Time Explorations

After asking Jenny out on a date, Seb shares how she might train her powers.
Jenny stands in front of the windmill, carefully watching the blades pass by the small entrance at the base. Her head bobs up and down and she silently counts the seconds between each blade. She looks down at the ball at her feet and shuffles to get her club in the right position. She looks over to the windmill again, counts… and putts.
“Heh, I guess it makes sense you’d be good at timing things.” Seb observes with a chuckle as Jenny’s ball sails cleanly between the blades and into the windmill’s tunnel. He was doing his best to keep up, but he couldn’t recall the last time he’d played minigolf… it was a nice change of pace.
“I just need a bit of time to myself to really- ah! We’ve gotta see if it went in!” Jenny runs over to the scoreboard to check. It didn’t. She groans in frustration. “Timing is no good if I don't know everything I need to know!” She slumps down into a chair, crossing her arms and pouting.
“It’s just an extra stroke.” he points out, her ball was only a few inches from the hole. He sets his ball down on the line and attempts to replicate Jenny’s shot without success. “See, now I’ve got to try and get it in at an angle, as well as miss the blades...” he says, frowning at where the windmill had knocked his ball to the side.
Jenny stares at Seb’s shot, considering how different it was to hers. “I’m sure you can still make it up!” She walks over to her ball and putts it into the hole gently, then bends over to pick it out of the hole. “I guess two swings isn’t so bad… I would rather do it right on the first try though.”
“Well of course. Nobody’s perfect though, and the game wouldn’t be much fun if you got a hole in one every time.” Seb crouches to get a better look into the hole in the windmill, then steps up and steadies his breathing, waiting for his opportunity and… tok! Times it just right to actually bounce off the edge of the windmill blade and into the tunnel. Another easy putt finishes the hole.
Jenny gives Seb an enthusiastic applause then quickly shifts to the more reserved clapping she’s seen in movies and tv. Her expression becomes pensive when she says “Well, what if your mistakes make everlasting changes to reality around you? I don’t like making mistakes very much…” She slumps back into her seat.
Seb grins as Jenny visibly restrains herself changing to the polite golf-clap. He sobers up when she brings up her powers. “That is certainly more important… but like anything you’re only going to get better at using them safely if you practice. Just ask Ernest, he used to be terrified of his powers to the point of having nightmares about them. Now he’s an internet star, and makes flashy rainbows on the regular.”
“Ah I see… He’s an internet star?”
“Yeah! You didn’t know? He’s got tons of followers on Chitter and BeTube.”
Jenny waves her hands around. “Nevermind that! Just how would I even ‘practice’ with my powers? Any small change I make can have enormous consequences!” Jenny looks down at her lap. “All the more reason I shouldn’t be using them in the first place.”
Seb takes a seat next to Jenny as he considers her question. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about how your powers work? There’s gotta be some way you can practice them on a smaller scale or something. I get the whole chaos theory thing, but there’s a lot of weird science in Halcyon.”
“Mmm.. well, the more I use it the less I really understand about it. Before I thought I overlapped events but it’s really not that simple… I edit them? Tie them together? All I know for sure is that I reach out with a feeling of wanting something to go one way and sometimes things happen so that they do… Other times I let supervillains get away and make pocket timelines…”
“Ahh, instinctual use. Yeah that’s like… the first stage of power use; low control, high power.” Seb leans back in his chair, tapping his foot thoughtfully. After a few moments he recognizes how she’d finished that and puts his hand on her shoulder.
“You also helped us get back from that other timeline, and… well we’ve all let villains get away before. Even when we catch them they don’t stay locked up for long a lot of the time.” He grimaces at the thought. “Point is… that’s what Big Team is about. I try to encourage everyone to be more responsible and careful, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems like Big Team is a training ground of sorts. It’s somewhere where we can practice our powers, practice being heroes, figure out what kind of heroes we want to be, or even if we really want to be a hero. It’s somewhere we can feel safe to make mistakes and know that the rest of the team has our back to help fix them, and that we won’t get in too much trouble even if we do wreck a building or two.
“If that’s not enough though then… Well, I can’t guarantee it’ll work with your powers, but I do know one place where you can mess around with time powers that won’t affect anything else.”
Jenny listens intently, eager to hear about what it means to be a part of Big Team. Then she gasps and leans in close to Seb. “There’s a place I can train my time powers?!” Her hands grasp his though she doesn’t notice.
“Yeah… I’ve known about it for a while, but kind of been avoiding the place...” he admits, shifting slightly in his seat. “The hole I tore in this dimension to finally get back is still around. I uh… I guess you don’t know that story huh...” He looks down to his lap and can’t help a little smile at seeing her clasping his hands.
“The whole reason I have these dimension warping powers is because I overloaded the wormhole belt I used to have to… well break time a little. There was a palace full of civilians that was collapsing due to a villain called Black Mole Sun, and there wasn’t a lot of time to get them all out. It worked, I was able to get everyone to safety but then time snapped back and… I got stuck.”
He’s silent for a few moments, his shoulders shaking ever so slightly. “I was in this weird void dimension… like some sort of temporal rubbish heap. A big empty, probably infinite void full of bits and pieces of… everything really. Buildings, spaceships, ancient ruins. Time flows strangely there because it doesn’t have any of its own I think, just whatever fragments ended up there from whatever disasters opened a connection to this place and got pulled through. So… I don’t really know how your powers would work there, but they wouldn’t be able to affect Halcyon I think.” He ends on a forcefully cheerful note.
Jenny’s brow furrows. “Are… are you okay going back there? I don’t want to make you go back just for me.”
“Yeah… It’s not the most pleasant place to be, but I have been back there already. I think from what I’ve been able to figure out, that just being there is what gave me these abilities. I couldn’t do anything before I got stuck there, I had trained and learnt a bunch of stuff with Doc Infinity… hrm, actually I should take you to meet him sometime too, he might be able to tell us more about how your powers work.
“But uhh, yeah, I think just being there I was able to absorb a bunch of… dimensional energy? When I first ended up there I tried to use tech to get back; I figured if I could rig up some kind of beacon that Doc would be able to use it to find me. That didn’t work and… it was rough there for a bit, but I never gave up. I uhhh… I’m rambling. Point is I figured out how to use that energy around me to push against the boundary and eventually broke back into Halcyon. Wait that wasn’t my point at all.”
“Well, glad you’re back!” Jenny smiles. “If this place really is devoid of time then maybe my powers won’t be so dangerous there!”
“Err. Yeah, I just hope there’s enough time energy there for you to actually use them.”
Jenny stands up from her seat and picks up her club. “Should we start now? Or should we finish our game?”
Seb stands as well, though he seems distracted. “Uh, we’ve only got a few more holes to go. We may as well finish.”
Jenny swings her club enthusiastically through the air, not noticing she’s narrowingly missing lights and decor. She then points her club at the next hole’s location, striking a pose of conquest before running over to it.
“Ooh, uh, careful there. Don’t want to break anything swinging your club around.”
-=-
“Alright, so… I don’t know how this is going to feel. You should be fine, but this is a hole in reality, and it’s kind of… Do you know about memes?” Seb pauses as they reach the roof landing, looking at Jenny. “This is my hole. It was made for me?” Jenny looks at Seb blankly. “Doesn’t matter, just, brace yourself for some weirdness.”
Jenny straightens up, keeping her arms close and holding on to a deep breath. As Seb leads her through this ‘hole made for him’, she could feel a strange pressure around her. Something different from being underwater or pressed down by gravity. It was similar to when she dipped into Pitch’s darkness: sudden, conspicuous, and eldritch. But just as suddenly as she felt it, it suddenly went away… and she was left with a feeling of emptiness as she stood in Seb’s sanctuary.
It was indeed a strange place to be. The first thing you noticed was the whiteness; like walking from out of a dark building into the noon-day sun, it was all that was to be seen until your eyes began to adjust. Even then it didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere, the place was just this white void… mostly at least.
Seb had to wait for his eyes to adjust like anyone else, but after that he turned towards what seemed to be… well a trash heap. As Seb walks over to one particular spot of the heap, it resolves into a crude structure; scraps of torn metal sheets, a car door, a fragment of brick wall all lashed loosely together with lengths of wire, cloth, rope; whatever he could get his hands on. Where one might expect a window seemed to be the back-side of a canvas painting.
“Soo… yeah. Welcome to the Void.”
“I’m not a fan.” Jenny frowns and sits down (though there wasn’t even ground to sit down on). “I’m trying to figure out why… cool pile, by the way.”
“Yeah, it’s not great. On the plus side, we can probably stay here for a while and less time will have passed back in Halcyon if my last stay here was any indication.” He shrugs as she comments on his little garbage shack.
She scrunches her face in thought. As she reaches out with all her senses, her scrunched expression settles on a more concerned expression.
“I know you said there wasn’t any time here… but this stuff doesn’t lead back to anything. They really are fragments lost in this place.” She stands back up and moves to be next to Seb. “What do you think I can do here when there are no tethers to reach out to?”
“Right… there’s probably not much left floating around here that I didn’t scavenge, but… you can pretty much travel in any direction and find stuff. Sometimes like… whole buildings, ships, you name it. There’s a Denny’s a couple miles... that way.” He takes a moment to orient himself to the cubby and a couple other towers of assorted junk before pointing. “Food doesn’t go off here, so that kept me going. We can pretty much pick a direction and I’m sure if we find one of the bigger wrecks there should be more time energy for you to work with.”
“Then it’s probably best to travel to one of those!” Jenny gestures at the pile in front of them. “I don’t wanna ruin any work you’ve done here! I have a few things I want to try out and they’re going to be pretty destructive.”
“Pft, please, this stuff is garbage. After I found the Denny’s I mostly just used this place for navigation and trying to escape. This is where I showed up, so I figured I might have already done some damage when I arrived. Don’t think that was the case, but my attempts to break back through definitely weakened the area and eventually...” he gestures at the hole which was slightly more visible from this side.
Jenny looks at the hole a moment before suddenly turning back to Seb. “Can it be a ship?! I’ve never seen a ship up close before!”
“Well, I did find a spaceship… It was fairly far away though so I only visited it a couple times. It’s gonna be a bit of a walk.” He ducks into the garbage shack and emerges a few minutes later with a worn looking clipboard. “Lets see, it was… about 30 degrees clockwise from the couch.”
Jenny looks around a bit confused before Seb points to what looked more like the ghost of a couch. She faces it and pivots a bit to her right, then starts walking.
Between moments of small talk, Jenny is quietly muttering the seconds it takes to reach the spaceship. A small comfort in this timeless space.
After about 10800 seconds (give or take a few seconds lost to laughter), the two reach the spaceship. Jenny looks upon it in awe, remembering Starkiller’s ship lodged in the abandoned school.
“Huh, I wonder if it’s been drifting closer… I feel like it used to be much further away.” Seb murmurs as Jenny takes in the wreck. It definitely was impressive, an enormous, bulky long distance hauler, covered in antenna, ports and other strange protrusions in quite good condition except for the jagged tear where the back half of the ship used to be. “So, what do you think? Enough energy here to work with?”
Jenny closes her eyes. “I’ll just have to just try and find out.” She reaches out, both physically and metaphysically, to the wreckage.
If she knew anything about fishing (which she doesn’t), she would compare it to casting your line into vast and empty waters. Usually she’s able to sense the alternate moments all around her if she just reaches out and--
A moment is pulled from time. The jagged tear on the back half of the ship changes shape to accommodate a different set of circumstances that led to its severance.
“That shouldn’t have worked!” shouts Jenny, crouching down and grasping her head. “There wasn’t a thread to this until there was- ugh, it’s weird.”
“Woh, are you okay?” Seb crouches down as well, his hand resting gently on her back. Jenny reluctantly nods. “Take it easy. Maybe start with something a little smaller?” he suggests with a concerned frown. “Seriously though, this place is weird, it doesn’t play by the normal rules. Although I guess… hrm, your powers do seem to be better at big changes than small ones come to think of it.” His hand remains on Jenny’s back, a comfortable presence as he looks up and lets out an impressed whistle as he takes in the spaceship; the damage seemed cleaner this time, less jagged.
“Maybe that’s something we can work on. You call them timelines, do you see them as lines? You mentioned tying them together right?” He waits for her confirmation before continuing. “I know it helps me to visualize things when I use my powers. So this spaceship is like a loose thread, right? It’s not connected to anything here because… it fell into a blackhole, or a temporal implosion or whatever that disconnected it from its original dimension. Yet you changed it, you were able to reconnect it to it’s old timeline, and break off a different one in its place. You’re like… a temporal weaver!”
Jenny sighs. "That name's already taken by Violet… Plus! That's why it scares me! Threads snap is you're not careful! I didn't know till now that I could follow a line that doesn't exist anymore." She takes Seb's hand in hers and stands back up.
“Oh… I haven’t really met all the newer people. She has time powers too? What is it with Halcyon and temporal anomalies...” he shakes his head, though smiles as she takes his hand “Well, what about a Splicer then? It’s more accurate to what I described anyway.” Weaver just had more positive associations.
Jenny holds up her finger to signal for one moment. "Hearing you describe my powers like that gives me an idea."
Jenny walks up to the spaceship and gives it a hefty punch. A large dent is left in the hull. She concentrates on a moment that just passed… and undoes it. The dent disappears like it never happened.
He watches as she dents the side of the spaceship. Ya know, the bit that was meant to protect it from meteorites and other space debris… how strong was Jenny? Weren’t they selling her model as a personal assistant?
“Nice. Temporal revision, that’s good. Why don’t we head inside though so we can try and work on your control?”
“What do you have in mind?” Jenny asks, looking around for the shortest way in.
Seb starts leading the way, seeming to walk downwards to pass under the ship if Jenny didn’t immediately follow. When she does she would see the hatch that he is walking towards.
“Well, the revision is excellent, it seems like that is pretty straightforward for you. I think we should work on your control now. That’s going to be the next step in honing your powers I’d say.”
He reaches the hatch, and with a gentle jump he soars gently into the air, landing on the outside of the hull with a soft thud and then just… sticking there as he begins to work on the mechanisms of the hatch.
“I still don’t get what you mean but I’m very interested in gaining more control but also how are you doing that?” Jenny lets out the question in whispered awe. “Is it special void powers?”
“Huh?” he looks up from what he was doing and grins to see her still--from his new perspective--standing on the ceiling. “Oh, right. No it’s not my powers it’s just this place. Gravity is pretty much optional here.” he pauses, considering how best to explain.
“So in the same way that the void doesn’t have any time of its own, it doesn’t have any gravity either. We’ve been walking around just fine, but we haven’t actually been walking on anything; it’s like… we bought our own concept of gravity with us from Halcyon. This ship though, is meant to go through space, where there is no gravity, so if you think about it like jumping from one ship to another with magboots on, you should be able to get up here.”
Jenny stands there bemused.
“Magboots help you stick to spaceships.” he adds after a moment.
Jenny nods absentmindedly as she does a big step forward towards the ship... and begins to float and rotate to orient herself with Seb. She, however, doesn’t stick to the hull like Seb does. “I saw this on a tv show once. People floating in space. I thought it looked fun!”
She does a little mid-air somersault to exhibit her newfound mobility.
“Zero-G is pretty great yeah” he agrees, finally managing to get the hatch to crack open. WIth that done he jumps up to join her, swimming lazy circles around her in the air and doing aileron rolls. “Especially when you don’t have to worry about being lost in the void of space. That’s a huge plus.”
Jenny laughs as he circles around her, idly following through the hatch and into the ship proper. It's dark, what you'd expect from a broken spaceship. Save for the intense white of the void outside.
Seb joins her inside, settling to what seemed to be the deck or floor of the airlock. He pulls out his phone, switching on the flashlight before pulling the hatch closed behind him, the airlock making some confused beeping before the inner door opens.
“Ship is basically in power-saving mode. Just life support and emergency lighting systems active. The reactor was probably in the rear half of the ship, but it must have batteries distributed throughout for emergencies.”
The flashlight function in Jenny's eyes light up as well, getting a better view of her surroundings. Strewn about the ship are various tools and parts and objects that Jenny didn't recognize. It reminded her of Seb's pile with how eclectic the things were.
She reaches out with her powers and looks around again. She could feel all the loose threads of time connected to every single object, though it was hard to focus on any individual one.
“Galley’s this way,” Seb says, setting off through the door from this equipment room into a narrow corridor, down a relatively straight passage and after a couple mistakes into a room full of small tables with bench seating next to each other.
“This is definitely the same ship but it seems a little different. I think maybe you changed the crew?” He’s looking at a notice board-like area but turns back to Jenny with a smile. “It really is remarkable what you can do. If Bishop had any clue what they’d lost…” he trails off with a chuckle.
"...They'd take me back by any means necessary," Jenny adds seriously.
“Mmm, yeah sorry, didn’t mean to dredge that up.” he admits, lips tightening into a grimace.
"I know you say the things here are lost to time now, from places long gone… but if they're lost they can always be found, right? Is it really alright to be making such big changes?"
“Well… the only way they could be found is by coming here and… you probably haven’t seen enough to notice yet, but there aren’t any bodies here.” he lets that sink in for a moment.
“I’ve been through a good portion of this ship looking for tech I could use to try and escape, and anything else of use and there are no signs of the crew. All the emergency escape vehicles are still intact too, so either this ship was abandoned with all it’s equipment and personal effects untouched, or the bodies went somewhere else.”
“I mean there’s a reason I started using the name Anomaly. I don’t think people are meant to end up here. But with all the weirdness Doc and Quantum Knight put me through I somehow did end up here.
“Er, which is to say I don’t think any of this stuff will be found… Besides. Have you ever heard of the Many Worlds interpretation of time and dimensional travel?”
"That any change to time will create an alternate world, not affecting our own?"
“Pretty much… though it’s not even just changes to time, it’s any change. Someone decides to turn left at an intersection instead of right. The timeline, or world, where they turn left they get to where they wanted and it’s like any other day. The world where they turn right however they end up in an accident, or they’re late due to a traffic jam and miss an appointment, which makes their life a little different.
“These are the threads you see, these individual timelines, and if you could… zoom out you’d see them all radiating out from the past, spreading cleanly out into the future. At least that’s how they would form naturally. Halcyon though, is… a knot. There’s too many time-travellers, people with powers that affect time, and scientists like Terrick messing with it all and turning it into a giant mess.” he sighs, shaking his head and then frowning.
“Sorry, that’s going off on a tangent; Halcyon definitely is a big ol’ snarl of interconnecting timelines… and supposed the Zodiac Tree is mixed up in it somehow? To bring this back to the point I was trying to make well; your abilities, I think they allow you to untangle the snarl a little. You come in with a pair of scissors, snip the timeline that shouldn’t be there, and restore the one that should.
“Or a different one of course, there’s nothing inherently good about your ability… but there’s also nothing inherently bad about it either. It’s just how you use it. The changes you make are permanent, so you can use that to fix things; untangle the snarl, makes things a little more sane, better… though you’re right to be cautious. This ship, the things in this void, they’ve had their connection to the rest of the multiverse cut by some kind of accident, or maybe intentionally.
“But out there, well… I don’t have all the answers, but from what you’ve described you’re likely just swapping a thread from our timeline for one from a different timeline, one where things went the way you want them to. But that timeline still exists, and that means you either severed it, or more likely gave it our original timeline, which means you made that timeline a little worse. This is why when me and Doc were travelling we stayed well away from our own timeline; we tried to make changes for the better but you never know what ramifications your actions will have.
“I know I’m saying a lot here, and I think it’s important for you to know this stuff, but it can be hard to wrap your head around. I’ve been doing this for years and am still surprised by some of the weird stuff that happens. I can’t tell you how to use your powers, but I think it is important that you do use them. When people try to suppress their abilities well… they have a way of coming out at the worst times.
“You need to decide for yourself how best to use them, but I’d say the little revision you did earlier with the ship’s hull should be pretty safe; you’re just snipping out a brief moment, it shouldn’t cause too many ripples. I also think you can use it to change your environment pretty safely… just keep the changes small and you should be good.”
Jenny floats bemused - mostly by the amount of words Seb was saying in one go. She stares wide-eyed, taking in all that he says. She’d never considered how the complex time of Halcyon was not the norm. It would explain why she never knew how to describe her feelings about time.
Feelings that were on par with the feelings about herself.
“Start small....” Jenny looks over at a fork on one of the tables, askew and to the left of a plate. She stares and stares… The different places that fork could be set coming into her mind (whether from her powers or her imagination, she wasn’t sure). She focuses on placing it on the right… and there it was, on the right.
Seb nods, and quizzically follows her gaze to the plate as he realizes she is staring there. A smile spreads as she manages to relocate the fork. “Yeah, there you go. It may not seem like much, but even just moving things around can affect the flow of a battle or other encounter with a villain. Move small stuff into their way and it can cause them to stumble or trip, and that gives you an opportunity to close in and pin them down.”
Jenny smiles back. “I’ve done small changes like this, you know. I just get overwhelmed very easily if things don’t go well.” She frowns. “I still have trouble keeping my cool in a fight.”
“That is very fair. It is easy to get overwhelmed.” he admits, smiling again. “Have you tried meditation? I’m no expert but it can definitely be helpful. Having someone you feel comfortable talking with helps a lot too, and I’m always happy to listen.”
“I don’t understand meditation. It reminds me too much of sleeping, which I also don’t understand.” She bobs her head from side to side in thought before adding “Like, I understand it but I don’t know if I need sleep so I don’t get it.
“And talking about what bothers me? That’s something I’ll have to think about… I don’t really like talking about myself like that.”
“Sleeping is rather strange, I don’t think anyone entirely understands the process, but it is necessary for humans to process the day's events and I remember hearing it plays a part in memory production as well. Have you tried staying up for a prolonged period?” he asks, seeming to look past Jenny as this new idea blooms in his mind.
“Uh, yeah meditation is good though. It’s easy enough to just keep yourself busy, and… it’s kind of similar to talking about yourself too. It’s all about self reflection. It isn’t always pleasant, but it is important if you want to have control of your own life and emotions. The more you look back at what you’ve done and more importantly why you’ve done those things, the better you can understand yourself, and recognize the patterns of thinking and behaviour that lead to different outcomes. Once you recognize those patterns then you can try to change the ones you don’t like, and strengthen the ones you do.”
“That sounds like a lot,” Jenny says bluntly. “I don’t know if I’d want to do that right now… But I understand it’s important for me to get a clear head...” Jenny groans, weighing her want to become skilled and her want to never confront her feelings.
“I would want to try it in a place where I feel more comfortable.” She gestures outside a window. “I can constantly feel the lack of time here and it kinda freaks me out.”
“It is a lot yeah,” he admits with a chuckle, nodding as she gestures at the void. “It’s also really quiet here. There’s nothing providing background noise, so I get what you mean. Let's start heading back, I think we’ve made good progress here, and it’s a decent walk.” He leads the way back towards the airlock. “Just remember, you don’t have to be awesome at it on your first try, as long as you keep trying; that’s what’s important.”
Jenny nods. As they float along she musters the courage to say "Thank you. I think I've been losing the confidence I had when I first joined.. and really needed some reassurance."
“Everyone needs some reassurance now and then.”
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