Temporal Rivalry

It was a lifelong dream of yours to make this generation's big scientific breakthrough, and you were all primed to do it. You had the best lab, the best lab assistants by your side, and nothing could stop you. You would eventually be Thomas Wiley, inventor of time travel!

That is, until Leo Kane came into the picture. Leo Kane had been your rival for as long as you could remember, even as children, he'd always one-up you at the science fairs. Your well-researched project would be upstaged by his far more visually impressive one. It burned your blood to see him getting the praise and adulation that you believed that you deserved. Your choice to go into temporal engineering had been chosen specifically because Leo wasn't intending on joining that field, but he couldn't even give you that. And then, right at the end of the race, when the finish line was in your sights, and you had assured your investors that you'd crack the secret within the year... you awoke one morning to see Leo Kane on the news, proudly proclaimed as the inventor of time travel.

It was the most disastrous turn of events that it could have been. In short order, your lab was reassigned and you'd lost everything you'd worked for, since it was now useless with Leo's time travel tech out there. A year later, you were stuck teaching "Intro to Physics" at an Ivy League school, but it wasn't what you'd wanted for yourself. But by that point, it was too late, your life's work down the tubes... that was until you were approached by a former colleague from the lab. They'd gotten a hold of Kane's time machine, as the lab was testing it for consumer use. As an expert on temporal theory, they wanted to contract you as a freelancer, something you eagerly accepted. But it wasn't until you were in the lab with the machine that you realized its true power. You could use it to change the timeline, you could change history so that you were first to invent the time machine and turn things around. It was easy to sneak into the lab after hours and boot up the machine, you were familiar with how it worked after the tests and you knew how to erase the trip log so that you'd be able to ensure no one knew about this little dalliance.

As you stepped onto the platform and set the timer for an hour, you had an idea of where you'd go in order to derail Leo Kane's life.