Crime-Time — A New Power for ‘Better Angels’

Written by Greg Stolze, © 2013.

Crime-Time (Greed)

This isn’t quite super-speed and it’s not quite time-control.  It’s more of a pause that refreshes.  Essentially, when you activate Crime-Time, everything stops for about sixty seconds.  Everything, that is, except you.

If it were more comprehensive, this power could be used for every kind of evil, from sneaking lewd glances at people who wouldn’t give you the time of day to dabbing sarin paste up the noses of passersby.

The good news for humanity is that Hellbinders with this power cannot affect frozen matter.  Anything that’s touching them and becomes “unstuck in time” with them remains touching them and stays unstuck.  Flaming objects instantly go out.  Those sarin dabs remain stuck on one’s finger.  Punching someone who’s frozen is like punching a brick wall.

With all these limits and restrictions in place, Crime-Time might seem less useful, but consider the advantages of compressing sixty of your seconds into an eyeblink for everyone else.  Any physical attack that’s timed later than you in a fight misses you, because you can simply get out of the way.  You can (apparently) vanish from plain sight.  You can hide behind the door while they search the basement and then, just as they’re about to look where you are, you can freeze time, hide in the basement and continue to spy on them.  You can’t slit an unsuspecting time-frozen cop’s throat, but you can run around behind him, point your gun and wait out the freeze.  Or you can just climb on top of him and, when time comes back on, have him collapse under the sudden, unbalancing weight.

Being a product of demonic magic instead of stodgy ol’ science, there’s no air displacement shredding the scenery and seeing light seems to work normally without any blue- or redshift.

Make a Cunning Greed roll.  When it goes off (assuming you’re in a time-sensitive situation), you can describe about sixty seconds’ worth of action that you can take without moving anything (not even opening doors!) or leaving anything behind. When the time ends, you get +1 to +3 Advantage from surprise, depending on what (exactly) you set up.  You cannot activate Crime-Time again the same round its effect occurs.  (That is, your GM can stop you if you’re trying to just roll one pause into another without letting anyone else ever act.)