The Traveler's Journals

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

Personal timeline: 25th Year, 280th Day
I must do this thing properly, if at all.
Poor Herbert seems to have been taken in by my "accident;" he believes me dead or lost forever in some distant time. It is for the best, I keep telling myself; the Machine must remain my secret alone if I am to have even the remotest chance of success.
I do not know, even, if it can be done. Can the future be changed? Can the future that I have been to, have experienced myself, be changed, and what then will become of me?
And yet I must try. For the sake of generations yet to come, I must try.
All the tools and knowledge of the future are potentially available to me. I shall become a Scavenger, then, improving my situation and my Machine to the point where I may become an effective force of change.
If it is within my power, the future of Morlocks and Eloi will not come to pass.
If...

---

This is the story of the first Time Traveler.
The story of what he sought to accomplish, and how he went about it; of where and when he traveled, and above all, of who he became along the way.
This is the story of the First, who would in due course be known as the Last.

THE TRAVELER'S JOURNALS
Part 1: The Scavenger of Time

[Bob Schroeck]

Oooh. This looks very promising.

-- Bob
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I intend to be a freak for the rest of my life, and I shall baffle you with cabbages and rhinoceroses in the kitchen and incessant quotations from Now We Are Six through the mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant poisoned electric head. So theeeeeere....

[bmull]

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This is the story of the First, who would in due course be known as the Last.

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I want! ^_^

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

Personal timeline: 25th year, 281st day
Funding, shelter, and range. These first of all.
Some carefully planned investments in the recent past should do for the first. Must be careful not to use any money that has not yet been minted.
The second... a warehouse or two, perhaps. I must find a base of operations that remains unchanged and unattended for as long as possible.
The third is vital. My Machine can travel through time yet has no provision for moving through the lesser three dimensions. I cannot remain confined to London. It might be possible to unfix the Machine's field from the mass of Earth's gravity, but at this stage I lack any means to direct its course... such an attempt would no doubt leave me asphyxiating in the void of space.
Conventional means will suffice for now. I shall purchase one of Daimler's motorcars and transfer the vital components of the Machine into its chassis. This will allow three-dimensional transit and disguise my creation in one stroke.

[Bob Schroeck]

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I shall purchase one of Daimler's motorcars and transfer the vital components of the Machine into its chassis. This will allow three-dimensional transit and disguise my creation in one stroke.

---

Unfortunately, unexpected side effects will require that he be travelling at 88 MPH before he can activate the time-traveling mechanism...

-- Bob
---------
I intend to be a freak for the rest of my life, and I shall baffle you with cabbages and rhinoceroses in the kitchen and incessant quotations from Now We Are Six through the mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant poisoned electric head. So theeeeeere....

[bmull]

---

Unfortunately, unexpected side effects will require that he be travelling at 88 MPH before he can activate the time-traveling mechanism...

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Cute!
What happens if he tries to move the car while in an active time field?

[Necratoid]

Batman had that happen to him once in one of the cartoons. Some clock theme guy put him in a slow time field in the middle of the highway... it took him 3 days to the outside to counter it in 5 minutes. Basically, Force still equals Mass times Acceleration... and it equals that for each time interval (lets say a hundredth of a second). so once the time fields synchonize F=(MA)^T instantaniously for that moment of sync... Which probably means which means either giant explosive release of energy... or in the case of how it was handled in one of Undocumented Features stories, where a static timefield was put on a door and constant force was applied to it until right before the field shut off, the door was hit with the culmulative force used up to that point on it. Meaning the door caved in badly.
Edit: This is why I think that what the Flux Capaciter does that makes the Time Traveling object slightly out of phase with the dimension your time traveling in. Thus the reason that Time Travel experiments tend to lead to explosions is that the time traveling object is hitting air molecules and the like and the energy involved in Time Travel is exceeded by the build up of F=(MA)^T feedback... meaning BOOM!!!.
I heard that photons have been shown making short trips back in time... this is probablly possible (speculatory science in progress) only because they are so small that they not only hit less random stuff... but being smaller than an electron any actual explosion is very small and involving ultra small amounts of matter so ultra small we can't even see the particals exploding in the first place... the explosion itself may actually be what stops them from going back in time father than a few seconds/fragments of a second.