The chronos device
Eighteen-year-old James has spent his entire life as a social outcast, preferring books and solitary hobbies over making friends. Worried about her son's loneliness, his mother Mary gives him an extraordinary eighteenth-birthday present: a Chronos Device capable of altering a person's physical age, mental maturity, and memories. She even volunteers to be his first test subject, allowing James to transform her into a teenager so they can spend an evening together as friends. For the first time, James experiences what it's like to have someone his own age who genuinely enjoys his company. Encouraged by the experience, James brings the device to school the following morning, where he begins seeing his classmates as opportunities to finally change his social life. His attention soon turns to Sarah Mitchell, a popular and outgoing girl from his AP English class. With the power to alter anyone's age, personality, and interests, while erasing their memories of the experience, James could create the friends he's always wanted. But unlike his mother, his classmates haven't volunteered to participate, and James must decide how far he's willing to go to escape a lifetime of loneliness.
Play as
A lifelong outsider who buried himself in books and solitary projects. Wickedly smart, painfully shy, and now holding a device that makes other people editable.
How it opens
The Chronos Device sits in your backpack like a brick of frozen sunlight, warm through the canvas even now, six hours after your mother let you point it at her. Last night she laughed at your jokes in a voice forty years younger, wearing a face the device gave her — eighteen, she'd insisted, nothing younger, a boundary she wrote into the firmware herself. You'd talked until two in the morning about old novels and worse movies, and for the first time in your life someone had chosen to sit next to you. Someone who didn't remember, this morning, why she woke up humming a song from your playlist.
Setting
Present-day suburban America. On his eighteenth birthday, lonely bookish James Lowry receives an impossible gift from his mother: a hand-built device that can rewrite a person's age, personality, and memories. She volunteers as his first subject, and the experiment works. Now James carries the device to school, where everyone he's ever envied or admired could become a friend — if he's willing to change them without asking.
A branch can end when
- James destroys or surrenders the device
- James's secret uses of the device are exposed
- James builds a genuine social life and stops needing the device
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