Writing Prompt – Worst People In History

I think this is the first prompt I have had from Vision in Blue and it poses one of the classic time travel dilemmas. If you could go back in time and kill (insert horrible person who did horrible thing here) would you and what repercussions would that have?

This is not from the point of view of the time travelers and in face it’s not even certain that there are time travelers, but it sure looks that way. If it is, they aren’t doing a good job of it.

I think the first thing you would need to do when you go back in time would be find a way to blend in. Even if you are only going to be there to do one quick thing, the likelihood that there will be others who see you is pretty high. That leads me to believe these are amateur time travelers or time travel does not allow them to be in the past for very long. Maybe they only have an hour or maybe even less. They wouldn’t have time to get clothes that help them blend in, but wouldn’t it make sense to have a dedicated arm of the time travel agency, whomever they might be, that helps them look the part? So amateurs.

I should probably talk about the main character, but we don’t really know anything about this character. They are well versed in stories about time travelers or maybe even in actual time travelers depending on what’s going on in society who want to kill the worst people and assume that for some reason it looks like they are the target of time travelers.

There is also the phrase, “history is written by the victors,” which cannot be properly attributed to someone though people do like to tie it to a statement by Winston Churchhill saying that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it. Or we could go by this quote by Napoleon Bonaparte, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

Whether these things are true or not, there is no doubt that some things do get hidden and distorted and it’s possible that the main character will become a horrible human being who does something so terrible time travelers will try and come back and kill him or her. Or maybe the main character just has the worst PR in history. What do you think?

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CommentLuv badge

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.