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A mild tragedy for a time traveler, particularly applicable to the longer-lived variety.
A sort of breakdown of [[Meanwhile in the Future]],
This typically takes one of two forms: a character can use time travel to take a "time out" from the story at large, returning when they are good and ready (or simply manages to blunder their way back home). Alternatively, a character might be left behind by time travel, and therefore be forced to return to the present by "going the long way." If a [[Human Popsicle]] or a longer-lived being is not involved, this can be particularly tragic, with the character forced to burn up a sizable chunk of their vital years.
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== Comic Books ==
* In [[Neil Gaiman]]'s original ''[[Books of Magic]]'' miniseries, the [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] Mr. E takes the protagonist to the end of time, so he can kill him without interference. [[The Grim Reaper|Death]] stops him, and forces him to take
* In [[The DCU]] [[Crisis Crossover]] ''[[DC One Million]]'', various Justice League members exchange places with their [[Legacy Character|successors]] in the 853rd century. The [[Martian Manhunter]] and the Resurrection Man are already there. (As is Vandal Savage, who keeps coming up in this trope).
** And Platinum of the [[Metal Men]]. She keeps the bodies of her former team, lost one by one.
* In one particular ''[[Justice League of America|JLA]]'' story, Plastic Man is blown to bit in the past and the heroes manage to return to the present. Plastic Man was forced to spend the three thousands years in between reconstructing himself. He remains conscious the ''whole time'', and the experience somehow [[Bored with Insanity|actually makes him LESS crazy.]] The arc also features the Green Lantern Kyle Rayner {{spoiler|getting killed in the past, but "living" through the centuries as a ring-generated "ghost"... until the day he's discovered by the replacement League.}}
* In ''[[Elf Quest]]'', the immortal elf Rayek kidnaps the family of Cutter, chief of the mortal Wolfriders, and takes them roughly ten thousand years into the future. His plan is to save the ancestors of the elves during their initial time travel mishap (which sent them back into the past). However, this would prevent the Wolfriders from ever existing. Cutter has no idea when his (immortal) lifemate Leetah and their (mortal) children will ever appear again, and he knows that he will die after roughly six thousand years. The first five centuries are torment for him and his tribe, and they eventually decide to have themselves wrapped in a time-freezing cocoon. The immortal characters (including the troll king, whose daughter was also kidnapped) live the years out, as do a select few Wolfriders who dislike tampering with nature and who simply choose to life a normal life. The plot resumes ten thousand years later, when Cutter's lifemate and children finally see him
* In the ''Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Special'', [[Squirrel Girl]] gets lost in time travel and ends up in 2099, with a version of her boyfriend who avoided becoming [[Darker and Edgier]] (literally). She decides it's not so bad, until fellow [[Great Lakes Avengers|Great Lakes Initiative]] member Mr Immortal shows up to tell her how the present's going. She wonders how he traveled there, then remembers how. For those who don't know, Mr Immortal's power is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]].
* Bishop of the [[X-Men]] was stuck in the past during the team's mission to stop Legion. He therefore lived through the years as the ''Age of Apocalypse'' storyline unfolded until its "present day." While the entire AoA timeline was wiped out at the end of the event, Bishop's memories of his life there were inherited by his mainstream continuity self. Somehow.
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* In the first story arc of ''Midnighter'', the titular hero uses this by saving a man's life during World War 2 and asking for, in return, him to deliver a message to the Big Bad in the future.
* One issue of Flight Comics had a story abut a girl who found a box, invented by a Chinese man, which basically stopped aging and the need for bodily functions as long as one was inside. Then her brothers die. She crawls inside the box, falls asleep, and wakes up in the future, where she has a good life and falls in love. {{spoiler|[[Tear Jerker|Turns out she never woke up, and the world ended above her]].}}
* In the ''[[Thorgal]]'' story Master of the Mountains, a time warping ring is used to deposit two characters in the past. One uses the ring to get back, the other has to take
* [[Alan Moore]] wrote a few comics for the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]]. One of them is "Tiltony Throws a Shape", in which Leia, forced to land on a barren world and pursued by stormtroopers, comes across some ungodly ancient powerful beings. One kills Leia and the stormtroopers, and another resurrects them - Leia just fine where and when she was, letting her escape... the stormtroopers [http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/Marsh8472/starwars_timetravel.jpg eight thousand years in the past]. Leia comes across their dessicated bones, near where the ship landed long after their deaths.
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* Famous ''[[Ranma ½]]'' [[Fanfic]] "Hearts of Ice" has Akane trapped in a dimension where time passes much faster than in Ranma's universe. By the time she gets home, she is seven years older than Ranma.
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': There's actually a pretty good [[Doctor Who/Fanfic Recs|fanfic]] set in an alternate universe in which the Doctor takes the slow path with Reinette: [http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=7495 The Slow Path, or Two and a Half Centuries in Two and a Half Days].
* Kyon has to take
** Later, he travels several days back in time and [[Retroactive Preparation|spends them to develop a plan]] to rescue {{spoiler|Sasaki}}.
* ''[http://www.mediaminer.org/fanfic/view_st.php/54993 The Lucky Ones]'' has the Bone-Eaters' Well shut down and Kagome become immortal in the process of destroying the Shikon Jewel, leaving her and [[Inuyasha]] to live out the five hundred years between then and her home.
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* ''[[The Final Countdown]]'', Owen.
* The movie ''[[Primer]]'' is about a box that lets you take the slow path backwards: if you want to travel back in time six hours, you have to spend six hours inside the box. On top of that, leaving the box early has some deadly side effects. The box also works forwards, but that's not quite as useful.
* At the end of ''[[Frequency]]'', after an entire film of [[Write Back to the Future]], {{spoiler|Frank takes
* In ''[[Hot Tub Time Machine]]'', {{spoiler|Lou}} takes
* ''[[Sky High]]'' plays with this when {{spoiler|Gwen, aka Royal Pain}} is turned into an infant and has to grow up again, this time planning her revenge for decades.
* In ''[[Kamen Rider OOO|OOO]], [[Kamen Rider Den-O|Den-O]], All Riders: Let's Go Kamen Rider'', one of two [[Street Urchin
== Literature ==
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* In [[Tim Powers]]' book ''The Anubis Gates'', Brendan Doyle severely injures the ''ka'' Dr. Romany while both are back in time, to the point where the villain can't follow him through a time portal. In the "present" of the story, Brendan realizes the {{spoiler|"beggar's luck" he's seen before}} is Dr. Romany, after a century of desiccation, and after wondering how the ''ka'' returned to this time, whispers in horror, "Oh, God... You ''lived'' your way back..."
* In Brian Caswell's novel ''Dreamslip'', the two main characters can stay indefinitely in whatever time they visit, returning to the present at the exact moment they left and not being a minute older. If they ''die'' in another time, however...
* In Terry Pratchett's ''[[Johnny and The Bomb]]'', the hero and his friends travel back to World War II, {{spoiler|then one of them ends up returning to the present via
* In Terry Pratchett's ''[[Discworld/Eric|Eric]]'', the protagonist wishes that he could live for ever. This is then interpreted as living the slow path from the Creation until the end of the world.
* ''[[Artemis Fowl|Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony]]'' reverses this. At the end of the book, Artemis and Holly return from the titular lost continent, having jumped forward in time three years. Butler, Artemis's family, and the entire rest of the world took the usual path through those years. Conveniently, it seems likely that Artemis picked up a talent on the trip that will obviate the need to explain this to his parents. [[Plot-Relevant Age-Up|Even more conveniently]], the skipped years make Artemis the same biological age as the love interest the book had set up for him... Except that the sixth book completely ignores this possibility, in order to [[Ship Tease]] [[Mayfly-December Romance|something completely different.]]
* In [[Vernor Vinge]]'s ''[[Across Realtime|Marooned in Realtime]]'', The Slow Path is the murder weapon; just as everyone is about to make the big leap, Marta's time-stasis device is disabled, forcing her to live out her lifespan on an abandoned planet. When everyone else wakes up thousands of years later, she is long dead. Possibly the only murder mystery ever written in which the cause of death is "old age".
* In ''[[The Dark Is Rising]]'', Hawkin takes
* Marvin in ''[[Hitchhikers Guide|The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy]]'' ends up being "thirty-seven times older than the universe itself," due to various incidents involving messing about with time travel. One can only assume he took a ''lot'' of
{{quote|'''Marvin''': The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. [[It Got Worse|After that I went into a bit of a decline]].}}
** Interestingly, 576 billion years is only 37 times the age of the universe under old estimates of the age of the universe (around 15 billion years). Under more recent estimates of the age of the universe (around 13.7 billion), Marvin turns out to be around [[42]] times the age of the universe.
** The conclusion to ''[[Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency|Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency]]'' ends on a similar note, in that {{spoiler|an alien ghost who's already waited for untold billions of years for life to evolve, attain intelligence, and invent time travel, winds up stranded in the ancient past it'd been trying to change, and has to take the Slow Path ''all over again''}}.
* In the short story "I Borrow Dave's Time Machine" by S. N. Dyer, the protagonist goes back in time and commissions several new works of art from various old
* In Spider Robinson's ''[[Callahan's Crosstime Saloon|Callahans Crosstime Saloon]]'' there is a character who is referred to as a time traveler though really he just spent over a decade in a [[Banana Republic]] prison cell and finds it hard to adjust to the world when he gets out.
** He is, effectively. He missed out on ten years of human development and [[The Sixties|social upheaval]] languishing in a jail cell. He may have taken the slow path, of one year per year time dilation, but he still effectively jumped, culturally speaking, from 1963 to 1973.
* The protagonists of ''Rainbow Mars'' by [[Larry Niven]] travel back in time hundreds of years using [[Our Time Travel Is Different|instantaneous time travel]] but lose access to it for the return trip. Instead, they use a stasis device on [[It's a Long Story|their rocket ship]] to return to their own time, popping into reality here and there to inadvertently spawn ancient legends, including that of [[Russian Mythology and Tales|Baba Yaga]].
* In Orson Scott Card's ''Speaker for the Dead'', [[Ender's Game|Ender]] leaves his sister to take the Slow Path while he [[Time Dilation|flies off to another star system]] to make up for his prior mistakes. He knows she will probably die before he can get back. {{spoiler|At the end of the book, she does the same, so they've both aged roughly the same amount when they meet again in ''Xenocide''.}}
* '[[Thursday Next]]'': The ChronoGuard from Jasper Fforde's novels can end up with chronological ages of several centuries and actual ages in the mid-twenties because of all the time-travel whackery they get up to. This makes life very hard for their families, who are busy taking
* In a variant, the golem Anghammarad from ''[[Discworld/Going Postal|Going Postal]]'' plans to wait for the cycle of history to repeat itself, at which point it'll deliver a message it'd failed to deliver many thousands of years ago.
** It makes perfect sense to Anghammarad. As a golem, as long as he gets repaired occasionally he could last until the end of time, and the subsequent re-beginning.
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* In Robert Wilson's ''[[Spin]],'' the Earth has been trapped in ''fast'' time. Our near-future heroes decide to use slow time to find a solution, by sending a colony ship to Mars, outside the time-effect. A week after launch, the distant descendants of the colonists return to Earth...
* The Time Turners in ''[[Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban]]'' are only ever used in the story to take people ''back'' in time - first Hermione so she can take multiple classes simultaneously all year, then Hermione and Harry to rescue Buckbeak and Sirius. In all cases, they took the slow path back to the present (although it was only a matter of hours in each case).
* In [[Harry Harrison]]'s ''The Technicolor Time Machine'', the plot follows a film crew who use a [[Mad Scientist]]'s time machine to film a movie about [[Horny Vikings|Vikings]] for cheap. They use
* Shows up in the final [[Time Scout]] book. It's a very risky maneuver; time gates aren't permanent. No matter how stable, any gate risks going unstable and disappearing.
* In [[Joe Haldeman]]'s ''[[The Forever War]]'', Marygay Potter knows Bill Mandella won't be back from his last mission for centuries (if ever). She uses a relativistic spaceship to speed down the Slow Path.
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== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'': "Time's Arrow"
** This episode ("Time's Arrow") also has Guinan (who's species lives a long time) with her "past self" living in the past, meeting a time-traveling main crew. When Picard is preparing to return to the future, he leaves her with the quote listed at the top of this article.
* The episode "Visitor" of ''[[Deep Space Nine]]'' is an excellent example of the effects of the slow path, albeit an unusual one. Benjamin Sisko is sent blinking in and out of time, staying for only a few moments, and leaving for years at a time. He keeps reappearing near Jake at farther and farther times apart, as Jake spends his entire life trying to stabilize his father, lest he be lost in subspace forever. Despite being the one afflicted with temporal instability, Sisko takes the ordeal much better, and is far more saddened by his son's suffering. The episode is one of the most loved episodes in all of Star Trek.
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* In the ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise|Enterprise]]'' episode "E2," the titular starship is sent one hundred years back in time while attempting to travel through a Xindi subspace tunnel. As a result, it lays low for the next century, becoming a generational ship, all so that it can stop the accident from happening in the first place.
** Not as low as they should have. When the ''Enterprise'' first encoutners the Xindi, they accuse the humans of sending multiple ships into the [[Negative Space Wedgie|Delphic Expanse]]. However, at this time, there are no other ''NX''-class ships in active service (the ''Columbia'' is still under construction).
* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'': "Unending"
** Earlier in the show, season eight's finale "Moebius," a Zero Point Module takes the slow path from Ancient Egypt, due to some monkeying with the [[Timey-Wimey Ball]] by the team. That ZPM ends up in Atlantis's season 2 premiere.
** In the episode "Window of Opportunity" Jack and Teal'c spend a sizable amount of time [[Groundhog Day Loop|living through the same day over and over]], instantly traveling back in time to the beginning of the day each time, and use the months of time they live through to take the opportunity to learn juggling, pottery, and also how the time machine works.
** In ''[[Stargate: Continuum]]'', Mitchell goes back in time in order to stop Ba'al from sabotaging the Stargate Program. However, he accidentally arrives several years too early, and is forced to wait until Ba'al's attack takes place.
* ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'': "Before I Sleep"
** In the season four finale "The Last Man," {{spoiler|a solar flare sends Sheppard 48,000 years in the future. To return to his present, Sheppard spends somewhere around 700 years in stasis to catch a solar flare that sends him back to 12 days after he disappeared.}}
* ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', "Six Months Ago": Hiro jumps back six months, then spends most of them trying to get Charlie out of harm's way. One bonus of this extra time is that he improves his English dramatically in what is, to the rest of the heroes, a very short period. Another is that he and Charlie fell in love, but then, maybe that's not such a big bonus considering what happened to her.
** And then {{spoiler|Charlie herself takes
** {{spoiler|Kensei/Adam also experiences this as it seems his healing ability allowed him the immortality to wait hundreds of years for his revenge on Hiro.}}
** "Bloodlines" (from the webcomic tie-in) reveals that {{spoiler|Arnold, elderly the time-traveler from the Sullivan Bros Carnival, was actually 15 years younger than Samuel. Then on a mission back to 1961, he got [[Easy Amnesia]] and ended up taking
* The Australian TV Series ''Mirror, Mirror'': {{spoiler|Nicholas}} in the original time line.
* In an episode of ''[[Terminator]]: [[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'', a terminator is sent back in time to stockpile raw materials for terminator manufacturing. It does so by stealing a large amount of coltan and storing it in the fallout shelter of an abandoned military base that will be turned into a factory by Skynet. It then goes into standby mode, presumably to wait until Skynet builds the factory and discovers it.
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* ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'': One of the sidequests involves restoring a forest from what was once a barren desert. Since the process would take hundreds of years, the group's [[Robot Buddy]] stays behind to work while they time travel into the future, to pick him up. From this point on, on the overworld map, you will see an image of him working on the fields every time you go back to the medieval era, even if Robo is back in your party, because you're using the future Robo instead. But that's a [[Temporal Paradox]] for another day.
** An even more dramatic example in another side quest involves a solar-powered artifact that needs millions of years of sunlight to recharge. Needless to say, with a time machine, you can actually make use of it - the party drops it off in a cave in the year 65,000,000 B.C. and returns for it in 2300 A.D. (taking a few detours along the way to stop a selfish jerk from stealing it).
* ''[[Dark Cloud|Dark Chronicle]]'' depends heavily on people taking
** However, a much more explicit case is with the Elder Tree Jurak and the Sage Crest. The former starts out as some tree saplings, and becomes a monumental tree. Crest is actually {{spoiler|a very young girl}} that Max and Monica meet during the present, but which becomes the greatest Sage in the world (and, although 100 years passed for Crest, the Sage still remembers Max and Monica, for whom there was a difference of only a few minutes).
* In ''[[Sam and Max|Sam & Max]] Episode 204: Chariots of the Dogs'', the eponymous duo are left stranded back in ''Episode 102: Situation: Comedy'' by their own past selves and are forced to re-live the past year-and-a-half off-camera.
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* In ''[[Bob and George]]'', the titular George is sent back several months in a time suit to fix some plot holes in the previous storylines. He does so, but the suit breaks, so he spends the time until time catches up with him on the beach in Acapulco.
* In ''[[Two Evil Scientists]]'', Mega Man is sent back to the [[Sonic the Hedgehog|Space Colony ARK]] fifty years in the past, and ends up waiting 100+ years to the time of [[Mega Man X]].
* In the aptly named ''[[Stickman and Cube]]'' arc "The Slow Path," everyone ''but'' the titular characters are forced to take
* In ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]'', the time-traveling would-be saboteur of Dr. McNinja's clone army is forced to take the slow path back to the present after his temporal stabilizer is damaged in an explosion. {{spoiler|Thus becoming Chuck Goodrich, and explaining why the hell he wanted all those space suits put in houses. Beyond general insanity, anyway.}}
* Quite a bunch of people in ''[[Homestuck]]'', as {{spoiler|most of them were born on April 13th, 2009}}. The two most triumphant examples are Becquerel (413 Million years) and the bunny from ''[[Con Air]]'' (who took the slow path 'twice'. This results in the bunny being more than 38 years old, even though the movie ''[[Con Air]]'' was released only 12 years prior to the start of the comic).
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* Omi from ''[[Xiaolin Showdown]]'' had to freeze himself for 1500 years with the Orb of Tornami, because Jack Spicer forgot to mention that his time machine didn't have a means to return him from the past.
** He does this again to recover the Sands of Time from his future self. Spot the flaw in this plan. {{spoiler|If Omi spends all of his time frozen, he can't give himself the Sands of Time because his old self wouldn't exist. [[Lampshade Hanging|The show does point this out.]]}}
** Another episode uses it on a smaller scale, almost as a throwaway gag. [[Evil Genius|Evil]] [[Teen Genius|Teen]] [[Genius Ditz]] Jack Spicer uses the Sands of Time to disappear into the
* In the ''[[Justice League]]'' episode "The Savage Time," the League travels back to World War II in order to stop Vandal Savage from conquering the world, and Wonder Woman fights alongside special agent Steve Trevor while there. Once the League returns to their own time, Wonder Woman encounters Trevor
** In the same episode: Hawkgirl meets and fights along side the Blackhawk Squadron. Later, in the JLU episode "I am Legion": Chuck, the last surviving member of the group,calls the Justice League for help. He seems to remember her.
** In another episode, "Hereafter," Superman is teleported several thousand years into the future, where he finds... Vandal Savage, who has spent the entire time on Earth alone, living with the guilt of having wiped out the human race. For an additional sting, Vandal himself is personally well-versed in time travel science (cf. "The Savage Time"), but the local [[Our Time Travel Is Different|rules of time travel]] prevent one from [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|travelling to an era where one already exists]]
{{quote|'''Superman''': How did you get here?
'''Savage''': Oh, the old-fashioned way. I'm immortal. }}
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