretical physics, has a high perception/assensing, and has dumped adept power points into the varying bonuses for perception/assensing. In other words, hes the perfect man to solve the mystery of this, but is cursed with never being able to remember events. Fortunately, the time machine only goes back 2 hours, 8 minutes (128 minutes, a la 128, 256, 512, 1024, powers of 2, a very important concept in computer science), but obviously, it can go back further.
At this point, the party has decided to take down the Johnson, in a collective notion that this is a very bad thing to just let out. Sadly, hes a department head at SK Prime in Seattle, and well, that's not an enemy we want to make, especially given that he asked for the party by name at the start of the game.
Anyway, not quite sure what my goal with this post was. Partly wanted to just put this out there, as its not something I can discuss in detail with the party. Partly wanted to know if people had any suggestions for trying to take down a fairly powerful exec/how much should we worry that he knew about us at the start of the game (could he be a time traveler?!). Also, maybe just get thinking about how wacky SR would be with time travel.
TL;DR = this is part campaign journal/ part player venting / part "I know my GM reads these boards so he might want ideas" / part "maybe other people would want to cannibalize this" about a game with time travel
