Time travel
I'm getting way ahead of myself in terms of where I'm at in my actual writing, but when I get a thought in my head, I have to explore it thoroughly or else I risk losing that thought completely.
This week I've been thinking about the time travel (vs. time freezing) aspects of Amber's power - like, how it actually functions logistically. I don't think that there are going to be any spoilers here, because like I said, I'm nowhere near ready to write any scenes with Amber using her ability; I'm just sort of thinking out loud, which really helps my mental process, and I may change my mind completely later. So, I'm not going to be describing actual scenes or events, just thinking about logistics. But, read at your own risk.
There are two basic methods of time travel that could apply to Amber:
1. She actually, physically moves through time, like she would if she had a Time Turner or a TARDIS.
2. She only mentally/psychically travels through time, much like Okabe in Steins;Gate.
Option 1 could play out in a couple of ways. If her ability functions like a TARDIS, then she can travel anywhere in time - across her own timeline (so there could be two Ambers at once) and beyond it, either further back than her own birth, or into the future beyond her own death.
Most fanfics utilizing Amber's power that I've come across go for this option. It is the easiest to write logistically (you can have her just show up whenever and wherever you want), and it has the potential for some really interesting scenes and concepts (like, she can talk to Hei again after her own death, when he's had time to come to terms with everything that she told him in Hell's Gate, or Hei can have a conversation with future Amber thinking that she's contemporary Amber, if her apparent age hasn't changed too much, and end up thinking that she's an imposter - I actually had an idea for a scene like this, but I don't think that I'll use it).
On the whole though, I don't like this option, because it makes her too powerful. If she can actually see the actual future, then she can have 100% confidence in the outcome of events, and there's no faith or risk required on her part. It also allows her to go visit any event (even events that have nothing to do with her; she just feels like going and dropping in on someone else's life) and manipulate the outcome or provide key information, which makes her a Deus ex machina/guardian angel, which I hate, because it removes the agency from the characters whose lives she's dropping in on.
One way to limit Amber's power in this option is to have it play out more like JK Rowling did in Harry Potter with the Time Turner - that is, established events can't be changed (compossibility), but the cause of the event that already happened is due to the time travel itself. Then more rules can come into play, like, Amber can't cross her own timeline or let others know that she's a time traveler. But, it also brings up more problems: the grandfather paradox, violation of causality, that sort of thing. And then, events are necessarily constrained - there is only one possible outcome, the outcome that already happened.
Then there's the issue of her price with option 1 - if Amber from S1, looking fifteenish, travels back to, say, a time before Heaven's War in an attempt to gather more information, she's going to show up at that time looking fifteen when she should be looking thirty - so she really can't cross her own timeline or even interact with other people who know her. (Option 2 has this problem too, but I'll look at it later.)
And, I don't think that the hints that the anime gives us about her power (S2 aside) support this option. She has to fight Heaven's War over and over again to get it right, which wouldn't be the case if events are fixed, and it doesn't seem like she knows ahead of time what choice Hei will make at Hell's Gate - I think that she wanted him to choose being human so that he could be happier, but she wasn't sure what he was going to do.
So, that brings us to option 2, the Steins;Gate option. On the whole, I think that this one fits better with what we know from S1 - there are a multitude of possible outcomes for any one event, and by going back in her own timeline Amber can shift the timeline to favor one outcome over another.
This option also makes the most sense scientifically - quantum physics, the multiverse theory, etc., all favor alternate timelines, parallel universes, and infinite possibilities over physically moving into the past or future (I barely even halfway understand it because Math, so I'm not even going to try and explain it - I just know enough to know that this is the most realistic. Unless I'm completely wrong, which is entirely possible).
This option poses really stringent limits on her ability and thus on her actions (the more limited a character is, the better): because she can only time travel within her own life (ie she jumps into her own head at a previous point in time), she can't travel past her own death; she can't take people with her; she can't travel past her own birth; and I'm even going to say that she can't travel to earlier than the appearance of Heaven's Gate - if she did, she would be traveling to before the time when she became a contractor and obtained her ability.
If her ability is directly tied to her star and the Gate (which it is), then traveling back to before those exist would essentially be the same as traveling to before her own birth - which she can't do. And then if she wanted to move forward, she couldn't, because she isn't a contractor at that time and so she wouldn't have the ability to return (in fact, she'd be human, which would open up a whole other can of worms - future/contractor Amber's personality and experiences jumping into past/human Amber's head?? That would be a severe case of split personalities...).
So, I'm pretty sure that I'm going with this option with its limitations, but there are still a lot of details to work out. For example, can Amber travel backward and forward in time, or just backwards?
On the one hand, it would make sense that she can travel bidirectionally, if we're going with multiple universes and time existing as a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff (+1 if you get that reference) rather than a single infinite line or a closed loop. Thus she can see a future, or many futures, but not know for sure which one is the one that is coming unless she actually goes and looks.
I'm not sure if I like that though - because then all she has to do to know whether she made the right choice is hop forward in time and check it out. Instant confirmation. Though of course, there would still be any number of events that could affect that same outcome, then she would have to find the critical branching point that would lead to the outcome that she wants no matter what - so this might actually be ok.
Or, maybe she can travel to the past, then jump back ahead to the point at which she left but no further? But then, if she changes something in the past that sets things onto an alternate timeline, that point wouldn't be the same anymore; it would be on the old timeline so would she be jumping back to the old timeline (which wouldn't work, because then the change would have been pointless). I could say that she's jumping back to the parallel point on the new timeline (which may not even exist anymore, because of the butterfly effect), and just wave my hands and say it works Because Gates. I might just do that; and actually, I have an idea for how I could fudge this.
Otherwise, if I decide that she can't travel back to her original starting point, she'll have to re-live those days or months or years to get back to it (if it still exists - again, butterfly effect). I don't really like this option either - I mean, she could re-live years, because her price allows her to do that. But story-wise, I'll either have to re-write those years, which could be boring especially if she goes a long way back, or do a time skip while trying to make it clear that it's me who's skipping ahead, not Amber. And if she re-lives, say, meeting Hei, after having months and months of interacting with him and building a relationship with him, then there will be this really uneven balance, where she knows exactly where things will go and she can manipulate him on an even deeper level. Which could be good or bad.
Hm...or maybe she could do a bit of both. She's about to be killed and jumps back fifteen minutes to avoid it; then just lives out those fifteen minutes again and doesn't get killed. She realizes that she needs to alter an event that happened a year ago in order to avoid a situation in the present; she jumps back one year, lives in it long enough to alter that event (a few days), then skips back to her present in the hope that that worked; if it didn't, she has to go back and try again?
Ugh, I don't know. It starts getting so complicated. This is the problem with time travel!
As far as her price goes, what I think I'll have happen is that she pays it in two different ways. First, when she just freezes time, she pays a price that's directly proportional to the length of time that she freezes it. For instance, if she freezes time for five minutes, she loses five minutes (or five seconds, or 7 hours - it doesn't have to be exactly equal, just proportional). Longer use = higher payment.
Second, when she actually turns back time/travels through time, she pays an exponential price - the more often she uses this feature of her ability, the higher the price she pays for any use of her power. This is why at the end of S1, her age drops so drastically from the time that Hei sees her at the shrine to the time he sees her in Hell's Gate, when it doesn't seem like she's used her power that much (I suppose that she could have been using it all that time; but I like to think that by this point she's got things pretty well mapped out and is just working with people on the ground, rather than using her power). If she loses so many years every time she uses her ability, then she could hardly ever use it, and especially couldn't redo Heaven's War over and over again.
(Also, this fits in nicely with physics in reality, especially time dilation and the theory of relativity - if we consider that Amber hasn't actually frozen time in the literal sense, but is instead just moving at an accelerated rate relative to the rest of the world (or, they're moving much slower relative to her), then she would age at a much slower rate, thus appearing to grow younger while everyone else remains their same age (when in fact they are aging faster than her) - then with a little hand-waving and applied phlebotinum, we could extrapolate and have her actually start to age backwards. This aside from the fact that, of course, it's poetic/ironic/fitting/whatever that her price for gaining all the time in the world is to lose all the time in her life.)
But, however her price works, it's going to be tricky writing, especially if she travels back years at a time and uses up a lot of her power. A potential problem would be this situation: Amber is 34 when she becomes a contractor. She works for MI-6 for two years, uses her power a lot, and de-ages down to, say, 28. So she's physically 28 (but chronologically 36) during Heaven's War, when she decides that she needs to jump back to the time at which she is age 34 to steal some information from MI-6.
28/36-year-old Amber jumps into 34yo Amber, and the jump costs her (randomly choosing a number) 1 year. So - who pays the price? Does 34yo Amber become 33/34? Or does that year get tacked onto her previous payments, so that she's now 27/34 (which would be a bit of a surprise to her co-workers who saw her just yesterday, looking 34)?
One thing that will help solve this is having her be unable to stay in the past and re-live that time. She can go back, into her physical body that exists at that point, make the change she wants to make, and then has only so long to jump back to the present. This will prevent her from living with too much foreknowledge - and then she makes her payment when she returns to her present. The longer she stays in the past, the higher the price she has to pay when she gets back (like a draining battery).
Right now, that option is making the most sense.
So, to sum up: Amber can only head-leap between past and present. She can't stay in the past for longer than some limit that I'll have to arbitrarily make up, but has to return to the point at which she left, which *waves hands* is now on a new timeline, according to the change that she made in the past. She can only travel within her own contractor-lifetime. The amount of time that she loses is dependent on how often she's turned back the clock and for how long - the more times she does it, the higher the price she pays even for just freezing time. And she pays her price upon returning to the present.
Pros:
- This prevents her from having certain knowledge of the future (though she can certainly pretend that she has certain knowledge), so she has to make many mistakes and keep trying over and over again.
- It keeps her time-travel personal to herself: that is, it's only events that she herself experiences/participates in that she can change, and so while she is more limited, she also has more agency, is not a Deus ex machina, and has an even larger personal investment in the outcome.
- It prevents her from having to re-live long stretches of time (and me from having to re-write it) and thus her actions and responses throughout the story will remain organic and natural (ie not affected by her foreknowledge or any changes in her future personality).
- I think it works best with what we see of her ability in the anime.
Cons:
- It's still freaking complicated.
...is what I'm thinking right now.
I wish I could say that I'm over-thinking this, but I'm really not - because this is vital to Acts 2 and 3 of the story. In the end, I'm going to write it the way that I want to write it, but I don't want the plot to be contrived, so I need to figure out these details in advance. There's always going to be a certain amount of hand-waving and things that don't make sense when you look closely at them in any time travel story, but the harder those things are to see, the more believable the story will be. Internal consistency and logic: that's what I'm looking for.
(And I should note: I'm only undecided on the time travel part of her ability - freezing time is pretty straightforward, and I'll portray it exactly as we see it in the anime.)
This week I've been thinking about the time travel (vs. time freezing) aspects of Amber's power - like, how it actually functions logistically. I don't think that there are going to be any spoilers here, because like I said, I'm nowhere near ready to write any scenes with Amber using her ability; I'm just sort of thinking out loud, which really helps my mental process, and I may change my mind completely later. So, I'm not going to be describing actual scenes or events, just thinking about logistics. But, read at your own risk.
There are two basic methods of time travel that could apply to Amber:
1. She actually, physically moves through time, like she would if she had a Time Turner or a TARDIS.
2. She only mentally/psychically travels through time, much like Okabe in Steins;Gate.
Option 1 could play out in a couple of ways. If her ability functions like a TARDIS, then she can travel anywhere in time - across her own timeline (so there could be two Ambers at once) and beyond it, either further back than her own birth, or into the future beyond her own death.
Most fanfics utilizing Amber's power that I've come across go for this option. It is the easiest to write logistically (you can have her just show up whenever and wherever you want), and it has the potential for some really interesting scenes and concepts (like, she can talk to Hei again after her own death, when he's had time to come to terms with everything that she told him in Hell's Gate, or Hei can have a conversation with future Amber thinking that she's contemporary Amber, if her apparent age hasn't changed too much, and end up thinking that she's an imposter - I actually had an idea for a scene like this, but I don't think that I'll use it).
On the whole though, I don't like this option, because it makes her too powerful. If she can actually see the actual future, then she can have 100% confidence in the outcome of events, and there's no faith or risk required on her part. It also allows her to go visit any event (even events that have nothing to do with her; she just feels like going and dropping in on someone else's life) and manipulate the outcome or provide key information, which makes her a Deus ex machina/guardian angel, which I hate, because it removes the agency from the characters whose lives she's dropping in on.
One way to limit Amber's power in this option is to have it play out more like JK Rowling did in Harry Potter with the Time Turner - that is, established events can't be changed (compossibility), but the cause of the event that already happened is due to the time travel itself. Then more rules can come into play, like, Amber can't cross her own timeline or let others know that she's a time traveler. But, it also brings up more problems: the grandfather paradox, violation of causality, that sort of thing. And then, events are necessarily constrained - there is only one possible outcome, the outcome that already happened.
Then there's the issue of her price with option 1 - if Amber from S1, looking fifteenish, travels back to, say, a time before Heaven's War in an attempt to gather more information, she's going to show up at that time looking fifteen when she should be looking thirty - so she really can't cross her own timeline or even interact with other people who know her. (Option 2 has this problem too, but I'll look at it later.)
And, I don't think that the hints that the anime gives us about her power (S2 aside) support this option. She has to fight Heaven's War over and over again to get it right, which wouldn't be the case if events are fixed, and it doesn't seem like she knows ahead of time what choice Hei will make at Hell's Gate - I think that she wanted him to choose being human so that he could be happier, but she wasn't sure what he was going to do.
So, that brings us to option 2, the Steins;Gate option. On the whole, I think that this one fits better with what we know from S1 - there are a multitude of possible outcomes for any one event, and by going back in her own timeline Amber can shift the timeline to favor one outcome over another.
This option also makes the most sense scientifically - quantum physics, the multiverse theory, etc., all favor alternate timelines, parallel universes, and infinite possibilities over physically moving into the past or future (I barely even halfway understand it because Math, so I'm not even going to try and explain it - I just know enough to know that this is the most realistic. Unless I'm completely wrong, which is entirely possible).
This option poses really stringent limits on her ability and thus on her actions (the more limited a character is, the better): because she can only time travel within her own life (ie she jumps into her own head at a previous point in time), she can't travel past her own death; she can't take people with her; she can't travel past her own birth; and I'm even going to say that she can't travel to earlier than the appearance of Heaven's Gate - if she did, she would be traveling to before the time when she became a contractor and obtained her ability.
If her ability is directly tied to her star and the Gate (which it is), then traveling back to before those exist would essentially be the same as traveling to before her own birth - which she can't do. And then if she wanted to move forward, she couldn't, because she isn't a contractor at that time and so she wouldn't have the ability to return (in fact, she'd be human, which would open up a whole other can of worms - future/contractor Amber's personality and experiences jumping into past/human Amber's head?? That would be a severe case of split personalities...).
So, I'm pretty sure that I'm going with this option with its limitations, but there are still a lot of details to work out. For example, can Amber travel backward and forward in time, or just backwards?
On the one hand, it would make sense that she can travel bidirectionally, if we're going with multiple universes and time existing as a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff (+1 if you get that reference) rather than a single infinite line or a closed loop. Thus she can see a future, or many futures, but not know for sure which one is the one that is coming unless she actually goes and looks.
I'm not sure if I like that though - because then all she has to do to know whether she made the right choice is hop forward in time and check it out. Instant confirmation. Though of course, there would still be any number of events that could affect that same outcome, then she would have to find the critical branching point that would lead to the outcome that she wants no matter what - so this might actually be ok.
Or, maybe she can travel to the past, then jump back ahead to the point at which she left but no further? But then, if she changes something in the past that sets things onto an alternate timeline, that point wouldn't be the same anymore; it would be on the old timeline so would she be jumping back to the old timeline (which wouldn't work, because then the change would have been pointless). I could say that she's jumping back to the parallel point on the new timeline (which may not even exist anymore, because of the butterfly effect), and just wave my hands and say it works Because Gates. I might just do that; and actually, I have an idea for how I could fudge this.
Otherwise, if I decide that she can't travel back to her original starting point, she'll have to re-live those days or months or years to get back to it (if it still exists - again, butterfly effect). I don't really like this option either - I mean, she could re-live years, because her price allows her to do that. But story-wise, I'll either have to re-write those years, which could be boring especially if she goes a long way back, or do a time skip while trying to make it clear that it's me who's skipping ahead, not Amber. And if she re-lives, say, meeting Hei, after having months and months of interacting with him and building a relationship with him, then there will be this really uneven balance, where she knows exactly where things will go and she can manipulate him on an even deeper level. Which could be good or bad.
Hm...or maybe she could do a bit of both. She's about to be killed and jumps back fifteen minutes to avoid it; then just lives out those fifteen minutes again and doesn't get killed. She realizes that she needs to alter an event that happened a year ago in order to avoid a situation in the present; she jumps back one year, lives in it long enough to alter that event (a few days), then skips back to her present in the hope that that worked; if it didn't, she has to go back and try again?
Ugh, I don't know. It starts getting so complicated. This is the problem with time travel!
As far as her price goes, what I think I'll have happen is that she pays it in two different ways. First, when she just freezes time, she pays a price that's directly proportional to the length of time that she freezes it. For instance, if she freezes time for five minutes, she loses five minutes (or five seconds, or 7 hours - it doesn't have to be exactly equal, just proportional). Longer use = higher payment.
Second, when she actually turns back time/travels through time, she pays an exponential price - the more often she uses this feature of her ability, the higher the price she pays for any use of her power. This is why at the end of S1, her age drops so drastically from the time that Hei sees her at the shrine to the time he sees her in Hell's Gate, when it doesn't seem like she's used her power that much (I suppose that she could have been using it all that time; but I like to think that by this point she's got things pretty well mapped out and is just working with people on the ground, rather than using her power). If she loses so many years every time she uses her ability, then she could hardly ever use it, and especially couldn't redo Heaven's War over and over again.
(Also, this fits in nicely with physics in reality, especially time dilation and the theory of relativity - if we consider that Amber hasn't actually frozen time in the literal sense, but is instead just moving at an accelerated rate relative to the rest of the world (or, they're moving much slower relative to her), then she would age at a much slower rate, thus appearing to grow younger while everyone else remains their same age (when in fact they are aging faster than her) - then with a little hand-waving and applied phlebotinum, we could extrapolate and have her actually start to age backwards. This aside from the fact that, of course, it's poetic/ironic/fitting/whatever that her price for gaining all the time in the world is to lose all the time in her life.)
But, however her price works, it's going to be tricky writing, especially if she travels back years at a time and uses up a lot of her power. A potential problem would be this situation: Amber is 34 when she becomes a contractor. She works for MI-6 for two years, uses her power a lot, and de-ages down to, say, 28. So she's physically 28 (but chronologically 36) during Heaven's War, when she decides that she needs to jump back to the time at which she is age 34 to steal some information from MI-6.
28/36-year-old Amber jumps into 34yo Amber, and the jump costs her (randomly choosing a number) 1 year. So - who pays the price? Does 34yo Amber become 33/34? Or does that year get tacked onto her previous payments, so that she's now 27/34 (which would be a bit of a surprise to her co-workers who saw her just yesterday, looking 34)?
One thing that will help solve this is having her be unable to stay in the past and re-live that time. She can go back, into her physical body that exists at that point, make the change she wants to make, and then has only so long to jump back to the present. This will prevent her from living with too much foreknowledge - and then she makes her payment when she returns to her present. The longer she stays in the past, the higher the price she has to pay when she gets back (like a draining battery).
Right now, that option is making the most sense.
So, to sum up: Amber can only head-leap between past and present. She can't stay in the past for longer than some limit that I'll have to arbitrarily make up, but has to return to the point at which she left, which *waves hands* is now on a new timeline, according to the change that she made in the past. She can only travel within her own contractor-lifetime. The amount of time that she loses is dependent on how often she's turned back the clock and for how long - the more times she does it, the higher the price she pays even for just freezing time. And she pays her price upon returning to the present.
Pros:
- This prevents her from having certain knowledge of the future (though she can certainly pretend that she has certain knowledge), so she has to make many mistakes and keep trying over and over again.
- It keeps her time-travel personal to herself: that is, it's only events that she herself experiences/participates in that she can change, and so while she is more limited, she also has more agency, is not a Deus ex machina, and has an even larger personal investment in the outcome.
- It prevents her from having to re-live long stretches of time (and me from having to re-write it) and thus her actions and responses throughout the story will remain organic and natural (ie not affected by her foreknowledge or any changes in her future personality).
- I think it works best with what we see of her ability in the anime.
Cons:
- It's still freaking complicated.
...is what I'm thinking right now.
I wish I could say that I'm over-thinking this, but I'm really not - because this is vital to Acts 2 and 3 of the story. In the end, I'm going to write it the way that I want to write it, but I don't want the plot to be contrived, so I need to figure out these details in advance. There's always going to be a certain amount of hand-waving and things that don't make sense when you look closely at them in any time travel story, but the harder those things are to see, the more believable the story will be. Internal consistency and logic: that's what I'm looking for.
(And I should note: I'm only undecided on the time travel part of her ability - freezing time is pretty straightforward, and I'll portray it exactly as we see it in the anime.)