Chapter 4: Teleportation Training Montage
For two rather aggravating weeks I began getting me head around the whole teleportation malarkey. You got to believe yourself on this one; it isn’t easy trying to figure something out (and master a subject) when you have only yourself as a teacher, gets really awkward at performance reviews with your instructor too.
Slowly but surely however, good ol’ Danny Boy started to get the swing of it, that’s you by the way. After a few more practise runs with the shelf & screwdriver, I had become a tad bit more confident. So, in response, we moved on to more advanced training techniques. Basically, it boiled down to greater distances, slowly branching further and further out with each successful ‘jump’. Yeah, we don’t use sci-fi babble terms round here; we call it ‘jumping’ in these parts, boy.
Now don’t get me wrong, there were still a few mishaps along the way, not always landing in the exact position I wanted was the most common. Looking back at it, I put that down to lack of concentration though. But with each jump I was able to get a little closer to el target with pinpoint accuracy, and less like an attempt at falling down a flight of stairs for the insurance money. Also, to answer the question from before, it was teleporting in relation to my destination, and not just a fixed point in space. Thank God for that, no blood boiling head exploding space death for us. Yet.
By the end of those two weeks we had gone from a measly inch to the entire length of the local park, not a bad feat at all. And just to make sure I wasn’t playing the game on easy mode, I only practised at night. In all seriousness though, I just didn’t want anyone seeing us zip zip zooming around the place like a dog on cocaine. Whilst I know jumping the distance of a long grass pitch sounds impressive, we were ready to go further, but thanks to council budget cuts the street lighting was patchy at best, and the other end of the park was as far as I could see at night. At that point in time we had yet to try teleporting to somewhere that I couldn’t see from our starting position. I had no idea whether I could do that, or if we could even jump to a place I had not even been to before. Plus, I did not particularly want to end up merging into another person, or end up as part of a support structure somewhere.
Deep down I knew I was just putting it off due to the fear of all the ways it could go tits up wrong. I mean sure, we could just continue practising with places I could see, but eventually it would get to the point where I wouldn’t be able to go any further without plunging off the deep end. So hey, it was time to take off the miniskirt and put on the big boy pants, stop being such a scaredy-cat, and take the initiative by the balls and just try it. Something nice and simple for the first jaunt, the nearby communal garden to our lounge.
It was the evening of the 1st of October 2019 when we finally grew a pair and went for it; I only remember the date because it was National Boyfriend Day. Stupid day, stupid concept, you shouldn’t need a special day to show your appreciation for the person that you love. Come on now, I’ve got to include some social commentary somewhere. Anyways, everyone knows that it is just a global conspiracy by the banking institutions to get people to spend more money and take out mortgages. Fucking… duh.
Anyway, it was late into the night when I went out to the small garden patch, the one just outside our bathroom window. We had a quick look around the immediate area, had to make sure none of the nosey neighbours were around, especially that guy a few doors down that would never shut the hell up. God, I can still hear his whiney voice and high-pitched laugh that was always going off no matter what time of the day it was. I swear I wanted to stuff cotton wool down his throat sometimes just to shut them up, and that is putting it politely.
Putting aside my obviously deep respect for our neighbours, once the coast was clear I stood in place. Eyes firmly closed, I breathed in and out to try to calm myself, meditation style. If you haven’t of picked up on it by now you were somewhat of a wuss back then, one who used to overthink everything to the point of obsession. I mean come on, we were a sheltered, socially inept lad, what do you expect? It probably also had something to do with autism, but who can really say for sure?
Instead of concentrating on the positive things, such as what I could do if we mastered teleportation; all I could obsess over was what could go wrong. The demon voices in my head kept telling us how I could end up imbedded in the couch, or have our atoms spread halfway across the solar system. It took an embarrassingly long amount of time, but I was finally able to quell my overactive imagination and overcome our doubts. Well, overcome them enough to attempt the jump anyhow.
I visualised the middle of the lounge in my head, I had made sure everything was moved to the corners of the room beforehand to ensure that there were no obstacles, so we could land without having to worry about any of that shit. I took a final breath and held it in for a few seconds, trying to make my mind as serene as possible. I slowly let it out, the tingling sensation spread across my skin, followed by the jolting lurch-like feeling. The gentle breeze of the cold night vanished, replaced with the warm and slightly musty air of the apartment, the sudden change in atmosphere broke my concentration and my eyes sprung open.
It took a few moments for our peepers to adjust from the near complete darkness to the suddenly bright and artificial lighting. Damn, I thought, we had done it; I was indeed standing inside the lounge. I gave myself a quick once over, making sure my feet weren’t implanted in the floor, or that I was missing my silky-smooth skin, but no, nothing wrong with us. Well, not physically anyway, you can never be too careful when it comes to mental health.
I was grinning from ear to ear; giddy like a schoolgirl. I was genuinely happy with myself for once, and frankly why shouldn’t we have been? I had just proven to myself that we could go wherever we wanted. Well, perhaps that statement was a bit premature as we hadn’t of quite proved that yet, but it was still one hell of a milestone. Then an idea sprang to mind, what if I combined slowing time just as I was teleporting? Our reasoning being: what if there was an obstacle where I was teleporting to, maybe I could step out of the way before I fully materialised? Yeah, really should have thought of that one before trying to teleport into the lounge but hey, better late than never.
Only one way to find that out, so for the next couple of days (besides work) I put all of our efforts into slowing time down as far as I could muster. I can say with a small amount of pride that we got it down a fair old amount; the milliseconds on that fancy clock moved so slowly that for every 10 milliseconds that past on it, it was the equivalent of a whole second for myself. Whipping out the old calculator, that meant I could squeeze a total of a hundred seconds out of every ‘normal’ second, or nearly two minutes. Now, it must be stressed that by slowing time by such a magnitude, it drained us rather quickly, and therefore I couldn’t keep it going for long. But hey, even keeping it up for just a few moments could be enough to keep us from dying a dirty death. I mean slowing time by the way, not an erection.
A few sleeps later and the weekend had finally rolled around, yay. It was time to perform the grand experiment, but where could our launch site be? I thought about it long and hard. I wanted somewhere that was clear of any hinderances just in case I cocked it up and jumped a few mere feet, empty of people so they wouldn’t just see me ‘disappear’, but also close enough to home so if (for whatever reason) I couldn’t teleport I could just hoof it home. Besides, it was bloody cold out at that time of year, didn’t want to be too far from le toastie warm bed of cuddly warmth.
Turns out our starting location was a tad bit farther than I had anticipated however, it looked so close online. Sad face. It was a grassy pathway directly underneath a bridge for some new bypass road that went over the nearby river, secluded enough for our perverted needs. I made sure that there were no druggie teenagers or weirdoes around that could see me, there weren’t, so I stood in the middle of the muddy path and prepared myself for the task at hand.
Unlike previously, this time I was keeping me eyes open, purely so I could see if there were any barriers that I was about to morph into back at the apartment. It was a long trip after all, didn’t want to be off by a few centimetres and end up inside the wall. Jumping is a weird visual sensation, let me tell ya. One second you see something, and within the blink of an eye everything is completely different, like flicking through a photobook, but you’re flicking through actual locations. Not the best analogy I know, but it is the best I can do at the moment, I’ve got a headache coming on so give me a break.
Anywho, I did the usual ritual, worrying about what could go wrong, take a long time to calm myself down, breath in, out, shake my money maker all about, and imagine where I wanted to be. Whilst focusing in on home, I also began slowing down time as far as I could without taking my concentration off the jump. As soon as I felt the tingle spread across my body, things started to get a bit special, in a psychedelic kind of way. It is difficult to explain really. The scenery from underneath the bridge started to fade, and the bright artificial light of the lounge began to replace it. The whole affair kind of reminded me of one of those effects used in a presentation to go from one slide to the next, but far less pixely, a bit like superimposing one photo over another. Yes, that’ll do.
My eyes darted around to make sure the landing zone was clear, lo and behold something was going wrong, my entire right side was inside the bookcase. Now, needless to say my initial reaction was to panic like a boob. Which, when you think about it, is a perfectly normal way to react when you’re about to fuse with a wooden object. My terror-stricken mind went totally blank on good ideas, like, for example, just sidestepping before completing the jump into the lounge. All I did was stare at the doorway in front of moi, and just like that I felt myself lurch forward towards it with a fair amount of force, with our shoulder smashing into the very solid timber frame. Memo: don’t try to tackle a doorframe. I took a few steps back, cradling my poor tender shoulder as I looked around, and tried to figure out what had just happened.
My amateur-educated guess was whilst panicking; I must have subconsciously focused in on someplace else, AKA the open space within the doorway, and jumped there instead, purely on instinct. It took me a while to calm down after all that excitement, but guess what: at least I had come up with a way to teleport to a place I couldn’t see. Simply slow time and begin to jump, have a look around to see whether I am going to phase into an object and / or person. If that were the case then concentrate in on another area, an unobstructed area, and divert there instead. As simple as trigonometry really.
Very convoluted I have to admit, but that’s how we’ve done it ever since, and it still works, so there. It has saved us from a few stinky stanky situations, plus a few spouts of incoming death, including that time we almost jumped on to a demon planet. I mean who would be so stupid as to try and teleport to a place they can’t see without taking precautions? A completely mental moron, that’s who. I’m talking about you by the way, in case that flew over your head.
But hey, whilst I almost ballsed it up completely, the experiment was a grand success, just about. However, I decided it was best to quit whilst I was ahead and stop for the evening. Not exactly a Monte Carlo ending, but after so much excitement I could hardly top it in terms of fun.
Before we end here, I have to quickly build upon what was said earlier about the resistance getting greater the slower we make time. After many a decade of pondering, and reviewing research from various scientific institutions, my hypothesis is as follows. If we slowed time down to almost nothing, not only would we not be able to move, we would also be blinded. You know, since the light spectrum wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough to keep up with us, we would just see beams of light moving about and no actual images.
Technically, if we slowed time down by that much and tried moving about, the slightest amount of friction would cause a humongous explosion, and could create a time warp effect, the ultimate friction burn. So again, please don’t try it.
Lucky for us though when time is slowed we can still breathe normally, when exhaling the air from our lungs it just pushes the external air out the way, and whilst inhaling it just sucks air out of the atmosphere like usual. But please do not stand still for too long, otherwise you are just going to end up breathing the same section of air full of carbon dioxide. That stuff is bad for you by the way.
