- Location
- US
It was just called the Protectorate before Hero died. And if she was a member in the late 80s that would be five members, not four.
Horologist (Worm AU/Altpower)
- Thread starter We Just Write
- Start date
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
The mechanics behind entity-derived powers are not public knowledge; while *most* parahumans have a corona pollentia - the only form of parahuman detection outside of trump powers or social engineering - not all parahumans have (detectable) brains, nevermind a corona, and finding it is unreliable anyways. As far as the rest of the world will care, she's either a tinker with a temporal specialty or a trump who empowers mostly-mundane clockwork systems she constructs.
If she can teach people how to make her stuff, that would throw a wrench into the unofficial discussions - but officially, it would make her trump rating skyrocket. They are threat ratings, after all.
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- Location
- U.SA
this is watched. though when time goes fucky things get confusing. sooo
- Location
- On a Journey Through The Decade
Since the watches get unmade when they reach the point in time they were built, does that mean that people time traveling with them have their age altered relative to the time traveled (ie; go back 2 hours, de-age 2 hours. Go forward 3 hours, age 3 hours)?
All The Time In The World
We Just Write
Blatantly Plural
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
After the timestop activated, Dad and I were staring out of the field of motion making up our property at the unmoving world. From our current position, we could see birds stopped in midair, trucks locked in place, and a static unchanging sky. After watching for a few moments, Dad voiced the sentiment we were both feeling when he said "Well, that's utterly disturbing to look at. I vote we go inside and have breakfast."
The house still had power at the moment, but only because we'd lugged the backup generator out of storage and I'd thrown together a temporal motor to turn the shaft instead of the generator's normal engine. That said, internet and telephone service? Flat out not happening. Same went for the gas and water lines, though I had some ideas for a way around that problem based on a temporal oscillator. I really wanted to get the toilets in the timestop up and running, so that Dad and I wouldn't need to pop a minute or two into the future whenever we needed to go. Thankfully that hadn't happened yet, but it would only be a matter of time.
All that accounted for, we opted for toast and microwaved sausages, with milk as our drink for this morning. As we ate, Dad asked "So. I know that the house is time stopped, but what I'm wondering is why our brief pops into the future for bathroom usage haven't revealed the house in a completely different state. Basically, where did everything we both know you're planning to make go?"
Nodding, I swallowed my current bite of food and answered "So, unlike a simple time stop which is effectively an extreme time dilation gradient, the house is not being subjected to such effects. What I actually did is define an additional timelike axis; the stopped house is still moving through time, just at a ninety degree angle from the rest of the universe. Let's call this perpendicular time, and what people normally experience as prograde time. As for the version of the house in prograde time, from the perspective of prograde time there was no point at which the house was actually absent, so it was duplicated for each time axis. Anyway, we're conscious observers and therefore inherently quantum systems, which renders us exempt to that particular mode of temporal duplication thanks to the no-cloning theorem; since we were expecting to end up in the stopped house, here we are."
There was a brief pause, as Dad and I processed what I just said. This pause abruptly ended when I blurted out "HOW IN THE WORLD DID I KNOW THAT!?"
To this, Dad replied with a weary tone "I don't know; we both know that you've been tested for being a Tinker repeatedly and come up negative each time, but all of those tests were before your clocks started telling time what it is, instead of telling what time it is. On top of that, we've also done all the research on Trigger Events, and nothing that's happened recently remotely qualifies."
I couldn't help but chuckle at the wordplay, before going back to being serious "Dad, this is really worrying for me; my mind is changing in ways I don't understand, I'm able to see the flow of time itself, and measurements have revealed that I've started subconsciously warping time when clockmaking in order to get more done than I have any right to. At this point even I'd be wondering if I were a Tinker, except that some part of my subconscious keeps screaming at me that I'm not whenever I think that way."
Dad simply shrugged, noting "Sorry, but I don't have any answers that you don't. Anyway, on a somewhat more productive note, I hope you get the toilets in this version of the house up and running soon. Also making those safety watches."
I nodded, then answered "First thing's first, I'll be making a temporal duplicator machine; entirely aside from the household utilities, I'll be needing parts and supplies to make all this stuff, and the supply in the workshop is very limited. If I put together a machine that lets me make duplicates of stuff at the touch of a button, it handily solves all those problems. I'll probably even be able to make copies of my clocks that way, so that I only need to put together the original, then can just run off however many I need."
Dad simply grinned, noting "I guess you're still planning on founding a Time Patrol, then? Either way, I say you get to it."
With that, I marched down to the basement, and got to work on my temporal duplicator machine. The temporal mechanism was going to be the easy part; most of the challenge would come from making the tray able to seamlessly slide in and out of the machine's working volume, and keeping people from getting bits caught in there. I had it put together in about an hour; now that I knew about my time distortion effect, I was exploiting it for all it was worth. Regardless of production time, the final result looked an awful lot like a microwave oven, except with only two buttons; operating it was as simple as putting a tray in with what you wanted to duplicate, closing the door, opening the door again to remove whatever you put in, closing the door, hitting the rewind button, and taking out your newly copied item.
I immediately used this to restock all my clock-making supplies. In mere minutes I'd fully restocked on sheet metal, Brass, Invar, glass, spring steel, and the super-Luminova paint I used to make my watches glow in the dark. I'd wanted to use Tritium for my luminous displays, but both my father and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had vetoed giving me access to radioactive gasses. Spoilsports.
Musing aside, next up I needed to make the temporal oscillators to get the utilities working, and also maintain the house's air quality. The clock part was fairly straightforward, since I'd just built a mechanism that did almost the same exact thing; that part took me a mere half-hour to build the first of, then I just ran it through the duplicator a few times.
Next up, I needed to connect these devices to the lines for water, gas, sewage, and the ventilation system. Fortunately, the water and gas lines were still at full pressure since we'd had them shut since the timestop started, and the sewerage lines were mercifully clear due to proactive planning on the part of my Dad. So I wouldn't need to try and open up the pipes to get them into the correct state for the temporal oscillators or anything. A few well-placed band-clamps later, the temporal oscillators were installed, and the time-stopped version of our house now had the full range of utilities available for use, along with a guarantee that the air quality would stay fairly pleasant.
After a very relieving bathroom break that didn't require leaving the timestop, I immediately got to the next project of making an automatic safety watch. First step, list design priorities: whatever else it did, I needed something that would keep me from getting killed. On top of that, it would be really nice not to get seriously injured, captured, or unintentionally get outed as having a connection to my hero persona. Also, suddenly vanishing when the safety kicked in would be a dead giveaway; fortunately the wall clock had conclusively proven that I could make a device that screwed with time in a way that gave no outward hint of what just happened. That coupled with the knowledge from nowhere about conscious observers getting some sort of privilege gave me the idea to build a clock that would induce mental time travel, sending the wearer's mind back in time by a set amount and merging with their past self's mind.
I was pretty sure I could do that fairly easily; the hard part would be making the watch able to sense incoming problems in order to actually activate the rewind function automatically. After puzzling over the problem for a few moments, the idea arose that I might be able to have the watch pass itself information from future states, effectively predicting how long until a given future event would take place. Of course, this would have to be based on elapsed subjective time, otherwise constantly bouncing between prograde and perpendicular time would cause all sorts of problems. Grinning, I immediately began work on a prototype of the safety watch, with the only criteria that would cause a rollback being a physical injury in the next 100 milliseconds, with no severity threshold.
Getting the watch ticking, I immediately grabbed a hammer and swung it at my thumb. The next thing I knew, I was staring at the pile of parts that would have become my prototype safety watch. Alright, let's build this thing for real. This time I included a severity threshold so that minor bumps, scrapes, and scratches wouldn't cause an automatic reset. I also included being unwillingly immobilized, being unwillingly Mastered, being subjected to hostile time alterations, and being disconnected from the paired safety watch as things that would cause the watch's user to be rewound. All that said, I completely encased the mechanism in brass aside from the 'pair to user' button, which would also function to manually activate the rewind once paired; this was one clock face that I most emphatically did not want visible.
Safety watch complete, I immediately ran it through the duplicator until I had sixty four of the things; I did the same for the time manipulator watch I was wearing, just so that I'd have a lot of extras in case I wanted to recruit people. That done, I paired one of the safety watches to myself, and brought another up to Dad. Seeing me, he asked "So, I'm guessing that you have everything done you want to for right now?"
Nodding, I answered "Yep. Got the duplicator running, rigged up the utilities for the timestop, and I not only made a safety watch, I ran off sixty four of them using the aforementioned duplicator."
Holding out the circular brass device about 12 millimeters across to my dad, I told him "As soon as you push that button on the side, the watch will pair to you. Any time you would be seriously physically injured, unwillingly immobilized, Mastered, subjected to hostile time alterations, or disconnected from the watch, it will rewind you by an hour or until your most recent period of consciousness. Hitting the button again will also activate a rewind after the initial pairing. It runs on your subjective time, so there's no reason to worry about popping in or out of the timestop."
Dad simply stared at the innocuous brass item, and silently nodded as he took the device and pressed the button. After a few moments, he noted "So, that's everything we wanted to do in order to get your initial setup complete. I guess now we finally leave the timestop, and you get ready for school?"
I smiled and replied "One last thing before school; my workshop in prograde time still has a few time manipulators lying around. I need to clean those up before I forget about them, or something unfortunate could happen. Also, I need to modify the wall clock to disable its time travel functionality. From here on out, the only way to get to or before this moment is if I deliberately let someone do it, and that is final."
After cleaning up my workshop and tweaking the wall clock, I gladly hopped on the bus and rode to Arcadia. Getting there took about ten minutes as always, with me gladly showing off my new time manipulator watch to my friend Mandy on the bus, though I didn't say it was a time manipulator, nor did I allow her to fiddle with it. Honestly, by this point it would be more suspicious if I didn't show up wearing a brand new wristwatch every few weeks.
Either way, homeroom went pretty much like normal, as did History, Biology and Mathematics, then came lunch. As usual, I sat across from Amy. We chatted about random things for a few minutes, before I said "Amy, I'd like it if you came over to my house after school today. There's something really important I want to share with you."
Amy looked around, before asking "Just how important is this?"
I just held out my hand for her to hold. Amy immediately got my drift and held hands as I used my other hand to activate the timestop for my new watch. Immediately, Amy's eyes went wide, and I said "Seriously, we need to talk. But only after school. If we move too much in the timestop it will be immediately obvious to everyone that something weird just happened."
Amy held extremely still as she replied "Got it." and I started time back up again.
The house still had power at the moment, but only because we'd lugged the backup generator out of storage and I'd thrown together a temporal motor to turn the shaft instead of the generator's normal engine. That said, internet and telephone service? Flat out not happening. Same went for the gas and water lines, though I had some ideas for a way around that problem based on a temporal oscillator. I really wanted to get the toilets in the timestop up and running, so that Dad and I wouldn't need to pop a minute or two into the future whenever we needed to go. Thankfully that hadn't happened yet, but it would only be a matter of time.
All that accounted for, we opted for toast and microwaved sausages, with milk as our drink for this morning. As we ate, Dad asked "So. I know that the house is time stopped, but what I'm wondering is why our brief pops into the future for bathroom usage haven't revealed the house in a completely different state. Basically, where did everything we both know you're planning to make go?"
Nodding, I swallowed my current bite of food and answered "So, unlike a simple time stop which is effectively an extreme time dilation gradient, the house is not being subjected to such effects. What I actually did is define an additional timelike axis; the stopped house is still moving through time, just at a ninety degree angle from the rest of the universe. Let's call this perpendicular time, and what people normally experience as prograde time. As for the version of the house in prograde time, from the perspective of prograde time there was no point at which the house was actually absent, so it was duplicated for each time axis. Anyway, we're conscious observers and therefore inherently quantum systems, which renders us exempt to that particular mode of temporal duplication thanks to the no-cloning theorem; since we were expecting to end up in the stopped house, here we are."
There was a brief pause, as Dad and I processed what I just said. This pause abruptly ended when I blurted out "HOW IN THE WORLD DID I KNOW THAT!?"
To this, Dad replied with a weary tone "I don't know; we both know that you've been tested for being a Tinker repeatedly and come up negative each time, but all of those tests were before your clocks started telling time what it is, instead of telling what time it is. On top of that, we've also done all the research on Trigger Events, and nothing that's happened recently remotely qualifies."
I couldn't help but chuckle at the wordplay, before going back to being serious "Dad, this is really worrying for me; my mind is changing in ways I don't understand, I'm able to see the flow of time itself, and measurements have revealed that I've started subconsciously warping time when clockmaking in order to get more done than I have any right to. At this point even I'd be wondering if I were a Tinker, except that some part of my subconscious keeps screaming at me that I'm not whenever I think that way."
Dad simply shrugged, noting "Sorry, but I don't have any answers that you don't. Anyway, on a somewhat more productive note, I hope you get the toilets in this version of the house up and running soon. Also making those safety watches."
I nodded, then answered "First thing's first, I'll be making a temporal duplicator machine; entirely aside from the household utilities, I'll be needing parts and supplies to make all this stuff, and the supply in the workshop is very limited. If I put together a machine that lets me make duplicates of stuff at the touch of a button, it handily solves all those problems. I'll probably even be able to make copies of my clocks that way, so that I only need to put together the original, then can just run off however many I need."
Dad simply grinned, noting "I guess you're still planning on founding a Time Patrol, then? Either way, I say you get to it."
With that, I marched down to the basement, and got to work on my temporal duplicator machine. The temporal mechanism was going to be the easy part; most of the challenge would come from making the tray able to seamlessly slide in and out of the machine's working volume, and keeping people from getting bits caught in there. I had it put together in about an hour; now that I knew about my time distortion effect, I was exploiting it for all it was worth. Regardless of production time, the final result looked an awful lot like a microwave oven, except with only two buttons; operating it was as simple as putting a tray in with what you wanted to duplicate, closing the door, opening the door again to remove whatever you put in, closing the door, hitting the rewind button, and taking out your newly copied item.
I immediately used this to restock all my clock-making supplies. In mere minutes I'd fully restocked on sheet metal, Brass, Invar, glass, spring steel, and the super-Luminova paint I used to make my watches glow in the dark. I'd wanted to use Tritium for my luminous displays, but both my father and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had vetoed giving me access to radioactive gasses. Spoilsports.
Musing aside, next up I needed to make the temporal oscillators to get the utilities working, and also maintain the house's air quality. The clock part was fairly straightforward, since I'd just built a mechanism that did almost the same exact thing; that part took me a mere half-hour to build the first of, then I just ran it through the duplicator a few times.
Next up, I needed to connect these devices to the lines for water, gas, sewage, and the ventilation system. Fortunately, the water and gas lines were still at full pressure since we'd had them shut since the timestop started, and the sewerage lines were mercifully clear due to proactive planning on the part of my Dad. So I wouldn't need to try and open up the pipes to get them into the correct state for the temporal oscillators or anything. A few well-placed band-clamps later, the temporal oscillators were installed, and the time-stopped version of our house now had the full range of utilities available for use, along with a guarantee that the air quality would stay fairly pleasant.
After a very relieving bathroom break that didn't require leaving the timestop, I immediately got to the next project of making an automatic safety watch. First step, list design priorities: whatever else it did, I needed something that would keep me from getting killed. On top of that, it would be really nice not to get seriously injured, captured, or unintentionally get outed as having a connection to my hero persona. Also, suddenly vanishing when the safety kicked in would be a dead giveaway; fortunately the wall clock had conclusively proven that I could make a device that screwed with time in a way that gave no outward hint of what just happened. That coupled with the knowledge from nowhere about conscious observers getting some sort of privilege gave me the idea to build a clock that would induce mental time travel, sending the wearer's mind back in time by a set amount and merging with their past self's mind.
I was pretty sure I could do that fairly easily; the hard part would be making the watch able to sense incoming problems in order to actually activate the rewind function automatically. After puzzling over the problem for a few moments, the idea arose that I might be able to have the watch pass itself information from future states, effectively predicting how long until a given future event would take place. Of course, this would have to be based on elapsed subjective time, otherwise constantly bouncing between prograde and perpendicular time would cause all sorts of problems. Grinning, I immediately began work on a prototype of the safety watch, with the only criteria that would cause a rollback being a physical injury in the next 100 milliseconds, with no severity threshold.
Getting the watch ticking, I immediately grabbed a hammer and swung it at my thumb. The next thing I knew, I was staring at the pile of parts that would have become my prototype safety watch. Alright, let's build this thing for real. This time I included a severity threshold so that minor bumps, scrapes, and scratches wouldn't cause an automatic reset. I also included being unwillingly immobilized, being unwillingly Mastered, being subjected to hostile time alterations, and being disconnected from the paired safety watch as things that would cause the watch's user to be rewound. All that said, I completely encased the mechanism in brass aside from the 'pair to user' button, which would also function to manually activate the rewind once paired; this was one clock face that I most emphatically did not want visible.
Safety watch complete, I immediately ran it through the duplicator until I had sixty four of the things; I did the same for the time manipulator watch I was wearing, just so that I'd have a lot of extras in case I wanted to recruit people. That done, I paired one of the safety watches to myself, and brought another up to Dad. Seeing me, he asked "So, I'm guessing that you have everything done you want to for right now?"
Nodding, I answered "Yep. Got the duplicator running, rigged up the utilities for the timestop, and I not only made a safety watch, I ran off sixty four of them using the aforementioned duplicator."
Holding out the circular brass device about 12 millimeters across to my dad, I told him "As soon as you push that button on the side, the watch will pair to you. Any time you would be seriously physically injured, unwillingly immobilized, Mastered, subjected to hostile time alterations, or disconnected from the watch, it will rewind you by an hour or until your most recent period of consciousness. Hitting the button again will also activate a rewind after the initial pairing. It runs on your subjective time, so there's no reason to worry about popping in or out of the timestop."
Dad simply stared at the innocuous brass item, and silently nodded as he took the device and pressed the button. After a few moments, he noted "So, that's everything we wanted to do in order to get your initial setup complete. I guess now we finally leave the timestop, and you get ready for school?"
I smiled and replied "One last thing before school; my workshop in prograde time still has a few time manipulators lying around. I need to clean those up before I forget about them, or something unfortunate could happen. Also, I need to modify the wall clock to disable its time travel functionality. From here on out, the only way to get to or before this moment is if I deliberately let someone do it, and that is final."
After cleaning up my workshop and tweaking the wall clock, I gladly hopped on the bus and rode to Arcadia. Getting there took about ten minutes as always, with me gladly showing off my new time manipulator watch to my friend Mandy on the bus, though I didn't say it was a time manipulator, nor did I allow her to fiddle with it. Honestly, by this point it would be more suspicious if I didn't show up wearing a brand new wristwatch every few weeks.
Either way, homeroom went pretty much like normal, as did History, Biology and Mathematics, then came lunch. As usual, I sat across from Amy. We chatted about random things for a few minutes, before I said "Amy, I'd like it if you came over to my house after school today. There's something really important I want to share with you."
Amy looked around, before asking "Just how important is this?"
I just held out my hand for her to hold. Amy immediately got my drift and held hands as I used my other hand to activate the timestop for my new watch. Immediately, Amy's eyes went wide, and I said "Seriously, we need to talk. But only after school. If we move too much in the timestop it will be immediately obvious to everyone that something weird just happened."
Amy held extremely still as she replied "Got it." and I started time back up again.
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AMessOfWires
Return to sender
- Location
- England
Gaining knowledge by studying it and sending her memories of studying it back in time? 
- Location
- Hungary
All this sounds like something the Time Lords could have done in their prime, before the time war.
And the thing with slowly gaining knowledge and skills related to time manipulation is not something that Shard powers do or are capable of, so she has either some connection to Time Lords or just ROB did it.
And the thing with slowly gaining knowledge and skills related to time manipulation is not something that Shard powers do or are capable of, so she has either some connection to Time Lords or just ROB did it.
- Location
- Russia
I'm pretty sure that she just got that good at clockmaking that she accidentally discovered ways to control time all by herself, no external influence required.
TortugaGreen
Constantly out of the loop
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I imagine Taylor will be a lot bolder than in Canon, as she knows she definitely won't experience too severe of consequences for fucking up, at least on herself. On others, who knows, but Taylor is passing out safety watches pretty freely.
AMessOfWires
Return to sender
- Location
- England
and if worst comes to the worst, she can always spam the safety watch until she gets back to a point where she can change her decisions
@I just write
"ten minute as" -> "ten minutes as"
Is it intentional that the standard operating procedure for her
temporal duplicator machine only uses one of its two buttons?
"ten minute as" -> "ten minutes as"
Is it intentional that the standard operating procedure for her
temporal duplicator machine only uses one of its two buttons?
We Just Write
Blatantly Plural
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
The other button opens the door latch.
- Location
- Hot Springs
All I can say is this is a marvelous story, and I'm looking forward (and sideways, and backwards at the same time too!) to seeing more!!!
- Location
- Militiagan
The key bit is being able to sense the flow of time, from which all the other abilities Time Lords have spring.
Interestingly, this isn't the first time I've seen this kind of ability development outside of the Who-verse. There was a guy in the cartoon "The Batman", who was a clock maker who, after being stuck in a cell in Arkham surrounded by clocks, gained an intuitive understanding of time and was able to jump back in time in short bursts. There's also Professor Paradox, who is so OP the he makes the Doctor look like a child with tinker toys.
Enjoying the story so far! My first question: just how hard will Taylor no-sell Clockblocker's everything? That could be a fun interaction.
Second: will she address the Grey Boy bubbles? On the one hand, major good deed, excellent PR, and a chance to study time shenanigans that aren't hers. On the other hand, it would almost certainly draw the eye of the S9. She's not (yet) prepared for that kind of heat.
Second: will she address the Grey Boy bubbles? On the one hand, major good deed, excellent PR, and a chance to study time shenanigans that aren't hers. On the other hand, it would almost certainly draw the eye of the S9. She's not (yet) prepared for that kind of heat.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
Coil's power, in canon at least, is essentially parallel precognition(that presents itself as timeline splitting so it doesn't have to precog its user's reactions to his reactions to his reactions to his reactions to his reactions to his...), and like most (all?) entity precog it's reliant on data. That said, precog shards have data gathering capacity, and the really good ones have really good data gathering; an Out of Context Problem, normally, might cause a blackout, but they'll get back on track sooner rather than later.
Normally.
Barring AU elements, entity temporal manipulation is very inferior to what Taylor's shown; combined with the fact that she's started warping time around her just by being her, it's entirely possible that she's a precog complication, and may cause blackouts and/or stuttering to precog attempts.
Or maybe it'll just cause a blackout or two before she's properly modeled; her brain may still be open to shard analysis, which could be enough.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Counter point, the shards would effectively need to precog an effectively infinite amount of Taylors as she jumps around, and seeing as how she has a space only she can effectively observe, where she can spend an undocumented time, there's no reliable way to predict her without space magic.
Guardsman_Sparky
The Clueless Wonder
- Location
- Virginia
Oh dear.
Now I'm just imagining Taylor jumping back and forth between the two timelines as she casually unravels all of Coil's plans.
You know, it might be a good idea for her to make a precog device. Something that let's her see a few seconds or even a minute into the future in any situation that her adrenaline spikes could save her a shitload of trouble if she ever gets into a fight she can't avoid. The watch she just built after all isn't built for a combat time scale.
Though it might have been a better idea to have it do a initial rewind into stopped time where she could decide how far she wanted to go backward.
Though it might have been a better idea to have it do a initial rewind into stopped time where she could decide how far she wanted to go backward.
AMessOfWires
Return to sender
- Location
- England
If she can travel back in time past the watches' creation as opposed to the wall clock, I'm imagining her extending her watchmaking business back in time