The Ballad of Sharp Affon

Prologue - The Hotel

There is a hotel on the outskirts of a small village in Iceland which reaches infinitely up into the sky. Now, depending on where you are in space, this hotel might be there, or it might not. I'd suggest looking online for hotel bookings and, if an infinite number of results is of the "Stjornhiem" hotel you're in the right place. The only reason I bring up this hotel is because I feel like it can help explain how I do the things I do.

One day, I decided to take a trip to iceland. I'd seen myselves there a number of times. Through pictures, paintings, etc. And I decided I finally needed to try the place out myself. Now, where I'm from, Iceland sunk into the sea in 1422 after a terrible boating accident, so I needed to go somewhere else. So I did, and when I got to a place where the hotel existed, I checked to see if there were any rooms. Now one might obviously assume a hotel containing an infinite number of rooms would have some vacancies, but I must have come at a holiday or something, because there were absolutely none. Now, obviously, I was kinda shocked, but even stranger than the no vacancies thing, was that I could still buy a room. So I made my way to this particular Iceland, and I talked to the lady at the front desk. I asked her "can I get a room?"

"Of course you can."

"Well, which one?"

"Room one," she said. Now, I was confounded by this. I mean, if there were no vacancies, than why was room one still open? So I bought the room, and I got my key. When I entered the first room, I saw the real beauty of the hotel. As soon as I entered room 1, I saw a man sitting on the bed. He wasn't tall or short, he wasn't skinny, nor was he fat. His hair was a kind of darkish brown, which matched his eyes. More importantly than all of that, though, he had the pocket watch that immediately let me know that he was me.

"Hi," I said.

"Hello," I responded, setting my things down.

"I guess I have to move"

"Where to?"

"Room 2. You will too, once someone else shows up."

"Ok," I said, before I watched him walk out with his suitcases. I sat down on the bed, unpacked my things, and went to bed for the night. I spent three days in the hotel, seeing the sights, squinting really hard to see just how infinite this hotel was (for those wondering, it was indeed an infinitely infinite infinite hotel.) I even struck up a couple conversations with myselves -- this hotel seemed very popular with me. After a few days, though, I saw someone walk into my room. It wasn't me, funny as that may seem. It was a large man with a goatee named Dave Coffer. I would come to find he was a nice enough guy, though he did not smell amazing.

He asked me, "Who are you?"

I said, "I'm Sharp. You?"

"Dave," he replied, "Is this your room?"

"Not anymore."

"Oh. What room is yours?"

"Room 2, apparently."

And so I packed my things and moved to room 2, and then the me from before moved to room 3. Once I was there, I again spent some time looking around pre-sunken Iceland. I talked to Dave some, and had an overall good time with the whole thing. However, two days later, Dave came into my room again. He told me someone had taken room 1, and that he had to take room 2. So, naturally, I kicked myself out of room 3.

I stayed in that hotel for a year, and by the end of it, I was in room 135. Room 135 wasn't a bad room, mind you. Neither was 3-134, but it was time for me to go. So I packed my things and left the hotel. And when I did, the me from room 136 moved back into my room, and the person from room 137 moved to 136, and so on. When I got downstairs, I asked the clerk again how many vacancies there were, and she, predictably, said "Zero."  And it was true, there were never any vacancies, no matter how many people left or came in.

So, with all this in mind, travelling through time is quite a simple affair.  When I jump back five minutes in time, I'm really just moving from one room (my universe,) to another room (a universe created 5 minutes later than mine.) And when I do that, me from a universe 5 minutes earlier than mine jumps to my universe, and one from 5 minutes before his jumps to his universe, and so on and so forth. And when I jump back, we just do the same thing in reverse. Now obviously it'd be boring if I just used my watch for time travelling, and I don't.  However, I feel like time travel is the most complicated part, and its something that a lot of people don't know how to do, which is a shame.

~An excerpt from a letter by Sharp Affon, addressed to Sharp Affon