With Time Frozen Still

On December 10th, at precisely 7:13 pst, every clock froze, and every person froze.

Except for you, apparently. Surrounded by your frozen-in-place family, friends, pets, and neighbors, you are entirely normal. So, you decide to do what any average person does when faced with a potentially apocalyptic event.

You open Twitter. When all hope seems lost, you find a Tweet that matches your predicament, and the replies are already filled with plans to meet in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. You decide to join the chat and decide to come along. After all, what's the worst that can happen?

Lucky was never one to have much of a social life. Xe preferred the quiet side of things, curling into bed, ignoring the world, and not having a panic attack because a waiter made eye contact, and their eyes were filled with so much annoyance that you had to stop yourself from bursting into tears.

Yeah. Staying home was much better.

Xe, however, liked to people-watch. Xe would sit at the desk by the window, the blinds just open enough to look out and sketch the interesting people xe saw. Sometimes it was just a feature: a particular nose shape, a posture. Sometimes Lucky would get lucky, and someone would hold still long enough to sketch out. Xe tried to ignore how that was probably really creepy.

Regardless, that’s why xe noticed almost immediately when everyone froze. Xe was sketching someone who had really interesting hands when the person just froze in place. Lucky blinked. That was… weird.

Xe looked around at everyone else in xer university campus courtyard. Everyone has frozen as if someone had pressed pause. People stopped with their feet in the air in the middle of taking a step. A bird was in mid-flight, its little wings open and stationary.

“Oh, dear.” Xe scrambled for xer phone. What could xe do? What if xer family was also frozen? What if xe was the only person who wasn’t? “Oh dear, oh dear, oh my.”

In a last-ditch attempt, xe opened Twitter. If someone had suddenly found themself in a frozen world, they’d post about it, right? Lucky took a deep breath. There were no new posts, so xe decided to make xer own. Xe quickly typed up a post and sent it, taking xer account off of private.

“Oh, please. Someone respond.”

Marvin’s lab partner had just opened the buret in order to add the NaOH for the acid-base titration, and Marvin had been watching to make sure he didn’t mess it up. He’d thought that in college, his classmates would generally be more competent, but apparently not— he heard a test tube breaking every other week. Oh well. Marvin would make sure his lab group didn’t fail the class, at least.

But right as the NaOH solution started to flow, everything. just. stopped. Marvin squinted at the solution, seemingly frozen like a waterfall in winter. He looked up at his lab partner. “Hello? Jared?” He waved a hand in front of the guy’s face, but Jared just kept staring unblinkingly at the buret.

Marvin spun and looked around the room. Other pairs were frozen in the middle of working on their titrations, and the teacher was talking to one such pair, her mouth open mid-sentence. It could have been a sculpture exhibit— “Day in the Life of a Chemistry Student.” Marvin frowned. Perhaps this was just a lucid dream; he’d had those before, and it’d be a logical explanation.

He tried to conjure up a hot dog. Nothing happened. Marvin pinched his arm and felt a pinprick of pain. …Maybe not a dream, then.

He walked to the doorway, lifting his goggles. Maybe this was just some kind of temporal anomaly. Who knew what those physics or engineering majors were working on? But when he looked around, the campus was silent and frozen. Marvin took off his lab apron and placed it and the goggles on a table, grabbed his phone, and left the building. Perhaps it was just a small area that was affected.

He broke into a jog, weaving around sculptures strolling, eating, and talking. He couldn’t hear any cars, but one could hope—

Marvin reached the road winding around campus. None of the cars were moving.

Marvin did not usually like to admit when he had no idea what was going on, but— he had no idea what was going on. He slumped onto a nearby park bench and pulled out his phone.

“Weird. The wifi’s still working.” Marvin first clicked to a news site, but there hadn’t been any articles posted about time being frozen. Which made sense, if the news reporters had been frozen as well. But surely he wasn’t the only one affected?

Marvin didn’t typically use social media, but now he dug up his password from his password manager and logged into his old Twitter account. And there it was: a tweet, describing the exact situation he’d found himself in. Marvin clicked reply.

“Hello there. I appear to be experiencing the same problem.” He thought for a moment. What other information would be good to include? “My name is Marvin, and I am a college student near Chicago. If anyone else sees this, please include your location— I would like to determine if this is an America-exclusive occurrence, or if there is any other pattern to”

He blinked at the screen. Character limit reached? With modern technology, shouldn’t it be possible to sent much more than 280 characters? Marvin sighed and edited his reply.

Shirley was not having the greatest of days. It had all started with the rubber duck epidemic. The prank war between fae and faer roommate had escalated to the point where fae had woken up covered in the things which meant getting ready for the day had proved to be a rather squeak affair.

And now outside, ready to accept the magical powers of the great caffeine gods, fae was having even more problems because midway through pouring faer coffee order the barista had decided to freeze.

Now that would've been fine, hey it was a cool prank, but then when the coffee also froze mid pour and everything around fae seemed to pause, it could not be ignored and laughed off. Of all the times the universe chose to just freeze fae in some sort of temporal anomaly why did it have to be before coffee. If it was after coffee, fae could have done so much, like remove those rubber ducks and flood faer roommate with plushies, or pirahnas in the bathtub. No that was too extreme, the lack of coffee was making fae ever so slightly cranky.

After walking around considering kicking several tempting targets, fae decided the only way to find an answer to this was going to be the internet. After scrolling around fae found nothing but conspiracy theories, all dating back far too much to be related to this event.

Shirley finally circled around to social media. If there was ever going to be crazy updates (and hopefully memes) about this it would be that. The usual suspects were starting to turn up nothing until fae finally spotted something that looked promising. A conversation between two people. Well this was something. The fact that it was twitter wasn't ideal, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Sticking faer lip out like fae always did while writing, fae started to type.



Satisfied with the result, Shirley settled in to wait for a moment, perhaps fae could brainstorm how best to get coffee.

"Okay, so what would the conjugation be?" Aashi paused with her dry-erase marker hovering over the whiteboard, waiting to get a response from her students so she could write it down.

But a response didn't come.

She blinked and turned around, glancing around. She only had two students -- well, "students" -- she wasn't a real teacher, just tutoring them. They were staring at her blankly.

She furrowed her brow. "Helloooo?"

They didn't move.

"Earth to Connor." She waved her hand in front of the most mischievous student's eyes but he didn't flinch. "Oh, sure, you're frozen. Okay. I believe you." She made sure her tone was as flat and sarcastic as possible.

When he kept a straight face, she glanced at her other student. "Alright, guys, ha-ha you got me. Jamie? Tell Connor your little bit is done..."

But Jamie just kept staring straight ahead, unmoving and unblinking.

"Guys?" She fidgeted, uneasy. "This isn't funny anymore. Stop... please stop?"

She didn't like this at all. She tried a false start towards them to hopefully scare them into flinching. When it didn't work, she backed away rapidly. Nope-nope-nope-- minimum wage wasn't anywhere near enough money to deal with this. She quickly left the room to go complain to the manager of the tutoring center that her students were being weird.

Aashi got even more scared when she realized her manager was frozen in place, too. She was a very no-nonsense sort of almost-not-quite-but-kinda-lowkey-actually-was Karen. She wouldn't play games like this, Aashi was sure.

Other employees and students were frozen too.

Aashi felt like she was on the verge of a panic attack and pulled out her phone to text her best friends but she didn't get any responses back, so she quickly turned to social media. It took a bit of searching and refining keywords before she finally found the post exchange.

She quickly liked each comment and retweeted the primary post, then answered frantically:

Spoiler

Also c/p the tweets in case @Mageheart wants to use them so she doesn't have to manually transcribe lol


Hello? Can anyone see this? Everyone is frozen still and I don't know what's going on. Someone anyone respond please.


Hello there. I appear to be experiencing the same problem. I'm Marvin, a college student near Chicago. If anyone else sees this, please include your location-I would like to determine if this is an America-exclusive occurrence, or if there is any other pattern to this time freeze


Greetings Earthlings! I am your new master. Bow befor...jk jk. I'm also stuck in whatever this is. I'm in Boston. I was definitely (not) responsible for this. Oh and I go by Shirley though I will absolutely answer to Rainbow The Colorful. Also that duck is giving me flashbacks...

omg im so glad im not the only one im in omaha does anyone know what happened??? im scared ngl -- ideas on what i should do? is there resources we can access or someone we can contact for this or something? this is so freaky and im not okay please tell me what to do im scared.

When time froze for Blythe, they were in the middle of grinding a domain in Genshin Impact. By some chance of fate, they had been lucky enough to be granted a C1 Scaramouche, and they hadn't even had to tap into the early Christmas gift cards they had gotten from some relatives that were already in the Christmas spirit.

There was the flip side to that luck, of course. Scara had dropped on the 7th, but they hadn't been able to actually work on building him until the 9th. It was a crime, if you asked Blythe.

Anyways, they were killing it with their Ayaka when all of the other players stopped moving. Whitewood, South Dakota wasn't known for its exceptional signal, but still. Blythe hadn't even seen lag hit that bad. Which weird, seeing that their pings were still somewhat decent, and the people they were co-oping the domain with hadn't ever had Blythe's exceptionally bad lag.

They waited for their party to start moving so they didn't get absolutely annihilated, but said party members weren't moving. Blythe quit the domain and tried registering with a new co-op party, but no one joined.

Blythe didn't like turning to Twitter for other people to play with, but he was desperate. And he did have a pretty decent amount of Genshin followers, so he was bound to get someone who could play a domain or two with him.

But when he opened Twitter, it all seemed frozen too.

He scrolled and scrolled, right up until he found a tweet thread. They blinked, stared at the thread for a bit, and then decided to throw in a reply of their own. Stranger danger be ignored, this was weird and they wanted to share their location. That Marvin guy, with his default avatar, was on the right track with asking for locations.

Blythe typed up a tweet on his phone, then clicked send.



Now it was time to see what the internet would throw back their way.

Spoiler

Here's my transcript for those brand new tweets:

hey time also stopped for me to. didnt know until all the other co-op players went still when i was fighting a domain. im over in whitewood south dakota, which you've probably never heard of before

also anyone else wondering how the time froze but we can still message on twitter? seems a little weird if u ask me but 🤷‍♀️

Lucky practically leaped from xer chair when xe started getting replies. Xe wasn't alone! Thank goodness! Because xer family had a history of schizophrenia and this felt like just the thing to witness for a psychotic break.

Xe took at least seven deep breaths before typing out a response, trying not to stim so hard, xe knocked the chair over.



Lucky set xer phone back on the table and awaited, just tapping xer finger on xer desk. Anxiety started to creep in. What if all of those were just... really slow to react to the time freeze, and Lucky would end up alone? What if they were just a part of this elaborate delusion xe was about to have?

Xe groaned. Xe needed more responses, and xe needed them now, thank you.

Shirley was even grumpier than earlier. All coffee related brainstorming had led to nothing, well nothing that didn't involve straight up stealing and fae wasn't quite feeling up to doing that even in what appeared to be an apocalypse level event.

Fae was cheered up ever so slightly by the replies coming in. It looked like there was a decent amount of people not frozen unless bots had become smarter than Shirley remembered them being.

The replies had been both normal but also very interesting, especially the observations someone had made about twitter. Fae wondered if perhaps all social media would work and they appeared frozen only because a non frozen person hadn't tried anything there yet. Well there was time for research on that later. Right now meeting up like Lucky had suggested sounded like a great idea (provided this wasn't an elaborate ploy by some evil mastermind who froze everyone n the first place to freeze them). Shirley fired off a response.

Spoiler

Yessss!!! We should totally meet up!! (If either of you are serial killers I humbly request that you kill me last or give me coffee and you can kill me first ;) ) And that's so cool!! Meeting at the geographical center. See y'all there then! P.S. I've decided you're a far better

...duck than the ones I strangled this morning.

Marvin watched as the replies came in, raising his eyebrows at some of them. Anyhow, it appeared that the others who hadn't been frozen were indeed in the United States, which would make meeting up, as the original poster had suggested, much easier.

He pulled up Google Maps and inputted Belle Fourche, SD. It didn't quite look like the geographical center-- it was a little towards the North-- but Chicago was also more northwards, so who was Marvin to point that out?



15 hours of driving. Great. Marvin sighed, then typed out a response, pointedly ignoring the strangling ducks comment. If someone was murdering waterfowl, he did not want to know.

Spoiler

I can be there in fifteen hours, assuming my car is still functional. As Blythe pointed out, Twitter works, so perhaps objects that we are in contact with maintain their functionality? Well. Where exactly in Belle Fourche should we meet?

Then he pocketed his phone and headed to his dorm to prepare for a road trip.

Belle Fourche? That was convenient. That would only take...

Blythe mulled it over for a moment, then gave in and decided to check Google Maps. Which weirdly worked, apparently, but so had Genshin Impact. It seemed like people were affected, but not necessarily technology.

But it was within riding or skating distance, so Blythe had no problems with meeting there.



It wasn't until Blythe packed up all of their stuff and and started heading out that they realized they didn't know where exactly they were meeting.

He shrugged as soon as the thought hit him. He'd know it was the others as soon as he saw them—they'd be moving, too.