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Post by seraaches on Apr 20, 2008 2:16:18 GMT -5
His tail flicked in irritation at her tone and he fairly exploded at her again. "You just said that!" He resisted the need to flail his claws at her. "You said '"In my confessional Corvistownian opinion, it's just a stupid lump of wax with sparkles.' And then you handed it to me and I was flipping it over and thinking that it needed to do something with time or. . ." He trailed off suddenly, sending the girl a contemplative glance before his eyes dropped to the figurine.
There was no way, right? Because that would just be too awesome for words. Too freakin' awesome! "It's a time monkey!" he exclaimed rather happily. "It took us back in time! Man, this is awesome, Thalia!"
It didn't yet occur to him to be concerned that she couldn't remember the last five minutes, even if he did. Still, when it did, it wasn't a big concern.
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Post by Bee on Apr 20, 2008 2:35:19 GMT -5
Thalia had very little trouble believing this. That good old Corvie blood told her that all sorts of incredible and odd things were possible in the world, and that people could make them possible with enough time, dedication, and illegal substances. Besides, she liked the idea of mystical monkey figurines a lot more than she liked the idea of Tosiek being a total crack addict. She was very fond of him.
She was just sad that she couldn't remember any of the apparently epic jump through time. She didn't like missing out on cool things. Perhaps they could get the monkey to work again, and this time she would be aware of everything. She wondered what moving back in time felt like. She wondered if they were back in the present--the real present--now, or whether they were still lagging by seconds or a minute. Would everything click back into place when realities realigned?
"Let's do it again!" she said, excitedly. "Make it work again."
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Post by seraaches on Apr 22, 2008 17:32:43 GMT -5
Tosiek nodded in excited agreement and accepted the figurine and tried to remember exactly how he'd set it off the first time. He carefully turned it one way, then the other, and thought very hard about how it should do something with time, or something else. . . Unfortunately, however, it didn't seem to be working this time. He glanced now and then again towards the girl to see if she would be back in time and saying something she'd already said.
She simply stood expectantly staring back at him. His ears went back. This should totally work. "Blast it!" he finally exclaimed, tail twitching in annoyance. "I don't think I turned it funny! I was just thinking about time. Wot if you try it again?"
He passed it back to her with a slightly annoyed expression; why wasn't it working? "Think about time," he instructed her. "Surely that's the key."
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Post by Bee on Apr 22, 2008 19:33:48 GMT -5
The power of positive thinking had never helped Thalia before, but she was willing to concentrate, if Tosiek honestly thought it was going to work. He was, after all, the one who had gotten it to work the first time. She closed her eyes thought about moving back and forward and sideways and diagonally through time, slipping through reality like a snake through brittle meadow grass.
She almost felt like she was drifting through space, and half-managed to convince herself that she was traveling to the past before she remembered that she felt like that most of the time. A happy space cadet, Mom called her, when she was feeling charitable.
She opened her eyes. Everything looked exactly the same, and felt like only a few moments had passed by, painfully normal.
"Tosiek," she said, very disappointed. "I don't think we moved. Maybe the magic in the monkey was only good for one go-around."
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Post by seraaches on Apr 23, 2008 8:29:46 GMT -5
"If so, those people are going to seriously get ripped off," Tosiek replied, disappointment heavy in his voice. A one-time use mystical time monkey? And they had only jumped a few minutes into the past; he would guess that it hadn't been more than five minutes.
"Maybe it needs to recharge," he finally suggested again. "You know, like a spool of thread. Maybe it needs to wind up some time before it can jump back." He didn't sound very hopeful, even if it made a sort of strange sense.
It would imply that time was completely linear, which opened up all sorts of thoughts and surmising. Only one instance of each moment could exist if time was completely linear, which meant that the first five minutes he had lived no longer existed. He wondered if he would forget how it had happened. He examined his memories curiously.
No, he remembered exactly how the first time had gone and he remembered the second time as well. Maybe there could be multiple instances of each moment in memory even if not in time.
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Post by Bee on Apr 24, 2008 23:57:13 GMT -5
"Maybe we're in some kind of alternate reality!" she said enthusiastically. The possibilities, really, were endless. "The space-time continuum fractured when we went back and the whole of this world has been altered somehow. Like now our parents have flower pots for heads and bleed teddybear stuffing and my mom thinks men are awesome and worth the air wasted on them."
But that was a bit ridiculous. "Or maybe we just altered the course of someone's day. Maybe we changed the direction of the wind, which blew a butterfly into someone's face, and that butterfly distracted him from killing some flowershop boy." She was quite satisfied with this conclusion, and finished her sentence with an authoritative nod. She wanted to believe that their brief jump back in time had not been a waste of a perfectly good mystical time monkey, if it really had run out of magic. "Tosiek, we save lives."
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Post by seraaches on Apr 26, 2008 19:24:08 GMT -5
Tosiek wasn't entirely certain that they were running around saving lives, but at least they had the chance to do something interesting and new, if needed. Assuming, of course, they could get the stupid thing to work again. He, too, would be rather upset if that had been their one time use of the mystical time monkey.
Still. . . he did like his string theory quite a bit. "We should hold on to this," he said with his own strange certainty. "We'll let time wind up for a bit and then we'll try it again. Let's try again in an hour, and if that doesn't work, we'll do it again tomorrow."
He gave a small nod of further decisiveness. Yes. That was the only way to go about it. They would have do however many tests needed so they could figure out just exactly when they could do their time jumps. And then maybe they really could.
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Post by Bee on Apr 28, 2008 13:01:15 GMT -5
This sounded like a good idea. They lollygagged about in the park for an hour, playing pranks on hapless families out for picnics and vulnerable looking kids, and then tried the monkey magic again, but to no avail. The monkey was not cooperating. It sat obstinately in their hands, defying them with its waxy stillness, tiny dead monkey eyes taunting them. They were going to need to try again tomorrow.
"Okay then," she said, with a sigh. "We should meet up here late afternoon tomorrow, to give it a full twenty-four hours to recharge. I should probably take the monkey home with me. I can take it up to the lab and Mama and I can try to see how it works."
But, later that night, Mama had pronounced the monkey just as worthless as Thalia had. The whole thing was terribly confusing. The notion that this monkey operated outside the normal scope of science and magic was weird.
When she met up with Tosiek the next day, she said, sadly, "We couldn't find anything."
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Post by seraaches on Apr 30, 2008 12:03:21 GMT -5
Tosiek frowned, tapping claws against a stone nestled in the grass of the park near the Bazaar. Bizarre was right, really. "Something happened," he said in an almost protesting tone of voice. "And the man said they were magical. . ."
He shook his head slightly. "Let's try it again. If it doesn't work, we can hide ours and then go ask the shopkeeper if he has any information." He gave another nod of his head, this one a little more definite. He liked to have a plan of action.
Moving closer to the girl, Tosiek tried to help her get their mystical time monkey to work. Unfortunately, though not entirely unexpectedly, nothing happened. Again. With a frustrated sigh, Tosi led the way back into the Bazaar, making sure that their monkey was hidden as they searched for the man selling the magical figurines.
He was nowhere to be seen. Tosiek felt the need to curse and gave Thalia a discouraged glance.
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Post by Bee on Apr 30, 2008 17:15:51 GMT -5
Thalia too was disappointed that they could not find the vendor--perhaps he needed to keep on the move to keep people from hunting him down once they discovered that his frickin' time monkeys were defective.
Though Thalia did not quite know how they would approach the man to begin with--what would Tosiek have said, anyway? "Hey, we stole this magic monkey from you a couple of days ago, and we're damned disappointed that it's not working properly. You, sir, have no morals!" She wasn't sure that that would go over very well. It would be kind of hilarious, though. Before they were arrested.
"There's something we're missing," she said, with a sigh. She glared at the monkey. She wanted to pinch its little monkey face off. "I guess we wait the full week and see what happens. Time needs to get a move on."
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