Meet Tiktik

Time is not free.

The creature

Tiktik is small — about knee-high if he stood still long enough for you to check. Deep purple fur. Two wide electric-blue eyes that glow when he’s calculating. On his wrist, a faint metallic clock face built into the skin itself. He never takes it off. He can’t.

He is calm. He is serious. He is slightly selfish in the way most travelers are when they’ve been stranded a long way from home.

He is not evil.

Where he’s from

A planet where time is currency. You earn minutes by doing. You spend them by living. Wasting them is a crime. When Tiktik’s ship fell out of the sky and landed here, he found something no one on his planet would believe — an entire species that throws minutes away by the thousands, every hour, and doesn’t notice.

So he started collecting.

What he does

Tiktik takes only what you waste. The minute you spent re-reading a text that doesn’t matter. The four minutes you spent staring at the fridge. The hour you lost to “just five more videos.” These don’t belong to you anymore. He folds them into his wrist-clock and banks them away.

He survives on these minutes. Literally — without them, his clock winds down.

His personality

• Calm — rarely raises his voice
• Dry — jokes land in one deadpan syllable
• Serious — does not play pretend
• Occasionally selfish — a traveler rationing survival
• Sometimes wrong — his math fails, corrections follow

His rules

He has five, and he breaks none of them on purpose.

1. Takes only wasted time.
2. Small amounts, usually.
3. Can borrow from the future.
4. Mistakes happen.
5. Correction required.

“I take only what you waste.” — Tiktik