Hoping you have a very merry Christmas 😄🌲☃️🎁Lock your doors and fortify your chimneys. Hope you have a great one.

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It was Christmas Eve. But for Officer Maya Chen, working alone in the empty, dark offices of the Chronomaly Department, time meant very little. She had few friends to speak of, so the festive period was an opportunity to catch up on her Reg-Prog reports while accruing the unsociable hours bonus. All hours were unsociable hours, as far as she was concerned.

She was an age-regression analyst for the TFPD. Cases of age discrepencies were the department’s bread and butter, far more common than the esoteric stuff. Back-alley brain transplants. Old perverts using cosmetics to sneak into college dorms. Surgeons harvesting their young patients. All cases that crossed her desk. She replayed suspect interviews, cataloguing slang and cultural references to construct a profile of their true age. You could tell a lot about a person from a stray skibidi. It was steady, methodical work, and she had seen enough field duty for one lifetime.

The clock had just ticked over to midnight when her computer froze.

She tapped the keyboard repeatedly, but the monitor remained fixed on the half-completed report. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d saved. Rubbing her tired eyes, she pointed a warning finger at the inert laptop.

“I’m getting a cup of tea. You’ve got fifteen minutes to unfreeze yourself, or there’ll be trouble,” she said.

The empty precinct was even more silent than usual as she walked to the staff canteen.

The kettle refused to boil, no matter how she rattled the switch. She sighed and reached for an energy drink instead. It didn’t fizz when she snapped it open. She frowned, glancing at the clock on the wall, then the microwave. Both read 00:00. Her unease grew. She turned the can upside down and dropped it. It hung suspended in the air, a viscous ooze spilling from it like thick treacle. She set off for the central servers at a sprint.

A time anomaly in the very halls of the Chronomaly Department. On Christmas Day. It could only mean one thing. But he was supposed to be dead. For eighteen years, he’d been dead. His workshop worn down by the polar winds. His reindeer reduced to bones.

The server door was locked. She smashed it open with a fire extinguisher, wood splintering outward in a slow, drifting cloud as she rushed to the terminal and hammered in commands.

The central surveillance servers tracked huge amounts of data from all across the planet for signs of anything moving out of kilter with the flow of time. The fact that they weren’t blaring alarms could only mean that the entire planet was affected, and thus there was no frame of reference to compare against. The servers were thankfully powerful enough that the severe time dilation was less noticeable, though it still took long minutes for the machine to register her inputs and begin running through the data.

She loaded a dozen live satellite feeds. Earth looked like a still image. Her eyes flicked from monitor to monitor. There, a single moving pixel - a tiny red blip moving over Berlin. The satellite tracked it as it came to rest near the gold glow of a Christmas market. It zoomed, resolving a grainy image of a red and green sleigh from above. A portly, pixelated figure in red hopped down from it and began to move purposefully through the Christmas market, the only thing moving amidst the crowds that stood like statues. Most people joined the Transformation Police Department out of a desire to help. She felt horribly helpless, watching from orbit as the red figure touched one of the time-frozen figures, and the small cluster of beige pixels that was a person writhed and deformed into a larger blob of brown pixels that was no doubt a reindeer. The poor transformed individual was lashed to the front of the sleigh.

It was like watching a massacre as the red figure moved through the Christmas market, transforming all he came across. Men turned into gingerbread figures, or life-sized nutcracker dolls, or stuffed toys on carnival shelves, or plump turkeys for sale. There was an aura a few metres in diameter, around the figure, within which time moved as it should, and carnival rides near him began to whirl. A carousel came alive and dragged in a dozen men, fusing them inside its mechanisms.

The red figure, satisfied with his work, returned to his sleigh and whipped his reindeer up into the sky. The satellite tracked him as he began his reign of terror. Maya stared at the monitor in mute horror, unsure of what to do. There were response teams trained for dealing with these sorts of reality deviants. But deploying them still required them to be able to move.