The Beast Fears Fire - Ghost Islands

Ghost Islands [Malevolence 3]
Impulse - Entrap, Bring back the Past

The Gulf of Catastrophe is full of tiny islands, too numerous and small to appear on even detailed maps. Experienced sailors know all the islands visible on their routes, which is a damned good thing, considering. The Gulf of Catastrophe is challenging to the point of a feature of national defense to navigate for a host of entirely mundane reasons - shoals, currents, sudden shifts in weather (two microclimates abut one another over the center of most of the Gulf), territorial pods of hippothalassoi (Sea Creatures [Violence 4], stay tuned, true believers). Then there are the ghost islands.

The ghost islands predate the coming of the Queen - they prowled the Long Drink River and its tributaries in the Ketteleye for as long as anyone has lived in the region. Their association with the Queen is a modern one; it's uncertain how long they have operated as they currently do, and no one knows why.

Ghost islands appear to be tiny, mobile islands. They are rarely larger than the bare minimum needed to justify a stand of trees or a tiny structure (such structures are common on ghost islands, little cottages or boat houses to draw people to set foot on them. These structures are part of the island and grow from it). Ghost islands are capable of manifesting or generating local fog banks of varying size and density. Despite not appearing to bob with the waves, even during the strongest seas, ghost islands float, and have an underside that observers describe as sporting a tangle of appendages, some like flippers and some not. On the rare occasion that one has been successfully destroyed and studied, the most of the living entity that is the island is a sort of biological web that moves through the soil and rock that make up most of its bulk. Ghost islands don't appear to have sensory or cognitive abilities more developed than the simplest organisms that Cricks designate as such, but they do possess a powerful and unconscious psychic resonance of Grief, one of the two resonances that the Queen gifted some of her servitors.

The Grief is one of the things that links the islands to the Queen, despite them not being significant to her in the historical record or, more tellingly, not being something she created upon arrival in the Ketteleye. The other major link is that the ghost islands seem to exist in two points in time. The first is the present, as it continuously moves forward, and the second is a fixed point, the same for all known ghost islands, approximately 300 years in the past, during the reign of the Queen, thought to be a year or so before the destruction of the Ketteleye and the formation of the Gulf.

Harm - Moderator Hard Move [Transported to the Past]/Peril [Grief] Ghost Islands want, to the extent that they are capable of wanting, to bring living things from the present back to their homing point in the past. Anything currently touching the island when it returns to its homing point are transported with it. The island can remain current with time going forward from its homing point for up to 144 hours, at which point everything that went back with it comes forward to the point in the present from which it departed, regardless of whether those things are still on the island.

Also regardless of where the island was in space when it departed from the present, it arrives in the same point in space (somewhere on the Long Drink River) it was located when it arrived at the homing point in the natural flow of time. Regardless of where the passengers of the island were in space when the island returns to the present, the return to the present on the island at the time and point in space from which it departed. Those who have arrived in the past on the island report that the only ones to arrive at the homing point on the island were the ones to depart from the present on the island, which shouldn't happen, since all future instances of time travel to the homing point should arrive in exactly the same place and time. No one is sure why previous passengers are not there on the island at the homing point, whether or not their actions have changed the course of history or what damage to spacetime all this looping has done. Time travel is hard.

People who explore the island do not run afoul of its resonance, and may not even know of its presence unless they open themselves to the psychic impressions of the place (at which point, they activate its Move), ride the island to its homing point or they attempt to, as impractical as this sounds (and it is as impractical as it sounds, but possible) attack the island.

We Have to Go Back - When you open yourself to, transit through time with, or attack the island, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you fight off the Grief, and can choose to leave the island before it transits to its homing point.
On a Hard Hit, you can prevent the island from transiting at all, or force it to and be able to control, up to the 144 hour limit, how long it stays in the timeline going forward from its homing point.
On a Miss, you wake up in the past, having suffered Harm as stated. Good luck.

To a world others might have missed
The study of how and why the ghost islands go to and from their homing point drops almost directly off into speculation. No one knows why there aren't localized time paradoxes, and the occasional adventurous scholar has ridden the same island to the past multiple times without encountering their previous arrivals (this is probably spectacularly irresponsible on the part of said scholars, but the universe hasn't appeared to collapse. Yet. That we know of. Time travel is hard.). The speculation that seems the most plausible (and this should give you an idea about the plausibility of the runners-up) is that the Queen, somehow, foresaw her own decline and fall and started using the islands as a shot in the dark to change the future by bringing folk from the future to mess up the timeline. The thought is that she clears the cache or the islands self-clean the timeline every time it doesn't fall her way. This still creates all sorts of paradox, though, since people in the present (and all the past inhabited trips leading up to the present) remember their trips to the homing point and time travel is really hard.

Attempts to make use of any part of a destroyed ghost island have failed. Attempts to communicate with ghost islands have, so far, also failed. Custodial spirits cannot inhabit any part of a ghost island and will not go near them willingly, to the point where they hold grudges against anyone who is able to compel them. Elves cannot inhabit a person touching the island, and have not successfully traveled to the homing point. You don't see them crying about it. Despite the dangers posed by these beings, historians view them as an excellent window to a fascinating period in the past. 300 years ago was the tail end of the provincial system in the east, the beginnings of the end of imperial collapse in the west, collapse of technologies reliant on totally depleted resources and a great place to scavenge for artifacts that may have multiple copies in the present. Oh dear.

A certain number of islands arrive in the present with servitors of the queen aboard, the same servitors, of which there are multiple copies of individuals in the world today. Some people posit that the ghost islands are the sole reason populations of servitors of the Queen survive in the Gulf of Catastrophe today. The islands that bring other servitors forward don't do so when returning other passengers to the present. No one knows why. Time travel is hard.