Bio

Time travel hasn’t been invented yet…and it never will be. At least not for normal people. Pendulum was born in the future, raised in the past, and currently resides in the present.

A family trip to the Mall of America when Pendulum was only 5 turned to heartbreak as he became separated from his parents in a crowd. Afraid and alone, Pendulum waded through the forest of stationary people, not understanding why nobody would speak or move. He eventually found his parents, still as mannequins, and cried for them to wake up. In a hot flash of emotion, the mall was suddenly empty, dark and terrifying. Security guards found him sleeping the next morning, and like a good boy he told them his name and presented his arm to be scanned. Perplexed, the guards kept asking questions like his parent’s names and phone numbers. These guards were stupid to not just scan his arm, but he was a smart boy and told them his parent’s names and his address which he remembered well.

“There is no such address.” Said one of the guards. “And there is no record of the people he says are his parents.”

A hot flash of emotion. The guards were gone, replaced by unfamiliar faces.

Pendulum was lost…in time.

The ability to control time would not come until many years later, or earlier, depending on your frame of reference. Cities were too dangerous, so Pendulum sought out the most timeless place on the planet, a monument in the English countryside called Stonehenge. Sometimes there would be hooded monks praying and performing rituals, other times it would be filled with tourists and cameras, but the stones were always there. A book showing the placement of the sun and stars in relation to the stones allowed Blank to determine the time without needing to ask the most awkward of questions, “What year is it?”

By the time his voice started to change, Pendulum had gained enough control that he could move forward or backwards mere days, and was finally able to attend school. It wasn’t easy, of course, as encounters with school bullies could cause him to miss months of lessons, or have to re-learn weeks worth of subjects. Girls were especially a problem, causing unscheduled time jumps almost as severe as when Pendulum was a child.

By the time he could grow a dashing mustache, Pendulum returned to the Mall of America to seek out his lost family. Never having learned the year of his birth, the search took many jumps and was riddled with false hope. Stories of children getting separated from their parents were not uncommon from decade to decade, but by the 22nd century, everyone was tagged with an ident chip in their arm, so Pendulum knew he must be close. A few jumps and a little distortion later, Pendulum saw his parents for the first time since he had been lost. He saw his two older sisters with them, just as they had looked when he was a child, but they did not seem to be looking for him. Containing his emotion, Pendulum rushed to the nearest guard station and insisted they scan his arm, but the device read “Unknown.”

It wasn’t until the return to the mall that Pendulum realized he had never seen a past version of himself. Later, Pendulum would come to learn that time is constant for him, always moving forward. Jumping backward or forward in time erases any actions taken during the intervening period, including things like being born.

The future is a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there, so Pendulum has chosen this time to call his own. Careful observation of the future stock market has made it possible to live without being troubled by money, and a satchel contains all the items he may need if he were to become lost in time again. Pendulum lives with the knowledge that if he ever jumps too far back, all the people he knows will forget his existence, and everything he has must be built again from scratch. His most prized possessions are an antique pocket-watch that he winds twice a day, and a digital organizer from the future where he meticulously logs important decisions, in case they need to be repeated on a future trip through past.

Having seen the good and bad throughout the ages, Pendulum has chosen to dedicate himself to helping people, and protecting those who are lost, as he was.