DE: Slipping away

[bjornwilde]

I keep finding myself thinking it is later in the week than it actually is; I blame having two EPs so early in the week. This has me thinking of our perception of time which has inspired today's topic, how is your pup with perceiving time? Are they as accurate as an atomic clock or are their friends lucky they arrive within an hour of appointments? Are there certain events they sync their internal clock to?

Comments

[a1enzo]

All I know is, he's better at it than me. I have no time sense whatsoever.

[last_kallig]

Kreyu would be rather bad at time by modern standards, but in the Mythic Age time is determined by the position of the sun, moon and stars. "Clocks" and the accuracy that goes with them are not a thing yet.

Annabelle has a Pulp hero's knack for arriving at just the right time for things to work out well. Sometimes the 'right time' involves being spot on time, but it can be quite a long stretch before or after too.

Ibani is very good at gauging the passage of time. That may be a side effect of Force sensitivity and being connected to everything through it.

[sdelmonte]

Let's start by establishing that I have a great sense of time and hate being late on top of that. I can usually guess what time it is when I wake up, and I have to be really out of it to not when I am.

Kirk, Charlie, Cy and Howard are all like that to some degree. Jim loses some of his time-sense when shifting from ship time to planetside, though that is essentially jetlag in space. Charlie developed his as a news reporter, when knowing how long till it's 6pm mattered. There were times on stakeouts when he wished he couldn't feel time not passing. Cy's brain might not be a computer, but he's got some many motherboards and switches in him that it's hard not to sync. Never mind that he likes to fill his day with so much stuff that he needs to be on time. And Howard is just like that naturally.

Which leaves Knox and Gibbs. The latter has no sense of time when on land, but it's not like he needs to be anywhere, and it's not like precision is needed in a day before standardized time. At sea, though, patterns drilled into him by the navy take over, and he can tell you exactly the hour by looking at the skies on clear days and nights (and sometimes can tell you the time on overcast days). And Knox...he has a watch. It tells him what time it is. Otherwise, he's on time when it serves the story he's writing or the meeting he's going to, but he really is not good with timing. He's arrived for the second inning of far too many Mets games.

[road_to_calvary]

You can set your watch by Javert.

Valjean is rather more chilled. He's never late late, but he can't turn away from someone stopping him on the street to talk, or requiring something of him, or so forth. So even when he was mayor of Montreuil, he would have to make apologies to various businessmen/dignitaries at times. And he's OK with that, because it's more important to chat with the kids that flocked round him, or help a woman carry her shopping, than to worry about rich men's sense of propriety.

Gene - turns up when he turns up. He's actually not as bad as he could be when it's something official. For pub/mates/social gathering - well, he's pretty damn sure the party won't start until he's there anyway, and he's certainly not above making an entrance.

Both Bruces are punctual, if not obsessive about it.

Robin has very few official set times to do anything. 'Dinner at sundown' or 'come when the call for archers goes up' is about as precise as he gets.

[1nv1nc1ble]

Mark Grayson is developing a reputation for always being late. This is because, much like Dr. Barry Allen (the tardiest man in the DC Universe), he's always getting called away to Deal With Things. Things that he really can't tell anyone about. William and Eve know what's going on, so they don't particularly mind. Debbie sighs and wishes her son were better at time management. Amber thinks he's a drug dealer.

Cecil doesn't give a damn, because he knows that Mark's getting paid to drop whatever he's doing to go Deal With the Things that Cecil has asked him to Deal With. That's why he's the Man in the Black Suit. (Mark is rarely late when it comes to meeting with Cecil.)

[camwyn]

Gordon loses track of the passage of time a lot. This was the case before Black Mesa- I've headcanoned that he was chronically late unless he set his target for arriving somewhere half an hour early, in which case he'd get there just barely on time- but it's gotten worse since then, because after the Incident he started having patches where he just didn't notice the passage of time at all. These days he wears a watch and checks it a lot for safety's sake.

Shephard is better at telling the time by looking at the sky and gauging light levels than he is at having any kind of an innate time sense. He works harder than Gordon at maintaining a proper schedule, though.

Ellen spent every day of her life from her tenth birthday to shortly after escaping from the Enclave with a Pip-Boy clamped on her wrist. It had a clock built into it. She relied on that for her sense of time and other chrono-functions. These days, since she's worked out how to get the thing into and out of her sylladex instead of having to wear it 24/7, she's had to get a little better at having a time sense of her own.

Medic is very precise and almost always on time, unless someone has tried to blow him up or something like that. Not that this happens outside of work hours very often, but then there is always the possibility that someone might have a worse injury than usual and he might get stuck dealing with that after hours and that tends to delay him a bit. Generally, though, he's very accurate time-wise.

Mordin is terrifying about being on time and accurate in sensing its passage. I don't know if that's a salarian species-wide thing or just him. Probably just him.

Santo usually relies on a good quality wristwatch, as he tends to be a little too busy to maintain an inner clock.

Edward Kenway is not from a time in which precise timekeeping is all that possible. The British navy has a prize of twenty thousand pounds out in his time for anyone who can accurately and precisely calculate longitude, which relies heavily on reliable, precise timekeeping; the prize doesn't get claimed until 1761. He doesn't currently let time concern him very much except for navigating.

Varric tends to be largely on time for his appointments, but being from a medieval fantasy world, neither he nor anybody else expects time to be more accurately kept than by water clocks or candles. The Qunari probably have excellent mechanical clocks to ensure that they observe their daily duties at the correct time and place, though.

Stacker Pentecost has an extremely accurate internal clock and is always on time or early.

[katyafeline]

Ace used to be chronically late for just about anything, mostly because there were so many other interesting things to do and usually she couldn't give a damn about the thing she was supposed to show up for. Now she has an inherent time sense that beats most atomic clocks, and there isn't a whole lot she's asked to do that she wouldn't willingly do anyway. Except parent committees at the girls' school. But she's learned, from long painful experience, the tactical advantage of arriving early so she can intimidate incoming parents by sheer presence - it cuts down on the useless nattering and politics if they're already a bit cowed.

Katya... was on time if it was for the Boss. Or she was supposed to be hosting a party. Otherwise she and Bear just might be holed up somewhere watching black-market films or reading really horrific poetry and getting utterly smashed on cheap vodka. They always knew what time it was, but it was a matter of bothering about it. Now Katya is slightly less above tweaking probability lines if she needs to get somewhere quickly to avoid being late, but there's so very little she has to be on time for.

William: Lives his life by the ship's bells - he's still not completely in tune with it, as he's overslept a time or two, but usually he can guess the time without needing to hear the bells.

Glorfindel: Wants to know what a clock is.

Simmons is On Time. Always. It goes with the rule-obeying thing - keeping her world ordered makes her more happy and relaxed, so that's exactly what she does. Mostly. She really needs to not improvise, it doesn't go well.

Bones is fairly decently on time, but he isn't exactly accurate about it - he'll show up anywhere from fifteen minutes early to a couple late, moseying in with a cup of coffee in hand. It's worse if he's really trufax on vacation - then he's not hurrying anywhere, damn it.

Both Oswin and Clara have an almost preternaturally good sense of time, Oswin better than Clara (side-effects of how there came to be an Oswin), but it does help when keeping up with a Time Lord. It does not help when dealing with the Time Lord's TARDIS.

Sam has a very accurate internal clock, which is rather helpful during the blackout, and for her job. It's actually canonically considered very odd if Sam is late to anything, and a cause for concern.

[minkhollow]

Assassins always know what time it is. Cata even knew what time it was when she was whitewashed, as there's nothing inherently Evil about knowing what time it is. (She just never processed the ever-lengthening days beyond 'hey, that's a little odd...') You simply don't run late to a contract.

Claudia is decently on time, but slowest early in the morning.

The sunrise literally doesn't start without Apollo, so yeah, his time sense is pretty precise.

Imp could theoretically check the floral clock, for all the good that would do him; he can't read the damn thing. He tends to run early.

Regulus is punctual, except for when it's of benefit to be fashionably late.

Red doesn't know what a clock is, nor does she have many appointments that aren't dependent on the moon. Pre-curse-breaking, Ruby is chronically late; the only reason it's not more of a problem at work is that she lives where she works. After the curse breaks she's a little more timely.

Woolly makes a point of being on time, if not a little early.

[aberration]

I feel like the only way I can do this is by splitting up my characters along "standardized time oriented," "artificial light oriented", and "natural light oriented." Because... reasons, apparently. Though really this distinction seems to be "those who grew up/lived largely in a post-industrialized world and those who didn't," so.

Standardized-Time Oriented
Leslie - Schedules herself pretty much down to the minute, and has a very accurate sense of time along with it. She's the type of person who can generally make herself wake up when she wants to (rather than even needing an alarm, though she'll set it anyway), who knows how long it takes her to do any given thing, and who has difficulty letting any second be spent in a way that isn't doing something. So if asked the time off the top of her head she could probably answer within a minute or so without a watch, from her own sense of time or from what she's doing at the moment given how she's scheduled it.

Asami - She doesn't have anywhere near the precision or scheduling-obsession that Leslie does, but Asami is accustomed to standardized-time-measuring in Republic City and operates accordingly. She's generally punctual (though more so when she knows she needs to be), and while a little more inclined than some to lose track of time, particularly if she gets a little too involved in working on something or the like, she'll usually take precautions to ensure this won't cause problems for her.

Artificial Light Oriented
Elle - For many years when Elle was growing up, time had very little meaning, and was usually only coordinated with when lights in her home were turned on or off. It wasn't until she got older that she actually had to start being concerned with time and how it was passing, and even then, this really only corresponded with immediate events in her life - when a plane would leave, when a meeting would take place, when someone would be somewhere, when it was time to eat, etc. Longer-term things like months, seasons, ages, holidays, etc. held little meaning - they were like occasional illustrations you stumbled on in a book. Their place in time wasn't something that clicked in her mind. So time doesn't feel like something that moves exactly - it's like standing in a big, empty space where sometimes there's light, and sometimes there isn't.

Manny - Being in the Land of the Dead has a similar effect. There's night and day, but an constant awareness that at this point, it makes little difference. You're only going in one direction. (Which, granted, is true of life as well, but it seems more immediate in death.) So Manny tends to feel like he's in a constant lights on-lights off standstill. His sense of progress more comes from meeting the ambitions he sets for himself, even in death.


Natural Light Oriented
Katara and Hiccup both grew up in settings where time was important in as much as what needed to be done, and what could be done, at different times at days and at different points in the seasons. So their sense of time is mostly dominated by the position of the sun and the weather/length of the days. They both have a very good sense of what time of day it is and what it means for them, but they wouldn't necessarily answer "what time is it" with a standardized-time answer.

Marceline is allergic to sunlight, and so to the extent that she pays much attention to time at all, she has to know when to be adequately prepared to go out during the day.

Will is better with natural light in determining what time of day it is, and would probably be fairly accurate in answering even with an whatever-o'clock answer by using natural light. The fact that people around him tend to experience time at their own pace and in their own sequence can make it more difficult for him to attach a lot of meaning to the read-off-your-clock kind of time (it's a bit like river rafting where currents can be stronger or weaker in different places and it sort of bumps you around), but he can usually depend on his physical surroundings to be consistent. Erm. Except for right now, when telling time is the least of his problems.

[death_gone_mad]

I think I remember answering this before; maybe I can remember how as well! To borrow aberration's terminology

Amascut is Natural Light Oriented. Her father is a sun god, so of course she is natural light oriented. She has also been around for a long time and watched civilizations collapse to the point where other measures of time don't matter. She's not exact about time, but she has had enough time to develop an accurate sense of when and how quickly things will happen.

Fairy Fixit is Standardized-Time Oriented. But there are so many standards she pays attention to that I find it surprising she has a sense of time at all. She must have a main standard and just keeps the others in mind. Usually punctual, less so with artificial and natural light oriented people's schedules.

[cameoflage]

Aradia is a Time player, and a god-tier one at that; while I haven't given too much thought to this aspect of Time powers, I do think it's likely that this confers a really good sense of timing and the ability to tell what time it is in an absolute sense, at least in the Medium. I'm not married to that theory, though.

Thurlow... has a pocketwatch. I hadn't thought a lot about their punctuality, so I expect they're not especially good or bad at being on time for things.

I personally have a difficult relationship with telling time. In increments of, like, under a minute, I have good timing, and at some times of year I can do a decent job of estimating the time from the state of the sky, but I'm absolutely terrible at estimating travel time on unfamiliar routes and this has made me horribly late for things more than once. (So I take Google Maps at its word nowadays.) I also generally suck at perceiving how much time has passed while I've been doing something; if I'm waiting for something to happen then the minutes crawl by, and if I'm absorbed in something I'll look up and suddenly it's been two hours since I last looked at the clock. Also I tend to leave for appointments or stop what I'm doing at the last possible minute, because I detest waiting around.

[hey35andholding]

Clementine Is fashionable late everywhere.

Dixie is too.

Pinkie is super early and likely has an entire mug of coffee ready to be drunk!

Juliet Is an annoying chipper morning person who's very punctual.

Eponine her clock is set by sunrise and sunset, and she sleeps scantly to better be wary of predators.