Time travel is a complicated concept to include in a story. There are so many theories out there on how it would work, obviously none of them proven in any capacity, that we know of anyway. I would guess that none of them are provable since as interesting as I find time travel in theory and in fiction I do not actually believe it is possible in practice.
Just because I don’t believe time travel isn’t actually possible doesn’t mean I don’t want to read a good time travel story and this has the potential to be a very interesting time travel story. What would you think if someone claiming to be a time traveler killed your parents and now it was starting to look like that person might be your best friend?
The main character might be a woman, but given that the best friend is a man, I am going to go with a man to make it easier. You can obviously pick a female character for the main character if that makes more sense to you.
The main character in this prompt has to deal with that exact question. Orphaned as a child, the main character saw this supposed time traveler kill his parents. That has to have left a huge psychological scar on the main character.
While the main character did lose his parents, he still had a support system and one has to assume that he probably stayed in the same area, though that might not be the case. The reason I assume that is because of the best friend.
Now it is possible that the man who killed his parents and his best friend are not actually the same. They could be related. I’ve seen pictures of my dad in high school that look exactly like a black and white picture of my brother in his twenties. Given that my dad was a redhead and my brother is not, in color this would not have worked, but I can definitely buy that a parent and child at the same age can be mistaken for each other. In fact that’s not the only one of my siblings that look just like one of my parents. A couple years ago we found a black and white picture of my mom and up until that point we had all collectively thought that I was the one who looked most like our mom, but no. No, the woman in that picture looked like my sister with glasses on. It was crazy weird to see. And I have seen pictures of my grandma at the same age that if not for her clearly blonde hair would easily be mistaken for my mom and sister.
Of course I don’t believe for a second that this is the conclusion the person who wrote this prompt wants us to to come to. The person who wrote the prompt wants us to think that the friend went back and time and killed his best friends parents. I have to imagine that if that is really the case and the best friend is really a friend that the main character’s parents were horrible, maybe to the main character, maybe to people in general. Maybe the best friend learned that his best friends parents were serial killers and he worked for an agency that had the ability to travel through time and he volunteered to be the one to do it because he wanted to make it the least traumatic for his friend. Failed at that by the way.
Or maybe the parents abused the main character for years before finally killing him. Maybe they experimented on him, giving him things to “improve” him or “get rid of defects” he had and the best friend just wanted to spare him all of that.
We don’t know what lead to this situation, but we do know that the best friend and the main character’s parents’ killer looks like the same person. Do you think they are the same person?
