I can justify making this post under it being connected to my previously elaborated on Timepools and therefore part of my "free One Piece worldbuilding to use at your convenience", but let's be real, I just want to ramble about my silly portal gemstones.
inspired by these animatics
Traveller's Crystals, also informally referred to as Timestones, are the creations of the Time God Manticore and his children.
The crystals always start out blue, but the more they're used, they slowly change color from blue to pink to red to grey. Red and pink can be recharged back up to blue if left unused, but grey crystals are dead and useless, hence them being the ones found around the Timepools. The pools use a lot of magic, so the only crystals they produce are dead.
Traveller's Crystals/Timestones, as their name implies, allow the user to travel through time & space via portals they generate when touched with the intent to travel. Blue crystals are capable of hopping Universes, Pink through Timelines, and Red only allows travel through the universe/timeline the user is currently in, though still allows time-hopping in general.
The crystals are not to be given out to Mortals without careful consideration and Manticore's express permission. They are precious and supremely dangerous in the wrong hands, so any Mortals who wield them must be vetoed and trusted. The only ones who naturally have the crystals as part of their bodies are those who are related to Manticore, like the Time Children and Ishtar. Otherwise, a good handful of select Mortals across the multiverse wear them as accessories.
The crystals can be destroyed, but the fragments will be useless due to the "liquid" (more accurately, condensed magic) inside evaporating on contact with anything outside the crystal. The fragments can be welded back together and refilled with magic by Manticore and the Time Children, but only by them, and only if it's done quickly before the fragments turn grey. There is an infinite number of crystals, since Manticore and the Time Children can always create more no matter what.
Grey crystals can still technically generate "portals", but they don't lead anywhere and are more of magical shields, platforms, or discs. Grey portals can only be summoned by the Time Child assigned to them, Scorpion, and Manticore. No one besides them in possession of a grey crystal can do anything even resembling portals, so many deem them useless beyond aesthetic appeal.
However, grey crystals do have an actual use. At their center, they generate a small, circular, green gem. This is called a Greenscreen Stone, and functions as illusionary magic, allowing the wearer of one to tap it and cloak themselves so thoroughly it resembles shapeshifting. Extracting Greenscreen Stones from grey crystals is an extremely delicate process, due to these crystals being far more fragile than blue/pink/red, and the stones sharing that trait.
If a Traveller's Crystal is broken neatly in half and sealed without allowing the magic inside to spill out, then you create Twin Crystals. These allow the wielders to switch places with each other by tapping their half, or summon the other to their location by holding their half with intent to do so. The tapping causes the other's half to flash with warning, and holding the crystal after already summoning just warps the other back to where they were. Importantly, these function across time, space, Timelines, and Universes, allowing for (as some would put it) fun crossover shenanigans.
The most known users of Twin Crystals are the Monkey D Luffy and Shirakumo Oboro from their respective "SunCloud" AUs, but they certainly aren't the only ones.
This has been your introduction to Traveller's Crystals. As implied at the top, I have no problem with anyone using these or something similar, so long as if they're named & explained like this, I am credited. I will eventually get around to making a post explaining Manticore & the Time Children, but that's for another day. This covers all I wanted to when it comes to the crystals, but I'll probably realize I forgot something and circle back to add it.
Time crystals could become accurate and efficient timekeepers
Time crystals could one day provide a reliable foundation for ultra-precise quantum clocks, new mathematical analysis has revealed. Published in Physical Review Letters, the research was led by Ludmila Viotti at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy. The team shows that these exotic systems could, in principle, offer higher timekeeping precision than more conventional designs, which rely on external excitations to generate reliably repeating oscillations.
In physics, a crystal can be defined as any system that hosts a repeating pattern in its microscopic structure. In conventional crystals, this pattern repeats in space—but more exotic behavior can emerge in materials whose configurations repeat over time. Known as "time crystals," these systems were first demonstrated experimentally in 2016. Since then, researchers have been working to understand the full extent of their possible applications.
Time crystals suggest that under certain conditions, matter can generate stable, repeating temporal patterns.
If time can emerge from structured change…
Is time a fundamental feature of reality —
or something that arises from interaction?
Time is fundamental and universal
Time emerges from physical interactions
Time emerges from consciousness
Something else entirely
Voting ended onMar 13
(You can respond in the notes if you picked the last option — I’d love to hear your reasoning.)
I'll start this one by saying it's reaaaaally suspicious that we weren't shown how Evil Morty turned off Rick Prime's regeneration schtick.
He obviously did do it, because Rick C-137 successfully punched him to death, but we weren't shown the process. I guess, since he managed to hack into Rick Prime's brain and got access to aaaaaaaaall his weapons, schematics, implants, etc, it wasn't particularly difficult to turn off whatever implant granted Rick Prime this ability. I wasn't particularly surprised when he didn't recover from Rick C-137's punches; Evil Morty is very thourough.
But why weren't we shown the action of it being turned off? Was it unnecessary? Was it to reduce screen time? Or was it plot-relevant?
...Does this really look like regeneration?
Compare it with Rick C-137 sorta fixing himself:
Aaaaall the blood stays where it was spilled.
While Rick Prime becomes completely clean (although the tears in his clothes remain, a whole sleeve reforms):
...Where did all the blood go...?
Is it like he "regenerated"...?
...or is it more like...
...whatever happened to his body physically was...
...undone?
And I think this is interesting:
Rick C-137 has exactly ZERO obligations, no job. He also has FREE TIME.
But... what if Rick Prime LITERALLY had "free time".
As in: a free supply of time crystals (maybe granted to him by Slow Mobius, whose death "hurt [Rick Prime] too") allowing him to LITERALLY have AS MUCH TIME AS HE WANTED, for EVERYTHING.
Which would also explain why he's young.
And it could be a metaphor of his inability to mature as a person.
Time crystals sound like something a video game character would be trying to collect, but this bizarre phase of matter is very real – and now one of them has been created in Google’s quantum processor, Sycamore.
Time crystals sound like something a video game character would be trying to collect, but this bizarre phase of matter is very real – and now one of them has been created in Google’s quantum processor, Sycamore. Regular crystals are characterized by a highly ordered structure of atoms in a repeating pattern. So if those atoms repeat through space, could other crystals exist with a pattern that repeats through time instead? And what might that look like? In 2012, Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek hypothesized that these so-called time crystals could exist, and by 2016 they had been experimentally created in the lab. Later studies found them in a children’s crystal-growing kit, and observed them interacting with each other. In a time crystal, the atoms exhibit motion in a pattern that repeats periodically – so, for example, their spins flip up and down in a predictable ticking motion. But where it gets weird is that this rhythm doesn’t follow the frequency of the force that kicked it off, and in a perfect system the atoms will keep on ticking forever without any further input.
Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this
WTF
“Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.
A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.
“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.
Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.
The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state.
“This is just this completely new and exciting space that we’re working in now,” said Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team…”
