Speeding Bullets
The thing about moving at superspeed is that from your point of view everything else has slowed down and you’re moving at normal speed. So, yes, I can run back and forth across the country in way less time than it would take a commercial jet, but when it’s not an emergency I still fly.
Do you know why? Because relative to my point of view, I’m running at about twenty miles per hour. That’s fast for a human, but slow for a cross-country vehicle. It means that when I go from coast to coast, I’m spending two months doing nothing but running. I don’t get tired. I don’t get hungry. I’m not aging any faster than normally, relative to objective time… though the first few years of using my powers, that was always something I worried about.
But I do get bored.
Two months of seeing the country unfold a bit at a time, with nothing but your own thoughts. No sounds. Not even the wind in your hair. The interphase field that moves molecules around to keep me from destroying myself or everything else in my wake prevents that.
I’ve always been a solitary person. I don’t mind having some time to myself. I’ll take a hundred mile run sometimes just to get some hours to spend clearing my head or thinking through a project. Trying to make a living and be a superhero, it’s nice to be able to steal some moments out of thin air here and there to do the brain work. After all, I can push up the speed a little when I’m sitting in front of a computer, but only so much.
So short trips are fine. Longer ones are for emergencies only. If I were going to run across the country for fun, I’d have to stop every few hundred miles and spend some time moving around in real time just so I didn’t go crazy.
Still, you asked me what the worst thing about my powers are, and honestly, as bad as that can get, that’s not it. The absolute worst thing is when I get there too late. I can all but stop time, but I can’t make it go backwards.
Bullets travel thousands of feet in a second. That’s nothing compared to me, but it’s fast enough. They’re faster than the speed of sound. If I hear a gunshot, the bullet has already hit its target before the sound hits my ear.
Imagine arriving at the scene of a shooting that’s already in progress. Someone’s just been shot. Now imagine you’re seeing it slow motion. No sound. Just visuals, slower and sharper and realer than anything you’ve ever seen in the movies.
A moment not quite frozen in time, not quite suspended in front of you… and you could step out of that moment, you could speed it up, but there are still bullets flying and people in their paths and you can’t let go and step back into the normal flow of time until you’ve saved everybody else.
Do you have any idea how small a thing a bullet can be? How hard it is to spot in mid-air even when it’s barely moving? How big an area a burst of gunfire can cover by the time I know about it? Most of those bullets will probably bury themselves in walls or trees or the ground, but not all. Any one that I miss could end or change a life.
You see it like this: there’s a blur and suddenly I’m standing there with everyone’s weapons at my feet and a hand full of lead. What you don’t see is how many times I go back and forth, how meticulously I search the area, how wide a zone around the action I comb, how far I stretch time from my point of view in order to be sure… and when I come back down, it’s never because I am sure. It’s because I’ve given up. Because I’ve realized that I’m making myself crazy.
I can’t stop all the bullets. I can’t be everywhere at once. No one can, of course, but I have a power that lets me feel like I should be able to.
I wouldn’t give it up, of course. Not for anything.
But you asked me what the worst thing about my power is, so I told you. It’s not something I’ve ever told anyone before, but then, that’s not the sort of question most people ask.
It makes me wonder what the downside to yours is.
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
Petal To The Metal
There is a sound like the crinkling of aluminum foil as the scytheflower slowly unfurls its petals. The stem flexes and they turn to face the rising sun, the petals angling to best catch the light. The plant’s leaves make use of sunlight for photosynthesis, but the mix of metallic elements in the petals allow it to produce energy more directly as they heat up throughout the day.
The energy produced by the living thermocouple is difficult to store, but it still contributes to the scytheflower’s sustenance. The silvery sheen on the surface of the petals as they twitch in the sun has been designed by evolution to catch the eyes of birds in flight, a trait which helps give the scytheflower some of its other names: magpiercer and crow-murderer.
Down swoops a blackbird, attracted by the shiny flash of the flower. There’s the whining whir of a buzzsaw and a brief, aborted squawk. The bird’s carcass will feed the soil, which feeds the plant.
Though its metallic petals are valued by collectors, the scytheflower is best approached with care, or not at all.
(via alexandraerin)
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
Infinite Scoops
“Do you think somewhere there’s an alternate universe that’s just like ours except they have frozen cream and ice yogurt instead of ice cream and frozen yogurt?” she asked while we waited our turn in line.
“Probably not,” I said.
“But if there’s an infinite number of worlds, there must be at least one where that happened,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “Infinite worlds doesn’t mean that anything you imagine has happened somewhere. There could be an infinite number of identical worlds, for instance.”
“Okay, but if we assume the infinite number of worlds hinge on every possible outcome then wouldn’t there have to be be some where people decided to call it frozen cream and ice yogurt?”
“‘Ice cream’ was actually made with ice, originally,” I explained. “Frozen yogurt came about after refrigerating technology made it possible for something to be frozen without the application of ice. The names weren’t just a random outcome… they wouldn’t make sense the other way around. So, even if there are universes where people eat ice yogurt and frozen cream, it wouldn’t be ‘just like ours’ in every other way. Other things would have to be different, too.”
“Well, that makes sense,” she said. “I guess I was being silly.”
“You’re admitting you were silly?” I asked, surprised.
“Of course,” she said. “Imagine… suggesting there might be a universe somewhere whose inhabitants occasionally give things names that don’t make strict etymological sense.”
“You’re mocking me now, aren’t you?”
“Now?”
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
Ignorance Is Bliss
The little girl looked out the window of the airplane. It was the second leg of what seemed to her like a very long journey. She’d begged for a window seat for both of the flights, but the first one had been in darkness and she’d seen very little but lights far below. They had been pretty, in a way… a lot like stars, in fact. She’d thought they were stars, actually, until she asked her mother, who had disabused her of that notion swiftly and in a very no-nonsense way.
“No, honey,” her mother had said in a very tired voice. “Those are just lights. Street lights, cars, lights in buildings. Nothing special.”
“Oh,” the girl had said, disappointed, and she’d turned her attention away from the window for the rest of the flight.
On this flight, though, she had been able to see the green and brown of fields and the gray strips that were roads and the tiny-looking buildings, at least for the beginning of it… but as the plane had climbed higher and higher, eventually it had broken through the ceiling of clouds hanging over the city and now when she looked out, clouds were all she could see… a vast and snowy expanse of them.
At least, she thought they were clouds. She was enjoying looking at them, and wasn’t about to ask her mother, just in case they weren’t.
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
Upon Whom The Bell Tolls
The angel Gabriel had six hundred wings.
He did not fly swiflty upon them. They were so crowded upon each other, many growing out of the backs of others, that they could not hope to bear him aloft. Indeed, he could hardly bear their weight himself. He had six hundred wings, and more were springing up all the time.
He took a flaming sword and sheared off all that he could reach, leaving the smell of burnt feather and flesh in the celestial air. He hacked and he cut and he slashed until his back was a mess of stumps, and from that smoldering mass a dozen more wings swiftly arose.
Sobbing in pain and frustration, Gabriel sank down to his knees in despair and uttered a prayer, his first ever of supplication rather than praise. Would his torments never cease?
Somewhere down far below, at the front desk of a hotel, a four-year-old was being ignored by her parents and the desk clerk while they argued over a service charge. Lacking any other amusement, she slammed her palm down on the desk bell, again and again. She giggled in delight at the noise it made.
Ring, ring, ring.
Six more wings.
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
This Could Be The Start of Something Good
Whenever the dating site told her that it had found a potential match, she messaged the person with a single question.
“Do you remember when you were a child and you would spin around in place as fast as you could and when you stopped the world kept spinning?”
She did this every time, with every person the site told her would make a good match for her. It was both her introduction to them and her own additional screening step.
More than a few people never answered her, either ignoring the message completely or replying to it with a lot of personal details she had already gleaned from her profile or questions about what she was into. She ignored these. The questions and details were uninteresting, and the person behind them probably more or less so.
One of her matches replied to her with a detailed explanation of how this effect was caused via something called “persistence of memory”… she had no idea if this was true, and suspected that her correspondent didn’t, either. It had the ring of something that one says because it sounds good, because one cannot bear to appear ignorant.
She deleted that reply and ignored all further messages from the person.
Another person replied with “My mother always told me to stop because I was making her dizzy to watch. Honestly now I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it.” She felt a little sorry for that one and did not delete the message immediately.
The possible suitor after that asked her, “What do you mean when you say the world keeps spinning?”
A request for clarification always seemed like a fair question, so she answered, “The world keeps rushing past you while you’re spinning around, and when you stop the world seems to still be moving in your view.”
The reply came: “Do you mean your head or eyes keep spinning from momentum? That doesn’t seem likely.”
She responded: “No. It’s purely a sensory effect. You are still, the world is still, but the world seems to be moving.”
“Like a scrollbar in your head? Impossible. Your eyes must have been moving and you didn’t realize.”
She didn’t care for the tone she perceived in that text, but knowing how treacherous such things may be, she persisted.
“No,” she wrote. “It’s a physical sensation. The same objects, the same stretch of the world, the same everything is in your sight as before… but you swear that they’re moving sideways.”
“So you become delusional when you spin? Thanks for the warning.”
That was the end of her attempt to explain herself to that person, and it also damped her enthusiasm for making such explanations to anyone else in the future. She had almost decided to give up and try a different opening gambit for future matches when she got a reply from one last person she’d sent the question to.
“Yes,” it said. “Wasn’t that awesome?”
(via johnnysaisquoi)
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
Matters Of Perspective
“You see?” the first man said, pointing over the railing of the boat at a pair of otters. “The otters use rocks to crack the shell. If that’s not tool use…”
“Perhaps to a layperson,” his companion said. “I’m not convinced that ‘tool use’ is as simple as all that. The rock is something in their environment that they make use of… but then, so are the shellfish. We may as well label eating as ‘tool use’ since it involves making use of an object. If otters could be observed shaping the rocks, fashioning something from them…”
“So, then, when a bird strips the bark off a twig before using it to dig insects out of…”
“Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.”
“How am I being ridiculous?” the first man asked. “It fits the definition you just gave.”
“Birds and twigs… instinctive behavior!”
“Who says tool use can’t be instinctive?”
“If we’re talking about tool use as a meaningful signifier of intelligence…”
“That’s such a slippery term.”
The floating otters watched the boat drifting slowly out of sight, listening to the babel of increasingly agitated sound coming from the cute, clownish creatures who stood on the floating hulk. They almost sounded intelligent.
(via alexandraerin)
Source: fantasyinminiature.com
(also known as leastlikely)
