Literature / Crusaders Of The Chrono Crystal

The cover is meant to look fifties or sixties retro, but it was done on a budget.

Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal is a comedic sci-fi fantasy adventure by C Randall Nicholson.

In the year 2153, the Milky Way galaxy is dealing with an extradimensional invasion and a surge in space piracy, but exuberant Jane Padgett and stoic Lillis Hawker are still just trying to make their living as freelance space adventurers and heroes. Their fast thinking and faster reflexes have gotten them out of every tight spot so far.

A mysterious woman hires them to return with her to her dangerous homeworld, infiltrate an ancient, booby-trapped temple, and recover a crystal with the purported ability to transport people through time and space. They don’t know if this power is real, but others certainly think so – others who will stop at nothing to get it and rewrite the galaxy’s history for their own ends.

Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal provides examples of the following tropes:

• Alternate Timeline: The villains' meddling creates one of these where they now control the galaxy.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Technically, Jane is a little bit bisexual and Lillis is asexual, but the point is they're best friends and partners with no romantic entanglement, although Jane sometimes flirts with Lillis as a joke.
• Reset Button: The protagonists can't figure out which event(s) to change to erase the Alternate Timeline, so they reason that destroying the crystal will have the same effect. It works... mostly.
• Stable Timeloop: The story ends with the characters tossing the crystal into a black hole, erasing the Alternate Timeline and ostensibly destroying it. In the Epilogue, though, it's revealed that the crystal traveled back in time through a wormhole and shot out of another black hole, and this is how it came into existence in the first place.
• You Can't Fight Fate: In-universe, it's explained that time fits together like cogs in a machine. While people can change some things, the overall course of events will stay similar, unless they change things so drastically that the timestream splits into an Alternate Timeline (which it does at one point).