One afternoon, a young adventurer named Piper burst through his door, trailing the scent of rain and distant mountains. She slapped a crumpled map onto the counter.

Piper took the watch, crossed the pass in ten minutes, and spent the remaining two eating a stolen scone on the troll’s snoring belly. She returned the watch the next day, slightly singed, slightly smug.

“This is the There and Back Again ,” he said. “Wind it once. For exactly the runtime of a hobbit’s unexpected journey—no more, no less.”

“How long is that?” Piper asked.

The old clockmaker, Bilbo Baggins by name (though no relation to the famous one, he’d insist), had a dusty shop at the end of a crooked lane. His specialty was not ordinary time. He built runtimes —tiny, humming devices that could compress a long journey into a single pocket-watch’s tick, or stretch a moment of courage into a small, quiet eternity.

“I need a hobbit runtime,” she said, breathless. “The old pass is guarded by a troll who only falls asleep for eleven minutes every century. The journey to the pass takes twelve.”

Bilbo adjusted his spectacles. “Eleven minutes of troll-sleep, twelve minutes of travel. You need one minute of borrowed time.”