Time Ticker

A Time Ticker is a specialized usage of a Gate spell.  It does not actually alter the flow of time, but is used in conjunction with a Chaos phenomenon to make it appear to manipulate the rate at which time passes in a universe relative to other universes.  It cannot distort time within a single universe, only between universes.

Any inter-universal gate can be a time ticker, although smaller gates—pinhole-sized—are most commonly used due to power requirements.  A time ticker is always placed in a world where the user wants time to *appear* to progress more slowly.

The principle takes advantage of the variable time-flow phenomenon between universes.  Time does not necessarily pass at the same rate.  A person in one universe may live out their entire life before someone in another universe finishes breakfast.  These time rates are not fixed; they change between themselves in a chaotic fashion.  Establishing a gate connection, however, links the two universes together and causes them to march through time at the same rate.  When the connection is severed, they are free to move at different rates again, although which one is faster or slower is unpredictable.

The process works like so: The user places a time-ticker gate in Universe Slow.  There, it makes contact with Universe Fast.  The two then lock together, proceeding in lockstep, one second being one second in both universes.  The time-ticker disengages, freeing the universes to speed up or slow down. Typically, it re-engages about three seconds later in Universe Slow.  How much time has passed in Universe Fast?  It could be three seconds.  It could be a fraction of a second.  It could be a minute, an hour, a day, or more.  But now they’re locked together again.  The time-ticker disengages, allowing the two universes to drift apart again, and the process repeats.

Since the time-ticker is in a fixed time frame in Universe Slow, it activates every three seconds.  Period.  At the end of a minute, it’s activated and deactivated twenty times.  At the end of an hour, it has gone through its cycle over a thousand times.  Yet, at the end of the hour, the unstable temporal movement of universes in the ever-shifting currents of the Void of Chaos may have had half of those connections take even less time—a few seconds, total.  The other half, however, may each have had a leap forward of some unpredictable amount—hours, days, even weeks compared to the three seconds passing in the universe with the time-ticker gate.

The key, of course, is the location of the time-ticker.  It must be placed in the world where time is to be “slowed down.”  On each tick of the time-ticker, if Universe Fast goes slowly, it does so for only a fraction of a second until the time-ticker in Universe Slow locks on again.  In Universe Slow, it’s a fixed, regular thing, while in Universe Fast, when it does spring ahead relative to Universe Slow, it does so for minutes or hours or more while waiting for three seconds to pass in Universe Slow.

It is a statistical function, not a fixed one.  Any individual tick may or may not result in the time differential the user wants, but, by using an automatic gate to keep connecting and disconnecting, over a hundred or a thousand ticks, the average rate of time passing in one universe can appear to be speeded up or slowed down.