Time Traveling
From DirtyWiki
Work is, obviously, still being done on this, and something will show up on the Fantasy FAQ in the next couple of days.
Contents |
General Information
The ability to time travel is a form of magic that can attach itself to anyone. In its core nature it is magic itself moving people back through time. But a time-traveler is not a form of humanoid species like Dirty Life's other playable fantasy (angels, demons, therianthropes, vampires). More, time traveling is like a magical illness or affliction than a magical ability or a state of being. It's something that happens to some people and, for the most part (as there are rare cases of people only traveling once, but these are rare cases) happens throughout the course of their lives.
Because for the most part (see exception) it cannot be controlled, calling it a power or ability is really the wrong way to look at it.
Like all other supernatural manifestations, time traveling begins at puberty, though people are capable of having their first trips as late as twenty-five (kind of like those angels and demons who get their wings late in life). It can happen to anyone, from humans to angels and everything in between, though it is most common in humans.
It does have a genetic component, but appears first as a random mutation. Time travelers are more likely to have time traveling descendants (though it is a one in eight chance that one of their children will actively be a traveler, they are carrying the predisposition down the generations) but it initially comes from nowhere at all except the magic itself choosing that particular person. Reasons that people end up with the mutation besides being descended from time travelers are unknown, and most travelers themselves don't know (unless it is in the recent family at all) that anyone else travels. As an event it is so rare and so isolated that there would be no way to know.
The Exception to the Rule
Angels and demons can have control over traveling because they are literally made of magic. If they concentrate hard, they can choose their destination and the time they arrive, but they may lose focus on other things and might get sicker. They can't choose when things occurr, though, as it's up to the magic when it chooses to activate. It also takes a full understanding of what's going on and a lot of practice to be able to have this sort of control.
Other species can't control what happens, because they aren't actually made of magic, even if they have some (vampires, therianthropes).
Traveling
Warning Signs & The Present
A time-traveling person does not stay in the present, but is physically brought back in time. They vanish from their present location and are not in two places at once. Clothes and possessions being held at the time can come with because you are physically leaving the present and going back to the past. Any item that doesn't exist in that time will not work in that time either, though newer models of an old thing (like a modern cell phone in 1993) will.
No one will be gone longer than twenty-four hours (a full cycle of the sun) in the present time, though they can spend up to two weeks in the past. They will age as they do in the present, ie one 24 hour cycle.
Warning signs are in the form of things like faintness, dizziness, fading vision, nausea, pins and needles all over the body as opposed to just the extremities (it isn't due to numbness), and auras. They resemble signs of an epileptic seizure. It happens when one travels to the past and and can sometimes look like a tonic-clonic seizure, too, with slight twitching.
To the Past
A traveler can move as far into the past as recorded human history exists, though people are not likely to travel more than 200 years earlier than their own birth. (It does happen. Just not often.)
The past cannot be changed. This doesn't mean time travelers are only silent observers – they can do things, but not change anything that is already remembered. Things happen as they happen. A time traveler going to something that's already remembered by lots of people as not having them there won't be able to do anything to change it, because that's already how it happened. Attempts to do things like stop World War II will obviously not work. Giving someone a flower or making a friend, though, is possible.
In a nutshell, events of the past are set in stone, but time travelers are a part of the past.
Because of this, sometimes time travelers already know that they will end up in a certain place, because someone who remembered them from then told them.
If a time traveler ends up in their own past, literally – meaning that they are there as a younger version of themselves as well – they are invisible and silent and basically made up of 100% pure magic. Even angels and demons, who are already magic, cannot be noticed, not even by other supernatural creatures. They are only able to watch. Because, after all, you can't be in a place twice, and you already know how the memory of that particular event goes. You don't remember seeing an older version of yourself, so you can't be visible to the younger version of yourself the second time through the event, either.
To the Future
Traveling to the future does not occur. The future is the future, and is thus undefined and everchanging. Infinite choices make infinite futures.
Stopping Time
People who already travel through time are sometimes also victims of another time-related fluke in the cycle of magic: time stopping. It isn't really time that's stopping, though, so much as the fact that the person experiencing it is getting stuck in one single moment on a loop.
The person in the stopped moment can move around, and move objects that are not living, and basically do whatever they want. The problem with that is there is no way to tell when the stopped time is going to start up again, so if you're halfway across town and there was another person in the room, well, you have quite a story to tell.
(It would also be kind of hard to get across town because electronic devices and combustion engines won't work in stopped time, so unless you wanted to ride your bike or walk you might not make it anyway. A bus wouldn't pick you up, a car or motorcycle wouldn't start.)
Stopped time tends to happen to a traveler long after a manifestation (closer to age thirty than fifteen – some people still haven't had their first trip at fifteen).
A single episode can last anywhere from one minute for the traveler to five hours. Their aging and bodily function will move in the time of the world, and therefore during stopped time no one will age, have to eat or use the bathroom.
