Wait can you tell us more about your time travel oc’s?
YES YES ABSOLUTELY I WOULD LOVE TO
Admittedly it’s a bit oversimplified to call them “my” OC’s. One of them is mine, but a lot of them belong to friends and mutuals, and even just general people of the internet! Back in 2020/2021, I created a TikTok cosplay RP tag focused around a scifi time travel story world I’ve been building since highschool called “The Cafe at the End of Time”.
I could delve into the lore of the Cafe for forever and maybe that could be its own separate tumblr post if people want! but at its core it’s a cafe/diner inhabited solely by time travelers, which exists in its own little pocket universe that most people almost glitch into by accident. Many of the OCs were characters created and played by others to goof around in the lighthearted scifi tag and duet other people! But overall it was very Doctor Who, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Back to the Future style vibes, with hints of things like The Backrooms, Treasure Planet, and more. Basically my love letter to scifi media and concepts I enjoy!
The main OC’s I can yap about at length (because I know the most about them) are my own OC, Stoker, and my girlfriend @darkwrenduck’s OC Polly!
(Also affectionately known as Stoker Stopwatch and Polly Pocketwatch,,, they match it’s very cute, IRL Wren and I both have matching pocket watches in black and gold to represent them)
Stoker and Polly have a bunch of different looks and vibes and dynamics depending on where in their timeline they’re situated (and which version of the canon it is). They’re enemies to lovers to coworkers to enemies to friends to lovers again in a fun little cycle, often never at the same stages at the same time, since they keep meeting each other out of order (a bit Doctor/Riversong style).
Stoker was the first person to ever discover the Cafe at the End of Time. He just sort of… woke up there, one day, in this minuscule liminal dimension on the edge of reality, in an empty 1950’s diner with nothing but a stocked pantry and a coffee machine. Depending on the continuity/story he’s also sometimes the physical manifestation/avatar of the Cafe itself (since the cafe is at many points hinted to be a sentient entity of its own) but ultimately he’s just a guy. Which is kind of his core feature, he’s just a very unassuming boyfailure of a man. Not particularly smart or charismatic or skilled he’s just a guy. He’s fun in that he’s a time traveller but he doesn’t actually have his own way of time traveling; he just sort of hitchhikes his way through time by catching lifts with other time travelers who pass through the Cafe and history, often leading to him getting stranded in places for up to decades at a time. He once got stranded for about 200 years on earth in the 18th century (but he doesn’t like the talk about it). He sort of just ended up working at the Cafe by virtue of being the only person who knew how the fuck anything worked. So time travelers would fuck up and somehow end up there and he’d be chilling cause he lives there like “oh hey want a cup of coffee or something?” After a couple of centuries of working behind the counter, once the cafe got more staff, he sort of became more of a rambling hitchhiker seeing the sights, when he finally got the chance to not be working/trapped. He’s technically the owner of the Cafe too. He doesn’t consider himself that, he thinks the Cafe belongs to anyone and he just found it. But if you ask literally any other person in the universe they’re like “oh yeah Stoker owns that place” lmao
Polly is technically the manager of the Cafe. Or at least she becomes the manager. Stoker didn’t really hire her, she just sort of took over after she started working there and he wasn’t going to say no. She was the first person to ever actually offer to help and not just ask to be served. Before becoming a manager, Polly was actually a member of an elite time-traveling paramilitary from a far future authoritarian government that took over reality after a time-traveling war, and was sent to eliminate any any potential threats to the structure of history (a bit Marvel TVA adjacent). She was sent to arrest a future version of Stoker who committed space crimes (potentially something that led to the downfall of said space government), only to instead find the past version of him, and end up trying to arrest this tired uncooperative young barista who just wanted to go home and hadn’t even done anything yet. And then after their adventure, Stoker escapes. Ages later, a future version of Polly turns up after realising the time cops are so so evil and tries to ask for forgiveness and Stoker just gives her a cup of coffee and a place to rest. If future him was going to make mistakes, he can’t hold it against past her for doing the same.
I think what’s really fun about Stoker and Polly is that they’re these two potentially immortal time travelers but they aren’t necessary the protagonists of the stories at all in this world (at least not any of the ones I’ve written as short stories/novel/podcast concepts). They have no real bearing on the universe or the timeline or anything like that, as much as sometimes they try to influence things. History just keeps happening, with or without them. They’re just kind of there. They have their silly little adventures and dates but mostly they just make coffee. Serve pie. Give some sage advice to time travelers on their own adventures and send them on their way. They just want to heal from their pasts and be happy, as much as they can. Time traveling is lonely and it sucks but they fight off the loneliness together. They don’t have a happy ending waiting necessarily because their endings are their beginning and their beginning is going to end eventually, but they get to be happy now, working at the Cafe and having their little on again off again fated to fall for each other romance. Their happily ever after is always happening, somewhere, if not here, and it’s something they have to work for forever, and they’re okay with that because they have each other, and over time they find a family in their regular customers and their friends. And of course they have the Cafe. Everyone always has the Cafe, even when everything else is gone. It always exists, forever.
As a fun little bonus; people might recognize Stoker as my profile pic for most of my platforms! It’s from an art piece by wonderful friend @skeletongraveyard-art from years ago, where he stole a burger from her OC, North Dakota lmao
I could yap about all the characters and storylines and the world lore for forever. There was @jamphibiann’s character Casey who had a sort of Unus Annus dynamic with Stoker, and had some incredible arcs. There’s Regicide, the AI-powered star-warship who was given sentience to wage war and then decided his passion was music and his dream in life was to become a jukebox. There’s the Great Quarter-Centennial Stock Intake Heist. I love this world so much and the characters are so whimsical. Some day when I settle on which story I want to publish for them, I’d love to share it online somewhere. But who knows when that’ll be and how much the story will have changed by then. For they most party they’re just whimsical worlds and characters and stories to have fun with and take comfort in :)
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