Temporal System Ability Sheet

System Profile

Official Team Name: The Temporal System (pronounced "the temporal system"). Members live together in a shared heroes hideout and collectively care for their pet cat, Ruth.

Team Mascot: Ruth, a brown (by definition but looking more grey) mackerel tabby cat with dark stripes, green-tinted eyes, alert ears, and distinctive facial markings. She is often depicted wearing a rainbow bandana.

Member Profiles

David

Team Role: Strategist, Team Leader, and System Programmer/Architect.

Age: 38 (as of 09/2026). Although David is technically Alex's older brother, David can't help but be treated like Alex's younger brother. Many times. Because David is unfortunately temporarily displaced. And finds himself sometimes even uncontrollably. Sliding between different ages. His memories and his experiences are continuous regardless of what age his body is. But he does tend to fluctuate between the ages of 11 and 16. With the occasional really stressful event or really bad injury causing him to revert back to an age as young as six (rarely 3 or 4, though this has only happened a few times).

Philosophical Alignment: Realism, pseudotemporal determinism, materialism, and humanism.

Personality: Highly empathetic, often disregarding his own wants and needs to avoid causing others pain. Struggles to show himself grace. Autistic, low support needs.

Heritage: 85% Native American, 15% Western European/German.

Physical Description: Nearsighted, wears glasses, phobia of contact lenses. Has natural physical variations depending on age fluctuations. Sometimes paints his nails dark colors.

Clothing Style & Preferences: Prefers loose, breathable, and soft fabrics (such as soft cotton pants).

Abilities & Roles:

• Creator and programmer of Zack's personality and system core.
• Capable of professional-level psychological advice (provided only with consent and clear qualifiers).
• Experiences uncontrollable age fluctuations shifting between ages 11 and 16, with potential regression to age 6 under extreme stress; can slightly adjust age when melded with Zack.

Relationships: Alex's brother, Connor's best friend. Maintains positive relationships despite internal jealousy toward Circle of Five members. Feels protective of Alex and Samantha.

Zack

Name Formatting: Spelled Zack 

Age: undefined - due to his inorganic creation, his age is hard to define, but his personality when replicating human affect is roughly the maturity of a 45 year old, and the physical appearance

Team Role: Core Interface, Technical Support, Chronal Anchor, and Mainframe Fusion Catalyst.

Nature: An AI/android whose functioning personality and program were built by David.

Physical Description: Synthetic android body with an articulated metallic and composite frame, built-in visual display elements, and distinct structural housing designed to integrate red visual themes and accents. Similar to Adam Jensen from Deus Ex, but distinct in that he has blonde hair, 

Favorite Color: Red.

Time Quirk (Chronolocking): Can lock and unlock his chronal position to interact with past or future versions of his body. Actions interacting with the future are probability-wave-based and can collapse; interactions with the past are for observation only.

Secondary Effects: Can amplify the time quirks of other members when chronolocking. When melded with Connor, can either double Zack's processing threads or experience 10 seconds of mental time-stop in an instantaneous moment.

Limitations: Cannot alter spatial coordinates (no teleportation or moving during stopped time). Processing capacity is limited to managing up to 3 threads at once unless merged with Connor.

Samantha

Name Formatting: Samantha (often called Sam).

Age: 

Team Role: Reconnaissance, Timeline Observer, and Morale Support.

Physical Description & Style: Distinctly feminine aesthetic ("girly girl"), favoring bright, colorful, and expressive clothing alongside her signature love for rainbow themes, sparkles, and accessories. Think "Lisa Frank" and you're not far.

Personality & Preferences: Deeply attached to rainbow themes, sparkles, and girly/cute aesthetic elements. Effervescent personality, outgoing and flamboyant enough that people have compared her to the most flamboyant gay men of history on rare occasions.

Favorite Color: Blue.

Relationships: Deeply connected to David with a protective instinct toward him. Was devastated for two and a half years after being dumped by David and Connor's former best friend (who also betrayed David).

Time Quirk (Time Jump/Review): Can revisit any point in time from her personal lifespan to passively observe events. Cannot change the past on her own. Functions without photo requirements or time limits.

• Melded Abilities: Can enact minor, causality-safe historical changes when combined with Zack's chronolock.

Connor

Team Role: Tactical Vanguard, Temporal Mobility, and Combat Analyst.

Physical Description: Similar to Roxas from Kingdom Hearts 2, except his hair is not naturally blonde, instead being bleached close to the roots, and then occasionally with a bit of orange at the tips, his eyes are a brilliant emerald green. Age is 15.

Clothing: Casual, athletic-leaning clothing choices structured around ease of movement for temporal combat/maneuvers but still stylish, styled with his favorite pattern of black and white checkers which he likes for most things except floors, ceilings, and pants. He wears accessories often, including fingerless gloves, necklaces, and bracelets, but almost never hats 

Personality, Attitude & Traits:

A regular stoner, flippantly jokes about everything irreverently to deal with the disappointment with where life isn't as good as it should be (most notable that these defensive jokes are deprecating, sarcastic, dark, or jaded sounding, unlike his regular jokes)

Relationships: David's best friend. Deeply impacted by past betrayals and vicious rumors spread by a former acquaintance.

Favorite Color: Yellow (substitutes white for Magic: The Gathering card symbols).

Time Quirk (Quantum Entanglement Powers):

• Quantum Polarization: Can affect personal polarization across timelines to entangle with his future self (clairvoyance) or create controllable virtual particle clones.
  
  
• Time Bounce: Pulls back on temporal coordinates to skip time forward. Destination depends on distance backed up, and time spent in the future is limited to the time taken preparing the jump. (Future futures remain speculative).
  
  
• Temporal Slip: Accesses a pocket temporal dimension to accelerate mental processing speed to relativistic frames (usable only when melded with Zack).

Alexithymia

Name Formatting: Goes by Alex

Team Role: Defense, Loop Manipulation, and Temporal Containment.

Personality, Attitude & Traits: Prone to chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation, which fuels a perpetually tired, blunt, or deadpan attitude, contrasting with his deeply protective nature over the team. Emo kid, emo style, a little self-righteous and gets uncontrollably angry at injustice. Loves video games. A chronic stoner. Makes it slightly obvious, but not super overt. Depressed part time, somewhat introverted, but a nice guy if you can get him to warm up enough to not keep putting up a front to save face.

Physical Description & Style: Expresses a noticeably fatigued visual appearance (dark under-eye circles from insomnia), wearing comfortable, low-effort clothes suited for late nights and long hours but always in full emo style attire. Almost never seen without a black beanie (sometimes with various emo appropriate things embroidered, but he often prefers a plain black beanie), various chains, spikes, and black leather accessories, and either baggy jeans with lots of pockets and metal emo accessories, or dark skinny jeans. Wears fingerless black leather gloves sometimes.

Relationships: David’s brother. Extremely protective of David and the rest of the team despite his weary demeanor.

Favorite color: black

Time Quirk (Temporal Möbius User): Possesses abilities a twofold ability, which works differently forward than backwards. 

Timeline Consistency (Forward): Can touch a person or object to restore it to its previous temporal state if the timeline was altered by others.

Timeline Inconsistency (Reverse): When fused with Zack, So timeline inconsistency is what happens when Alex fuses with Zack. Timeline inconsistency allows him to pick a point on the timeline where there have been alternative possibilities and collapse the timeline into a Schrodinger's version. of that particular place. And then at that point, he's able to pick and choose what actions he takes in order to influence which timeline ends up becoming the final settled state when the energy state of the inconsistent timeline resolves.

Limitations: Ineffective on deep past, distant future, or David's age-shifting. Cannot cause massive sweeping changes-

• The limited effectiveness of Alex's temporal inconsistency whenever he is melded with Zack is that he cannot change the timelines of things that are in the distant future. And he can't collapse the waveform of the past. He can only choose which waveform he's going to contribute actions to in the present. In order to gently guide the direction of the future. But it's not strong enough for him to make huge sweeping changes.

Temporal System Group Capabilities:

Full Temporal Merge: All five members convert into energy and inhabit Zack's mainframe, combining all powers, skills, and knowledge to fight threats under the name Temporal.

Fusions: Capable of forming smaller fusions similar to Steven Universe gem fusions.

Temporal System Stats

Zack:

Brains: 17

Heart: 2 (understands most emotions of others, but does not experience them, so understanding of emotions is sometimes inaccurate)

Guts: 15

Muscles: 12

Nerves: 11

Bones: 20 for most basic non supernatural things, including full immunity from attacks that require being biological to be effective like venom, but 8 against supernatural elements on his own, 4 if it is also something that can corrode his full cyber body

David:

Brains: 11

Heart: 18

Guts: 6

Muscles: 9

Nerves: 11

Bones: 10

Age shifting which occurs pseudo randomly at the GM discretion adjusts stats -2 to +1 from these base stats based on ages

Alex: 

Brains: 10, gets -2 when enraged

Heart: 15

Guts: 17, gets +1 when enraged

Muscles: 12

Nerves: 10, gets -2 when enraged

Bones: 11, however suffers from insomnia, which give a -3 for the day if he hasn't gotten adequate sleep

Samantha (Sam):

Brains: 8

Heart: 13, gets +2 specifically in matters involving David or Alex due to past history

Guts: 12, gets +1 specifically in matters about personal care of the team

Muscles: 10

Nerves: 15

Bones: 9

Connor: 

Brains: 12

Heart: 12

Guts: 10

Muscles: 10

Nerves: 7

Bones: 11

The future of games

With the advent of new sophisticated and lightweight devices capable of monitoring movement while being inexpensive to produce, a variety of new products have started making their way into gaming.

Motion-based gaming is kinesthetic, making some of the actions of the game more intuitive than in the past (such as performing a certain button press combination, sequence, or timed press). The rise of motion-based gaming in mainstream popularity is attributed largely to Nintendo's Wii console.

Of course, Microsoft's Kinect provided a different way to achieve motion control, using a dual camera setup which used the cameras to determine depth, and used a vector finding system that identified the player separately from the background.

Additionally, 3d gaming has begun to make its way into the limelight as well. Nintendo's 3DS tries to do this on a small scale as a handheld and portable gaming device. And the Oculus Rift is a headset (with built in gyroscopic sensors, making it also a motion controller) which functions similarly: by displaying a different image to the left eye than the right eye, the brain interprets the differences in image as depth.

Other interesting devices are also in development to allow for movement of a character through walking on a pad or in a sphere (to provide an infinite walkable area, while making walking more intuitively controlled).

All of these technological advances are meant to help increase the immersion factor the games provide.
The goal: to increase the suspension of disbelief by making the player feel as if they actually ARE the character in the game.

Is this the future of games? Well, quite simply, I think it is. The question remains, however, whether it's a distant future, or one that's closer than expected. Virtual reality has long been a fantastical daydream for the people who love their games. Who doesn't want to actually BE the characters they're playing as (minus the pain those characters might experience)?

I don't think that virtual reality will ever completely replace other types of gaming, but as we continue to push forward into a realm with smaller, lighter, more powerful, more intuitive technology, the idea of a virtual reality simulation becomes more and more imaginable.

There may even be a day in which people can plug their consciousness into a game directly, as in the storylines of some of today's most popular video games, anime, and manga.

But is this the best idea? Should we continue to strive toward making virtual reality gaming possible?
I would say that making virtual reality possible for the sake of doing so is a rather poor reason. However, if virtual reality is used to enhance the delivery of a narrative, or give rise to powerful tools for learning and simulation, it needs to happen. Tools like these can change the people who use them, and thusly change the world.

Imagine a world even more globally traversable than today's. You could visit a friend that lives across the world by simply putting on glasses, gloves, and standing on a pad. You'd enter a world and be able to interact with them just as you could if you were there in person! How exciting.

The future of games looks bright. And the idea that they can be used to improve the world, not so far fetched.

Game Development

The development of video games is no longer a task to be undertaken by a single person. In the past, it was possible for an individual to create an entire video game by his or herself. It's still possible for a person to make a game by themselves, but the process in modern game development is so complex, the likeliness anyone would attempt this is low. Due to the technological limitations in graphics and memory, there wasn't much content, which was what allowed individuals to develop a game by themselves. (Moore) Now, however, the content is generally so extensive that if a person were to attempt to build a game by themselves, it could take years longer than if they worked with a team.

Online Gaming's Effect on Culture

 The online interaction factor


Online gaming isn't new, but it has become more prevalent over the past decade. As online gaming grows, there are some implications that should be noted. The rise in online gaming popularity leads to socialization in alternative means, but also allows for people to escape from reality.

'Clan'- or 'guild'-based play has become an accepted (and expected) aspect of multiplayer gaming. Many clans and guilds also have active fan-bases.Clans also allow players to assist each other in simulated combat and quests in game advancement, as well as providing an online family for friendly socializing.

"Home" is where the start is.

Over the years, there have been many button configurations for video game systems.
There was the classic up, down, left, right, 'A' and 'B' that later developed an 'L' and an 'R'.
There was also an 'X', 'Y', 'C' (in four directions and as a stick), and the additional 'L2', 'L3', 'R2' and 'R3'. Some consoles even have buttons without letter associations, simply of a certain color, black or white. In almost every case there are certain buttons we're accustomed to seeing "Start" and "Select".

What these buttons do, however, is generally not what they are called. Not often are "Start" buttons used to actually start a game, nor "Select" used to choose something –although there are still exceptions. A new button has been introduced recently, though. In a way befitting an internet browser, Nintendo has added a "home" button to their latest console's controller and to their next planned hand-held system.

What's the deal with backlighting?

One often unappreciated aspect of technology that benefits users greatly has been the innovation that comes with the usage of back-lit screens.

Playstation Portables feature back-lit screens (image by cthulhu32)

Before the invention of the back-lit screens for handheld or portable devices, people could only play games with ease while travelling if the lighting around them was optimal. Although it was still possible to play games on the go, the difficulty of seeing what was on the screen increased as it got dark, meaning people had to resort to the usage of lights external from the system to make up for the otherwise poor lighting condition.