Rudolph The Extremely Gifted Psychokinetic Red Nosed Reindeer

Introduction

It's that time of year again, for googologists the world round to contemplate the apparent impracticalities of One Jolly Old Elf bringing toys to all the world's children in one night! 

Most children know Santa is real (and Rudolph too! But more on that later), but for some godforsaken reason most adults "reason" themselves out of it. The most common reason given is that it would simply be physically impossible for Santa Claus, or any being for that matter, to accomplish the feat of delivering all those presents in one night without violating the laws of physics. However I will show you, by means of geometrical proofs and mathematical and scientific argumentation King Gelon, that not only is it not impossible, but it's very very possible and weeeeeeeell within the realm of physics!

The Red Hole  Proposal

But before we get to that, you've no doubt heard of one way that Santa Claus could actually deliver billions of presents to all the world's children in one night: Time Travel! Yup. It's like Marty McFly said, when you've got a time machine you've got all the time in world; enough time to deliver all those presents on a dark Christmas night even mayhaps? Mayhaps. But wait, how does Santa travel through time? And wouldn't that violate some unspoken rule? And how does that help him accomplish the apparently intractable task of his Christmas flight? Allow me to explain. It all begins with his elves.

You see, Elves are not just short weird little humanoids with pointy ears that wear funny festive outfits year round, well okay, they are also that, but more importantly they also have remarkably elastic brains! A human wouldn't survive storing all the digits of a mere 3^^4 in their heads without it imploding into a super ultra massive black hole killing themselves in the process, but our elves are different. Their stretchy mental membranes are not only able to resist being damaged by their brains being squished into a singularity, but they can go so soooooooooooooooo much further!

It is said that by Santa's elves storing the digits of Graham's Number in their heads they are able to produce a "red hole", an even stronger version of a black hole. The red hole is formed when the digits of graham's number (or any suitably large integer in that range) magically collapse to a point of subfinite size that serves as a bridge from the present to any finite amount of time into the past. 

This point of pure concentrated mathematical abstraction appears as an impossibly small and bright point of red "light". What one is actually seeing though is not light at all, but accelerated tachyons leaking from the past into the present. These tachyons, rather than emitting heat absorb energy as if going backwards through time, making a red hole feel apparently very cold. 

The closer one approaches a red hole the further back in time one will be taken. Even a modest of fraction of an inch away can send you back to the moment of the big bang or even the beginning of the xennaverse ... so be careful! Here is rare footage of what happens when someone trips and accidentally gets too close to a red hole.

 Thankfully red holes, unlike black holes, have a slight repulsive force, that is inversely proportional with distance, making it impossible to actually make direct contact with a red hole and get sent infinitely far back into the past, which doesn't actually exist. All times are finite amounts of time apart from each other even though time (like space) is infinite and doesn't actually have a true beginning or end. (Sorry Aquinas, guess reality didn't get the memo about it having to conform to human reason).

Elves have one other important mental ability that humans do not: they can project their thoughts outside of their own heads. By encoding their thoughts at a small distance from themselves an elf is able to create a red hole at a safe distance for use (See illustration below):

So how does Santa use red holes to make all his deliveries in one night? Simple. When Santa is done leisurely placing all the presents under the tree and filling all stockings of one single house he simply has his elf assistant, the illustrious "Red Elf", produce a red hole, sending the elf, the sleigh, sleigh team, and Santa himself a few minutes or hours into the recent past (the timeframe depends on how long he took at that particular house). Santa then leaves just as his past self and sleigh team are about to arrive. Rinse and Repeat ... for hundreds of millions of homes across the entire globe! By doing so, Santa is essentially able to deliver presents to all the houses of the world all at once in one fell swoop!

The red hole itself creates a temporal walkway in which space and time are inverted, with space becoming time and time becoming space, so that as one walks one is literally walking back through time along slices of space across time. 

It was Cedric Fausey who brought this handy solution to the googology communities attention back in 2015 in his groundbreaking Article: The Googology of Santa's Second Elfing. In the time since then some have argued though that since backwards time travel is required, and backward time travel clearly violates causality, it is therefore impossible and Santa Claus does not exist! Checkmate Santa-ists! (No that is not a typo or an anagram). After all, how can Santa show up and leave before he's arrived if he'd not arrived already in order to travel back in time in the first place!? Purportedly The Great Long Earred One works an extra shift that night to patch up any time travel paradoxes created by Santa's stitches in time, but this assumes the Great Long Earred One cares enough to save humanity elvenkind from it's own stupidity (hint: it doesn't).

In any case, this argument isn't worth a pair of dingo's kidney's because Santa doesn't actually need fancy shmancy backwards time travel to accomplish his apparent "physics-breaking" holiday feat as it turns out. All one needs is SANTA SPEED, Galaxy Class Psychokinetic powers, and a little Geolocal-Special-Relativity (GLSR) on one's side!

But before we get to that let's consider the absurdity of Santa's old method of completing the task ... TOO SLOW! Wait ... old method? Am I suggesting that Santa really did use Red Holes and backwards time travel to accomplish his feat at some point in the past? Well let's just say, if it were possible, it would be terribly inefficient. Whether one choses to believe red holes and backwards time travel are even possible, it is ultimately a moot point as there are other ways for Santa to accomplish his feat without using time travel or violating any laws of physics, but for the sake of argument, let's say that Steinhaus was right. How long would it take Santa to accomplish his feat? "Well one night obviously!", I hear you say. No no no, that's not what I mean. I mean according to Santa's worldline. How long does it take Santa from Santa's point of view? Oh shoot ...

Well from Santa's point of view he must spend real time in all the houses in which he delivers. The amount of time it would take Santa to go down the Chimney, put all the presents under the tree and load all the stockings would of course vary from house to house, but I think realistically it would take a minimum of 15 minutes per house, and that's assuming Santa really knows what he's doing and doesn't spend inordinate amounts of time fumbling through presents trying to figure out what present goes to who. But hey, Santa doesn't technically need to be in a hurry, now does he? Not if he's got red holes and time travel on his side. Really he could spend the entire night at each house and still be good for time. Such are the strange effects of time travel. So let's go for broke and assume he spends the entire night at each house. Let's upper-bound it and say that's 16 hours of nightfall for each house. How many households are there in the world though that Santa delivers presents to?

It is estimated that there are approximately 432 million households Santa has to deliver to. Multiplying that by 16 hours, we get a maximal available time for Santa to accomplish his task of ...

6,912,000,000 hours (6.912 billion hours)
or
288,000,000 days (288 million days)
or
788,501 years

Yes, that's right! It would take Santa a maximum of about three quarters of a million years to deliver all those presents every - single - year! But wait, that's just the maximum time. Well, multiplying by 15 minutes instead we get ...

4,320,000,000 minutes (4.3 billion minutes)
or
72,000,000 hours (72 million hours)
or
3,000,000 days (3 million days)
or
8,219 years

Alright, that's an improvement ... I guess. Santa only gets 8000 years older every year ... but multiply that by 400 years and that's 3,200,000 years. Yes, no matter how you slice it, even if Santa is immortal, even if red holes exist, Santa must literally be millions of years old then for this to make sense.

Now even if you were immortal ... wouldn't that be incredibly boring? Think about it. For 364 days Santa probably gets to lounge around at home, feeding the reindeer, checking on the elves, chatting and having meals with the misses ... but all the while an existential dread is growing in the back of Santa's mind ... as the day of Christmas comes closer and closer far far too quickly. Then the day finally comes. He kisses Ms. Claus goodbye, waves goodbye to the elves ... and he knows ... tonight begins the night that will never seem to end. For the next 8 to 788 millennia it is always night everywhere Santa goes, and it's like the worst Amazon workshift imaginable, checking his little mobile computer to see what presents go under what tree. Scan, stash, scan, stash ... for 8 to 788 thousand years! 109 to 10,513 lifetimes go by. More time passes for Santa than between the building of the pyramids and the moon landing. So much time passes that most would forget their own names, never mind anything else about their life. His wife would be a distant foggy memory at best. Perhaps he forgets that his existence was ever anything other than stashing gifts ... perhaps he begins to believe that this is all the universe ever was ... or will be ... an eternity of stashing presents for children in a world that will never wake to appreciate them ... a bleak and pointless eternity ... yet he carries on with some vague notion or suspicion that it is not in fact truly eternal ...

years go by in this way, decades, centuries ... millennia ... yet the task is barely just begun ...

 ... then finally finally ... Santa returns to his castle ... FOR ONE YEAR OF VACATION! Imagine the sheer mental anguish of it. Best case Santa spends 1 percent of 1 percent of his time on vacation and works 99.987% of the time. Surely there has got to be a better way ... a quicker way! And there is ...

Enter Rudolph, the unimaginably gifted Psychokinetic Reindeer!

But first ... if time-travel is impossible ... just how fast does Santa have to deliver all those presents to make it in one night?! ...

Why most Adults don't believe in Santa:
How fast does Santa need to be without time travel?

The fact is, most adults don't disbelieve in Santa because time-travel isn't real, or because Santa would have to be millions of years old to deliver all those presents in real time. No it's another logistical nightmare that adults use to disprove Santa, one that is apparently intractable, and why the whole finagling with time-travel seems down right practical by comparison by way of solutions.

Let's go back to those 432 million households Santa has to deliver in a single night. Let's be as generous as we possibly can and give Santa the maximal possible time to deliver those presents. Realistically Santa has a maximum of 36 hours to work with. Wait, what? Why's that?! Remember Santa can only use the darkside of the earth, but that darkside is itself constantly moving across the globe. If Santa begins at sunset in one location and then let's the sun slowly catch up with him, he can ensure to cover 360 degrees of the earth in 36 hours, by which time the darkside of the earth has turned 540 degrees, meaning he's lost 180 degrees to the racing sun, ending his route as the morning sun rises on his last delivery location.

Alright. So with 36 hours to work with, how much time does Santa need to spend at each house on average. Well dividing 36 hours by 432 million we get ...

0.000 000 083 hours (83 nano-hours)
or
0.000 005 minutes (5 micro-minutes)
or
0.000 300 seconds (0.3 milliseconds or 300 microseconds)

... yeah. So Santa doesn't have 15 minutes to putz around gingerly putting presents under the tree while casually munching cookies and drinking milk. Nope. He's got 432 million households to get to in a 36 hour period. He's got 300 microseconds to get in and gtfo. Santa's got a tight schedule!

But wait ... it get's worst! (Kinda like googology)

This only considers the problem of how much time Santa has to spend in each house, and that's already assuming Santa spends zero travel time from house to house. Unless we are proposing wormholes, this would seem to imply infinite speed. Let's look at it from the opposite end. What if Santa spent zero time in each house, effectively making no stops, and devoted all his time to his travel route?

Well to figure out how fast Santa would need to travel we would need to know what the length of the travel route was. Before I get to my own calculation, I'll point out that a variety of figures have been proposed, and commonly Santa is said to travel at some small fraction of the speed of light, falling around 3 million mph. This already presents some problems, but before we consider the implications of such speed, let's come up with our own figure.

Firstly 75% of the earth's surface is water, so we only need to consider 25% of that as habitable. The earth has a surface area of 196 million square miles (if we ignore the polar regions. More on that later), so this works out to only 49 million square miles of habitable land. That helps.

Next we consider that that space must contain the 432 million households. Let's assume the houses form an evenly spaced out grid. Taking the square root of the total households yields 20,784 households. If we treat the total landmass as a giant square, 7000 miles to a side this works out to a house every third of a mile approximately.

Santa begins his journey at the north pole and picks a bearing, then circumnavigates the globe snagging up houses along a great circle within a third mile of longitude of each other.

Given that Santa has to cover the full 360 degrees of the earth, and changes latitude by only a third of a mile on each pass (this works out to only 17 seconds of arc if you are curious), this implies Santa has to circumnavigate the earth 74,703 times in one 36 hour period!

The minimum circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles on the standard globe earth model, so circling it 74,703 times works out to a journey of 1,860,179,403 (1.86 billion) miles! Dividing that by a 36 hour period yields:

51,671,650 (51 million) mph
or
14,353 miles per second

This so called "Santa Speed" works out to approximately Mach 67,368. It's also approximately 7.7% the speed of light. Even at such incredible speeds the time dilation factor would be somewhat negligible, however the 36 hour flight from Santa's point of view would only take 35 hours and 54 minutes. At such an incredible speed Santa would be circumnavigating the earth every 1.735 seconds approximately from a stationary observers point of view and 1.729 seconds from Santa's point of view.

So even assuming Santa had to travel a third of a mile on average to go from house to house, essentially visiting every square mile of the earth 3 times over, STILL this doesn't break physics. Santa wouldn't need to travel faster than the speed of light, so it is within the realm of physical possibilities!

But there is a much bigger problem than the sheer speed, nor even the fact that Santa also needs time to put the presents under the tree, no the real problem is Santa's one great enemy: AIR RESISTANCE!!! In essence, Santa would need an impossibly strong heat shield the likes of which had never been seen not to instantly be vaporized by the heat. Think of a spaceship re-entering the atmosphere at a mere 25,000 mph, and then remember that Santa's sleigh would be traveling approximately 2000 times faster than that!

Not only would Santa vaporize himself in microseconds, but colliding with the air molecules at such a speed would be the equivalent of setting off a nuclear chain reaction every second, for 36 hours! Santa would effectively sterilize the entire earth ... rendering the whole gift-giving thing rather moot since there would be no one left to enjoy their presents. Bummer ...

This at last is the most serious issue, and combined with the others, is it any surprise Santa would opt to spend dozens if not hundreds of millennia taking his time giving out his presents rather than attempting this suicide/world ending mission trying to carry out the task in a mere 36 hours?! But hey, think of it from the old man's point of view. If he could reduce his travel time to a mere 36 hours he could spend 99.58% of his time on vacation instead of 99.987% of his time at work! The truth is, Santa was desparate for a work around to carry out the impossible of impossible tasks ... actually making Christmas happen in a reasonable amount time, tens of millions of mph and super heated hyper-hyper-hyper sonic air flows be damned!

The truth is Santa only relied on the Elves Red Holes because he simply didn't have another viable option ... until the 20th century! Enter Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer ... and I promise you ... you don't know the story like you think you do ... 

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Redux:
True Origins

It's telling that Cedric Fausey never once mentions Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer in his article, and that is because, Rudolph wasn't originally part of Santa's sleigh team. Santa's 8: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen, had to suffer for millennia each Christmas along with Santa. In a way their job was even worse, as the majority of it was spent standing around on roofs waiting for The Old Codger to take his good sweet time at a single house. Hell sometimes the old man would just take a nap by the fireplace. There was no hurry and to Santa he wasn't on the job, this was just his existence. Why shouldn't he get a milk and cookie break followed by a nap?

Truth is the Reindeer were also getting pretty sick and tired after 300 years of these sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow millennia-long christmas shifts. Although the Red Elf was considered an illustrious title, in actual fact it was usually not a job anyone actually wanted to do and had to be picked by lots. While the elves might live to toil at Santa's workshop, at least they'd get breaks and be with their friends and family year round, and they'd get Christmas off of course. Whoever got picked as the Red Elf that year however wouldn't get to see their elf brethren for thousands and thousands of years. All around, it was a miserable job.

Fact is, Santa and his team were begging for a better way, one that wouldn't have to take millennia according to their own world line!

The reason Rudolph wasn't part of Steinhaus's discovery is simply because Rudolph hadn't joined the team yet. Steinahus made his discoveries before the publication of Mathematical Snapshots, which came out in 1939, the same year Rudolph joined the team and his fable spread (more on that later). Steinhaus and his grandfather had simply not been there to tell of this development because it had not happened yet. 

Although Rudolph seemed to come out of nowhere, a freak accident by nature, or perhaps a dubious "gift" from a misguided spirit or goddess, make no mistake, Rudolph was no accident. That was just the cover story contocted by Santa's PR team. No Rudolph's existence was very very deliberately engineered from the beginning. It was actually a long time coming with many many decades of research and development behind it. 

No doubt you've heard the ridiculous story of how Rudolph had a glowing red nose, a freak mutation of some random reindeer kid, and how Rudolph's nose was used to light the way one stormy Christmas night, but no Rudolph didn't come about to solve a very specific and fairly routine winter weather problem, after all, that could hardly have been the first time Santa ran into such a problem, and you don't think Santa had flood lights on his sleigh when he's got Red Hole time-travel technology?! No. That cute story was fabricated specifically to hide the terrible top secret Reindeer breeding program Santa had begun in the early 19th century, to create a special reindeer of such unimaginably vast magical power they would be capable of transporting Santa, his sleigh, and all his presents all the way around the world ten thousand times over in a single night without turning the earth into a nuclear denoting device!

 Perhaps you've heard of the supposed magic corn feed that reindeer take to fly. While Santa does give his reindeer a special blend, this is more to maintain a healthy weight and give them suffient magical energy for their long flight, however not just any reindeer can fly. Actually the Reindeer were specifically breed to have the flight abilities by the elves.

How precisely do reindeer fly? Well they don't so much fly as levitate, through expert Ki control. They were breed specifically to have high midi-chlorian counts. At least that's how it was originally accomplished, although Rudolph is something all together different ... something unimaginably more improbable.

In the olden days breeding programs were simply choosing which animals got to reproduce, artificial selection, until Santa had reindeer capable of flight that could travel a couple of hundred miles per hour to reach the first house on the route, one way way up in Alaska. At a mere 229 mph the original 8 could reach the first Alaskan home on the route in about an hour from the north pole, or at least the outpost they were stationed at (more on that later). That's right, the original 8 couldn't even break the sound barrier, let alone travel faster than a bolt of lightning (a bolt of lightning for reference travels at 270,000 mph. That's right, Rudolph can literally outrun a bolt of lightning. He is by far the fastest reindeer that ever lived!).

From that first house Santa would then just employ his Red Hole Elf over and over again to hop from house to house. The travel speed for the reindeer wasn't terribly important, as long as they could reach the next house in under 24 hours. With a top-speed of around 519 mph, they could in fact reach any point on the earth in no more than 24 hours starting at the north pole. All this required was time-traveling back one day.

As you can see, the red holes really do make Santa's flight weeeeeeeell within reason. Santa didn't even have to travel faster than a commercial jet to make sure he could deliver all those presents. This also technically solves the load problem since even at these modest speeds Santa could make a return trip, grab some more presents, then fly back out ... for every single house. However this would lead to total times closer to the 788,000 years mentioned earlier instead of the more modest 8000 years by going house to house. Santa did not originally have his compact present technology so he originally had to take almost a million years to make all the back and forth trips and it was sheer misery. All Santa's innovations have been about saving time because it really is a terrible crunch you see.

Rudolph, as yet another technological innovation, was really no different, though perhaps not quite as innocuous as Santa's Compact Present Technology. Santa had started his breeding program long before even the Compact Present Technology, with the idea that if he could get a reindeer to break the sound barrier, he could make his trips even faster. He breed his original eight with various does in an attempt to create a superior beast. Dasher Mk. II managed to not only pass the speed of sound but was the first to be able to travel over 1000 mph. He was eventually beaten by Blitzen Mk. II, then Blitzen Mk. III, eventually surpassing Mach 2 at around 1500 mph. Problems began to rise even with this modest speed increase. The cold winds blew by with such ferocity they began to burn, and Santa was forced to create a window shield for the Sleigh. Doubling the speed would also quadruple the air resistance, making it harder and harder to go faster and faster. Santa had managed to reach an incredible speed of mach 3 or 2250 mph when his own reindeer could no longer take the physical strain, their fur beginning to get cinged in the heated air flows. The breeding program was discontinued after about the 25th generation of reindeer, still using the names of the original 8, since Santa's elves had come up with the more practical solution of the Compact Present Technology by then to reduce return trips to a bare minimum.

While this improved things considerably by a factor of approximately 50, reducing his Christmas night to a mere ten millenniums, Santa was still not satisfied!

In the year 1801 Santa decided to start up his failed reindeer breeding program again. Fire resistant fur coats and magical protective aura's were selected for, but the process was slow going, and estimates held this would only lead to modest improvements, like possibly going as fast as Mach 9.876, but Santa was becoming greedy. He wasn't interesting in modest improvements. To get a new generation of reindeer took 4 to 6 Christmas's and each of those was nightmarishly long for him, and it would seemingly take dozens and dozens of generations just to get those incremental improvements. Ultimately even at such speeds they'd barely make a dent as most of the runtime would be taken up with the slow and methodical house visits and the use of red holes. No Santa needed something radically different. A reindeer who was not x10 faster or a x100 times faster, but at least x20,000 times faster than any previous incarnation, with enough power to protect the entire team from the "thick fog" of the atmosphere flying into your face at millions of miles per hour; a much much more difficult problem than cutting through a foggy snow storm I can assure you. Not only that, but he wanted this reindeer to somehow make his deliveries near instaneous and automatic as well, and a brain so lightning quick it could do all this in microseconds as well. Santa's wishlist in fact was so long and ridiculous that the elves just shook their head in dismay and digust. Why was Santa being so stubborn!? He was asking for something beyond the impossible! It was too absurd to work, not in a million years!

That got the R&D team thinking: just how long would it take to breed by artificial selection a reindeer meeting all of Santa's outlandish specifications? They came to the conclusion that evolution just was not up to the task and told The crazy old man it would take a virtual eternity to make his dream a reality and to just forget it!

"A Virtual Eternity you say," the normally jolly old soul pondered as he stroked his ten million year old beard with a shrewd smile, "Well then" he reasoned, "if it's a virtual eternity, it can't be a real eternity now can it". The elves could do nothing but silently shake their heads no. "Therefore it must be some finite amount of time! Now go find out exactly how long it takes, and no I am not taking Infinity as an answer!" he bellowed.(Perhaps Santa was a classical googologist).

The elves moaned and groaned but eventually they got to work on it. It turned out however to be a highly technical and complex problem, involving the longest possible sequence of evolutionary adaptions such that no prior adaption was embeddable into the next, something involving subsequences of codons. The problem proved too difficult for even the best and brightest of the elves though, despite their ability to perform operations with numbers with graham's numbers of digits in their heads. 

As such they were forced to employ their secret weapon: The Xicohtxul. Many years ago they'd discovered how to communicate with an other-dimensional Fractal Super Computer that existed far far away in the infinite void outside of the omniverse known only as The Xicohtlxul. Programming the problem into the computer remotely they set the program in motion, with it brute forcing the problem by trying every possible sequence to find the longest one. One of the Elves then used a Cyan Hole (the reverse of a Red Hole) to go googologically far into the future (instead of the past) to retrieve the answer, then used a Red Hole to return back to the present. When they saw how mind numblingly vast the number was though, no one on the team had the guts to tell the Big Man in Red the answer.

Eventually though Santa got his answer ... and he reeeeally didn't like it! The Xicohtlxul had shown that it would take approximately a thohtothihlith (E100{#,#,1,100}100) years of Santa's breeding program to create a reindeer with the kind of mind-numbing universe-defying magical powers he needed to reduce his trip to a single night out of the year! Santa couldn't wait that long ... in fact he had grown to despise such large numbers, especially googologically large ones! This is when things started to get ... "out of hand", to put it delicately.

The year was 1822, over a hundred years before Rudolph would come to be, during the first recorded reindeer sightings when Santa was caught calling out the Sleigh teams names, that Santa's top secret illegal experiments in genetic engineering began. For years Santa had been trying to mix and match the reindeer through the tedious process of crossbreeding a daughter of Dasher with a son of Donner or Blitzen. It is a common myth that Rudolph's father was either Donner or Blitzen depending on which fable you took as canon, but the confusion began in the first place because Rudolph, in fact, was the son of all eight of Santa's reindeer. That's right. Rudolph had 8 dads! So Regardless of the canon you chose to regard as "fact", you'll always be one eighth correct, from "a certain point of view", as Obi Wan would say.

Santa had decided to speed up the process by taking all the best genetics of his eight reindeers and splicing them together: From Dasher he took his great speed, from Dancer his agility and grace, from Prancer his playfulness, from Vixen his fair face, from comet his sharp turns and sharp wit, from cupid his sweetness and sentimentality, from Donner his proud and indominable spirit, and from Blitzen his electrifying presence.

To enhance them even further he continued his experiments, bombarding the genetically engineered bucks with vast amounts of magical radiation, often leading to glowing red noses, but many fawns died in the process. The elves were sworn to complete secrecy to not reveal the truth of Santa's diabolical breeding program. 

The cheerful myth of an "accidental" mutation that lead to a useful adaption was made to hide the dark and heinous truth that Rudolph didn't and couldn't have happened by chance. Rudolph coming into existence by a chance adaption would be vastly more unlikely than a Boltzmann Brain. No, Rudolph was the product of over a century of deliberate tinkering and experimenting. With every failed attempt Santa's elves learned more. Eventually they were producing beings that radiated pure magic, but still the failure rate was catastrophic. 

Santa's impatience grew and his demands become ever more overbearing, and bowing under the pressure the elves attempted all sorts of unholy science and magic in a madcap rush to be the first to create the fabled "Perfect Christmas Icon". 

They experimented with cybernetic enhancements, DNA from unicorns, gryphons, chimeras, and other mythological creatures, they sought out and collected the seven magical snow flakes, and beseeched the goddess of the Northern Lights to grant them special signs and sigils, they simulated quintillions of years of computerized evolution, a nightmarish amalgamation of magitech like the world had never seen! Yet despite pulling all the stops, violating the laws of both nature and man, the elves failed to create the philosopher's stone of magical enchanted talking fawns.

That is when the Christmas Abominations began ... the dark times ... often uncontrollable, unimaginably powerful, and sadly short lived. A few of them would rampage the castle, destroying toys and presents, causing Santa's numbers to fall below quota aggreviated him further, then running off into the Alaskan wilderness:

Cryptid sightnings are just escapees of Santa's failed reindeer experiments: The Abominable Snowman, The Chupacabra, The Loch Ness Monster, The Jackalope, Ifrit, Thomas The Tank Engine, The Teletubbies etc.

Creating the perfect reindeer was finally decided to be virtually impossible, and to everyone's relief (save Santa), the program was mercifully shut down.

That was until one day when a retired Red Elf named Farnwaddle was sweeping up the old experimental magitech lab some 30 years after it had been shut down. He'd been "demoted" to Janitor about twelve Christmas's ago, but Farnwaddle wasn't complaining. He liked his new  job because it was undemanding, had lots of good benefits, and gave him lots of time to ponder silly thoughts.

 Anyway as Farnwaddle was sweeping up the old lab he reasoned this way: If the perfect reindeer was virtually impossible that meant it was finitely improbable, therefore, all Farnwaddle had to do was calculate precisely how improbable it was, punch that into the Finite Improbabilty Generator, hook it up to the genetic splicer and magic radiation chamber, load up the genetic code of the octillionth generation of simulated reindeer and turn the whole damn configuration on. 

So Farnwaddle stopped his work, got out some pen and paper to try to work it out for himself. He soon realized no amount of paper in the obersverable universe was going to do the job, but then slapped himself for being a "galaxy brain" and realized he was already capable of graham's numbers of computations per second!

He was shocked to learn that the improbability factor was not only googologically large, about two to the power of a thohtothihlith to one against, but the simplest mathematical expression for it's exact value was itself of googological scale! It required an expression some G(3^^^^3) or so odd mathematical symbols long!

He quickly realized there was no way he'd have enough time until the heat death of the universe to punch it into the Finite Improbability Generators controls. It was then that he remembered he was a Red Elf and got another "Galaxy Brain" idea. Crushing his thoughts into a single proxy of subfinite space glowing a bright christmas red he created a red hole inside the Finite Improbability Generator in order to feed it the precise Improbability factor ...  

Farnwaddle was very surprised to discover that in the next moment the most adorable fawn that had ever lived had suddenly popped into existence out of thin air, infused with the magic of the Aura Boralis and the seven magic snowflakes, the power of millions of elf-hours of genetic tinkering from his eight dads as well as the genetics of elvenkind and unicorns woven seamlessly in, and the equivalent of a hundred million galaxies worth of psychokinetic magical potential energy to boot. He was even more surprised when Santa gave him Employee Of The Eon and was promptly dumped into the Artic Ocean by his coworkers because they realized the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart ass!

The Life and Times of Rudolph The Protege

When Rudolph was brought into existence, not only did his nose grow a bright red, but his entire body from his head to his toes illuminated the lab with a brilliant red light. Farnwaddle was completely thrilled and picked up the newborn fawn to show all of Christmas town, shouting "Eureka! Eureka! I've done it! I've done it!". Thankfully unlike Archimedes he had his clothes on in the hundred degrees below zero weather.

Rudolph had more magical power in a single molecule then most magical beings have in their entire body, and it was radiating uncontrollably, lighting up the north pole creating an aura borealis just from him being outside! But Rudolph was still just a baby deer. He would need to be cared for like any fawn, and so Santa told Farnwaddle to place him in the stable with the other eight reindeer.

With that the eight dads were tasked with raising their mutant super science son. Despite Rudolph's unimaginably vast power, he was a complete innocent and grew up like any fawn, stumbling and struggling to walk, him not realizing that with his immense power he didn't even have to, but it was for the best. Everyone dreaded the day Rudolph might accidentally use his powers. He could easily tear the entire earth asunder if he were not careful! As such the denizens of Christmas Town did everything in the power to make Rudolph's life nothing but pleasant and idyllic. When Rudolph was no but a fortnight old though he sneezed and the entire roof of Santa's toy factory collapsed.  The elves grumbled as they had to move their operations to temporary emergency shelter while they also spent many many months repairing the roof. The elves no doubt wondered if Rudolph was more trouble than he was worth, but Santa was only pleased by the massive destruction and delays because he only saw it as a sign of great things to come.

Rudolph was treated well and other than some teasing from the other fawns his age, which we will get to shortly, had a mostly pretty good childhood, especially at first. The fact of the matter was Rudolph was not mercilessly teased as often shown in specials. No. Everyone had to walk on eggshells. He was treated like the second coming of Christ for his sakes. This of course, did not sit well with the many many reindeer children of Christmas Town. They hated being forced to be so insufferably nice to him. If he wanted a cookie or a snack they had to give it to him. If he wanted to skip out on a reindeer school lesson he could and not even the teacher would say bupkis. If he made a mistake it was often others that were forced to apologize. Fact is young Rudolph was completely spoiled! 

But deep down Rudolph felt uneasy. There was something no one was telling him. What was so special about him? Why could his entire body glow unlike all the other children? Why was he the only one that could hear everyone's every thought all the time. Why could he with a mere thought change the patterns of trillions of snowflakes in a microsecond and no one was the wiser ... 

Sometimes when everyone is too nice it can also make you feel alone. Being put on such a high pedestal was a tall order for the young fawn and made all his interactions painfully artificial. When he stumbled he felt silly, like he wasn't living up to some expectation of him. He felt he needed to be graceful and poised at all times. What was really a desire to live up to his role though was often seen as haughtiness by the other children, and didn't exactly make him popular.

The other children, most of which had been brought about by traditional means, having both a mother and a father, grew increasingly jealous of Rudolph. He hogged their father's attention, leaving them mostly with their many many doe mothers to watch them. But Rudolph got to play with his dads. Contrary to popular opinion, Rudolph did in fact play many reindeer games with his fathers as there was always at least one of them with some downtime to play with the young buck. Each imparted a little bit of their personality and perspective to Rudolph. They frequently went on practice flights around the world just for fun. Why didn't they get to go and see the world? Why was he so doted on!?

So you see it was not for his Red nosed that he was persecuted or ostracized. He wasn't even the only one with special powers or anatomical quirks. Some of the other fawns were experiments themselves but their powers paled in comparison. Why were they not chosen? All they could do was envy the child whose merest glance could destroy worlds and he didn't even know it yet, the ignorant whelp.

That isn't to say he didn't have any friends. Brightheart, a reindeer whose heart glowed a bright red had befriended him. If anything it was Brightheart who was ostracized for his glowing red heart that could be perfectly seen in his chest ... it was a little creepy you see. This kid was also fast ... really fast. He could already make sonic booms at four weeks old and his fur was completely fire resistant so he could streak through the sky like a comet at 25,000 mph. This is how he earned the name Fireball. Every day he'd push himself further and further becoming the fastest reindeer the world had ever seen up until then. He wanted to show Santa that he too could be part of the Sleigh team too!

Rudolph adored his friend and developed a deep and abiding affection for him, but Fireball started to grow deeply jealous of Rudolph. Little Rudy had never even gone Mach 10, he would fly around Mach 3 or 4 like his dads ... and yet Santa paid Fireball no mind! It was completely unfair! To add fuel to the fire, Clarice, a doe Fireball was interested in, had a crush on Rudolph! Rudolph for his part seemed largely oblivious and innocent of the matter. He was polite and cordial to her as he was to everyone. For some reason this angered fireball even more. Rudolph could have any doe he wanted. He was a rockstar. The only fawn that got to sleep and hang out in the stable with the famous eight reindeer. Treated like a King and allowed to do whatever he wanted. Yet Rudolph was so meek and mild did so little to recommend himself. 'What was so special about him?!', Fireball fumed to himself.

Despite being a genetic experiment himself, one of the few to survive the magical radiation treatment as a child even though it caused him great pain, Fireball had a biological mother. He'd been born. He'd come from a breeding line that had evolved from one of the surviving lines of the magitech experiments. In fact by this time all the children were either descended from the original eight or were direct descendants of the "experiments". All except Rudolph. Not only did he technically have no mother, but having been magicked out of thin air he did not need to go through any magical radiation treatments. He was born born with his immense power and never had to suffer for it! It was for these reasons and many more that Fireball started to speak poorly of Rudolph behind his back to the other fawns, and an air of resentment began to foment.

The other reindeer children, all part of Santa's former breeding experiments, began to make fun of Rudolph for having eight dads and no moms. They'd laugh and call him "unnatural", or mockingly call him the "prissy prince". Rudolph took it on the nose. He tried to ignore it, he'd try to laugh it off and tell 'em "good one", but when the children saw that he wouldn't fight back the jeering only got worst and worst. "Fruitcake", "pantywaist", "sissyboy", they'd say. "Stop c-calling me n-names." he stammer, and the children just laughed all the harder because they saw he had no real power over them. Even the does came to make fun of him, angered by his aloofness and being jilted by him one by one. Donner began to start intervening with his booming thunderous voice. This quieted the children down, but when he wasn't around this made them all the meaner, "Hiding behind your daddies skirts are you little prissy prince, or should we say princess!".

One day the children went too far. They circled around him, they jeered and laughed and poked at him, tormenting and gloating over the boy they had once feared because  the adults had told them they had to. At last Rudolph had reached his limit. He couldn't take it anymore. An ember of rage grew in his heart and his entire body began to radiate a bright red light that even bathed the distant mountains in red. "Enough!" he said with the thunderous voice and pride he'd gotten learned from Donner ...

... and in that moment every single particle in the other fawns bodies were torn asunder from each other, flung to the furthest reaches of the atmosphere, seemingly vaporizing all the children in an instant! All except Rudy himself and Fireball who in disbelief and dismay. 

Everyone was shocked and horrified by this immense display of power.  But Santa wasn't surprised, he smiled.  This was exactly the sort of power he'd been seeking all this time!

Fireball stood tears in his eye, deep rage at the boy he'd once called friend. "Fireball? I'm sorry. I - I didn't know ..." Rudolph pleaded and took tentative steps towards his former friend. "Stay away from me!" Fireball shouted. Rudolph stopped in his tracks stunned. "You killed them! You killed them all!". Rudolph tried to stammer something, to apologize, to explain he would never do something like that to Fireball and he had nothing to fear, but he couldn't get it out.

 Clap. Clap. Clap.

"Ho ho ho. HO HO HO! HO HO-" Santa began to laugh with his trademark laugh. "Santa!? How can you laugh at a time like this" said one of the elves in stunned horror. Rudolph had just killed every fawn in Christmas Town.

"Ho ho ho! It's alright everyone. It will be alright. Let me speak with the young buck" Santa said signaling for everyone to calm down.

He walked over to the disturbed and confused and said magnanimously "Rudolph, with your nose so bright, won't you put back your friends together tonight?". 

Rudolph looked up with tears in his eyes. He hadn't meant to do something so terrible to his friends. "I - I don't know how?". Santa just smiled a knowing smile, and putting a finger beside his nose he said, "Oh, I think you do."

Rudolph paused to consider Santa's words. He was right. He bowed his head and closed his eyes and his nose began to glow a bright red. He concentrated, and his mind recalled every particle of every buck and doe, somehow he could remember everything if he tried, and with that he gathered their particles from deep in the ozone layer and the bucks and does re-emerged as if nothing at all had happened to them. They stood around in terror and awe, for they had had just enough time to understand that they had just moments ago been completely annihilated.

Suffice it to say they never made fun of Rudolph anymore ... nor would they have anything to do with him ever again ... not even Fireball.

Rudolph grew very very lonely and despondent, and worse, no one would tell him what that frightening power was or where it came from.

You see Rudolph wasn't just some fancy glorified glowing christmas ordiment. No. He had googologically vast levels of ESP and psychokinetic potential. Rudolph's nose was not simply a beckon, but the very source of his telekinetic powers. With it Rudolph could instantly change the position and momentum of decillions of particles, though naturally with some degree of uncertainty in one or both, in accordance with the law of indeterminacy. In effect, Rudolph could move particles where ever he wanted them and then move them back with no change in their initial momentum or position as if nothing had happened at all. He could do this in microseconds with barely any effort on his part. He could in fact accelerate an air molecule to nearly the speed of light, then make it return to its original position and stop dead as if nothing had happened. Hopefully the practical upshot of this is clear.

With this very power Rudolph could accelerate his own body to tens or even hundreds of millions of miles per hour, and even with a billion pound payload it would barely slow him down. Rudolph had the kind of power that would make even Elsa blush, and Mewtwo cower in fear. He was the most powerful psychic being that had ever come to exist, and so, if anything, it was only reasonable that the denizens of Christmas Town should fear him. Despite how hospitable and kind they'd all been, still they couldn't help but feel a strange vague sense of collective guilt. Afterall, no one had even told him what his task was meant to be or asked if he would willingly agree ...

A year passed according to Rudolph's timeline, and still he had no answers. He tried desperately to talk to Fireball, but every time he was rebuffed. 

Finally he could not contain himself anymore. "Please! Fireball! Who am I? What am I? Why won't anyone tell me what I am?!" he begged. Fireball turned around and said "I don't even know what you are, No one does! I don't think you are ... even a reindeer anymore ...". "help me. Please Fireball. Are we not still friends?" Rudolph pleaded pathetically with tears in his eyes. "No Rudolph, we are not. But I will tell you this in honor of our childhood bond ... I am leaving this town. I suggest you do the same. I am done with this place. The things that were done to our kind are unspeakable. If you want your answers Rudolph, go ask Farnwaddle". "Farnwaddle f-found me on his d-doorstep and gave me to my dads to r-raise. That's the tr-truth." Rudolph stammered. "That is a lie Rudolph, and you know it. He is the one who brought you into this world. He is the only one that can give you the answers you seek ... and now I bid you ado ... so long ... my former friend, I'm sorry it was not meant to be." and with that Fireball flew off into the sky becoming a shooting star as he left the north pole.

Rudolph was heartbroken, but he had no time to process such emotions. He had to discover the truth. He sought out Farnwaddle as Fireball had instructed. At first Farnwaddle refused to reveal the truth, for he had been sworn to secrecy just like everyone else. But Farnwaddle eventually could not betray the darling buck anymore. He had a right to know the truth ...

He showed Rudolph the lab where he'd been "born". Rudolph took it all in, he learned of the terrible experiments performed on reindeerkind, all in a desperate attempt to bring him about. "What was it all for?!" Rudolph demanded of Farnwaddle. "You were meant to pull Santa's sleigh." Farnwaddle told him. Rudolph realized that all this was brought about because of him. That he was somehow responsible for all the suffering his kind had endured to lead to his very existence. "It'd have been better if I were never born!" he said, and with that he flew out of the lab, out of Christmas Town, and out of the North Pole.

Rudolph went to go hide in the Alaskan Wilderness. He let the light of his nose go out, it finally turning a normal black like regular reindeer. His powers went dormant and he vowed to never use his powers again. He would live out his remaining days like a normal reindeer, and be forgotten like one as well. It was his penance, to ensure something like him was never attempted again. He'd let the light go out and with it any hope of Santa's ambitions.

He'd hoped to find Fireball, to show him how he'd snuffed out the light. He believed he now understand why his friend had abandoned him: he was afraid, afraid of his great power. How Rudolph wanted to tell him that he was not his powers, they were a curse, not a true part of him. The real Rudolph was just the sweet reindeer who wanted to make friends, not hurt anyone. That is was an accident what happened and he'd never let it happen again. But as time went on Rudolph eventually abandoned all hope of finding his friend. 

Time went by faster in the Alaskan wilderness, he noticed, the sun did not hang in the sky indefinitely like at home, it whizzed around the earth at lightning speed, at least so it seemed to Rudolph. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Christmas came and went. Rudolph sensed his Dad's as they left Christmas town. For some reason, he briefly sensed their presence almost everywhere on the darkside of the globe, but it only lasted a half hour or so before vanishing. Strange, he thought.

Rudolph befriended the wild life: the snow rabbits, and the squirrels, the birds, and the babbling brooks. He took shelter in caves, and lived off the evergreens. He'd grown mistrustful of Elf and humankind, but he was aware of towns not far from where he lived. He sometimes look at them afar. He saw his fathers as they'd bring the young ones gifts. How could they be kind to the bipeds, he wondered to himself.

One time he went to go free some caged rabbits and brought them to the woods. "You are free now!" he said trumphantly. But the rabbits were afraid, they did not know how to survive in the woods and did not want to be picked off by Hawks and artic foxes. "Please bring us back. The human children keep us safe and treat us well." they told him. Rudolph could not understand. Were they not being experimented on, and humans were wont to do? But he brought them back as requested, and stayed to watch as the rabbits and children gleefully greeted each other happy to be reunited. Strange, he thought.

As time passed, Rudolph became concerned. His body did not grow. He remained a fawn. His antlers did not become more than buds, and he realized that he likely would never become an adult buck. He did not know it, but he'd been designed to never reach maturity, so that he could never sire his own offspring and bring about the end of the world. How long would Rudolph have to suffer? He did not know.

 The next Christmas Rudolph decided to go investigate the strange signature he felt last year. He was shocked to discover millions of copies of his fathers, each standing a top a single roof. He flew down to one of them. "Dads! I don't understand what is going on?" he began. The father's were overjoyed to see their son, across time. This got Blitzen concerned, "Guys! Calm down we are gonna wake everyone." he said to get the hordes of reindeer to shut up, then he said "Rudolph you can't be here right now, you are going to cause a temporal paradox. Please come back home where you belong" Blitzen pleaded. "Not until you tell me what's going on. Why are there hundreds of millions of you?" Rudolph demanded. And so Blitzen explained how they went back through time ... over and over again ... millions of times, to deliver presents to all the worlds children. "How can you? How can you put yourselves through so much? For them? What has Santa ever done for you?" Rudolph demanded with tears of rage in his eyes. "Son. He takes care of us and gives us everything we need." Blitzen tried to offer. "You could come live in the wilderness like me. You could be free and you wouldn't need to wear that harness or pull that heavy sleigh". But the eight shook their heads no. "We can't do that son. We have a job to do, and so do you." Donner said. "No!" Rudolph said defiantly. "I will not be Santa's workhorse and you shouldn't either! I am free you can not tell me what to do!" he said, and with that he flew back to his chosen home in the wilderness.

He found an extra large cave to hide in, and he cried and cried. Why were the humans so cruel? Why were they so greedy? Why was so much time and effort put into making toys and merriment, while the world pretended like they didn't exist? A thankless job, and all for what? A pat on the head from Santa once and a while?

Rudy became startled suddenly when he realized he was not alone. "Whose there?!" he said flashing on his red nose for the first time in two years. All he could see was a terrifying bug-eyed face and strange protuding teeth and massive antlers, walking on two legs. It was currently shielding it's eyes. It made some garbled noises but Rudolph understood it's thoughts. It had said "Could you please turn that off, my eyes are very sensitive". "Greetings" came another voice, and Rudolph turned to flash his light at another benighted creature. Levitating in the air unnaturally he was what looked like a baby reindeer, curled up in a ball, surrounded by a metal shell of cybernetic enhancements. "I am Quayzlcoaxl. My compatriot over there is Ifrit and that is-" he began, "Plimkin! Plimkin Diddle-Impkin! I came up with it myself! And how are you on this scrumdiddly umptious night?" said a terrifyingly cheerful voice. "Sigh, can you please stop changing your name every five minutes... -_-;" said Quayzlcoaxl with a tone of exasperation. "NOOOO! hehe!" came a defiant giggle.

Rudolph tried to flash his light in the general direction of the giggle, but whatever it was had already moved. He could hear laughing and giggling echoing through the cave but couldn't seem to catch sight out it. "Hi!" Plimkin shouted in his face suddenly and Rudolph jumped and fell on his tail. Looking up he saw the most sickeningly cutesy creature he'd ever laid his eyes on. So cute in fact, that it looked impossible and unreal like a living cartoon character. It had the ears and teeth of a rabbit, but the body of a reindeer, only it had 6 limbs: four legs and two hands, and in those two hands were held two unnaturally large lolipops. "Would you like to lick my loliPOP!?! It's rumtumbblyummy!" Plimpkin cheerfully shouted. "Don't encourage him, he'll never shut up if you do." cautioned Quayzlcoaxl. "Who are you all?" Rudolph asked mystified. "We are no one truly, just sentient creatures like yourself. If we be anyone we are only that which we have chosen to be. We are runaways like yourself. Creatures seeking a purpose in a universe that offers us none." Quayzlcoaxl offered cryptically.

Rudolph spoke long and deep that night, with Quayzlcoaxl, and Ifrit, and with the cutesy creature that continued to change it's name every few minutes like a hyperactive child. 

He learned of their terrible fates as escapees of Santa's reindeer experiments. He learned of their confusion when they found they served no purpose and could not accomplish the task for which they were summoned. He learned of their struggles to find their own purpose when they were offered none. It was Quayzlcoaxl who first realized that Rudolph was the promised fawn, the one that all their existences and suffering was meant lead to.

Rudolph told Quayzlcoaxl how he had snuffed out the light inside himself, but Quayzlcoaxl told him the power was only dormant and could be awakened again. Rudolph explained how he didn't want it to, because it was the reason so much suffering had occurred. That he was free now, the power could not rule him. "And who are you then?" Quayzlcoaxl asked. "I am Rudolph" Rudolph said. "But that is the name given to you by them? Why do you accept it?" Quayzlcoaxl socratically said. "Because that is who I am. That is the name that was given to me." Rudolph tried to reason. "No. That is who you chose to be. We chose our names because we were never given any, but you hold  to yours because you do not wish to be completely separated from others. This is why you will not give up the last visage of your former identity. You see your power as your enemy, but you could just as easily acknowledge it as your friend."  

 Quayzlcoaxl went on to explain how his powers gave him the ability to see across dimensions and through minds, and that he'd seen and knew of the suffering of this world and many others. He too could have wasted his power, as it was neither understood nor wanted, he could have sought to harm those that harmed him, or to cause suffering to ease his own pain. But he chose instead to use his powers to project his mind into higher dimensions outside their universe, to ward off eldritch abominations that sought nothing but to do harm to their dimension. If Rudolph did not use his gift for something then all the suffering of the experiments would have been in vein. That if he wanted to make his existence meaningful he should use his gift rather than snuff it out to vindicate his reindeer brethren. It was then that Rudolph finally knew what he had to do.

Rudolph's Return:
A Legend is Born

When Rudolph returned on Christmas Eve of 1938, he was surprised to discover thousands of years had gone by at home. The Castle and The Toy Factory had been completely changed, and his friends had already grown up, passed away and had their own little bucks and does many times over. Only the true immortals, Santa, his elves, and the eight reindeer remained. We will learn a little later why so much time had passed at home but for now let us finish our tale.

Rudolph didn't like the way he had come into existence. He didn't like what had been done to reindeerkind, the horrifying experiments and dabbling in forbidden magic. Rudolph now saw himself as a champion of all animals and still mistrusted the humans and elves, but he realized something. Running away from your problems wasn't the answer. He had to face Santa himself.

He demanded audience with the King of the North, The Jolly man himself. "Is that really you Rudolph? You've been gone for 9,000 years?" said Farnwaddle rubbing his eyes in disbelief. "It is me. I don't know what's going on, but I am back, and I am ready to speak with Santa". "That's wonderful" said Farnwaddle, tears streaming down his face for a future where Red Elves would no longer need to be employeed.

Rudolph was promptly brought to Santa's Chamber. He sat on a large red chair like a King, not unlike the chairs Mall Santa's are seen sitting on.

"At last, you have returned." Santa welcomed him with open arms. "I have." Rudolph stated plainly. "You know the purpose for which you were created and brought into being?" Santa inquired. "Yes. I know the truth of my existence." Rudolph said. "Well then ... ahem ... Rudolph with your nose so bright won't you guide my sleigh tonight?" Santa said. He'd prepared the line many millions of years ago. All those in attendance help there breath. The elves and the reindeer. This had been the moment they had all dreaded. Rudolph had all the power. Ultimately it was up to him what happened next. He stood silently and was not quick to speak.

Finally he said, "On three conditions". "Oh?" Santa said as he raised a quizzical eyebrow. He'd expect a simple "it would be my honor", but no matter, he'd humor the impudent child. "And what conditions might those be youngling?". "You promise that you will never make any such as me ever again. I shall be the first and the last. That you will never perform such ghastly experiments on reindeerkind for the remainder of your immortality. And that you will henceforth bring Christmas presents to all the worlds sentient creatures, both humanoid and animal" Rudolph said like he was negotiating a contract. "Done! Now, shall we be off?" Santa said. "Not yet. I have one more thing to say to you while all are here to bear witness to my words". "I'm listening ..." said Santa as he stroked his beard fitfully, his patience beginning to be tried, "but make it quick. I've waited thirty-three million years for this day!". "Then with all due respect your honor, you can wait a few minutes more." Rudolph said standing his ground proudly not even budging or appearing the least bit hurried. The elves and reindeer began to whisper among themselves, the audacity of this obnoxious little upstart. Who did he think he was? He was just another Santa's helper like the lot of them.

The awkward silence lingered. Why was Rudolph not getting on with it. Why was he wasting everyone's time. Was this some petty sort of revenge? 

He finally said, "I want my father's present for this moment. Release their harnesses, remove their medals of valor, and fetch them for me." Rudolph finally commanded. Santa got up from his seat. The normally Jolly Old Patriarch had had enough. "Listen up young pup, this is really beyond the pale. How selfish can you be?!" but Rudolph steel gaze remained unphased. "This isn't all about me you know, children the world over are waiting for me, we really must be on our way!" Santa said as he made a show of putting on his coat and getting ready. All eyes turned to Rudolph, the defiant and uppity reindeer. But Rudolph was unphased. He'd weathered heckling and prodding since his youth. He was not easily intimidated.

"The children can wait your honor. Fetch my fathers as I've requested." Rudolph insisted. Perhaps Santa should have just acquiesced, but he wasn't used to being talked down to. How DARE Rudolph speak to him this way, he only existed because of him, because of the plan Santa had created him for. "Oh? You're a big shot now, are you? You think you can deliver presents to all the children of the world in one night, huh?! Well it's never been done child! But no hurry for the great Rudolph, eh?!" Santa mocked haughtily. "One night is more than I need. The world can not spin fast enough for the likes of me, but I will go one step further. You will make another sack for all the animals of the world as well, and still I shall need no more than 24 hours, just enough time for the whole surface of the earth to be covered in darkness." Rudolph said.

"Oh, you prepared to run this whole operation now are you? Would you like to seat on my throne as well? Shall I dust it off for you my lord? And where do you propose all these presents should come from?! Answer me that!" Santa bellowed.

"I will take it from the surplus silo. From next years stock. Now fetch my father's as I have requested." Rudolph said impatiently. This made the elves start to complain and grumble, they relied on the surplus silo to lighten their load for the next year and maximize their vacation time.

"Hold your tongue young imp! I am ten million times older than you! What gives you the right to order me around?!" Santa demanded.

"Because your honor, I am the one with the power you seek. I promise, if you do as I ask, I will never be difficult with you or anyone else here again. I am not bold your honor, I am meek and mild by nature, but the spirit of righteous indignation compels me. I am not your toy, and I am not your tool, but I can be your friend and ally. Please accept my offer."

Santa was furious, more furious than he'd been in his whole life. He never in all his millions of years of life thought that one such as this little feeble deer, would stand up to him in this way. Then Santa said something no one thought he'd ever say:

"That's it! Christmas is Off!" and with that he threw his coat down and prepared to storm off. That's right folks! The big man in red himself was the one that called Christmas off, not for a snow storm and inclement weather, no in a pissing contest with his greatest creation. Everyone erupted at once, "No Santa! You can't! You mustn't! We haven't missed a Christmas for 338 years, you can't ruin our perfect delivery record, we'll lose our five star rating on deliveries.com!".

"Nah, I've had it! I'm getting to old for this crap! Christmas is off, now and forever! Let the parents hand out the gifts!" Santa bellowed.

Rudolph scowled. As the old man went to retire to his bed chambers, Rudolph chastised him, "So it was all talk?! All this talk of the children, the children, but it was never about that really, was it? What was it all for then? Why did so many fawns have to suffer and die? Why were the children of the world worth all of that? Is a human life so much more valuable then that of a deer? We have hearts that beat as well, we breath the same air, and we can love and suffer just as you. Where is your love Santa? Not just for the children, but for the ones that make it possible! If the children of the world were really so important, were really the reason for why for 338 christmas's you bent the very fabric of reality to make it possible, why quit now? Don't you see Santa? If you do that, all of that suffering you caused will be for naught. So I beg of you. Let me show you how powerful I really am. I promise you I will exceed your wildest expections! JUST TRY ME!"

... and while Santa would never admit it, those words stung, and they stirred his heart as well. He'd forgotten the true meaning of christmas, had become jaded and cynical in his old age. The young buck was right. But he had to save face, and so he turned to Rudolph and began to laugh "Ho ho ho! HO HO HO! Gotcha youngling! I knew you'd come back, and I knew you would fulfill your destiny. Now you have proven to me you are no longer the meek deer you appeared to be, you have come into your own and now have the confidence to perform the greatest miracle the world has ever seen. Congratulations Rudolph, you have passed my test! Courage, Character, and a Heart that's True! Give Rudolph a medal of honor with all speed. Come now children, do not fret! Don't you see? Christmas is not off! Release The Flying Forces of their harnesses and their medals, fetch them as Rudolph has so kindly requested!"

And with that the elves erupted into cheers. The eight were freed of all their chains, and they walked in the hall as nature had always intended.

Rudolph turned to his fathers and embraced them, each one by one. "You are the only one's that have truly loved me, not because of my powers or destiny, but because I was vulnerable and needed love and protection. For that I will be forever greatful." he said. Then Rudolph turned to Santa, "As for you, let it be known to all in attendance that I do this not for Santa Claus to ease his nights, nor for the children of the world, but for my father's, who have suffered millennia after millennia standing on their hooves on billions upon billions of rooftops for some carrots. Never again will my father's ever have to endure such a horrific fate. Not as long as I shall live!"

And with that rousing speech, everyone erupted into holiday cheers. Christmas had been saved! Granted it had nearly been ruined by internal politics, but that, everyone assured themselves, was besides the point!

But there was no time to celebrate, Christmas was on!

At first Santa suggested that Yulwhiffle, that years designated Red Elf, come along just in case, but Rudolph insisted it would not be necessary. He was that confident in his abilities. He would not fail. Yulwhiffle thanked Rudolph shaking his front hoof rigorously. YulWhiffle had just been saved from a fate worst then death. Farnwaddle smiled approvingly at Rudolph, and Rudolph smiled back at his old Elven friend.  

After that was settled The Eight Reindeer were quickly suited up with goggles and air tanks, and Rudolph was assembled as the lead, with his own harness and medal of honor. The presents were already loaded, all ten million tons of them, compacted into the space of Santa's thousand gallon toy sack using the Elves Compact Present Technology. 

"Strap in Santa, it's going to be a wild ride!" Rudolph said as he pulled down his goggles and the teams with telekinesis and they all began to levitate. "Ready. Set. Go!" Rudolph said. And they were off like a flash. Within mere seconds they were already flying at thousands of miles per hour and Santa was thrown back into his chair from the several thousand mph winds blowing in his face. "Rudolph! Knock off this crap already and cut through the atmosphere!" Santa demanded. "Alright sir ... but I don't think you are going to like it!" and with that Rudolph accelerated the sleigh team faster than it had ever travelled before. Within minutes they had already surpassed a million miles per hour and counting! They'd already circled the earth once, but Rudolph was just getting warmed up ...

But how was Rudolph able to travel at even a "modest" 1,000,000 mph without burning up Santa, the sleigh, his fathers, and himself in the process? Simple. Rudolph would move the air molecules out of the flight path creating a perfect vacuum for the team to travel through. They flew between the air like a hot knife splitting soft butter! In their wake Rudolph would rush the molecules back setting their position and momentum back to whatever it was before he'd moved them. Since Rudolph was moving so fast and had control of the air molecules, not only was no heat produced but no sound either. In effect the team was completely invisible to the naked eye and more or less completely undetectable even to scientific equipment. They would flash by in microseconds and you couldn't see them even if they passed right before your eyes. They were going that fast! 

But wait, how would Santa not die from the massive G-forces?! He should be a pancake!

Well all Rudy had to do was make sure all the molecules in the team all accelerated uniformly. In this way he could basically accelarate as much as he wanted without crushing Santa under the massive G's.

But it gets even more insane ...

No longer did Santa have to slowly and methodically place presents anymore. No Siree. Rudolph would split the atoms of the houses they passed through, decompactify the appropriate presents, place the presents at their required locations then put the house back together exactly as it was and will microseconds to spare!

There is no doubt that there are some children he atomized in the process, but it didn't matter because they would get reassembled in approximately 300 microseconds none the wiser. In this way, Santa no longer had to "stop" and could simply fly through the houses and fill them with presents as he passed through them on route! 

Rudolph was able to do all this in microseconds because his brain was highly evolved like a supercomputer. Truly Rudolph is the second most miraculous and improbable being to ever exist, only second to The Easter Bunny. Rudolph can't go faster than light, but as you can see, he doesn't need to. Lightspeed would actually make the entire trip only last about three hours despite circling the globe 74,703 times!

Not only is Rudy able to solve all of these logistical problems, but even the Compact gift technology became largely redundant on subsequent trips once Rudolph was scienced into existence. Rudy is easily able to pick up the necessary payload of presents for approximately 12,000 homes on every pass around the globe.

As amazing as all this was, already blowing Santa's mind several times over, Rudy was only getting started! He'd barely tapped into even 1% of his true power. He continued to accelerate at a insane pace of 256 g's. Even at such a modest pace, he'd circle the entire globe 74,703 times in only 13.6 hours, reaching a top speed of 273 million mph. At that massive speed Rudolph would be circling the globe three times every second!  But Rudolph would have to do better than that to give out gifts to all the worlds animals as well. Rudolph would go around the world twice as many times, and toss out presents in a 440 foot radius from his present location. In this way he could give presents to all the worlds living creatures. That would require a minimum speed of 100 million mph! But Rudolph's bold spirit wanted to go so soooo much further! He kicked his acceleration into high gear as he prepared ... to approach lightspeed!

Recall that lightspeed is exactly 299,792,458 meters/second. To convert this to mph, first we note that this is 29,979,245,800 cm/sec. There are exactly 2.54 cm to every inch, 12 inces to every foot, and 5280 feet for every mile. Dividing by these factors we obtain that the speed of light is a 186,282.397 miles/second. Now multiplying this by 60 seconds per minutes, and 60 minutes per hour, we obtain: 670,616,629.384 mph. THAT is how fast light is.

To approach the speed of light by the end of 149,406 times around the earth would require and acceleration of approximately 770 g's. At such a phenomenal rate Rudolph would complete his route in only 11 hours!

But even that wasn't enough of a thrill for Rudolph's rapidly beating heart, he at last was truly free. He'd held his power down and tried to snuff it out for three years, but now he could finally "let it go!" and use the full extent of his power and it was exciting!

"Hold on Santa! I'm about to kick it into high gear! I'm going to be the first reindeer to reach a billion miles per hour!" Rudolph said as he prepared to push the very limits of what was possible. "Rudolph, hold on, let's not get carried away and do anything outlandish now, you've already performed with flying colors my boy! Ho Ho HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY CRAP -" Santa said as suddenly the world around him became sickeningly distorted!

Rudolphs G's started to go off the chart, passing a 1000, then racking up tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of g's. The g's were increasing exponentially!

Within no time at all Rudolph was travelling at a billion mph ... or so he thought, in actuality he was only travelling at 74% lightspeed at this point. How is that possible?! Because of special relativity. Rudolph had the momentum of going a billion miles per hour, that is what he felt based on how much energy he'd poured into his speed. But in reality it was space that had condensed by a factor of 2, so that they could cover more absolute distance in less time.

But Rudolph wasn't done ... "now ten billion miles per hour!" Rudolph shouted now having lost himself in pure christmas bliss. "Uh, RuDoLpH aRe YoU sUrE tHiS iS a GoOd IdEa?!" Blitzen spurted out in near panic, with even the eight starting to get very nervous now ... "one hundred billion miles per hour!! ONE TRILLION MPH!!!" Rudolph shouted as he whipped around the earth at 99.99997% the speed of light!

At such incredible speeds Santa only experienced about 15 seconds, even as Rudolph overshot his mark and looped around the earth another 75,000 times just to slow down!

When everything suddenly stopped where they had begun, one minute ago from Santa's reference frame, Santa got that horrible sensation you get when you stare at a fractal zoom video for too long and look away. He collapsed to the ground and exclaimed, "What hath I wrought?!" and promptly barfed up the excess of candy canes and cookies he'd unwisely downed before the trip.

Rudolph just beamed with pride, he hadn't know he was capable of going that fast, and who knows for sure what was possible, but it was already more than enough to accomplish the task of santa's flight. Perhaps Rudolph would test his powers by seeing how quickly he could reach Saturn, but for now it was time for a well deserved break. Rudolph had covered exactly 50% of the surface of the earth, but he couldn't cover 100% without making presents appear in the daylight. So he figured they had about 21 hours to take a break while the darkside caught up.

"It's alright your honor. You can rest now. It'll be a while til the darkside of the earth covers the remainder of it's denizens!" Rudolph tried to say to ease Santa's distress.

"I think I'm going to be sick" Santa said as he head to the castle.

Rudolph looked around. Where had everyone gone? They were all hear cheering them on a minute ago? Everyone had somehow gone inside?

Little did Rudolph know that things were very different from other points of view. For those across the globe Rudolph's journey had taken about 166 minutes even though it had only seemed to take 1 minute from his reference frame. But it was so much longer than that for the Elves and Reindeer of Christmas town. For them, Santa and his sleigh had disappeared for almost a whole year for them, 345 days to be more precise. They'd enjoyed their vacation while they were gone. Many of them had gone up to the Ski Resorts up on the mountains that surrounded them and were not there to greet them.

Rudolph was so fast that time had been distorted by a factor of about a thousand. He was very confused why so much time had passed for everyone else and at first he got worried.

"Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, what happened, did I miss Christmas!?! I'm so sorry, I don't know what happened?" Rudolph began to cry.

"No no son" Blitzen said nuzzling Rudolph reassuringly, "You did spectacularly and we are all very proud of you! All eight of us! It's just time dilation Son. It is still Christmas Night for half of the world."

"I don't understand?" Rudolph said. "It's alright son, you will." Blitzen replied.

And so he did. Rudolph quickly learned that the amount of time it took him to reach far off places was vastly shorter than what it appeared to others. As such he was cautioned against going to the stars because he would miss several christmas's that way even if to him it would only seem to take a few hours. As such Rudolph had to content himself with whizzing around the solar system for fun. He could reach Pluto in 13 seconds his time, and only 5.5 hours would pass on earth. Rudolph was very content though having realized his enormous potential, far more power than Santa would ever need in fact.

Rudolph enjoyed the time off,  7 whole years of it, playing with the other young bucks and does of that generation. They did not judge Rudolph, no they were flattered that he wanted to play with them! They knew he'd completely revolutioned Santa's flight, but all Rudolph wanted to do was play like one of them: Skating and Coasting, and Climbing The Willows, and Hop-scotch and Leap Frog (protected by pillows). Those 7 years were the happiest of Rudolph's life, he made many friends and got to see them grow up ...

... but finally it was time to set off again from Christmas Town. The darkside of the earth had finally turned 180 degrees, a mere 21 hours had passed for the rest of the earth. There was no time to lose! The Sleigh team was assembled again, and Rudolph and his fathers put on the harnesses once more.

And Santa shouted "ROLL CALL!", and the reindeer said in turn, "Dasher", "Dancer", "Prancer", "Vixen", "Comet", "Cupid", "Donner", "Blitzen", "Rudolph!"

And I heard them exclaim as they flew out of sight "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!" 

The End

Epilogue

... and the rest, as they say, is history, or rather mythology. Let us briefly discuss how the real story of Rudolph became the myth, the legend ...

After that first Christmas, Rudolph found that he preffered to travel the world and make friends, where time flowed much faster, then have the year tick by super slowly in Christmas Town. He made friends with animals mostly, but occassionally he'd visit a human child. He had recently come to view human children as innocent at least, if not adults, and while he wasn't suppose to, he occasionally made himself visible because children are never believed anyway. He'd tell them of the north pole, that Santa was real, and that some very special reindeer really could fly. And then the children would excitedly tell their parents to come to the window, but Rudolph was frightened of Adults, and as soon as they'd show up he'd zip off at a million mph and it would appear as if he'd vanish in an instant.

One time he saw a girl crying. "Why are you crying?" he asked. "My mother has passed away, and my father is depressed and can not think of a Christmas story to write for his job." she said. "Tell him about me. He can write a story about me." Rudolph said. "What is your name?" the little girl asked. "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer." and with that he vanished. This was in July of 1939.

The little girl rushed to her father to tell him to write a story of a red nosed reindeer named Rudolph, who had visited her in a vision. The father was Robert L. May, and he wrote the story of Rudolph, an ordinary reindeer who was teased by the other reindeer until Santa needed his help to guide his sleigh through a snow storm.

Rudolph told Santa about it, and Santa used his magic to ensure that the story became very popular. That Christmas of 1939 is sold like hotcakes at Montgomery Ward, where Robert L. May worked.

That story eventually became the well known song, The 1964 special, and many other films and adaptions, with the details all scrambled and changed with each rendition, but all of it was ultimately made up, all except for Rudolph himself of course! But now you know the true story of Rudolph, and as you can see, it is quite a bit different.

Is Rudolph still a hero? Was Santa the villian all along? Or did he only become that way? What are we to make of these strange events? Well the job of a storyteller is to simply tell the story, it is up to you dear reader, to make up your mind about the rest. And with that we shall end our tale.

Addendum:
The Googology of Rudolph's Powers

Now that the story is over, let's consider the ramifications of Rudolph's power level. How powerful would Rudolph need to be to make the above feat possible? How could it even be possible?

Let's consider the basic physics first. Momentum is the product of mass times change in velocity in classical mechanics, and mass times velocity times the so called "gamma factor" in relativity. This is typically measured in Kilograms*meters/second in the standard SI units, also known as Newton-Seconds, where a Newton is 1 kg*m/s^2. Newtons is a measure of force, which is mass times acceleration.  With that in mind we need to compute:

10 million tons x 0.999999775 c x gamma(0.999999775)

where c is the speed of light, and gamma here is a function which returns the corresponding gamma factor for a velocity divided by c. This requires some changes in units, but nothing too painful. Santa's payload works out to 9,071,858,188.71 (9.071 billion) kg. 0.999999775c would be 299,792,390.547 m/s. The gamma factor is 1490.71 (a unitless quanity). Putting this altogether yields:

4.05424530769x10^21 (4.054 sextillion) Newton-Seconds

We can figure out how much force Rudolph had to generate to reach such a massive speed with such a massive payload by considering it only took Rudolph 52 seconds to reach his peak speed. This works out to 7.796x10^19 (77.9 quintillion) Newtons. Although if he slowed down in only 8 seconds that works out to 5.067x10^20 (506.7 quintillion) Newtons. These numbers are so stupidly big that they're not particularly helpful.

We can also compute the amount of work done since we know the total distance traveled during the acceleration phase was 74,703 great circles of the earth. Work is measured in Joules which are Newton-meters. Using the Newtons from our previous result and multiplying by the total trip of 2.99366856114x10^12 (2.99 trillion) meters, we obtain:

2.33386401027x10^32 Joules

This is a loooot more than it seems. We need something large to compare it to. A typical nuclear bomb released an energy equivalent of 4.18x10^15 Joules. So the trip had the energy release equivalent of 55 quadrillion nuclear explosions! That is still so huge that it defies comprehension. Turns out 10^32 Joules is approximately the amount of energy to destroy the earth, so yes, according to this feat, Rudolph would have to be a planet-buster o_0;

But this doesn't even consider the energy involved in moving all that air out of the way and then bringing it all back unchanged. To figure that out we can consider that Rudolph had to move basically every molecule of air on the entire earth, accelerating it close to the speed of light, at least as fast as Rudolph himself, in order to move it quickly enough not to crash into it! The totality of earth's atmosphere would be 5.15x10^18 kg. Repeating the same momentum calculation and then work computation, we would have to multiply the previous result by the ratio of the mass of the atmosphere to the mass of Santa's payload. This works out to a multiplication factor of 567,689,650. That works out to:

1.324910443114x10^41 (132 duodecillion) Joules

Now even blowing up earth's isn't of much help. This would be the equivalent of blowing up 500,000,000 earths.

Now we need something of a completely different order of insanity. A Supernova explosion releases the equivalent of 10^44 Joules, so basically Rudolph's feat is the equivalent of 0.1% of a supernova. But maybe that's how much of his power he used? Maybe Rudolph has the equivalent of a supernova at his disposal? It's not out of the question. Clearly a supernova is a MASSIVE amount of power, enough to make the completely absurd Santa Flight feat not only feasible, but piddling!

If Rudolph had stuck with the minimum requirement of 50 million mph, how much would that reduce the total required energy? The total mass and total distance wouldn't change, 5.15x10^18 kg and 2.99x10^12 m respectively, but this only needs to be accelerated to 7.5% lightspeed now. To cover the 2.99x10^12 meters in 36 hours would require an acceleration of 356m/s^2. This leads to a maximum velocity of 103,216,659 (103 million) mph. Multiplying the mass times the acceleration times the distance yields:

5.481866x10^33 (5.48 decillion) Joules

Even this feat however could destroy the earth 54 times over. So even then it would be a planet-busting feat.

Let's look at this from another angle. What if Rudolph was not restrained by having to move the earth's entire atmosphere or even Santa's ten million ton payload. What if Rudolph simply had to accelerate himself in the vaccuum of space using the same amount of energy as 0.1% of a supernova? Just how fast would Rudolph end up travelling?

Let's say "m" is Rudolph's mass and is only 125 lbs, or 56.7 kg. Let "a" be the acceleration and "W" be the work. If we compute W/(ma) we get meters which is the total distance covered. From there we can figure out the final velocity based on the chosen acceleration. Let d = W/(ma). d = (1/2)at^2, while v = at. Acceleration and distance are known so we only need to solve for v and t. v = at -> t = v/a -> (1/2)at^2 = (1/2)a(v/a)^2 = v^2/(2a). since d = W/(ma) = v^2/(2a) it follows that, multiplying both sides by a we have 2W/m = v^2. Note that the acceleration in this case is arbitrary. Regardless of the acceleration chosen the same final velocity would be obtained, it just can be obtained slower or quicker. W = 10^41 J, m=56.7kg. 2W/m = 3.52733x10^39 m^2/s^2. Taking the square root of this we obtain:

5.93913870917x10^19 m/s
or
1.328547x10^20 (132 quintillion) mph
o_0;

So ... Rudolph could go 100 million times faster than he did in the story, and that's only at 0.1% of a supernova! Uhhhh ...

Alright well there is no way to wrap ones head around that so let's just move on to the relativistic calculation. Since this is proper velocity, how close to lightspeed would this be?

Let v = 1.32x10^20 mph, and c = 670,616,629 mph. If we compute sinh^-1(v/c) we obtain the rapidity, which in this case is ... 26.698. This ... this is just insane btw. Think of rapidity kind of like a warp factor. So this is like Rudolph going from warp 8 to warp 26. Ridiculous leap.

Next we compute the velocity from the rapidity. Let r be the rapidity. We then compute tanh(r). We obtain: ... 1. Well at least according to my calculator. So we will need to compute tanh(r) = sinh(r)/cosh(r), where sinh(r) = (e^r - e^-r)/2 and cosh(r) = (e^r + e^-r)/2. sinh(r) = 196,681,758,317 - 0. 000 000 000 001 , cosh(r) = 196,681,758,317 + 0. 000 000 000 001. Let x = 196,681,758,317 and dx = 10^-12. (x-dx)/(x+dx) = 1 - dx/(x+dx) which we can approximate as 1 - dx/x. This yields: 1 - 5.084x10^-24. Alright what the hell does that mean? Well that's:

99. 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 5% lightspeed

Total and complete insanity.

To get a handle on just how fast this is, let's consider how long, from Rudolph's reference frame, it would take to travel to various places at this speed.

To reach the sun from the earth would only take 2.5 nanoseconds.

To reach Neptune from the Sun would take 76 nanoseconds.

To reach alpha centauri from the sun would take 0.7 milliseconds

To reach Betelguese from the sun would take 103 milliseconds

To go from one end of the Milky Way to the other would take 16.03 seconds.

Suffice it to say ... RUDOLPH IS OP AF!

Granted while Rudolph could dash around the Milky Way if he wanted to, he'd jump hundreds of thousands of years into the future of his earthbound friends if he did that. And just imagine how long that would be for them? That's 300 million years just in Christmas Town, and it could be as much as 79 billion years for Santa if he uses his slowest method. But then again, if were already assuming red holes exist Rudolph could just jump back in time if it really came to that.

Geolocal-SR and The Elves Union

This leaves only one other issue. How does a small team of elves prepare billions of presents a year? Welp this is where geolocal-special-relativity comes into play ...

First things first, there are an estimated 2,200,000,000 (2.2 billion) children in the world. Assuming at least 5 gifts for every child that means Santa's Elves need to create the equivalent of 11,000,000,000 (11 billion) gifts per year. Yet in every depiction of Santa Claus he only employs what looks like a few thousand elves tops ...

Some sources even say Santa only employs 6 Elves, kind of like how he only has 8 reindeer, but let's be generous and say he has a thousand elves under his employ. How long would it take 1000 elves to create the 11 billion toys ordered every year? Not only do they have to produce 11 billion toys, but they have to come in a huge variety of shapes and forms. But let's argue that each elf can reasonably produce a single toy per hour with the materials and machines at their disposal. With ten hour shifts per day they could collectively produce 10,000 toys per day. Sounds pretty good ... until you consider what a tiny drop in the bucket that is. It would still take them 1,100,000 (1.1 million) days to complete their order every year ... hm. There is no way such a workforce could possibly complete that order in a single year. In fact this time period would be the equivalent of 3000 years. 

The Answer: Time Dilation!

There is an aspect of this we've been ignoring til then. How exactly does Santa hide in the North Pole? Supposedly Santa lives on a giant Ice Sheet, but it is well known that there is no such Ice sheet in the North pole, look at any map, all you will see is the vast and lonely artic ocean. It's anartica that is the giant Ice Sheet. So how or where does Santa live in the north pole? Does he have a deep sea base? No. The Snowcapped depictions are accurate and they are faaaaaaar more north than anything you've ever imagined, literally astronomically north of the magnetic north. 

Remember that line in Rudolph's Shiny New Year? The one that says that Eon the Terrible lives "north of the north pole where the sun never rises". What? You've never heard of the movie?! It was the official Rankin-Bass Sequel to the 1964 Rudolph Christmas Special, what do you mean you've never heard of it! Nevermind. The point is that depiction actually accurately describes the earth.

You see the earth isn't actually 196 million square miles, but is actually has virtually infinite surface area, at least 10^(10^(10^50)) square miles by some estimates, but no one knows for sure because no one has ever actually been able to reach true north. You see unbeknownst to ordinary physists, and known only to pataphysists, spacetime is actually not only relative to velocity, but also geolocation, latitude specifically. You've probably been told the lie that the equator is the largest circle of latitude, and all further circles of latitude as you approach the north or south are smaller approaching a point at the poles. This however isn't quite true. Actually all circles of latitude that we know have no detectable difference in their length. They are all 24,901 miles around, even the 89th parallel. How is this possible? Because spacetime is non-euclidean! As one approaches the poles on the surface of the earth the spacetime metric grows around the polar axis of the earth. This has the effect that the 2 other spatial dimensions expand, meaning the earth appears more and more flat from the vantage point of high levels of latitude. This is why flat earthers exist. In space however the earth appears as a perfect sphere, and this is why the famous "Blue Marble" photo the earth is round:

The mysterious missing Iceberg that Santa's castle exists on is now easily explained. It is simply too small to be seen from anywhere even up to the 89th parallel (that is 89 degrees north latitude). The 89th parallel appears to be only 1.7% the circumference of the equator from the vantage point of the equator.

The key thing to remember is that the scaling factor doesn't just apply to space, but also to time. Consider the following diagram:

Imagine Rudolph making circuits around a small circle of latitude. One can think of the time around as an orbital period. The x and y axes represent an idealized plane that the artic circle flattens to as one approaches the north pole. The z axis can be imagined as representing time. As we move into the origin of the graph all 3 axes expand. The circuit appears to grow, yet the z-axis grows as well, causing the orbital period to increase by the same dilation factor. The velocity appears constant and invariant with scale, but not time. Objects near the poles will appear to experience accelerated time, where objects more distant will appear to be going in slow motion. This is the essence of geolocational-special relativity, a hereto unknown aspect of relatively known only to a select few. Santa and his elves exploit this feature of relativity to accomplish their task at a relatively leisurely pace.

At 89 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of arc north of the equator, time is slowed down by a factor of 3000 relative to the 89th parallel. This gives the elves the 3000 years they need to complete their task. From the vantage point of the equator on the other hand Santa's workshop is shrunk by a factor 171,000 making it too small to be seen even off the closest coasts, thus Santa's Iceberg appears to small to see. 

At such high latitudes it is in fact always night all year round, not because the sun does not rise, but because the column of air it must travel through is too great of an angle to actually see.

The distance one has to travel on points of the earth can be found by taking the difference of logarithms using complex numbers in something known as the Eulerean plane. Santa's workshop, if you do the math is approximately 31,697 miles north of the 89th parallel, and so light has to travel through approximately a 31,697 mile column of air to reach Santa's workshop. As such it's a little bit like trying to see the Sun near the liquid core of jupiter. Basically all you can see is darkness because angles get stretched out too.  

In short Santa's elves have all the time they need, and if they needed more all they'd have to do is move santa's workshop closer to the north pole increasing the time dilation factor.

In the olden days this was considered fair. Santa spent tens of thousands of years on his Christmas flight, and the elves spent a comparable time at the workshop, although they only got one vacation day while Santa got 355 vacation days.

Rudolph upset that balance however, which is Why Hermey formed the Elven Workers Rights Union ... but that is a tale for another time :p