A costume with remote controls can pause, rewind, and speed up time. What could possibly go wrong on Halloween?

Imagine yourself waking up one morning, the morning of Halloween, of course. After you follow your normal morning routine, you head outside. You notice a strange tingling in the air, almost as if there’s electricity around you. A feeling that’s very familiar, a feeling that only appears when the costume tree appears.

With that thought in mind, you turn around to look behind you, and you just see… you just see your home. You shrug in disappointment and turn around once again to continue walking, and that’s when you see it: the costume tree. It’s appeared out of pretty much nowhere, or maybe you’ve been transported to where it is. It’s never really clear how this works.

Either way, you walk towards the ancient-looking tree. You reach out your hands and grab the doorknob of the old wooden door. The door creaks open, revealing a huge room with row upon row upon row of different costumes, each one full of a special power.

This is the perfect situation for Halloween. You start to rummage through all of the different costumes, trying your best to find the perfect one for tonight. There are costumes that resemble your favorite comic book characters. There are standard profession costumes, like a doctor, construction worker, that sort of thing. You actually wonder what those would do if you put them on. There are costumes that look like all sorts of different animals.

And then you come across a costume that, uh, well, you’re not really sure what it looks like. It looks a bit like a super-speed suit made of blue and white, but on the arms are, well, something that could be best described as remote controls.

You unzip the costume, and you step inside. You put your left arm in, then your right arm, and then you grab a big strap on the back that helps you zip the thing up. As soon as the costume’s fully zipped, another strange tingling sensation heads up your spine. Whoa.

You look down at your wrists. Your left wrist has a whole series of buttons, one that looks like a play button, a rewind button, and, uh, even a fast-forward button. And below that, there’s some sort of dial that says “speed indicator.” It’s set directly to zero, but it looks like you can slide it down or slide it up. Weird.

On your other hand is a similar set of buttons, only this side seems to be connected to… I don’t know how to describe it. Almost like a ray gun or something, as if these buttons are designed to shoot at other objects or things around you.

You open the door to the costume tree, and you step outside. The only way to figure out what this thing does is to test it out a little bit. You look at your left wrist, and you see the stop button. Wondering what it’ll do, you press it, and all of a sudden every single thing around you stops.

The wind stops moving. The trees stop swaying. The birds, well, just kind of float there in midair, without even a single wing twitching or moving at all.

You begin to walk through the environment, away from the costume tree, and eventually you come to a strange-looking wall of wiggly air. As you step through the wall, you find yourself back in front of your house, as if there’s some sort of force field or illusion around the magic costume tree that you couldn’t see going full speed.

Out by your house, everything is still stopped. There’s not a car moving. People are frozen in place on the streets. You see a cat stopped in mid-chase that seemed to be running after a mouse that is also completely frozen in place. It’s really strange.

You hit the play button on your left wrist, and immediately things start to move again. Some people seem a little surprised that you’re now standing there, since you weren’t the last time they knew anything about it. But they just shrug it off, as maybe they weren’t paying attention or something like that.

You hit the stop button again, and immediately everything freezes in place. This time you decide to try to interact with some things. You walk over towards a tree, and you gently push against it. Strangely, well, instead of just kind of, you know, being a solid tree, chunks of wood start to splinter apart, as if you’re an incredibly strong person hitting the tree at an incredibly fast pace.

You realize that maybe that is what’s going on. Everything else is frozen, after all, but you, you are still moving. Compared to the frozen things, it’s as if you’re moving at a wildly fast speed. Anything you touch must be very, very, very brittle.

You carefully back away from the tree with this in mind, but you trip over something on the ground. You fly through the air and you crash into a car. Normally that wouldn’t damage things too much, but at this speed, well, you leave a human-sized dent in the car, completely crushing one side of it.

“Uh, uh, oops,” you say.

You look down at the controls on your left wrist, and your eye catches the rewind button.

“I wonder,” you say, as you press down on the rewind button.

Suddenly everything around you becomes a blur. Without wanting to or meaning to, you begin to walk backwards, or walk backwards through your own timeline, I mean. You fall out of the car, and the car uncrumples. You move back towards the tree, move your hand away, and the tree fixes itself. You then continue to move backwards through the same timeline until you find yourself standing inside the costume tree, zipping up your zipper once again.

This thing can bring you backward in time. You try to hit the reverse button once again, but each time you do, it just reverses you to doing up your zipper. It must only be able to reverse you to the point where you put the suit on in the first place. Cool.

You head back outside and back through the little barrier just outside the costume tree. The world is moving at a normal pace, and you look down at your controls again. You select the little slider, the one for speed. As you slide it to the left, everything around you seems to sort of slow down, and when you slide it all the way over, it completely stops. This control seems to give you more precise control over how fast or how slow you’re going.

You then move the speed thing up all the way, until everything around you starts going really, really fast and then becomes a complete blur. Suddenly it gets dark out and then light again and then dark again and then light again, all in the flash of an eye.

You pull the control back to the zero point and look around you. The world seems to be about the same, but all of the Halloween decorations that were formerly set all throughout the streets are completely gone. All the leaves have fallen off the trees, and, well, frankly it seems like it’s just about to be winter once again.

How much time passed? I must have kind of fast-forwarded through it, you realize.

You walk towards the street, and then, sitting on a telephone pole, you see a poster of something very, very familiar. A poster of you. And above the poster it says, “Missing. If you see anything, please call,” followed by a series of numbers.

“Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” you say. “Everyone must think… everyone must think I’m missing. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

You look down at your wrist once again, and you see the rewind button. “Oh. Oh, yeah.”

You quickly press the rewind button, and once again everything seems to reverse, day to night and night to day, in the opposite direction, of course, until you find yourself once again standing inside the costume tree, zipping up your zipper.

Oh, this costume’s really weird.

You head back outside, and again everything looks like Halloween. People are getting ready for trick-or-treaters, decorating their houses with pumpkins and spiderwebs and all sorts of creepy-looking things.

You then wonder what the other set of buttons does, the ones that look like they’re sort of attached to a ray gun. You’re worried about trying them out, but remembering that you have the reverse button, probably nothing can go too wrong.

You lift up your right wrist and point it towards a bird that’s sitting on a tree. You press the stop button, and a red light shoots out, hitting the bird directly. The bird freezes in place. You press the play button, and the bird starts to move again. You press the reverse button, and the bird starts to move backwards.

Weird. This thing must be able to individually control objects. That is so cool.

You then start to wonder how you can use this suit to get as much candy as possible. You could easily pause time and run from house to house. Frankly, you could pretty much take all the candy you wanted, and no one would even notice. But, uh, that might not be very nice, or very legal.

Either way, you decide it’s a good idea to try it out, to see if this thing can let you move at incredible speeds. You adjust the dial to go slower and slower, and the world around you creeps to a halt. You leave the dial allowing things to move just a little bit, and then you start to run forward.

Unfortunately for you, it feels like it normally does when you run. It’s no easier, and from your perspective, it’s no faster. People watching you probably think it’s really, really fast compared to the speed at which they are moving, but to you it just feels like a normal run.

You stop at the end of a street and adjust the dial back to normal. The world around you buzzes back to life, and then you’re suddenly startled by a crashing noise: the noise of two cars crashing together. And then another one hits the cars, and another, and another, and another, until the intersection you’re standing at has a giant car pileup.

Smoke is coming out of some of the cars, and then people start climbing out of the cars, and then people start yelling at each other about how it’s your fault or their fault or somebody’s fault that their car’s gotten in this accident. You start to feel really bad for the people, and you wonder if maybe there’s something you could do to stop this accident.

You press the stop button, and everyone freezes in place. With everything frozen, you begin to look around the car crash scene. You pay careful attention to the first two cars that crashed. One of them is a black sedan, and the other one is a bright orange hatchback. You do your best to memorize the two cars and which direction they were coming from, and then you press down lightly on the reverse button.

Suddenly all of the cars shoot away from each other, and you once again begin walking backwards, back to the street corner just before the crash took place. You press stop again on your left wrist, and everything freezes in place, the crash completely gone and the world frozen at the exact point when you arrived at the intersection in the first place.

You look down the street to see the orange car, and down the other street to see the black car. You jog towards the cars with everything completely frozen. When you get towards the orange car, you look in the window. The driver of this car has kids in the back seat and both hands on the steering wheel. The woman driving it seems to be paying very careful attention to the road. You can’t see anything that would have caused this crash to take place in the first place.

You decide to check on the other car, the black sedan. You run towards the other car, and when you arrive and look in the windows, you see a, well, an older businessman driving the thing. He has one hand on the wheel and the other one on his cell phone. Now that could be the reason the crash took place.

With the world still frozen, you very carefully and very slowly open up the car door, trying not to move it so fast that everything just kind of shatters. After all, you are moving at an incredibly fast speed compared to everything else. With the door open, you reach inside the car. You grab a hold of the man’s cell phone and gently pull it out of his hand. You place it in the back seat of the car. You carefully and slowly close the door, and then you run back towards the corner of the intersection.

You take a deep breath and you press play. You watch as the two cars approach the intersection, but this time you see the man in the black car looking around furiously, clearly wondering what happened to his cell phone. He then sees the car and the intersection and slams on the brakes. The car skids sideways, but eventually comes to a halt before entering the intersection. The woman in the orange car passes through very, very safely.

You just avoided a car crash, and you can think of so many other things that this suit would be useful for. The ability to go back in time and fix your mistakes. The ability to stop all time around you and slowly make decisions about everything. Not to mention the fact that when time’s stopped, you seem to have some sort of super-strength. So many ways to help the world, so many things you could possibly do.

But tonight is Halloween, and on Halloween, well, the thing to do is to get candy. And so you decide that the best thing you can do right now is to try to set a record. A record for the most candy ever collected.

You run back to your house. You grab a whole bunch of pillowcases. Those should be enough to hold a whole bunch of candy. And then you run outside. You stop time entirely. You begin running from house to house, and as soon as you’re at the door, you allow time to start again, knock on the door, say “Trick or treat,” get some of your candy, and then immediately hit the stop button again, allowing you to head towards the next house.

In a few instances, you come across a situation where someone is already knocking on a particular door. Not really a problem for you, though. I mean, sure, you could wait your turn, but you also have a very special ability. You point your right wrist towards the people, and you press down on the reverse button. A red beam of light shoots out, attaches itself to the people in front of you, and they suddenly start to reverse through their path, walking backwards and away from the door.

When they’re far enough away, you hit the stop button again and run up towards the door. Once again, starting time, collecting candy, stopping time and moving on. The whole thing is really, really tiring because, as I mentioned before, everything seems like it’s the same amount of time to you. It does, however, allow you to collect a whole bunch of candy in a very short period of time. Well, a short period of time for everyone else.

When you’re done collecting sacks upon sacks of candy, you head back towards your house. You place the candy on your front doorstep, and a strange tugging sensation starts to pull at your suit. The suit being recalled to the magic costume tree.

You, and the suit along with you, begin flying through the air. You pass through the strange illusion that’s protecting the costume tree from anyone seeing it, straight through the door of the tree, and then you’re gently placed down on the ground. You unzip the remote-control suit, and it immediately flies back to its hanger, hanging itself up.

Wishing that the costume tree could come whenever you want it to, you open the door and walk outside. You pass through the barrier and find yourself back in front of your house once again. You grab the sacks and sacks of candy you’ve collected, bring it inside to the kitchen, and drop it there for your parents to check things out.

Then, feeling as if you’ve just spent fifteen hours trick-or-treating, which may actually be accurate from your point of view, you head directly toward your bedroom. You lie down on the bed, you pull the covers over top of yourself, and you immediately allow your eyes to close.

That was a lot of effort, and you can feel it in your arms and legs, and in your head as well. It feels like you’ve stayed up way, way past your bedtime. You begin to focus on your breath, and with each breath, the tension releases from your muscles. Letting go of any tension in your arms, any tension in your legs, your shoulders, your neck, your back, your stomach.

And soon enough it feels like you’re floating on a fluffy and very, very comfortable cloud. And the more you breathe, the more your mind begins to drift away, off to new dreams and new adventures to come.

Listen to the episodeListen on YouTube