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Drikonn
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Challenge of the Week LXXII
You (or your character) happen upon a strange pocket watch. You pick it up, dust it off, and tap it a couple times. It's ticking normally. You pull the crown and everything around you freezes. You press it back into place and normalcy returns. Amazed, you wind it forward, then backward, and impossibly, the world speeds up, then rewinds. Time is now yours to control.
Drikonn

Ticker

The problem with playing with time is that it stops affecting you, at least in the traditional sense. Every time I rewound time to fix a little mistake I kept going. Stop myself from spilling coffee on my shirt, I get a few second older. Take surface streets instead of the freeway to avoid the accident that made me an hour late for work, age an hour. Going forward was worse. I aged at the same rate I was moving forward, and going back didn’t undo the change. Of course I didn’t find out about this until I tried to see the distant future.

My hair had already gone gray, my sea-blue eyes getting cloudy. No one would ever suspect I was really only twenty-six. Or was it twenty-seven...my memory isn’t what it used to be. At any rate I definitely didn’t look my age. The biggest revelation of all was finding out that I had a bad heart. I managed to talk my way into an emergency room after my heart attack. It was interesting, trying to explain my lack of identification. I couldn’t exactly show them my driver’s license.

The prognosis said that the damage was too severe. I think I heard the phrase “borrowed time”. I remember thinking that it wasn’t borrowed. I had taken a loan and it was time to repay it. So I decided to go back, stop myself from finding the watch. It was the only option I could see.

I went back to the street where I had found it, sat down on the curb, and started winding it backward. The cold, sinking nausea came flooding back into my body. I was familiar with the feeling by now, not that it got any easier to deal with. I could see cars driving in reverse, houses being unpainted, small children getting smaller. It had only been a year since I found it, at least according to the newspapers that were being flung from a truck each morning. Relatively speaking it felt like minutes.

I could feel the strain getting worse. The pain my chest was almost unbearable, but I had to go back. If I could just go back I could stop myself from finding the damn thing, from using it, maybe I could change things. It took the last of my willpower to click the crown back to the neutral position, the creeping discomfort gradually falling away. I looked around, the morning sun feeling unbearably hot on my face.

That’s when I felt a searing jolt of pain up my arm. The world turned sideways and I felt pavement pressing into my cheek, a warm sensation spreading over my face. I could hear the watch bouncing across the street, rolling into the gutter. As my failing vision faded to darkness I could hear voices. Something about an old man. Get help. Are you okay?

I tried to lift a hand, to call out to the man across the street. All I could see was a confused look in his sea-blue eyes, his hand wrapped around something he had found in the gutter. Maybe he could pull it off. After all, they say the third time is the charm.

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