So…This story hasn’t taken off all that well. There’s only a few of you reading it, and I’m frankly a little burnt out. I’m writing a cyberpunk 2077 story, and I’d written about 80k words for another story and then tried to write this one and all of it together has got me a little tired and worn and…yea.
That being said, for those eight of you who are reading this, I don’t want you to be like “oh man, I wonder what exactly was going to happen in the story. That’s going to annoy me to my end of days. I will go to my grave wondering how that one Royal Road story I read back in the day was going to end.”
So, I’m writing down a bunch of my notes to let you all know what happens. Maybe I’ll pick up this story again in the future. Maybe not. I’m frankly unsure of everything at this point.
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So, we’ll call him the traveler because he doesn’t remember his name at all.
The traveler meets up with a hunting party led by the Tefsu hunter. He learns that where the Agawo live is slightly cut off from the rest of the world. There’s a desert to the south, an ocean to the west, and mountains to the north and east. Despite the difficulties in getting to this valley and interacting with the Agawo, there are still occasional trading caravans and pilgrims that travel through the Agawo land.
And then there are the Eaters. They’re a group of people who have been kicked out of their clans and their tribes and have banded together for safety. They also practice a form of “magic” where they can devour the bodies of living creatures and people and gain strength from them. The Eaters have managed to slip into the valley and attack a few tribes and villages and capture some slaves that they’re either going to work to death or eat to steal their strength and agility and dexterity and whatever other power they can get.
The hunting party led by the Tefsu hunter says he was going to ask Zypha’s group to join him. He’s wary of doing that now though because Zypha is guiding the traveler to the old men of the Tarro. His hunting party is made up of several different clans that have all band together to hunt down the Eaters. While Zypha’s clan focuses on using death echoes of recently killed creatures to empower themselves, other Agawo do different rituals. One tribe focuses on taming animals and working in partnership with them. Another one focuses on turning themselves more bestial through different magical rituals.
The traveler and Zypha’s people join up with the other Agawo and start tracking the Eaters as they try and slip out of Agawo land. One of the members of the tamer tribe has a hawk that he uses to scout, and he goes white-eyed while the hawk soars around and tries to spot the Eaters.
The hunting party tracks the Eaters down and starts fighting a guerrilla war against them. Meanwhile, more Agawo tribes start sending hunters to join with Zypha and the traveler and the Tefsu hunter. The traveler is able to witness more magic from different tribes. He watches on hunter inhale a strange herb that bolsters his strength and makes him go into a berserk rage against a small group of Eaters.
After several successful ambushes, the Eaters manage to capture a few hunters from the hunting party. The traveler and the rest of the hunters decide to attack the Eater camp to free the remaining captives and kill the rest of the Eaters. While they’re getting everything set up for the initial attack on the Eater camp, the traveler watches one of the Eater shamans go to a hunter he captured and carve out one of his eyes. He breathes some fumes on it before eating it, and it allows the shaman to see events that the hunter’s eye “remembers.”
There’s a massive battle between the Eaters and the Agawo that ends with the Eaters, the Tefsu hunter, Rilla, and Kazrik all dead. The Agawo are celebrating, but Zypha is stunned and surprised that much of her hunting party that she left the village with have been killed.
The rest of the Agawo provide an honor guard for Zypha and the traveler to finally make their way to the old men of the Tarro. They live at the foot of a mountain range that leads to the outside world. While Zypha stays behind in the village at the foot of the mountain range, learning more about how to be a shaman and training and making contacts with the other Agawo, the traveler heads up the mountain to meet with the old men.
They tell him the history of the Agawo people and the travelers. The old men explain that there have been a bunch of travelers through the years and they explain the differences between the sky-fallen and travelers. Sky-fallen are given a bunch of tools and weapons and whatever they need and they land on the planet and don’t have any impetus to do anything but survive. But travelers are often dropped on the planet without anything except an urge to travel north.
Travelers are able to learn the language faster, and they’re able to gain information about a great many things. The traveler thinks that the codex, which translated the Agawo people’s language for him, was something that all travelers share. The old men also explain that every traveler has talked about an urge to travel north, which is why they don’t often stay in Agawo lands. They also tell him that travelers are fairly well known in the rest of the world. They can’t speak for the tribes out in the wider world, but they do say that most people he visits won’t give him any gruff about being a traveler and that there are rules that people follow.
Several generations ago, the Agawo had been 9 separate tribes that had settled in the valley. One of the tribes brutally murdered a traveler and, the next year, their entire village had been destroyed in a freak meteor storm that completely obliterated the land for miles around their village. While people can challenge travelers, and travelers can die from situations they put themselves in, most tribes or cities or governments aren’t going to make too much trouble for a traveler for fear that they’re going to piss off some god.
The old men finish it up by explaining that no one knows exactly what the travelers are meant to do. All they know is that the travelers have an itch to travel and eventually head north.
The traveler eventually says his goodbyes to the old men and to Zypha and he packs up and gets ready to cross the mountain range that separates the Agawo from the rest of the world. As he is traveling, he spots a creature meandering about in the distance. He focuses on it and the codex simply reacts with a [???] and tells him that if he gathers more information to complete the codex, he’ll be rewarded.
The traveler eventually makes his way through the mountains and gets to the sea. He ends up in a port town and he’s struggling to figure out how to pay for his meals because he hasn’t gathered much stuff in his journey. Two ships sail into town and the traveler finds out that they’re pirates and they press gang him and several other town members into service.
The pirates put him in the brig on their ship and they sail out to an island, far from the rest of civilization. The pirates drag all the new prisoners off the ship and onto the island and the pirate captain demands that the new prisoners all sign a magical contract to protect the ship and serve as a loyal member of the crew.
The first guy refuses to sign the contract, so the pirate captain has his throat slit. The next guy, fearing for his life, signs the contract. As do the next several. When the pirate captain eventually gets to the traveler, they ask his name, and he says he doesn’t know it.
The pirate captain asks him a few questions and eventually figures out that he’s a traveler. He’s a little taken aback by this and decides he isn’t going to force him to sign the magical contract, but they still expect him to serve on the ship until they get to another port town.
The magical contract that all the sailors sign comes from someone that the codex explains is an [amateur malagwa tattooist.] The tattoos are infused with a magical ink that provides different benefits for different tattoos.
After several days of working on the ship, the traveler eventually strikes up a conversation with the tattooist and finds out a little more about her. He learns that she belongs to a tribe of people who do tattoo magic. She wasn’t supposed to be trained to be a tattooist, but her father was. She married an abusive ass who her father was going to take on as an apprentice, and she’d often hide in a closet to listen in on the lessons her father taught. She eventually kills her fiancé and runs from the village, only to eventually be captured by the pirate captain when they attacked the village she was staying in. They want her to sign the contract and serve on the ship. The contract they initially used to get people to obey the captain was an item that was implanted in the ship’s wheel, and the tattooist said that if she agreed to that contract, it would mess with her tattooist magic.
Tattooist magic, especially by those called Malagwa Tattooists, is incredibly beneficial and powerful, so they don’t force her to sign the ship contract. She’s able to fake being a Malagwa Tattooist a little bit, using what she remembers from her father, and starts working for the pirate captain. The captain has attacked several villages trying to find any books on tattooing for her to expand her skill.
The traveler sails around with the pirates. They attack several ships while he simply cleans the ship and deals with other things. He makes friends with a few of the pirates, and they begin to teach him how to use the plasteel knife he’s got. Over the course of a month, while they sail around the islands and raid villages and threaten shipping lanes, he learns how to wield his knife.
The ship eventually lands on a small, abandoned island one day and it’s dragged onto the beach so everyone can repair it. A member of the crew, called a Runshaper, checks over the boat and fixes several runes that are carved on the keel of the ship. He explains that each rune does different things. Some are there for speed, some are meant to increase the toughness and durability of the wood, some are meant to alert the captain that sea creatures are nearby.
The traveler learns that the reason the pirate captain has been press ganging people into service is because the captain is trying to replenish his crew after trying to hunt a dreaded sea monster.
[Krill Kraken]
Sailor tales speak of a mythical sea creature said to have once been the guardian of the Ocean’s treasures, cursed and twisted into an abomination by ancient dark magics. Those tales reference the Krill Kraken, an ambush predator infamous for its attacks on trading vessels. It is believed that the Krill Kraken is drawn to trading vessels due to the scent they give off of exotic spices, fine silks, and precious metals. Whatever its means of finding these ships, attacks all happen in the dead of night and leave almost no survivors.
The captain is obsessed with hunting down the Krill Kraken. The pirates eventually meet up with two more ships that have been sailing around under the pirate captain’s orders to recruit more soldiers for this hunt. They band together and go to find where the Krill Kraken had last been seen.
When they finally meet up with the Krill Kraken, the traveler learns it’s an enormous, chitinous mass that is covered in bioluminescent patterns that glow a sickly green in the dark waters. It has a mass of colossal tentacles, each lined with powerful suckers and barbs, capable of gripping and crushing even the sturdiest ship. The tentacles can extend to great lengths, making escape nearly impossible for any ship once the Kraken spots it.
There’s a massive fight with the creature. It latches its tentacles onto the pirate captain’s ship and it detaches smaller, pod-like growths that act as an attack mechanism. The pods house the reanimated corpses of previous victims, now mindless puppets under the Kraken’s control. When cut open, instead of bleeding out, the reanimated sailors let out a mixture of ink and rotten krill that splash on the deck of the ship, making the entire battle more difficult for the defending sailors as they are slipping and sliding on the deck.
There’s a massive, rolling battle with the Krill Kraken. The original plan is for the pirates to kite the creature through the Ocean. There are three ships under the command of the pirate captain, each one is acting like a fire kvetch. The plan is that the Kraken would go after one, and the other two ships would attack the main body while the sailors that are on the ship in the grips of the Kraken try to cut their way free of the tentacles.
First part of the fight ends when the traveler slashes one of the undead sailors and it spills its ink and rotten fish on the deck. The traveler finds it hard to stand, the other sailors are slipping and sliding, making them easy prey for the undead sailors. The first mate of the ship manages to free the traveler, and they leave the ship that the Kraken is attacking, knowing the Kraken will try to drag it to the ocean bottom. They manage to climb onto one of the other two ships while the Kraken breaks the keel of the ship it had been attacking. Then it chases after them.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
The captain is helping attack the Kraken. The ship he’s on rushes towards the creature. Its ropes were greased with fat and several casks of gunpowder were packed below deck. The entire ship had been drenched in oil with only a few pieces of the ship dry enough to allow the skeleton crew sailing it to try and leave the vessel as soon as the Kraken attacks. The traveler manages to free a few of the sailors and helps them escape from the ship while the captain does battle with two of the Kraken’s tentacles. The captain eventually kicks the traveler off the ship and then sets the whole thing on fire, blowing up the Kraken and killing it.
Most of the pirates have been killed, but there are enough that they can sail the third ship they had. The amateur Malagwa Tattooist brings out a book with dozens of pictures in it, sets it in front of the traveler, and tells him to choose.
The traveler gets a tattoo that the tattooist isn’t entirely certain will work. She explains that traveler bodies are slightly different from the bodies of everyone else. There might be complications between her magic and his body, but everything should work as planned. The tattoo uses energy produced by the body to recharge, and it’s only good for a couple minutes. She grabs ink from the Krill Kraken and mixes it with her tattoo ink and gives him a tattoo that will give his feet a sturdier grip when he’s moving about. It’s something he thought about while fighting the Kraken and slipping with all the ink and rotted fish guts.
[Malagwa Tattoo]
A unique and mystical marking often found on the bodies of seafarers and pirates who have sought out the magical tattoos for the edge they might provide. A Malagwa Tattoo is often viewed as a badge of honor, a sign of having braved the dangers of the Malagwa Islands to track down a tattooist capable of working ink into a permanent magical effect. The tattoos are typically dark blue or green in color, although they often shimmer with other tones depending on the magic infused within them. The ink used in these tattoos are derived from rare, bioluminescent plants and marine creatures, giving the designs a faint glow that becomes more pronounced in dim or moonlit nights.
After that, the pirate drop him off at a city on the coast of the next landmass and the traveler heads north, the constant buzzing in his head driving him forward.
I’m imagining something like a Samurai Jack/Into the West style journey where the traveler meets up with random cultures and societies and governments and has a whole host of adventures. Along the way he slowly gets more information about travelers. He’s stunned to find that there are a lot of different cultures and people who have heard tales of travelers.
Travelers aren’t immediately out of bounds for people to interact with. There are rules to interacting with them, and those rules are slowly explained throughout the story.
Here’s some notes on a few of them”
Isle of Despair
The traveler is imprisoned by a corrupt governor who doesn’t fear the travelers. He places him on an island he likes to call the Isle of Despair. It’s a harsh and unforgiving landscape that stretches beyond what the eye can see, marked by jagged cliffs, dense thickets, and arid plains. The air is thick with the smell of salt from the surrounding ocean that brackets it on all sides, and it’s tinged with the acrid smell of smoke from makeshift cook fires.
The ground is littered with debris and the remnants of past conflicts – broken weapons, tattered clothes, and abandoned shelters. The entire island is a prison, and everywhere you look there are signs of struggle and survival. The whole place is accessible only by air due to regular supply drops from the governor’s sky crates, and it’s a place where society’s outcasts are left to fend for themselves. Other kingdoms pay the governor to house their prisoners, and he stuffs them all on this island.
The regular arrival of supply pods are a focal point for life on the prison island. Every three days, when the sky fills with descending parachutes, it triggers a frantic scramble among the gangs vying for control over the vital resources. This ritualized competition has led to complex power dynamics and alliances forming around access to the supplies. For many of the inmates, securing a pod isn’t just about survival, it’s about asserting your dominance and gaining leverage over rival factions. Consequently, the supply drops have fostered an environment where strength and cunning are paramount.
I haven’t figured out how the traveler would break free of the prison, but he isn’t there for very long.
Floating Bazaar
The traveler arrives at a city floating above the clouds where merchants arrive from all over the world. It’s a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds, with vibrant stalls draped in exotic fabrics and goods from every corner of the world. The air is perfumed with scents from rare spices, fresh fruits, and aromatic teas. Merchants call out their wares in a cacophony of languages, while musicians play enchanting tunes on strange instruments. The ground beneath a person’s feet sways gently with the floating city’s movements, adding an otherworldly sensation to the trade experience.
The entire city is suspended high above the clouds, and the aerial marketplace travels between various cities to allow merchants from distant lands to trade their unique goods. It’s only accessible via airship or winged creatures capable of navigating the thin atmosphere.
I was thinking of having the traveler dealing with a murder mystery here.
Crystal Caverns
The traveler joins up with a spelunking crew that navigates a labyrinth of glowing crystal caverns. The crystals sing when someone brushes up against them. The team is searching for an ancient lost city said to be within the crystal caverns. The city supposedly houses an ancient and powerful artifact.
The whole place is a subterranean wonderland, where every surface glistens with crystalline formations that emit a soft glow. When touched, the crystals emit sounds, and the traveler is able to find rooms in the caverns where, by running around, a person could create a symphony. The entire cavern is filled with cool and damp air, echoes of dripping water add to the cavern’s haunting beauty, making it both enchanting and eerie.
The caverns stretch for miles, with some sections plunging into unfathomable depths. Spelunking teams often embark on perilous expeditions in search of an ancient lost city. The entire journey is fraught with danger as explorers can get lost or run into underground denizens of the caverns. There are individuals and teams that all explore the caverns and chart out safe areas for people to go. Even charting out a minor section of the cavern that has been unexplored is enough to allow an adventuring team to retire.
Starship Graveyard
The traveler stumbles upon a junkyard that’s littered with the wreckage of ancient starships. He scavenges for parts while encountering sentient machines. The machines have their own unique culture that has grown over the years, and they share a story of the time a traveler visited them.
The landscape is a chaotic maze of twisted metal and shattered hulls, each a relic telling a tale of its demise. The ground crunches underfoot, a mixture of broken glass and fragmented alloys. The distant hum of machinery and the clanging of metal echoes through the graveyard.
There is a clan of scavengers that live in the starship graveyard. They’ve developed a unique form of theater, using salvaged metals and debris to create elaborate stage sets. Their plays often dramatize the daily struggles and triumphs of life in the scrapyard, blending dark humor with poignant moments. Performances are often held under the flickering scavenged lights from ships, with music made from improvised instruments fashioned from starship parts.
Moonlit Market
The traveler joins up with a trade caravan as it travels, and it slowly gathers pilgrims as it moves along. Once a year, under the light of the twin blue moons of the planet, a hidden mart appears where mystical and alien beings trade secrets and artifacts. The market is thick with a mist that seems to shimmer with thousands of tiny, sparkling lights.
Stalls made from strange materials cast a gentle light on the wares displayed – mysterious artifacts and ancient relics that hum with a hidden power. The scent of exotic spices and alien flora fills the air, mingling with the subtle undertones of incense burning in ornate braziers. The sound of distant, haunting melodies plays on unfamiliar instruments.
The market is nestled within a secluded valley that can only be reached through a winding, labyrinthine path. Surrounded by towering cliffs and dense, mystical forests, it remains concealed to everyone who hasn’t been initiated into its secrets.
The traveler would stumble through this market, looking at all the fascinating items for sale, and then wander into a random store he doesn’t remember entering. He’d meet a strange salesman who sells him a [MacGuffin]. I hadn’t decided what exactly it would be, or what it would do, but the traveler would basically be given it for free. And when he wakes up in the morning with all the rest of the pilgrims, out in the middle of this field with the entire moonlit market gone, that would be the only thing that he purchased.
Infinite Library
It’s a city built around an “infinite” library containing knowledge throughout the known universe. To “buy” reading time and copies of books, visitors need to offer something just as important or perform minor jobs for the library. There is a floor of the library where every book you read takes your mind into a different realm, and the traveler navigates those worlds to find what he wants.
Hunters
After narrowly escaping an attack from large creatures, the traveler wanders around and gets on this random, broken, concrete road. He hears the distant hum of an engine cutting through the silence. A rugged vehicle, unlike anything he’s ever seen before, drives up to him. Inside are three individuals: fraternal twins and their younger brother. The twins are a brother and sister and are in charge of protecting their younger brother. The young boy is the prodigy of the family and is going to be the future of their clan. The twins explain that they’re bounty hunters tracking dangerous creatures across the desolate landscape, and they offer to let him ride with them. They eventually find out that he’s a traveler, and the twins are slightly hesitant to talk about what it means to be a traveler. They share a few stories that they’ve heard from different tribes, all saying that travelers have an urge to travel in a specific direction, and they land on the planet with almost nothing, but nobody can agree what exactly binds the travelers together.
Reality Shapers
This is…maybe a combination of two separate stories.
The traveler finds a group of people who have miniscule nanomachines embedded within their body, granting the host the ability to manipulate aspects of reality that defy conventional understanding. The nanomachines interface directly with the brain, responding to the user’s thoughts and intentions. The effects they produce range from altering the physical properties of an object, to influencing environmental conditions.
The origins of these nano-machines are shrouded in mystery, with no clear records indicating who created them or for what purpose. Some ancient texts and ruins that the traveler comes across suggest that an ancient, advanced civilization used to flourish on this alien world. It’s believed that the nanomachines are remnants of that ancient civilization, designed either as tools of survival or instruments of control by the upper class.
Over time, knowledge of how to create and use the machines was lost, leaving only fragmented legends and occasional discoveries. Among the native tribes and inhabitants of this world, reality-shapers are regarded with a mixture of awe and fear. Those who possess the machines are often viewed as shamans or sorcerers, wielding powers that can both heal and destroy. This has led to a societal structure where individuals with those abilities hold significant influence and status. However, due to the lack of understanding about how they function, there is also great superstition surrounding their use. Some communities see them as gifts from the gods, while others view them as dangerous relics best left untouched.
I was thinking that this would be a major mystery that the traveler is taught about. He would eventually find his way to the infinite library to study how these nanomachines work. He would also think about them in regards to the Agawo. He thinks that the inky black substance he was seeing under their skin was actually the nano-machines of different creatures in the area and that the shamans were able to collect them, strengthen them, and package them for safe use for other people in the tribe.
Spoiled brat vacationer
This is more a scene that I would be working in on some adventure. The traveler would come across a spoiled brat who has powers similar to the shamans and sorcerers of this world. The brat is guarded by a number of different guards and servants, and when he sees the traveler, he tries to start a fight with him and throw his weight around. The servants and guards are terrified of the traveler though; not so much physically, but what he represents.
The traveler doesn’t quite understand that but, eventually, he meets the spoiled brats father. The father hears that his son has been a dick to the traveler, and he disciplines him. Then, he explains to the traveler that he’s sorry he can’t offer too much help, as his people believe that the traveler’s are given divine missions from the gods and they aren’t supposed to be interrupted. That includes both limits about attack travelers, as well as offering them too many gifts.
After the traveler leaves, the father slaps the shit out of his son and asks him if they’re really related. He says that the boy’s mother begged him to let their son come on this vacation, but the son was an absolute idiot and decided to pick a fight with a traveler. The son doesn’t understand why his father is so scared of the traveler. He didn’t look all that impressive and he’s sure that the guards – who are all trained special forces – could easily have killed the traveler.
The father says that’s the point. If the boy had done something to impede the traveler, it would have pissed off his “benefactor”. The father isn’t scared of the traveler. He’s terrified of whoever dropped him off in this world. The son asks why, knowing that his father is a government official who is in charge of several worlds, but the father says that there are certain people you don’t want to do business with. Ignoring travelers, holding your breath until they leave and relaxing into a puddled mess of nerves once they get out of sight, is the right way of doing business. Travelers are like walking natural disasters.
Eventually
The story would end with the traveler having gathered a bunch of people together to travel with. He’s been wandering this planet for several years, always going north because his codex is pushing him in that direction. He eventually gets to a ritual area that some of the people in his party believe is meant for teleportation. He activates the teleporter and the codex spins up, telling him he has several minutes before he’ll be teleported.
Once the teleporter is activated, machines pop up around the ritual area and start attacking the traveler’s party. He helps to defend them, and there’s small hints that the machines aren’t attacking the traveler, just the companions he’s been traveling with. The machines eventually kill his companions, and the traveler is teleported while reaching out to one of his friends.
He ends up on a ship with a window that is staring down at the world below. Machines clean him up and run him through various scans while he’s in shock over the violence that he was teleported away from. He’s screaming that he wants to go back, but he’s eventually held down and decontaminated.
He’s ushered into a lab where there’s a scientist sitting at a desk. The scientist explains who and what travelers are, and what the planet he was just on was.
The planet is a cross between a dumping ground, a lab, a testing facility, a vacation destination, and a prison for the entire universe.
Planets send prisoners and their families to the planet and just dump them there, wiping their memories and exiling them on the planet. It’s a dumping ground of ancient ships and technology that is no longer useful for the rest of the galaxy. It’s a vacation destination, as proved by the rich father and his spoiled son, because you could basically do whatever you want to the people who live on the planet.
Travelers and sky-fallen make up the lab and testing facility parts of the planet. There are hundreds of different scientific organizations all over the universe that are trying to make military equipment, biological lifeforms, cybernetics, and a whole host of other technological absurdities. They need test subjects. The sky-fallen are often tossed down to the planet with military equipment to see how it holds up in real battle. The biological lifeforms like the Dreadboar and several dangerous monsters that the traveler has attacked, were dumped on the planet to see how they would interact with various flora and fauna.
But the travelers are the most expensive pieces of lab equipment. Each traveler is installed with cutting edge technology. And that’s it. If they were given anything more than the tech that they’re supposed to be testing, it could pollute the test results. So travelers are fitted with cybernetic organs, or mutated genes, or nanomachines, or whatever, and then dropped on the planet and told to survive.
The drive to venture north for the traveler was because the scientist, who had implanted the traveler with the codex, wanted to make sure he got his tech back. Travelers are all implanted with tech that would push them to go to a teleport platform where they’d be packed off the planet and studied.
The reason that there are dozens of different tales about travelers on the planet, is because scientists want to test their equipment, and they get pissed if a bunch of horrible shit happens to the travelers before they could actually test how well their inventions work in the field. Imagine spending all your time creating biotic eyes that could let you zoom in somewhere, and a bunch of people think your traveler is a witch for having blue eyes or something, and they kill them. Now you’re out the tech and your test only lasted a few days. So…early scientists got a little trigger happy when their tech failed on the planet and they’d wipe out entire villages and tribes if they messed with travelers.
The traveler was a test subject for The Codex which is meant to be an encyclopedia that could download relevant information directly into the minds of whoever had it. The traveler was also being used to gather information for the scientists on various things like the infinite library and the moonlit market. He traveled north because of the incessant buzzing, and only he was teleported to the scientist’s lab because the traveler’s companions didn’t have anything that the scientist wanted.
This is where that [MacGuffin] from the moonlit market would come into play. I figure there’d be some way for the scientist to shut down the traveler and make sure he doesn’t attack, but the MacGuffin would still be on the traveler’s person and would interrupt any signals sent his way. The traveler would then kill the scientist with his plasteel seax.
The whole story would end with the traveler in the lab, there’s no buzzing telling him to go anywhere.