titus n. owl

Kip's been experiencing timeslips since he was nine; he's in his early twenties now, and has lived for decades since his first accidental skip along the surface of the timestream. He's never been afraid of it, despite the best efforts of trainers and handlers. He always knows when he is, give or take a few hours or days or maybe five years, depending on how far he went a-slipping, and he always knows he can get back. Sometimes, just to practice, he'll go do it without Flash - he went to Stonehenge once, just to lay his hand upon the ancient rock and slide backward to see how far he could go with that to anchor him. He ended up overexerting himself and passing out, of course (he was somewhere in the Middle Ages at the time), but he managed to get back before they'd sent out a rescue mission - although he wasn't able to keep his minders back at base from hearing about it and giving him a thorough tongue-lashing. He's never been hurt; he's never been lost; and so he's never been able to really believe in the warnings or understand why other people get so worked up over it.

He's not the pilot of choice for retrieval missions for a dozen reasons, that lack of understanding being one of them - they'd rather send someone less likely to get in a fight, more able to empathize with and reassure the lost and found. This is perfectly alright with him; he's the fighter ace, the golden flyboy with blazing guns and a brilliant smile, the charmed champion of derring-do, and they give him jobs to fit; he's fought in a hundred analogues of the First World War, shot down a hundred Red Barons, saved a hundred timestreams by doing so, and just once been a dragon. The few times he's been saddled with "routine" missions things have taken inevitable turns for the worse (or the better, if you ask him, but only because he really enjoys risking his life), so they usually don't make him.

Timeslips are a strange thing, because they are not as strange as they could be. In Flash, in the air, flying through the aerial slips that connect to different streams, there's nothing to see while you do it - it's just more sky, although the cloud formations change rapidly and the weather and lighting alter themselves over the course of the flight. Kip flies airshows in his spare time, doing loop-de-loops and aerial tricks and showing off his own true love, his plane, and afterward in the local drinking establishments picking up the ladies he'll sometimes meet someone who wants to ask him about being a Chronopilot. They almost always seem to have some strange idea that the slips are like tunnels in the sky, full of flashing lights or something, and he just lets them believe that because there's more showmanship in their idea than there is in the reality.

He assumes that on land, where his natural abilities will let him go to different times within the same stream, the effect would be similar but more immediate: the landscape changing, buildings taking themselves down and the ones that preceded them building themselves up from rubble and then disassembling themselves in turn, trees shrinking to acorns, time sliding backwards like reversing the strip in a film projector. He doesn't know for certain, though, because his eyes close automatically every time he does it. Trying to keep them open is like trying not to blink during a sneeze. It's a shame, because it probably looks conking swell.

Kip Lowry! Ace Bravo! Dash Thoroughgood! Their names and countless others echo through the ages - quite literally - as the time-travelling flying aces of the Chronocorps!

Young pilots selected for their bravery, flying skill, and innate sense of timing go through training and are matched up with a chronoplane - a specially equipped flying machine, often built as a single-propeller biplane, capable of travelling not only through the air, but through the Time Vortex itself! Their daring feats in the service of the Grand Republic do more to preserve our way of life than we may ever know!

And indeed, they face more risk than we may ever know as well, for the Vortex acts as a conduit not only between NOW and THEN, but also between HERE and THERE - and "there" is not always located in our own reality! These dashing and gallant adventurers brave the dangers of parallel dimensions and untold aeons past and future to protect us from threats to the chronological order that could destroy life as we know it!