Luca DR
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13 – Time is illusory (1/2)
🕑 Added 2023-05-11 21:05:08 +0000 UTCThere was just one way to deal with the situation. Albert needed to use [Perception] tuned onto magic to spot any residual magic from a teleportation or whatever was used to kidnap the girl. Perhaps the guy was still there, but invisible, and he could spot him with the skill. But that wouldn’t be enough on its own. In the club, too many people moved around and about in their chaotic Brownian motion. What he needed was the skill he had been working on, unsuccessfully, the whole afternoon. He needed [Bullet Time].
When he activated his [Perception] what happened was exactly what he feared would happen. The skill quickly proved to be useless, even at level 4, and an encroaching headache quickly forced him to dismiss it. Meanwhile the girl was nowhere to be seen, and the people were moving and dancing wildly in their confusing tide. It was dark and hard to see, and everything was swimming, moving. Albert was trying to circulate mana in a specific way to perhaps gain an insight into unlocking the skill he needed, but he found it hard to do while concentrating on looking around and keeping his balance.
Yet for every moment that passed he knew that the chances of finding her were growing slimmer and slimmer, she was somewhere and getting farther by the moment. There was no sign of magic being used in the club in those brief glimpses Albert tried to steal with his skill before it was too much to bear, but how could there not be any? The girl was there one moment and gone the next.
Perhaps he was simply too drunk and had seen something but couldn’t make out what. Perhaps he was hallucinating the whole scenario, riding on Marc’s spoken suggestion that someone was hovering close to the girl. But the risk, the risk was too much. Magic was real, and if he had it then maybe someone else also did and they might not be as good a person as Albert was, and act in malicious ways.
Mana flickered and moved in his veins as he slid around people and strangers, dancing heedless of what was happening around them. Unknowing of the danger and of the hidden powers that were being put one against the other, unwillingly but as inevitably as life itself. Time was precious, and it was running out. The words of the other Albert echoed in Albert’s mind. About how time was nothing more than a matter of perception, of illusions. And the sole thought in his mind was how could it even be an illusion, so real it was right now that he didn’t have enough of it.
He found himself outside the club. Hoping that maybe he could spot her thrashing against her kidnapper and trying to break free. And if he could see her, even as she was being loaded into a van or a truck, then perhaps he could catch up to her before they ran away in the dark night and he could rescue her. But outside it was just cold, and there was a faint rain that sent chills down his spine all the way to his feet. His shirt got damp and wet and cold, and it stuck to his skin while his eyes tried to scan the burry landscape. Empty it seemed, all the people and the cars there of no value to him, like useless parts of a game he didn’t need. He searched but his eyes seemed to fail him, to fail to settle onto anything as he looked, sliding from surface to surface, form thing to thing, finding nothing.
Eventually he had to give up the search. It was useless and he was feeling increasingly restless out here alone, thinking that maybe he was wasting precious time searching in the wrong place while he should be elsewhere looking. The flickers of mana circulated and circulated, communing and mingling sometimes with ideas in his busy head, thoughts that came and went and disappeared at a rapid surreal pace.
Time, time was for him this strange occurrence. Real, all too real, while at the same time it was elusive and fictitious. He could not avoid thinking about what the other Albert did say in the video, about how time was nothing but the perception of something more fundamental, more real than how it appeared. And thus, it could be perceived differently. It didn’t have to be the cage that constrained everyone and everything, the sole container in which the theater of life unfolded its many events.
Yet he was a slave to it all the same, along with eight billion other men and women and people of all kinds, none able to break free of the prison. Other worlds and races out there too, they were caged and stuck to living in their fictitious stage, like us men do.
Aubrey.
He was lost in thought yet again, while the girl was missing. Now Albert looked for Marc, he needed to find a way to act and the first thing that he needed to do was to find his friend and devise a plan of action. Perhaps the best idea was to call the police, but first he wanted to speak with someone, see what they said, for he could not trust his own judgement tonight, and he knew it. He felt it was the sensible thing to do, but so did leaving the club and wandering the street under the rain with nothing but a shirt on, convinced that he could somehow chase a car taking his friend away and so he didn’t trust himself, he didn’t want to be the one who made the bad call alone.
But he could not find him. Not Marc, not Colin. They were gone too. Did they get taken as well? If that was true, then someone was targeting him and his friends specifically. They were going after him next, then, it was the only option. But why? Did someone find out about his magic? Who could ever know? Only his grandpa knew. Nobody else. He was warned against this, and he had taken the utmost care.
Shit. Perhaps that one time he manifested raw mana in the palm of his hand to check if Marc could see it. He did it in the middle of a busy street filled with people after all. Someone must have seen him do it, and he had been following him all this time. It was not good. He needed to be ready.
