Xavier’s own T.I.M.E. watch was custom made. He had a love for certain anachronisms. The most notable was the old fashioned pocket watch on a chain that gentlemen used to wear. Most watches were worn on the wrist, but he liked to be different. He had partially de-constructed the T.I.M.E. watch. He scoffed the the acronym. It was just an example of trying to force an acronym to sell a product. The TIME watch had nothing to do with ions, not really. At least not classic ones. Of course, the average person didn’t understand the physics. He knew that tampering with the product voided warranty. But then he really didn’t care. It was his belief that the watches should be far more accurate. The 2 hour limit had to be a flaw in the design - an intentional one. He suspected he knew the reason why. It was, in a way, his fault.
First of all, travelling backwards in time was originally believed to amount to trying to swim up Niagara Falls. It requires too much energy. Even of one managed the feat, correcting any errors became even more problematic. And the more one tampered with time the worse it got. Limiting the time allowed for minor tampering without creating universe true vacuum bubbles. In layman’s terms, history wasn’t set in stone within two hours. After that, altering time was more devastating in physics terms. This wasn’t exactly true. It was only true to the traveller as the future they once came from ceased to exist except as a theory.
In English then, travelling back two hours was easy to do. GPS and TPS (temporal equivalent of a GPS) could be correlated safely so that the user’s relative position on the Earth didn’t change. There were also safety features to avoid mass collision errors to prevent arriving in a solid object as well - unless that object shared your exact quantity. Ooops … English. The TIME watch let the future you replace the original you and alter fate.
There was a rumor that people were considering cheating death by having one’s demise trigger a 2 hour jump. Xavier smiled at that thought. That little option had been child’s play. But that was strictly classified - which he thought was ludicrous as it was an obvious use.
His face - both sides - still smarted from the recent fun he had had with his own watch. It was on the fourth attempt to talk to Mindy that she caught on to the fact he was using time travel to try to find different ways to charm her using a Groundhog Day approach. His 5th attempt wasn’t even intentional but had had the benefit of getting a smile out of her. He had told her she couldn’t blame a guy for trying. When he gave her a hopeful look after that the look he gave her told him not to push his luck. She had stormed off annoyed.
He shook his head at the memory grinning like a fool. He was beginning to suspect that the reason for the lack of accuracy beyond 2 hours was a matter of available memory in the GPS/TDS buffer - or a lack of processing speed. The first probability was easy to resolve. The latter was more a matter of the fact that the duration of the actual jump was so brief that there wasn’t time - ironically - to calculate the positioning accurately.
This watch was way too easy to hack. He could have trained a chimpanzee to do this…
Zzztt!! (Zzztt while working on a piece of technology designed to send someone through time was a bad sound … especially when followed by the POP sound that he never heard as he was travelling through time before space could close the pure vacuum left in his wake - not that anyone would ever realize it.)
**************
Xavier’s bodysuit (ignore the mask, add a Black Matrix styled duster)
He arrived in midair. Xavier had an eidetic memory with a mind that could run calculations freakishly fast. His mind would calculate the time it took for him to hit the Savannah River below with precision - just over 3 seconds. And in that instant he would pinpoint his GPS and TPS positions. 150 feet meant an impact at 66 mph. And at 8 inches her mile around the curvature of the Earth meant he had travelled some 225 miles to get here.
Simply put, this was bad.
Hitting water from such a height would have been fatal to pretty much any human of the 19th century, or 20th … or 21st. But a few things conspired to save Xavier. First, it took a full three seconds. For his sharp mind that was a long time. More importantly he was already in a standing position. The most survivable positions were vertical ones. Third, his suit had some impact safety features with very simple commands. PLF, Dive, and Roll. The suit was designed to stiffen in those conformations to act like a stiff exoskeleton. Technically he could stand and let someone punch him all day and he’d be able to stand there like a dummy - pun intended. It would feel like punching stiff leather. But he’d be unable to move. Still, the Roll conformation had saved him from serious injury ones while tried a hovercycle out. (He had wrecked in less than 3 minutes of trying to look cool.) This situation called for Dive, of course.
Dive kept his body stiff as he slammed into the water. He was more than a little glad he hadn’t belly flopped. As it was, it wasn’t a perfect entry into the water. And he went deeper than he would have liked. But he didn’t slam into the bottom of the river. When he surfaced he could barely move. His whole body felt like he had suffered whiplash. And he would have sworn he had swallowed half the river. He could barely move his arms to try to swim for shore.
Member
Half Pint
Goon
SonnetNSunbeam
AceofSpades
Stryder BC
ICanBeAnyone
