Meridian Lightyear

Meridian Lightyear is a member of the Time Police, although she isn't an especially high ranking member. While she is occasionally sent out to deal with time-related mishaps (or as their category system calls them, "Anomalies"), her primary job is that of a plant of sorts. She stays generally in a specific time period under a fake identity as a Movie Director. She's very eccentric and hyper active, mostly because she has Time Patches on her that give her enough energy to never sleep, even though her body really needs it physically. Some people are suspicious of her but she is always able to avoid blowing her cover, mostly because if she did she'd already know. Time travel is weird. Meridian's a big enthusiast of the various trends of the modern era, sort of like how some people are "buffs" of 80s culture or have a massive 80s aesthetic, except for the present. She's also barely under what most would consider the threshold to be an alcoholic. She's drinking buddies and the coworker of Dante.
No one actually knows Meridian's origins. She seemingly appeared one day in The Citadel, the Time Police's headquarters. The people there raised her and it became her lifelong dream to join their ranks and protect the multiverse from criminals. It is also completely unknown even to herself if she's a mundie or epithet user, as no attempts to find out have proved fruitful.
== Powers ==
Meridian can use what is either Time Police technology or a mix of that and her powers (it's complicated) to store and collect the "Time" she spends. She generates Time passively, through taking physical damage, and through spending energy to use her abilities. She can channel Time to either heal herself with Time Juice, duplicating actions any number of times if she has the fuel, or boost her damage linearly with no cap by firing more and more attacks. This damage buff manifests by allowing Meridian to layer multiple of her glowing energy spheres, or as she calls them her "Blue Marbles", from various time periods in a single flash, or boost her physique to punch things hundreds of times in an insane rapid succession.
Meridian can also donate her own turns to other players, allowing them to take turns or anytime actions in her stead. This also works as her best way to generate Time for herself, giving it a dual use. But her strongest ability allows her to "establish Standard Time", creating a timezone around her that allows both herself and allies to spend significant amounts of additional stamina in order to take main actions on the turns of other allies. This effect tends to consume stamina extremely quickly, allowing Meridian to create massive stores of Time really quickly at the cost of burning out very quickly.
She also wield a Lævateinn, a special weapon that is supposed to be the standard issue weapon for various time cops, but due to its dangerous potential, ornate construction, and the general bureaucracy of the Time Police, next to no one has one other than very high ranking officers. Meridian was only able to obtain one from the concentrated effort of her entire department, as a gift for her dedication and service in the force. The weapon appears like a massive black grandfather clock hand that is reflective like black glass and glows white. It can both be used as a spear and a sharp bladed weapon due to its unique shape, and damage it deals drains time from a target's lifespan to grant Meridian more time to utilize.
Meridian can at will paste the prefix "Time" onto any word or object, giving it time-related powers. Using this is powerful, but if done too much can be quickly overwhelming. As such she avoids using it except in particularly juicy scenarios.
=== Ultimate Form ===
During the events of Episode 50, Meridian was granted an "Ultimate Form", which boosts various aspects of her kit. Meridian's upgrades were mostly in the form of optimizations of her time generation, letting her generate double her usual passive amount and use her action cloning at a better time-to-copy ratio. She could also add Time as a suffix to words and objects in addition to her usual prefixes, letting her make any time into the time of whatever is relevant to her success. She also got a general boost to her stamina, like all Ultimate Forms.
== Destruction Bench Agreement ==
=== Episode 18 ===
Meridian spent much of the match building up time and empowering her teammates with extra turns. She immediately made it her goal to deal with Valeria as she's a Class 3 Anomaly for the Time Police, as well as being quite the asshole. She turned a train into a time train and helped Leon collect all the parts on the arena from all timelines to create the Time Mech. She also spent all of her remaining time to finish off Valeria, and then proceeded to suplex her and handcuff her to the side of her own shitty mech before it was launched into space and blasted away along with the moon, never to harrow the earth again.
After the match Meridian is approached by Cam Era, who has deduced Meridian's true identity as a member of the Time Police. He offers to join, and she slips him a card to contact her further on the matter. Another Valeria appears and tries to reveal her identity to the public as well, but either no one heard or no one took it seriously as none of them seem to carry on this info.
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=== Episode 21 ===
Meridian manages to use an item created by one of the other party members to create a Chaos Emerald. This is instead taken by Class 4 Anomaly Clarisse, which likely got Meridian reprimanded after the match. Other than that Meridian mostly helped the party fend off the incoming foes, especially Venus who Meridian dumped all her Time into attacking, in the resource sense. Not the literal one.
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=== Episode 28 ===
At the end of the episode, W the local elder god of The Shadow Realm is tricked into possessing a bucket instead of the Alpha Rogue Cam Clone to use as a temporary host by Rio. Meridian enters to take W away into a high security prison area, as he's a Class 7 Anomaly.
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=== Episode 30 ===
At the end of the episode (again) the party manages to barely escape the poison unleashed by Nagito Komaeda. They find Meridian and Dante waiting for them at the exit, who explain that Nagito is a reality warping time criminal of unknown Anomaly class, whose luck allows him to seemingly pop up anywhere and avoid being caught or being permanently detained. Then a massive Mr. Munch proceeds to devour the arena and at least half the audience members inside. No idea how they're still alive next episode.
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=== Episode 33 ===
After the battle with Tyrone, Nagito Komaeda reveals himself to be the orchestrator of his violent actions and hubris, tricking him into using his outclass on the three letter word "EGO". Cam calls in his now coworkers Dante and Meridian, who both attempt to intervene. They don't prove very effective, however, and eventually the party drags both Nagito and Shadow Nagito into the Lockerverse, where they were safely restricted by Weylan Jr. for the time cops to capture and bring back to headquarters.
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=== Episode 50 ===
Meridian was attempting to return as a contestant in DBA after a long break, thinking the episode was 51. However, she got a little bit of a panic when she found out it was actually 50, feeling like she remembered hearing something bad happening then. She was right, considering MatPat began unraveling in his Grand Theory. She met up with Dante, who then entered the temporal maelstrom along with the rest of the party.
Before the gauntlet began, the party was visited by a Time Construct version of W, who decided to fulfill the original intended gimmick of episode 50 by giving the party Ultimate forms. While she design wise opted out of her ultimate form for most of the fight, the power she gained was no joke. She generated slightly more time passively, her Destructo Dial cloning ability was more efficient, and she could add "Time" at the end of a word in addition to her normal beginning.
Throughout the combats Meridian was able to generate a significant amount of time utilizing her Establishing Standard Time ability, and due to having a large number of allies she was able to turn her team into an infinite spiral of actions that helped steamroll all opposition. She experimented with greater and greater Time Punches that increased in scale, going from obliterating the Time Construct Zalgo out of existence in frozen time all the way to performing a massive Muda Muda Destructo Dial combo which dealt 330 damage even with half the attacks missing. While she mostly hung back granting spare turns to allies and being a general support, when she did utilize her Time offensively it was explosive and impactful, which destroyed the entire final boss' health pool and pinballed him through the gauntlet of various high damaging setups which the party had set up.
At the end of the session Meridian received a special gift from her friend Dante, the Lævateinn. This took a lot of time and effort from their department to obtain, and she was very thankful. She mistakenly let Clarisse touch it for two seconds, which of course let her create a copy with a natural 20. Dante also announced to the rest of the party that he was a part of the Time Police and invited the party to visit for testing to join, although Meridian opted out of exposing her secret identity yet to avoid getting moved away from her position as a plant.
Another Meridian also appeared by technicality as a Time Construct created by a chain reaction of temporal anomalies at the heart of DBA. She was immediately obliterated by a version of Clarisse possessed by W, who blasted massive Shadowrealm nightmare portals that vaporized her.
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=== Episode 81 ===
Meridian joins the rest of the party to join their uncle's Christmas party. Of course these memories are completely fake, since Meridian doesn't have blood relatives nor is she related to any of the chucklefucks, coincidentally all participants from that day's DBA match. By the time they realized that this, they were already trapped within Uncle Moore's time loop. Due to her experiences with time-related phenomena, Meridian concluded that the only ways to break free before the house fire was to either fulfill the loop's condition of bringing back Moore's family, or to defeat Uncle Moore himself.
Meridian made expert use of her powerful Time generation to keep the team healthy while within a no stamina regeneration zone. Eventually she spilled the beans about being a time cop, under the premise that everyone there would keep it a secret. It would simply increase their chances of survival if Meridian could openly act out the law in this scenario. Meridian also had notably developed a friendship and maybe crush on Chad Chaddington, a normal police officer and total Himbo. She had agreed to show him The Citadel and go out for some drinks after all this was over. Once the players had cleared through the memories of Moore's relatives, they began combat with the man himself. Meridian unleashed her ultimate technique: using Destructo Dial to layer multiple Standard Timezones on top of herself at once. This allowed her team to take a maximum of 222 actions a round. Even though this technique was not fully abused to its greatest effect, it still significantly evened the playing field. Meridian took this opportunity to fuse with Blackberry, which only lasted a single turn due to both realizing their powers combined would begin to distort and devour time. In the end, Meridian was able to take what she'd learned from her "family" by performing a massive 350+ damage multi-timeline TIME PUNCH, which cleaved over half of Moore's health and left him primed for a final blow by Vis.
Meridian timecuffed Moore and planned on bringing him back to HQ, to pay for the crimes he had committed through the law. However she knew that ultimately this was just a formality, as upon leaving the loop Moore would likely age 50 years and die instantly. But before that could happen Groundhog, a manifested and now sentient fragment of Moore's epithet, fully separated from Moore and immediately burned the house to the ground, refusing to let anyone leave. The battle was short and precise, as Groundhog used the last of his power to spend all the proficiency Moore had gained over the past 50 years to prevent his death, so that he would be forced to suffer the consequences of his actions.
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=== Episode 97 ===
Hanging out in the Destruction Bar and Grill, or "D-Bag", Meridian immediately noticed how drunk Blackberry was and had to keep her cover as a time cop from being blown. She told Red to make sure she doesn't drive. Afterwards, Meridian quickly spotted Saint "Rocketlauncher" Nicholas, summoned by Wendrow Wonderland. She announced that he was a time criminal, since it's impossible for one man to travel the world and deliver that many presents all in one night. Of course, he disappeared before she could exact time justice.
== Trivia ==
* The name of Meridian's crit theme "Closing Your Loop" is a reference to the movie Looper, where people in the future would pay people from the past to perform certain crimes like killing, due to such advanced forensic technology making getting away with any crime completely impossible, with the last job offered being that of killing your future self to "close your loop" and stop you from spreading information of the scheme in the future. This both acts as a time and movie reference.
* Meridian was originally created because zanza both wanted a time manipulating character and a character who dealed with spending large amounts of red stat.
* Meridian's original icon lacked the arrows in her hair due to zanza being so tired when making it that he completely forgot.
* Her "Establishing Standard Time" ability was originally in her set of five, but instead of text simply had the message "Meridian creates a 5x5 Time Zone. Elaborate on this further before you share this zanza, you fuck." He of course forgot to actually add the text of this ability, and Ballast reworked it into a real ability in her upgrades.
** Establishing Standard Time, according to zanza, is the single strongest ability in all of DBA.
* According to Ballast, the one who has made her upgrades, they are amongst his best work when creating an upgrade path for a character design wise.
* Meridian was mistakenly called "Meridian Lightyeet" in her first character poll, forever staining her. It has been reincorporated into a nickname she's called in the force that she gets really annoyed by.
Category:Characters
Category:Destruction Bench Agreement Characters