Clock Roaches: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"2. Infest the timestream with time-beavers."''|'''Justin B. Rye''', [http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/chrono.html#ante Twenty Fun Things To Do With A Time Machine]}}
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* ''[[Primer]]'': The main characters become their own Clock Roaches after they realize what they've done to the flow of time. Although their clean up does create several paradoxes anyway...
* This is the role of the main character in ''[[Donnie Darko]]''
* In the ''[[Final Destination]]'' movies, Death itself manages to act as a Clock Roach. The protagonists have a vision of their own gruesome demise and save themselves along with a group of their friends, and the remainder of the movie consists of Death finding [[Necro Non Sequitur|increasingly gruesome, sadistic, and physically impossible]] ways of correcting the error.
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* ''[[The Langoliers]]'' in the book and movie of that title by [[Stephen King]]. In the story, several airline passengers find themselves trapped in a moment in the past, which is slowly fading and winding down as the present time moves further and further away, until the moment is completely eaten by the title Langoliers.
* ''[[Cthulhu Mythos]]'': The Hounds of Tindalos chase down time travellers; the only way to hold them off is to eliminate all angles in the immediate area, since they can only travel through these. Note that they're not portrayed as necessary or helpful; they just '''[[Eldritch Abomination|are]]'''.
* ''Singularity Sky'' by [[Charles Stross]]: the invention of faster-than-light travel brings with it the ability to travel through time. This in turn leads to the potential for whole new strategies of warfare and unpleasant weapons taking advantage of the ability to meddle with the past... but it is all prevented by a particularly powerful AI which uses its own (particularly effective) causality violation devices to smite any would-be temporal saboteurs with godlike amounts of overkill
It is also hinted that the reason the universe is habitable at all is that supremely powerful intelligences meddled with the first moments of the big bang via time travel, [[Stable Time Loop|enabling themselves to exist]].
* ''Sisters Grimm'': The pink eraser things in book ten, since the book they are in was magically linked to the time of fairy tales, and any changes change history, so Mr. Editor guy has his pink erasers eat everything and he resets the story. No, the one in the Book, not the Editor of the book (Bad Pun Not Intended).
* In the [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer|Buffyverse]] collection of short stories, ''Tales of the Slayer, Volume 2'', the short story ''Again'' by Jane Espenson has these after Buffy, Willow, and Xander are returned to their high-school selves. The roaches in this case manifest as mobile shadows that attach themselves to things they find in the wrong time, causing excruciating pain as they (presumably) eat them. They appear to be somewhat physical, as Buffy manages to cut one off of her arm, cutting her arm in the process.
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* ''[[Doctor Who]]''
** The Reapers, [[Monster of the Week|Flying Killer Time Gargoyles]] from "Father's Day". The Ninth Doctor describes them in terms similar to white blood
** The original series serial ''The Time Monster'' had the Chronovores, which were similar enough to the Reapers (giant winged things that eat people's timelines) that they may as well be considered a related critter.
* ''[[Eerie Indiana]]'': The garbage men in "The Lost Hour".
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== Video Games ==
* ''[[Prince of Persia]]: Warrior Within'' has the Dahaka, a guardian of time that hunts the Prince in order to restore time to its original flow. It's implied that whenever someone changes the past, a Dahaka shows up to deal with
{{spoiler|If you get the [[Golden Ending]], you kill the Dahaka, and the Empress of Time sails away with you. Thus the Sands of Time are not created in the past. (They get created when the Empress is killed.)}}
* In [[Super Robot Wars]], Ingram Pliskin and his {{spoiler|clone}} Cobray are secretly these. According to Ingram in an exposition, every universe is given only one (hence why Cobray's powers didn't manifest until after {{spoiler|Ingram was dead}}), and that their job is to protect causality by ''deleting from existence any force that threatens it''.
* ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'':
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** The Bronze Dragonflight and their hired help (i.e. the players) are this.
** The Infinite Dragonflight that attempts to change the timeline is universally villainous - only two out of four of their attempts even try to have a weak [[Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act]] excuse (which is explained to make the current situation worse anyway), the rest being outright villainy.
** Their goals have been muddied even further with confirmation in ''Wrath'' and ''Cataclysm'' that the Infinites are a corrupted future version of the Bronzes. While still
* In the ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'' expansion "Wings of the Goddess", The avatar Atomos is a mindless being that eats 'dispensable' time, including the memories anybody might have of alternative timelines that have become endangered due to the intervention of time travelers. All of this ends up dumped in the Walk of Echoes, a graveyard for everything that might have been.
* ''[[TimeShift]]'': The [[AFGNCAAP|protagonist]] fits this role, as there is [[Flash Back|apparently]] a danger of the [[Alternate Timeline]] "colliding" with our own if the [[Big Bad]] isn't stopped. What exactly this [[Divide by Zero|would mean]] is not explored, suffice it to say [[The End of the World as We Know It|that would be bad]].
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