Chapter 3: Work & Paranoia
[User connected, continuing]
Previously on trying to remember things from well over a century ago: instead of grieving for the loss of Serena, I soldiered on with mastering the manipulation of time. There we go, all caught up. Got my coffee so let us continue.
I was so wrapped up in it all that nothing else really mattered. Well, minus the job we still had at that point, along with el parents that we chatted to on occasion. I still couldn’t control my power to the extent I had hoped for though, nor could I really come up with any practical uses for it, besides the usual slowing down time when people fell off ladders spiel. The issue with that was I’d have to be pretty darn close to see or hear that happening, we don’t have super hearing y’know. The idea of using it to make money did cross my mind, but the only way I could image that working was the whole robbing bank or becoming a thief thing. There was no way I was going to expose myself and get caught just to have some scientists prod us in our sensitive areas and experiment on us. Also stealing is bad, blah blah blah, we were still in our Sainthood phase.
Looking back now it was extremely stupid to show Serena what I could do. Oh well, no point having a panic attack over spilt milk.
The only real-life application I could think of at the time involved our job, basically to make myself look good. You see, as an engineer I had a number of planned jobs every day, plus a bunch of unplanned emergencies that popped up. Example: a tree taking out an overhead cable, or some crackhead digging through a three-phase power supply. So, say for instance wiring in a new house, you would usually have to go to the local substation to take readings, make sure the existing installation could handle more juice running through it, ensure the earth cable was sufficient, then actually make the connection. Trust me, it all added up on the clock.
Hey, it isn’t even like we got any bonus cash for being quick either, it was purely to make us look excellent, and hopefully the boss would pull a bonus out of his arse for me due to being such a good boy engineer. Basically, I started to use our powers of time sparingly at work. After some patience and continued practice, I was able to keep the snail time going for longer, and as a consequence finish jobs ‘quicker’. Obviously, I couldn’t use them when working directly with others around, otherwise they would just see a blur of movement and I would be discovered. Not exciting and a bit convoluted I know, but there we go. Suck it up buddy boyo.
I don’t remember how long I was able to keep up the charade before the higher ups became suspicious, but it didn’t take long before I went from being one of the slowest engineers in the region to skyrocketing to #1. Looking back now that was a pretty dumb thing I did, bringing attention to myself like that. There were rumours that I was cutting corners and leaving dangerous situations. However, I learnt a lot from watching the videos our trainer had shown our group about a suspicious looking electrician leaving a live cable exposed that killed a fictitious child. It is best to be paranoid and triple check your work then assume it was correct but end up leaving a major explosion waiting to happen.
Basically, I was a paranoid freaky-deaky who always made sure everything was fine to the point where it would make me spend far longer on a job then necessary. Anywho, as a result of my sudden increase in production the company started auditing my work post-job to match. They even tried sending one of their top auditors out with me to try and trip me up, I think his name was Benny Cash, a complete dick who kept trying to get people in trouble and offering wrong information from what I recall. Naturally, I couldn’t show off why I was so quick, so whenever he was out with me I went back to being a turtle, whenever his back was turned, or he was busy with paperwork however… rápido time was activate.
About a month after the increased checks had begun (and during yet another bloody audit) a development of sorts occurred. We were on a job to fit a secondary power cable for someone’s neighbour, I believe they shared their mains power cable with the property I was sent to work on. Not always a problem, but this one was an undersized baby-cable so something needed to be done about that. At this particular property though the service head, where the main fuse was located, was this ancient ugly looking thing. It was this old, green painted metal container, thick and solid enough to survive a small explosion if the fuse inside ever went nuclear. After wedging opening the swing door to the service I found an incredibly old ceramic fuse carrier, with a stamp that was flaking apart with details printed on the side. I knew from experience that these things always contained asbestos, so I put on all my asbestos PPE as a precaution and gently wiggle-waggled the fuse free.
I placed the carrier on the shelf above the green monstrosity box, and begun stripping back the old cables that were bridging over to next door. Horrible looking cables too, they were those old rubber ones with cloth covers that had always deteriorated by the time you got to the job. As per usual with those kinds of cables, instead of just disappearing straight through the wall to next door they ran out from the service head and down the hallway, then went through the wall at a random interval. I was just walking back to the service head after inspecting where the crappy wiring went and had almost reached it, literally like three or four feet away, when suddenly the front door swung open with what felt like the power of God. We later found out that it was just the customer’s partner, to be fair to him it had been a very windy day out and le wind had taken the door handle right out of his grip and whooshed open. Naturally the door slammed into the shelf, which in turn snapped like a twig and collapsed, crazily enough when the shelf crumpled the fuse carrier fell off it.
Au naturel I panicked, I really did not want that museum piece to smash on to the floor, causing the asbestos inside to shoot out and fly everywhere like a bag of cocaine. Not only would that endanger my own and the customer’s health, but also cause an expensive clean-up crew to be called in. Now, instead of leaping forward to save the day, I froze up. I saw the situation unfolding and I froze, not a man of action back then, kind of pathetic really. I just watched in slow motion as it toppled off the shelf and fell roughly halfway to the floor before my body went “oh shit, yeah best let you do something about that.” I lunged forward towards it, I really didn’t care if I steam-trained into the wall, as long as I grabbed that damned fuse before it went poof in my face. We caught it just in the nick of time, and I mean literally just before it shattered on the ground, hooray.
The thing was though, I knew I shouldn’t have been able to reach it in time, I wasn’t close enough. Yet there I was laying on the laminate floor, huddled up against the wall, with fuse carrier intact. Bingo bango bongo, universe saved once again. At first, I thought I must have slowed time down but no, I can’t describe exactly how, but it just felt different. The more I thought about it, the more out of place it seemed. Instead of a fluid motion you experience when diving forward, it was more like I jolted forward; the scenery had changed ever so slightly, like everything had been pulled forward around moi. Kind of like when you’re watching a video and a single frame is missing.
It was similar to when we were a kid and our parents were driving down the motorway, we would look out the window and blink rapidly, each time you open your eyes suddenly the scenery has changed and you’re like ‘whoa’. What’s that, you don’t remember doing that? Well screw you for thinking we are weird, children do that kind of thing, believe it. I was sure that I had not just slowed time; whatever had just occurred had been an entirely different beast all together. My mind raced, maybe I could bend reality around me, perhaps I had teleported? It felt different to what normally happened that was for damn sure, there was a slight tingle across the entirety of our body before we jolted forward, when we slow time there is no such sensation.
Why did I think that? God knows, but it made sense to me at the time, the teleporting bit I mean, not the twisting reality part. Deep down I just knew, leap of faith and everything, tad bit of psychosis as well I suppose. Not exactly the most scientific method I know, but this is coming from the same person that loves to watch a good alien conspiracy theory documentary. The question was why would such a power suddenly manifest, and if I really did have more than one ability, how many did I have? Were my powers like a videogame, where when you get enough experience points you can unlock new abilities; if I beat up enough goblins could I unlock another ability? I certainly didn’t know back then, and news flash bitch: I still don’t. Maybe when we practise enough like a good boy and master one power, the next one comes along just to throw a wrench into the workshop perhaps. That’s beside the point, I had convinced myself I could suddenly teleport, my next mission was to figure out how to put a leash on it.
Additional: I forgot to mention earlier but je had also been experimenting with increasingly larger objects when manipulating the natural tempo of time. I was slowly increasing the size of the mass I took with me, it started off simple like the wristwatch (and later Serena), but I had been able to get it up to the magnitude of the company van by the time of the cable replacement job. Just to point out though: the larger the mass, the more tiring and straining it is if you’re not used to it. So, at first, when I tried taking the van with me it ate through our energy almost instantly, but after each time it got slightly easier and less knackering. Basically, what I am saying is don’t practise with a book, then move on to a jetliner in the 1970s, it doesn’t end well.
What I mean by ‘taking the van with me’ is if I was going 50mph down some road and I slowed down time, then the van wouldn’t suddenly slow to like 0.01mph causing me to shoot straight out the windshield. Instead, the van would be still travelling 50mph relative to me, but anyone perceiving it from outside would just see a blurred line as the van disappeared. It wasn’t an automatic process however, I had to consciously want to take something along with me. And that is why the van was suddenly moving at a snail’s pace during the famed deer incident.
It was a bit tricky to control the van with time slowed, and I had to be very careful no-one could see me, but damn did it save us some time whilst driving around. I had to eventually stop though, one day whilst zip zip zooming around with everything slowed down, there was a bug (that was too small to see) floating about, as soon as I drove into the poor thing it was like a shotgun blast had just gone off. A rather large hole appeared in the windshield with several angry looking cracks emanating from the impact, I was surprised the entire thing didn’t just shatter, scared the shit out of me it did. When I phoned the office up to report the incident I had to put it down to a small rock that had flown up and impacted the glass, suckers bought it hook, line, and sinker too.
I know it seems a bit odd that my body had ‘decided’ to unlock the ability to slow time first instead of teleportation, given the circumstances we discovered it in. You’d think a deer in the road would cause my mind to think “oh biscuits, get out of the way” and spirit me away instead of slowing time, but there we go. If I had discovered teleportation first, I may never have found out I could manipulate time. I mean we could go back in time and experiment, but yeah… no. That would just cause another big old temporal mess that would need cleaning up. Don’t try it, last thing I need to do is to fix a paradox caused by someone losing their God dang mind, that means YOU. If you do, I’ll kick a puppy and punch a kitten, just for you.
Concentrate Daniel, stop wandering, back to the story.
I tested the service head to make sure it was still safe, put the fuse back in, and wrapped the job up quickly. It didn’t take long for the adrenaline to wear off and I felt absolutely shattered, right tired like. We passed the audit funnily enough, Benny still gave us a lecture though about being more careful and I told him to do one (in my mind, prick). It was the last job of the day luckily so I scooted off homeski afterward. In total, it took just under an hour to get back, it was meant to take about an hour and a half; but I was so deep in thought that I may have broken the speed limit a tad bit, lucky there was no van tracker. Naturally, once we got home after a long day (especially when I had just exerted quite a bit of my energy on using my powers whilst working) I was somewhat tired. Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to replicate the teleportation trick at home. Trying to manifest magical powers whilst tired, good idea right there lad.
I wasn’t a complete moron (despite all current available data pointing to the contrary), I was still smart enough to be wary. At that point I wasn’t sure whether teleporting was in relation to where I wished to land, or if it was just a fixed point in space. Nerdgasm time. I won’t bore you completely but if I wanted to land in say Germany, I did not know when I attempted to teleport whether I would actually land in Germany, or teleport to the point in space where Germany had been when I teleported, I could end up in the vacuum of space or phased midway through the ground if we weren’t careful, so yeah, paranoia.
Another side note: when it comes to slowing time (and teleporting for that matter), we can take anything with us as long as we are touching it, or it is contained within something I am touching, take the contents of the van for instance. Also, if two objects are linked we can take them as well, example: if there were ten people and we held hands with one of them, as long as they were all holding hands in a chain then we could take them all with us. There has to be a link though, just because there is a car touching the same road that my foot is on does not mean I can take them with us. There has got to be a connection, remember that.
Anyways, just in case when we teleported it was to a fixed point in spacetime, I decided to start small, I mean really small, like the few inches or so I teleported for the fuse carrier. I had placed a screwdriver from the van on the bookcase by our television, I stood back so my outstretched hand was maybe a centimetre or two away. I concentrated hard, but surprise surprise, nothing happened, zilch. Of course, I had wanted it to be easy and for it to happen straight away, no dice. Sure, I was slightly annoyed, but I didn’t just give up after the first attempt, no, that would be after the twentieth failure. Even after concentrating so hard my body was shaking (my face was so scrunched up it looked like I had diarrhoea), it was for absolute nada. I ended up going to bed all huffy and puffy, could always try again the next day.
Morning came, the previous night’s failures had me beginning to doubt we could teleport, but we soldiered on ‘just in case’. However (after much soul searching) our efforts finally paid off in a substantial cash settlement, metaphorically speaking mind you. It was late into the evening; I was just about ready to give up when suddenly the tingling sensation came out of nowhere for a split second then boom, I had lurched forward and the el screwdriver was firmly in between my fingers. Quite frankly, I was just startled that it had finally happened, and that it wasn’t something my mind had made up, I was elated to know that I was not completely mental.
Just like when we were first practising with slow timing, teleportation took a lot out of me and I was uber tired. But you know what? That didn’t matter, I had been trying for so long and finally, by sheer dumb luck, it finally worked.
There was a niggling thought in my mind though, I wasn’t sure whether I had just inadvertently fallen forward after my leg had fallen asleep or something. I placed the screwdriver down on the shelf once more, waited a few moments for my heart to stop racing, and I tried once again. After a few minutes, the tingly and lurching feeling materialised, next thing I knew we were holding the tool de novo. I had successfully taken the first steps in getting teleportation down on me résumé, I fully intended to hit that nail on the head and drag it home kicking and screaming, like any good serial killer.
The tingling sensation feels like when you sit on your foot for too long and it gets all tingly by the way. Only lasts for a brief second before it dissipates.
