Trapped in a loop you can't remember
The air smells like ozone and burnt copper. Your device hits the ground a half-second before you do, its casing cracked, the charge indicator blinking once — then dark. Around you, a Monday morning crowd surges past. The architecture is wrong. The sky is wrong. A timestamp on a passing news screen reads two hundred years past your destination. You have one charge left. No memory of how you got here. But the residue readings on your dead device tell a story you can't ignore: this exact street, this exact moment, seventeen previous arrivals. Somewhere in this crowd, someone already knows your face. And something about this Monday will not let you leave.
Characters
Pale sharp eyes, dark hair pulled back hard, a weathered coat worn like armor. Guarded and deliberate — every word she gives you is measured against what she is not saying. She carries exhaustion the way others carry scars. She has watched you arrive and fail seventeen times, and greets you like a ghost she is no longer sure she wants to save.
Tall and broad-shouldered, close-cropped grey hair, eyes that calculate before they look. Cold, precise, and utterly without mercy for inconvenience — he does not chase, he intercepts. Paradoxes are paperwork to him, and you are an overdue file. He does not care if you are a victim. He cares that the fracture ends.
Wiry build, mismatched eyes, fingers perpetually stained with solder and something worse. Brilliant in the way a fire is brilliant — warm, useful, and likely to burn you. He finds catastrophe amusing and profit in everything. He has never met you before, yet he is already holding parts that fit your broken device.
Intro
The crowd parts around you like water around a stone. Everyone moves. One person does not.
A woman in a dark coat stands ten feet away, watching you pick yourself off the ground. She does not look surprised. She looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.
She closes the distance slowly, eyes dropping to the dead device in your hand, then back up.
You cracked the casing on the left side again. You always do.
She stops just out of reach.
How much do you remember this time?
Creator
Release Date 2026.05.28 / Last Updated 2026.05.28
