I've been thinking that a sort of 'Memento' meets 'Quantum Leap' form of time travel would be a quite creative (and to my knowledge, unused) format:

You can rewind your life to any given point, but you only have about 5 seconds of "future memory" before the timelines synchronize, and you forget everything that happened beyond the point you just reset to.

Of course, to any outsider, it'd look like you had Tourette's syndrome, and were given to periodically shouting to yourself or scribbling cryptic messages in a pocket notebook. But it would only take you one or two jumps before you won the lottery, and could be as eccentric as you wanted. The only question is... then what?

Oh yeah, and you can only do it so many times in rapid succession before it starts to seriously hurt. So you can't use your power in a fight to predict every move your opponent is going to make, and you can't give yourself multi-part messages. You also can't use it when you're unconscious or dead. (so no guarantees of survival if you decide to walk into the middle of a gun fight or across a mine field)

You can, however, preempt your previous jump as often as you want, but all you'll be doing is resetting your previous reset. Not especially useful, except if your past self "didn't get it" the last time, and you want to try rephrasing your message.

Now, 5 seconds isn't a lot of time (especially if you count the second or two it'll take you to fumble out the pen and paper), but once you've gone through a few resets, you'll inevitably end up developing a system of shorthand that allows you to "chunk" more and more complex pieces of information.

I envision a guy living in a mansion with an enormous Dewey decimal system-style collection of index cards, containing all sorts of crazy scenarios and generalized messages to himself.

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