Chapter 2: Just the Tip, I Swear
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Man, does my bladder feel better. Right, where was I? Ah. Deer, hips, Serena, sleepy time, bungee jump booking, suppositories. Got it.
Like almost everything back then some problem or another cropped up and we almost forgot about the booking, I barely thought about it during the following week. The closer the day got however, the more apprehensive and scared I got. It was such a stupid and reckless thing to do, as well as a massive waste of cash. After trying to chicken out and cancel, we found out that the booking was non-refundable, so no backing out unless I wanted all that money to go down the drain. Saturday morning came, I picked up Serena in the car and we both drove to the venue. It was a place up north somewhere, it took a few hours to get there I know that much.
There was another group of people before my allotted time, so we grabbed a quick bite to eat at the onsite café and sat around for about an hour until it was my turn to jump. I ruled out the notion of drinking anything, didn’t want to piss my pants as I fell toward the ground. I certainly didn’t want it leaking out my trousers and into my face, not exactly the tastiest or most nutritional drink in the world, not unless you’re a survivalist I guess. The chance of crapping our briefs was bad enough, can you image a bout of diarrhoea spraying out of our pants and raining down brown hell upon the spectators below? I wonder if that has actually ever happened? Probably, poor bastards.
Anyway, Serena wished me luck as I disappeared into the so called ‘disembarkation room’. It wasn’t anything that special, a quick presentation (plus safety briefing) on what was going to happen, how to put clothing on, along with giving me said clothing, what to do in an emergency, that kind of thing. It was a rather cold day; quite cloudy as well, but what do you expect from the north of England? You’re lucky if it gets above 10 degrees up there.
I was escorted to the ricketiest looking crane elevator I had ever seen, and against my better judgement I still got on it with the instructor. It took a damn long time to get to the top, we kept climbing until all the people on the ground looked like ants, I couldn’t even make Serena out anymore. The higher we got the worse the wind became too, it caused the elevator to shake gently, I grasped on to the side railing for dear life.
We finally reached the top with a loud clonk, a flock of birds got spooked by the sudden noise and took off with a mad flutter; they begun to circle around trying to find a new place to perch. The ‘instructor’, who might I point out was obviously just there for the money and didn’t give two craps about his job, opened the barrier and stood aside to let me jump. I gingerly approached the side to peer over and instantly regretted it, grabbing on to the railings once more for safety.
The geezer noticed that I was ever so slightly nervous and after a while became inpatient, asking if I wanted to go back down the lift. I replied instantly with a “no” and slowly let go of the railing, and inched toward the open barrier. After a few moments I said something along the lines of “you’re going to have to push me”. Now, I know staff members aren’t meant to do such things, but I think he was just tired of me pissing about. Without any warning at all he gave me a slight nudge; I lost my balance and began to plummet toward the ground, right fast like.
Just like with the deer situation I involuntarily gasped, the extent of the situation I found myself in suddenly sank in and flooded my tiny reptilian brain with panic. I instantly went to the ‘you are falling to your death and you can’t do shit about it’ mentality, only natural really. I could feel my heart drumming in my ears, despite having drunk sod all earlier my bladder suddenly wanted to empty itself. Just like a snap of the finger though, everything slowed down. I don’t mean my perception of time slowed like you hear about in accidents, but everything around me slowed down; not sure how to describe it really. If you have ever fallen a lengthy distance you would know what it was, wind whipping at you and a whooshing noise, a bit like when you hold your hand out of a fast-moving car, there was none of that.
I looked around frantically and saw the aforementioned birds flying in slow motion; their wings were flapping so slow it was like watching a hydrologic press slowly moving up and down. There was a pigeon almost directly below me, lucky for both of us though that for once one of those flying rats actually decided to get out of the way of an incoming object hurtling towards it. The bird was only about four feet away; but it still took a good few seconds before I reached their altitude, and then descend beyond it. The stupid thing was so surprised to see a human falling out of the sky so close to it that their reaction was to completely empty its bowels. Have you ever seen a pigeon perform a fear induced diarrhoea rainstorm in slow motion? I can declare with somewhat absolute authority that it is not pretty, interesting in a morbid kind of way, but certainly not pretty. The way their rear end slowly puckered and parted as the liquid just seeped out with such power… I hope for your sake that particular memory gets purged.
My eyes darted back toward the ground, all the ants down below were also moving around incredibly slowly. To be fair though not many of them had been running around like an escaped mental patient beforehand, so it was difficult to tell whether they were also affected. My initial terror began to plateau, I mean the ol’ heart was still going like a race car, but it was nowhere near as deafening. It felt like it took forever to calm down, realistically it was probably only less than a minute or so though.
Then, rather unexpectedly, a strong gust of wind slapped me in the face and begun whipping at the fabric of our jumpsuit. I looked down (up for our orientation since we were currently falling upside down) and saw terra firma was quickly and somewhat alarmingly hurtling towards me. Yet again panic gripped hold of our very soul and I let out a scream of girly terror, like a banshee on crack. Within the blink of an eye (once more) everything slowed down.
Looking around, everything was once more moving at a snail’s pace. This time however, I was able to calm myself down much quicker, fifteen (at tops twenty) seconds or. Then, of course, the ground continued falling towards me at the ‘normal’ speed. I stared up at the rapidly approaching Earth and tried not to panic, we wanted to consciously slow down time without letting fear get the better of us. I like to believe that we were able to, maybe even for a fraction of a nanosecond, but that was probably just wishful thinking. Perhaps it was just the bungee cord slowing us down, I honestly do not know.
However, without a shadow of a doubt, I knew what had happened in the van had not been some psychedelic dream, it had actually happened. I was able to slow down time, albeit not without any degree of accuracy yet, but I knew I could, and that was a start. I couldn’t wait for the damn bungee session to be over, mainly to be on solid ground, but also to tell sweet Serena.
Yeah, the long and short of it was Serena did not believe me, and to be fair to her why would she? I had no evidence. I had just bungee jumped (well, pushed) from a very tall crane, logic would dictate that the surge of adrenaline made everything seem slower. It really did not help our case when I couldn’t provide any proof either; like I said I wasn’t able to control our ability at that point. I decided to drop the whole thing, no point in causing an argument when I couldn’t prove shit. Well that, but I also did not want her to think I was losing my mind. I drove Serena back to her home and that was that, with the knowledge that I had a super power locked deep within us I made the executive decision to coax it out one way or another, like tickling a fart out.
Now look here, I know most stories would go into great detail about what happened over the following few weeks, maybe even offer a brief montage of events verbally, but no. Alas, nothing particularly interesting occurred, so I won’t bore my current, and future self, with utterly tiresome dribble.
In a brief summary, there was a lot of me continuing on with my life, and in our spare time a load of trying to coax our power out of hiding again. It took about a week, maybe a week and a half, of intense focus (and looking like I was about to make a shit sandwich in our trousers) but on one dark fateful evening I was finally able to slow time consciously for a few seconds. In fact, the sheer surprise of finally being able to broke my concentration and everything returned to normal. It was one hell of a surprise let me assure you, I was covered in sweat and felt fatigued to high hell after that brief moment of success. In case you are wondering by the way, I was using one of those magnetic field swinging ball contraptions to measure whether time had slowed or not, very scientific I know.
We had finally been able to consciously slow down time, go me. Well, to be honest it kind of felt more like luck than anything. But, with some practise I was able to do it again, and last longer with each attempt. I felt less and less tired with every successful try, it reminded me of exercising a muscle you hardly ever use. At first you can’t do much with it, and it hurts like a donkey, but overtime the muscle gets stronger and easier to use, practise makes perfect and all that pizzazz. It took nearly a month from that fateful evening in the van, but I was finally able to (at least in a very limited sense) control our ability of slowing time. What I mean by that is we were able to slow it down consciously for limited bursts. God I was so proud of myself for that, kind of makes me laugh looking back at it now.
Do you remember that old digital clock our father gave us? Yeah, we began using that adjacent with the magnetic swinging ball thing, mainly because it counted seconds, unlike some modern clocks. Oh, I’ve just got to make a quick note before I forget, the slower you make time go relative to yourself, the more resistance there is when you try to move around. Doesn’t feel too bad when time is only slightly slower, but it does start feeling like trying to walk through a swimming pool full of tar if you slow it down too much. So yeah, try not to bring the universe to an absolute standstill, or else any slight movement might ignite the atoms around you via friction. You’d certainly save quite a bit of money on the heating bill mind you.
After a while I used some of our hard-earned dosh and splashed out on one of those fancy expensive clocks that displayed milliseconds, so we could see just how slow I could make things go. You know how the milliseconds usually just fly by, to the point where you can barely make any of them out before a second passes and the counter resets? Yeah, I got them down to an actual countable speed; it was still somewhat fast, going from 0 to 999 in the matter of about five seconds. Well, five seconds in relation to me anyhow. It doesn’t sound impressive when written down like that but hey slowing down time is cool, hopefully you don’t have to relearn all that, sucks to be you that’s the case.
Oh, and I did dabble with speeding time up as well, but alas, no success with that. Probably for the best though when thinking about it, don’t want to accidentally speed time up and get rained on, instead of rain droplets they would be like bullets hailing down from the sky. Imagine that, you’re walking down the street when it starts to drizzle and the person besides you suddenly just explodes in a bloody mist. Also, just to make sure I was slowing down time and not just accelerating my movement up drastically, I wore a wrist watch, which ticked along at a normal rate whilst the millisecond clock slowly plodded along, so yeah, sluggish time confirmed.
Now, I will admit, I may have allowed this little fixation of ours to take over our life just a tad bit, and I may have been giving Serena the cold shoulder, not intentionally mind you. Naturally she was not incredibly pleased about all this, to the point where she turned up at my apartment unannounced to find out exactly what the hell was going on. At first, she suspected I had a side hussy, or perhaps she herself was now in fact the side chick. My initial reaction was to laugh when she accused me of that, which (as you may not be surprised to hear) just made the situation worse. I tried to explain what I had been able to accomplish in the past month, but she was not having any of it and tried to leave.
After some bickering, and raised voices being exchanged, I was able to convince her to stay for a demonstration. I stood her in front of the digital clock alongside me and told her to stare at it. I held her hand gently, cleared my mind, closed my eyes and concentrated, breathing in and out slowly. I gradually opened my eyes and stared at the expensive clock, and as expected the milliseconds were running slowly. By the way, up until that point I knew I could manipulate my wristwatch to stay at ‘my’ speed, but I did not realise that I could do it with other people, so another lesson learnt. I looked over at her and she was in disbelief, then fear. I grew concerned enough to lose concentration, resulting in time snapping back to normal. What is normal? No, let’s not get into that right now.
She simply blinked a few times, trying to wrap her head around what had just happened. Serena looked at me with a glazed over look as I explained that I wasn’t actually crazy, that I could indeed slow down time. Her response was simple, to forcefully pull her hand away from mine and leave. I tried to follow but she wasn’t having any of it, she had become visibly shaken, even scared.
The problem that I hadn’t factored in was she came from an extremely superstitious family, and what she had just seen (as I later found out via text message) freaked her the hell out. She told her parents what had happened and they were convinced I had slipped their daughter some kind of hallucinogenic drug, causing her to trip balls. That, or it was some kind of devil magic worship type thing going on. They wanted nothing to do with me anymore, a sentiment Serena wholeheartedly agreed with.
This is the part where you expect me to say (in painful detail) how I fell into a deep depression and lost my will to live, or some emotional crap like that. Perhaps I used my power to try and win Serena (and her family) back? Well, in short: you’re dead wrong. In less short: you’re dead dead wrong, Sonny Jim. I was at the tip of the iceberg, the precipice so to speak. I knew there was more, I could feel it, and I had to double down and continue exploring this gift that I had been granted.
Hey, at that point we weren’t even aware we could teleport all over the place, let alone travel back and forth throughout time. I was just so excited and wrapped up that I had this single power, that I barely gave her a second thought. I did love her I suppose, but I never really felt that special connection. Plus, finding out you have freaky powers overrides pretty much everything else.
Somewhat anticlimactic I know, but there we go. I am a man of many surprises, but mainly let downs, especially when it comes to climatic cliff-hanger endings. Right, I’ll be back tomorrow, I can already feel myself getting tired and I know I’m making mistakes. I’ll pick this up tomorrow, ciao for now.
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