Luca DR
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31 – Terrible Mistake
🕑 Added 2023-05-22 12:25:25 +0000 UTCThe television flickered, the image projected onto the old screen struggling to form according to the newest modern digital codecs. Inside Lloyd’s house everything was an antique, but everything was perfectly preserved, as if stepping into a past long gone that might or might not have existed in the real outside world. On the screen there was a journalist being grilled by the news host.
“It’s 88 degrees in Alaska, Robert, and the federal government has just announced that an arctic vortex is about to descend down on the American continent and bring sideral temperatures and extreme cold! What is it that they are not telling us?”
“I can’t tell you for sure, but I have never seen people in shorts here this time of the year. If this is the beginning of something bad, it ain’t that bad yet!”
Albert sighed, muting the volume of the news. “It’s all connected. Whatever was going on at Tryte was not an isolated event. At least the weather got better here, the sun’s peeking.”
“Yeah,” Lloyd said with a chuckle. “And there’s frost on the windows. Ain’t never seen that at the beginning of October at these latitudes.”
“End of September actually.”
“Right.”
The two spent some more time together, mixing serious talk about magic and adventures with random chit-chat to pass the time. Albert’s mind wandered, going from one thing to the next, trying to make sense of them all while also keeping in mind what his grandpa told him earlier. He needed to get his shit together soon, before the real shit hit the fan and all hell broke loose. Because whatever government agency was trying to stop the anomalous events from happening… well, if what he had seen at the Exclusion Zone was anything to go by, then he didn’t really have much faith in their ability to sort things out themselves.
Which meant that there was an unseen clock ticking, with an unknown amount of time before the fun was over. No pressure.
In the end he decided that he needed a new perspective, from someone other than his grandpa. Perhaps his friends could help, they could give him some comfort that only people his own age could really deliver. They would see it just like he did, perhaps. Or perhaps not, but he was feeling rather alone and isolated lately, and seeing people was not a bad idea. A text message later and they decided to meet for coffee and a snack somewhere close to a metro station so that they would not need to walk in the strange frost that had come to blanket the city.
Indeed, walking on the road towards the bar, Albert noticed how all surfaces were glittering under the sun. The clear blue sky deceived anyone who didn’t pay attention, and the temperature was so low that any moisture froze on the first surface it met, covering the city in milky white. On the road, the cars were moving at crawling speed, most of them stuck behind emergency vehicles called in from the north that tried to spray salt and other chemicals onto the frozen asphalt.
***
“Hey buddy, what’s up?” Marc, who was the first to arrive not by coincidence but by design, was quick to grab his beverage of choice and to come sit close to Albert.
“Overwhelmed, man. Very overwhelmed.”
“That’s why you decided to tell everyone?”
Albert nodded. “How do you think they will take it?”
Marc shrugged. “Hopefully well? I can’t really say for sure. Colin will probably be super hyped, while Aubrey…”
Albert sucked his lower lip. “Right. She might be a pain today.”
Marc shrugged, hiding the hint of a mischievous smile. His face had the words now you deal with it written all over it.
The two missing friends were now a couple, barely a week fresh, and walked into the bar hand in hand. Aubrey was quite short and well-built, while Colin was tall and huge like a bear. His face was clean shaven, with no sign of his distinctive ugly mustache that he used to wear in the past. The mustache was, among other things, a victim of the relationship with Aubrey, a thing that had to be sacrificed for the greater good of being together with her. At least according to the man himself, although it was visible in his face the pain of having had to part ways with such a beloved feature of his look.
Both Albert and Marc had laughed when their friend told them the story, but beneath their laugh was the slight uneasiness of knowing something Colin was not seeing.
They said their hellos, Aubrey led her boyfriend to order their lattes and then they all sat together. The topic of magic was not brought up immediately, although the two who were in the dark could immediately tell that there was something that was being kept from them by the way Marc and Albert exchanged knowing looks among each other. Eventually the question came up, and there was no more procrastination to be had.
“I know that you want to tell us something.” Aubrey said. “Even Colin can see it. You’re not being very subtle. Come on, spit it out.”
“Well, how do I say this…” Albert began, but Marc interrupted him with a grin.
“Albert can use magic and he wanted to show you.”
Colin blinked. Aubrey stared. The silence dragged on for a few seconds.
“Funny.” She said. “But no, really, what did you want to tell us?”
Albert shifted in place while Marc beamed a smile. Well, here goes.
With a snap of his fingers, done after carefully checking that nobody was nearby and could see what he was doing, Albert materialized the smallest fireball he could make. With the skill at level six, his control over the size and heat of the flame was quite impressive, and the magic manifested as a small round bead of living fire the size of a coin hovering a few inches above his open palm.
Aubrey inspected it from various angles, reminding Albert of Marc the other day. “What is that? How are you doing it?”
Her interest was a good sign, and her curiosity dispelled some of the doubts in Albert’s mind. Perhaps it won’t go as bad as Marc fears.
Albert slid a finger below and all around the fireball, then eventually plunged it inside the fire. It came out unscathed, but when he repeated the step with a napkin the paper caught fire and had to be put out before the smell of burnt spread through the empty café. Outside, seen through the window, a lonely pedestrian walked down the frozen sidewalk and cast a long shadow, making Albert dismiss the fireball rather quickly in a state of mild panic. It was not late afternoon yet, but a new front of clouds had obscured enough of the sky and hid away the sun that it was dark outside and the light of the fireball was quite visible.
“It could be a trick. Doesn’t need to be magic. I’m sure I could do it too with enough practice if I wanted.” Aubrey said smugly.
Albert looked at her with a smile. This was going to be a rare occasion to show her how wrong she was. What skill should I use… ah.
He took out a small coin, twisted it around with his bare fingers and then made it look like it disappeared into thin air. All this by using a combination of [Strengthening], [Bullet Time], and a micro-jump.
Aubrey’s eyes narrowed. “You learned illusionism, cool!”
Next to her, Colin had not spoken a word. That’s when Marc decided to tease him. “What do you say man, illusionism?”
Colin breathed in. “I mean… what can I say? It surely looks cool, and it would be cool as heck if magic was real!”
Despite pretending to be unfazed by what he was seeing, his voice was trembling with excitement.
“Not enough, eh?” Marc said. “Albert, you need to step up your game!”
The sheer lack of flashy moves was a problem that needed to be addressed. Albert tried to come up with something undeniably magic to do. Showing the videos of the destruction of property that lived inside his phone but were rewound back in time in the real world was not enough. Same goes with doing more stuff that could be rewound, since he could not carry people with him back in time. And objects could not be duplicated, he already tried. Unless…
“I’ll show you something. Give me your phone.”
Aubrey raised an eyebrow, but complied. As soon as Albert was holding the phone in his hands, he threw a fireball in the middle of the room and took a video. The explosion resulted in Colin springing to his feet and running for the door in a panic, Marc almost having a heart attack but quickly calming down when he realized what Albert was doing, and Aubrey yelling names, words and spittle at Albert. The video ended with him saying “Say hello to alternate you!”
Then time was rewound.
Aubrey’s version of the events went like this. She heard Albert ask her for her phone, and was about to raise her eyebrow at him before going through the complex set of calculations required to decide whether to give him her phone or not when the familiar weight of the thing disappeared from her hands altogether. She looked around in a panic and saw a grinning Albert, with ruffled hair and… spittle (?) on his face holding her phone in his hands like a prize.
Immediately outraged, she yelled at him to give the phone back, and the prick laughed while she yanked the thing away from him. Then he told her to check the gallery and watch the last video taken. She input the code to unlock the phone and opened the gallery with a huge frown, but the angered face first relaxed then tensed again in an expression of surprise as she first saw that there was a new video she didn’t take in the gallery, and then as she watched it. Colin and Marc huddled behind her to watch.
“What? The? Fuck?” She yelled.
“You blew up the whole place yooo!” Marc exclaimed.
The third voice was Colin’s, even more excited than Marc. “Dude! That’s awesome!”
Of the three, only Aubrey was mad. “You could have killed people! Started a fire! You could—”
“I rewound time. All that you see is stuff that might have happened but didn’t.” Albert said with a grin.
Aubrey stared with a wide-open mouth, unable to speak. The corners of her lips twitched, her eyebrows rose and fell, and lines appeared around her mouth as her face became more and more tense.
“That was reckless and stupid. Just to show me that you indeed have magic? What good does it even do to show off like this? Uh?”
Now it was Albert’s turn to stare at her wide-eyed. What was this reaction? And why was she getting up and stomping out of the café like this?
Colin exchanged a look with the boys and then ran after her.
Albert and Marc stayed behind.
“It went well.” Marc said sarcastically.
“Why would she react like this? Is she okay in the head? It makes no sense! She even knows that I can rewind time, so why even act like this? I could always rewind her back here!”
Marc shrugged. “People don’t always act rationally.”
“But why the reaction? I never thought she would react like this!” Albert sighed. “I guess there’s only one thing to do. Rewind.”
“To when?” Marc asked. “I would like to know if you want to delete all this fun.”
“I will delete it. But I will tell you all about it, okay?”
“I mean, it’s the right thing to do, I think. Aubrey is a loose cannon right now, and… I don’t want to say it but—”
“She can’t be trusted with the information.”
Unfortunately, no amount of extensive testing could have ever prepared Albert for what was about to happen. Because, it turned out, once information inside a device was taken back through time once, it became resistant to further rewinds. Having already shielded Aubrey's phone against deletion when he did the micro-jump, Albert had inadvertently made the information invulnerable to his personal time shenanigans, meaning that it also managed to survive the second jump.
Unscathed. Yet another ticking bomb waiting to explode.
