Chronophobia

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Ruko

Professional Otaku
Original poster
FOLKLORE MEMBER
Invitation Status
Posting Speed
  1. 1-3 posts per day
Writing Levels
  1. Elementary
  2. Intermediate
  3. Adept
Preferred Character Gender
  1. Female
Genres
Fantasy, Magical, Horror
Time does not run in a straight line. It twists and turns and doubles back on itself. Sometimes it flows freely like water in a brook. Sometimes it is thick and viscous like cold honey. Sometimes it stands completely still, sometimes it skips like a tightly wound coil snapping. But it wasn't always like this.

One can visualise "Time" like an evolution tree. It started at one specific point around 14.9 billion years ago, and it kept going along this path for 14.9 billion years. Just one timeline. One sequence of events that was destined to happen. Then, a group of scientists experimented with a microwave oven and broke all of this to smithereens. At the exact moment that time travel was discovered, in the summer of 2010, an infinite number of alternate timelines popped into existence out of nowhere. They all ran parallel to each other to begin with, never crossing, never even coming close enough to affect one another. But there was one problem - Paradox. Paradox's original name was Earth, a planet populated by almost 7 billion people, of which 8 knew of the possibility of jumping through time, 8 people who alone destroyed a thousand universes and ended the lives of trillions.

To begin with, the group sent a text message back into the past - this was all they could do. Their microwave wasn't powerful enough then. But send the right text message to the right person in the right point in time and you can have cataclysmic effects. The first text had little effect because it had little meaning. The second saved one person's life. One person who would join as the 7th member of the group of 8, and who had enough significance to jump Earth onto a different time line. To change it's destiny. But the scientists got greedy. They began to send messages into the past for menial things - to remind them not to forget to pick up something from the store. To tell their past selves that it wasn't such a good idea to leave the keys under the mat after all.

You see, humans are unique. Of all the sentient races of all the alternate timelines, humans possess one thing - a tendency to play around in things they don't understand. Once they got the ability to send an entire person into the past, they began to play around far too much. They never attempted to change the world out of fear of paradox happening, but even while being careful to avoid major events, they still managed to cause encounters that shouldn't ever have happened. They figured out at one point that the Timeline theory was true and that Earth was jumping to a new line every time they did anything. What they didn't realise was that the planet never detached itself from the old timeline. Eventually, Earth was wound up in so many alternate realities simultaneously that the fabric of reality snapped, isolating Earth in a gap between timelines as it tried to jump once more.

Have you ever been stranded in a world where time is just a concept? A falsehood? A legend told to children to scare them into not getting out of bed after the lights are turned off? It's not a pretty sight. Every individual object is isolated in it's own perception of time. Some objects feel the effects of time very suddenly in a rush-like pattern. A fruit might fall off a tree and will have rotted and disintegrated before it even hits the ground. Just next to it, another fruit from the same tree might have sat on the ground since 40 years ago, yet remain in perfect condition - for it, only a few seconds may have passed. A great person destined to be the leader of the free world could be born one minute and died of age related disease after only a few hours. In the hospital bed right next to it, an archaic woman may have been resting for a century, waiting for the 4 o'clock news to come on.

And the effect isn't restricted to individual items either. Different parts of the same thing can feel time differently, if the object is large enough. Which is exactly what happened in east Africa, in the Rift Valley. The Rift Valley was a divergent plate boundary, that would eventually break off a chunk of the east coast of africa to form a new island the size of a large country. However, this process was meant to take millions of years. Due to the state of being between timelines, dubbed "chronophobia", the entire rift valley shifted and formed the island in just 16 days. As soon as one object gets separated from another, time perception becomes individual to those objects. For example, a few months after the Rift Valley occurrence, a huge earthquake of magnitude 9.5 hit the city of San Francisco. An earthquake so powerful that visible ripples appeared in the surface of the land, like rolling waves of stone. The shockwave shattered monumentally gigantic skyscrapers, however, due to time isolation, the top of one such skyscraper which was cleaved straight off in the blast has floated in the air above the city for almost 13 years now, falling almost infinitely slowly.

Of course, this drastic Chronophobia caused scientists to decide they needed a way to measure what they called Chronological Divergence - how quickly or slowly time is felt by the object in relation to "normal" time (time that passes at the same speed as it did before the event.) It was decided it would be measured on a scale of 1 to 100, based on percentage deviance. An object of +50% deviance felt time pass 50% faster. For example, an alarm clock that was set to go off after 100 minutes had passed would go off after 50 minutes had passed. An object of -50% deviance felt time pass 50% slower - the same alarm clock of -50% divergence would take 150 minutes to go off. In essence, anything with a positive deviance moves faster, anything with negative deviance moves slower. There are absolutes, too. It ranges from +100% to -100%, and is logarithmic after 95%, since an object of 95% or more deviance is very rare. An object of +100% deviance will do everything instantaneously. The moment it gains it's own Time Field, it will carry out it's entire lifespan and disappear before a measurable amount of time had passed, even faster than the most sensitive nanosecond clocks could sense. In contrast, something of -100% deviance would never experience time. The moment it gained it's own time field, it would freeze forever. An object of 0% deviance moves just like normal.

Currently, scientists are working on two things. First, somehow getting out of a state of Chronophobia. Secondly, developing a device that allows them to alter deviance values, intended as a back up plan. If they can't escape then they feel they should stabilise everything in the universe at 0% deviance once more.

Characters:

For now, max 2 characters per player.
I don't mind who your characters are, provided they aren't a member of the original team who discovered time travel.
According to 0% divergence, 40 years have passed since the time travel first began, so it is early summer of 2050.

CS:

Name:
Age: (according to own deviance)
Gender:
Appearance:


Divergence:
Occupation:
 
I plan to join, but I have a few questions.

1. When it comes to occupation, is the minimum age based on 0% divergence or the individual's divergence?
2. Does school work as it did before the event?
3. Any requirements for the CS that aren't explicitly stated (picture and/or description type, for example)?

Sorry if I'm bothering you.
 
Its no bother at all.
1. It's according to individual divergence, since people will mature according to their own divergence rather than 0%.
2. School does work in the same way as it did before, however, classes tend to be grouped based on divergence, so those with high divergence aren't being forced to stay in school for loads of time after they already learnt everything, and those with slow divergence aren't being ejected from school before they've had chance to learn everything.
3. There're no further requirements. I usually prefer to ask people if they could either use an anime picture or a description but I feel that when I do that I limit people too much so I decided to leave it out this time. A bio is rather unnecessary here, since time is screwed up. One person's backstory may last several minutes in relation to another's. One may even run backwards.
 
Okay, thank you. And just to be sure, the percentage of divergence is calculated based on minutes, correct? If so, here are the two characters as they currently stand.

Name: Melvin Timberlake
Age: 15
Gender: Male
Appearance: He stands 5'8" (~1.73 m) tall and has a thin body. His straight hair is blond and neatly combed, and it goes to the middle of his neck. His eyes are hazel, and his expression is often pensive. He usually wears a green polo with black jeans and brown sneakers.
Divergence: -60%
Occupation: His parents have allowed him to work at their knick-knacks store, but only after school.

Name: Lindy Soun
Age: 12
Gender: Female
Appearance: She is 4'10" (~1.47 m) tall and has an average build. Her wavy hair is red and tied in a messy braid that goes down to the middle of her back. Her eyes are different colors; her left eye is emerald green and her right eye is teal. She usually wears a sky blue blouse with a brown knee-length skirt and gray sandals (once white, but worn from use).
Divergence: +25%
Occupation: She is currently unemployed, though she likes the idea of being a jockey when she's older.
 
-60% is a massive difference. Are you sure you want to use that? Assuming he lived 10 minutes away from school it'd take him 16 minutes to get home. If an hour passes for him, 1.6 hours (96 minutes) passes for the normal time.
 
Sorry I took so long to decide. I'm all right with it; I'd like to see how Melvin deals with his relatively inconvenient divergence.
 
Well, that's all good then.
 
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