Timekeeper Cookie

PLAYER INFO
Name: Io
Pronouns: they/them
Contact: ionicOneirologist ioniconeiroi on Discord
Permissions: Here

CHARACTER INFO

Name: Timekeeper Cookie
Canon: Cookie Run Ovenbreak
Canon Point: Shortly after the events of Time Relic Chaos
Age: GOOD QUESTION. Given how much time traveling she does, it's likely even Timekeeper herself no longer knows exactly how old she is. Appearance wise, she's an adult, maybe early to mid 30s.
Species: Cookie (Legendary), changed into a human when arriving in game.

History: https://cookierun.fandom.com/wiki/Timekeeper_Cookie

To elaborate: Timekeeper Cookie was once a version of Croissant Cookie, a talented engineer who was the first to invent numerous time travel related gadgets. She was one of the few Croissants to actually join the Time Balance Department, although as her abilities grew, so too did the monotony of her life. Pressured by the boredom to accrue more and stronger ability to control time, she eventually became Timekeeper, effectively ascending to Legendary Cookie status - cookies of terrible, demigod-like power. The exact events leading to this, as well as when exactly she became Director of the TBD, are currently unknown.

Personality:

✽ What is your character's main motivation? What drives them and keeps them going?

"Why change time? Because I can and it is fun."

At first glance, Timekeeper's only motivation seems to be... not being bored. That's it. That's literally it. She just wants to entertain herself, and if she screws around with the entire timeline in the process, so be it. But why would such a cookie choose to remain Director of the Time Balance Department, an organization dedicated to maintaining timelines? An organization she's claimed multiple times is boring and dull? (Well, partly because it puts her in a position to have a lot of "fun" with very little consequence. But still...)

Truth is, Timekeeper Cookie cares a lot more about the world and the cookies around her than she lets on, and she hides it well enough that most other cookies can't tell at all. It might seem like she's popping up and randomly trolling her employees and acquaintances, but half the time she seems to also be testing their mettle in the process, or setting up a cascade of events to nudge the timeline in what she sees as the right direction. Perhaps most telling is the alternate timeline featured in the Save the Future storyline, in which Timekeeper broke under the pressure of having to prune hundreds of splintered timelines and being forced to watch everyone she knew vanish from existence again and again in the process. That Timekeeper fell into a hopeless, nihilistic despair, and hid herself in a time pocket, something normal cookies can never escape from on their own. This Timekeeper is from a different timeline, of course - but having glimpsed that one, seems to wholly accept this as a plausible reaction from herself.

She wished to help all cookies, once. Not all of that desire has vanished.


✽ What is their biggest regret? Why?

"I have forgotten something... my past self does not remember."

You might think it's difficult for someone who can flit through time on a whim to have regrets. You'd be mostly correct. Regret is not usually Timekeeper Cookie's style. And yet... she's not the same cookie she once was, not by a long shot, not in many ways. Once, Timekeeper found a version of her younger self in another timeline, and tried to convince Croissant Cookie to become Director and gain power over time like her - only to become intrigued and invested when Croissant rejected the idea and promised to gain strength as a great mechanic/engineer instead. There's a place in Timekeeper's past that can't be revisited with mere time travel, and a small part of her very much regrets leaving it behind.


✽ What is their worst fear? Their greatest comfort?

"I hate being bored! It's nice to have fun, don't you think?"

Croissant Cookie's greatest fear is her life becoming boring and monotonous, even while doing her favorite things. Timekeeper Cookie has not changed much in this regard - experiencing exactly that was what drove her to obtain godlike power over time, after all, skewing her sense of morality rather sideways in the process. Now the ends very much justify the means in her eyes, as long as those ends are to never once feel the gnawing pain of boredom or watch the things she cares about become dull and grey and uninteresting even though she knows they should not be.

As for comfort... she still has a soft spot for the sandwiches a friend once made. And will absolutely steal them from Croissant given half the chance. Visiting her old friends in the past? Impossible. Those cookies do not know who this version of her is, and there's probably a reason why she's never brought up how they're doing in her original timeline. She'll take the sandwiches instead, it's much easier.


✽ Top three strengths?

"I can repair anything. Even time itself!"

-Smarts, quick thinking, and engineering skill. Timekeeper never lost her talent for machinery, she just hasn't had much drive or need to actively invent for a long time. She's blisteringly intelligent, and had a natural knack for understanding spacetime and time travel even before gaining chronokinesis. Complex concepts and calculations are second nature to her, and she's observed enough timelines to be able to piece cause and effect throughout time together very quickly in her head. And yes, if you hand her any given machine she can probably fix it. Or take it apart, figure out exactly how it works, and put it back together in a startlingly short amount of time.

-No sane person would call someone this chaotic "level-headed," but what Timekeeper certainly is is unflappable in most situations. Her analytic mind means she approaches problems logically first and emotionally last, and it's very rare to see her acting anything other than flippant, even when angered. She's seen so many strange timelines stemming from her already rather wild homeworld that there's very little that can surprise her with weirdness alone. She's already aware that different "timelines" eventually become different "worlds," so even finding herself somewhere so drastically different isn't going to throw her off her stride immediately!

-Ruthlessness and decisiveness. This is someone who looks at a situation, sees the path she wants to take to her goal, seizes it with both hands and no second thoughts, and doesn't let go until she gets there. The only thing that can interfere is usually something becoming even more interesting than what she was trying to reach in the first place. Timekeeper had a penchant for never giving up even before she was Timekeeper, and she isn't easily daunted, even when she can see significant obstacles in her path. She isn't about to hesitate when sacrifices need to be made, either. Of course, the other side of that double-edged blade tends to cut into what other cookies think of her... good thing she doesn't care about that!


✽ Top three weaknesses?

"What is the matter? Your problem was erased."

-Timekeeper has... difficulty connecting to other people, to say the least. Her perspective has grown far beyond mortal ken, to put it in cliche terms, and all the intelligence in the world can't make her good at narrowing it back down far enough to guess at what makes other cookies tick. If she messes with time to fix someone's problem, but they're unhappy with the result because someone else's experience was changed for the worse in the process, she doesn't really understand what the issue is or why the person she was trying to help would care. It's a tiny blip in the vast tapestry of time she's always looking at, why should it matter? To make matters worse, she actually does genuinely grow fond of others - many of her employees at the Time Balance Department especially. Unfortunately, she's so bad at expressing this in a way anyone can parse that most of them just find her kind of weird and unsettling, if not a downright nuisance. If they know who she is, anyway. Yeah, she... stays hidden from most of her own damn organization, probably so she can mess with them more freely. Sigh.

-Timekeeper has very, very, VERY much grown overreliant on her time powers. Literally everything she is and everything she does revolves around them, around being able to constantly check what the pasts and futures of each timeline contain, around the ability to poke and prod until she gets what she wants. She does not exactly handle not getting what she wants gracefully, either - when Gingerbrave became a thorn in her side rather than a convenient pawn, she quickly wound up threatening to "throw [him] back in the Oven and weld the door shut." She even lives in the time rifts, something almost no other cookie could pull off due to the risk of becoming lost in time! Or changed by it, but everyone is eventually, and for Timekeeper especially that ship has more than sailed... anyway, long story short, she's used to cheating at life and would very much struggle to live like a normal person again, or to interact with others on an equal basis.

-She cares. She does, despite everything, even though she doesn't act like it, even though she doesn't come off like it. She cares about her world, her timelines, her employees, her friends, insomuch as anyone would call her a friend. We've seen it happen in Save the Future - if something happens to those she cares about, it can and will break her, and she breaks badly. Full retreat, going somewhere no one can find her, claiming everything is meaningless and cookies are too small to matter after all.

Time travel stories are always about love, aren't they?

She cares, though she doesn't expect anyone to care about her in return. They think she's strange and annoying, after all. Or terrifying, perhaps. Those are all perfectly reasonable things to think of her. Yet maybe part of her still pines, in a way, out of curiosity if nothing else. Maybe the biggest shock and greatest weakness of all would be if someone else cared too, one day.


✽ What was their last lie?

"But I'm lost!"

Surprisingly, she doesn't actually lie much - lies of omission, usually, since she sure loves asking leading questions and dropping hints but ultimately not telling others everything she knows about the timeline. Leading a timeline in the right direction is a delicate act, after all!

Inventory:

PET: Continuum Cog. This strange little singularity with a cute face was once a normal cogwheel that fell into a time rift, but now it's... well, straight up, it's a little animate black/white hole. It can't speak and mostly seems content to follow Timekeeper around. What it can do is absorb matter in much the same way as a black hole, though it can do so with precision, sucking up food and objects without harming nearby people. Once it's absorbed enough matter, it enters its white hole state, where it spits that matter back out in the form of Pure Light Jellies, which have a minor energy restoring effect when consumed. Anything it consumes gets converted, so it can't be used to store items for later.

WEAPON: The Sonic Embroider, Timekeeper's giant pair of golden embroidery scissors, is not a weapon first and foremost though it certainly can be used as one. It is a time machine, capable of cutting open the fabric of spacetime to create time rifts, and Timekeeper often uses it as a method of mundane travel as well by riding atop it and flying around. (She does not need it to to either time travel or fly. But she does like to invent neat gadgets and accessorize, and this device is very much her own unique creation.)

MISC: A handful of normal clockwork parts, a key that goes to the Director's Office at the TBD headquarters, and some small tools. (Screwdriver, wrench, pliers, wire cutters, etc.) She likely had some less than mundane objects on her as well, like the Time Screws capable of granting time altering properties to machines, but these may not have made the journey.

Abilities:

Chronokinesis: Let's get the elephant out of the room first - this is Timekeeper's innate ability to control time. It's somewhat vaguely defined, but she can time travel at will, open and close time rifts, stop time, reverse time, destroy and manipulate timelines, remotely influence time machines, and make clocks go haywire just by being near them, at the very least. It's probably safe to say that if you can blame it on time, she can do it. Although magic exists in her world, this is implied to be less straight magic and more like an elemental affinity, which is in line with most other Legendary Cookies.

Floating/flying: It's unclear whether this is part of her chronokinesis or not, but she's far from the only cookie capable of floating around, so it may simply be magic. Often her preferred method of getting around, and totally not because she's constantly trying to offset how short she is, nooooo not at all.

Engineering: Tinkering, inventing, building, welding, repairing, she's done it all and more. It's a more deep rooted talent than even her chronokinesis, and she's very at home up to her elbows in clockwork. She can also draft blueprints with ease, as well as operate almost any machine or vehicle once she has a basic idea of the functions and controls.

That eyepatch...?: Yep, it's fancy and steampunk as hell just like everything she wears, but that's an eyepatch over her left eye. What happened to it? We don't know. What we DO know is that her alternate timeline self who fell into despair has lost that eyepatch, and behind it is... well... a giant crack in her dough, filled in by a spiraling void. It's VERY likely that our Timekeeper has something similar hidden, if less exacerbated. What does that mean? What can it do? We don't know but it sure has some implications! Extensive time rift exposure really fucks a cookie up, huh!

(The older Croissant Cookie also from that alternate timeline has a left eye that's gone very yellow, and Timekeeper's visible right eye is yellow with a spiral in it as opposed to Croissant's original brown, and don't get me started or I'll have a whole corkboard full of red string over this okay. Did a shard or artifact of time get lodged in that eye?? Is that how she got chronokinesis?? Why does time rift exposure always seem to mess with eyes first?? Is that why mandatory eye protection during time travel is a TBD policy?? I HAVE QUESTIONS.)


Sample: https://sticksandbones.dreamwidth.org/26131.html?thread=5060627#cmt5060627