Nao's Secondary Training Thread

Nao would just lie there, and think some more as the time particles washed over him. He would watch the clock filled sky slowly tick backwards and then forwards, and then backwards again. A peculiar site to actually see, being that time didn’t really move like that. But it was a little calming to know that time could be bent magically, especially if the gem of time was able to harness such a power. Maybe it was just waiting for Nao to harness it before letting him go free? Or maybe it was trying to teach him that time was just relative to the movement of objects in a space and the distance between objects could effect time all together. He wasn’t quite sure what the lesson by the gem of time really was.

Alright then, maybe if I try and scoop some of these particles, maybe I could put them into some kind of serum and drink it… Would that even work with these kind of things? I’m not even too sure how I’m going to be able to find the proper way of getting this to work. Please Shu… If you’re up there… give me wisdom and strength to do this… And with that, Nao would try and scoop the particles into a glass bottle for storage.

With the particles bouncing around the glass, slowly turning it back into molten glass, and then sand, Nao would try and study the particles with his eyes which would flicker between on and off here in this world. He found it a little annoying that he wasn’t quite able to use his magic here because the particles were trying to send his eyes back to their normal state each and every time he was trying to get them to work. He would just need a new approach.

WC:306

The time it would take Nao to work out what these things were, and put up with these particles switching his eyes on and off every second or two was starting to become more apparent. He couldn’t even figure out what they were because by the time Nao had looked at one of them, his eyes would turn off and he would have to turn them back on again. Surely this was going to be a problem when there were all these little specs of time trying to constantly throw you back in time.

What he could read, after many times at trying to get a good look at these particles, was that they were glitches in the space time continuum and that they were jumping forwards and backwards in time at sporadic rates. With the gem of time, it acted like a controller that would set them to force whatever they were latched onto to go forwards or backwards in time for some reason. When they were not activated by the gem they were instead set to a state of both forwards and backwards and that’s why his eyes were flickering to activate to not because they were both going backwards and forwards in time from the moment of activation.

He was able to work out that with some application of energy these particles could be set to forwards, backwards, freeze or off (which would force something into a state of going back and forth). It was almost like how binary worked, but with a few extra forms instead of just ones and zeros. It was more like zero, one, two, three but zero was both one and two combined in a short space. It was incredibly peculiar to watch this happen. But surely he would be able to find a way to enhance this right?

WC:307

Actually, it wasn’t as simple as Nao had thought it would be. Because both freeze and off were kind of the same thing, but freeze would deny both the forward movement in time, and the backwards movement in time while off was allowing someone to move by allowing forward movement with a small amount of reverse time. But he would have to try and find how he could force these changes using some kind of energy… Like his heat vision?

Nao would try and use his heat vision to try and apply some kind of energy to these particles, and then throw it at… something. He didn’t have any targets to practice on, and the gem of time hadn’t given him anything to work with.

”Hello? I need a target!” He called out, before feeling an energy force circle around his head, and then move to a few metres ahead of him. But what was it?

”No… no it can’t be!” He called out, watching the character take form was none other than the bulky man from the jewel store. ”Smirnoff! I knew you were here the whole time!” It looked like he would be using Smirnoff as the target practice.

As Smirnoff ran at him, Nao would try and get up, but get kicked far back from Smirnoff. He felt the bruising on his torso as he was kicked back so he would try and force the energy of the particles to go backwards. Instead they went forward, and bruising came out more than he wanted it to. He felt the pain of all those seconds mould into one excruciating jab on his chest.

Smirnoff smirked at the man in front of him. Nao’s eye’s would keep flickering on and off, showing that he wasn’t really in control of his eye magic here in the gem of time. Damn.

WC: 310 words

Nao was beginning to accept that he wouldn’t be able to control any of his powers here. He certainly wasn’t going to be able to control the particles by changing their energy with his eye beams here in this place. What he needed to do was absorb the particles slowly and carefully, and put them into his own cells to produce them as a biological component of his own body. That way Nao would be able to produce them, mix them with his own magic that was passed through his biological family, and would be able to use his magical cells to create more.

He would crawl away from Smirnoff, as the figure would keep walking towards him, taunting him over and over again to make Nao lose his morale. But he couldn’t give up, not when he had the whole of the gem of time to look after here.

Nao would begin to try and collect as much of the time particles as he could, breathing them in, licking them off of the floor, anything that he could do to make sure he got as many of them in as possible so his body could try and either absorb them, or copy them to make them his own. After all, Nao was good at copying abilities so his body was used to changing its magic to accommodate new spells. This was surely the same kind of technique that Nao would use with his eyes, only instead this time he was introducing his body to the magic he so craved to learn.

After a while though, he finally ran out of steam due to the wound he got on his chest, as well as just the general fatigue. Smirnoff was going to win, and Nao didn’t know what to do to stop him.

WC: 303

It was at that point that he could feel the particles of time starting to merge with his own cells, causing them to start recovering some of the wounds that he was taking. He felt that they began to regenerate the bruise that he had on his body, instead reducing it to a minor bruise. Not quite what he had in mind, but at least he would be able to fight a little better.

As Smirnoff kept walking towards him, Nao unleashed some of the particles from his hand. No longer looking like green particles, but instead more like glitches in space. They would flicker through their states, before hitting Smirnoff and freezing him in place for a moment. Nao smiled, before running up to the man, and punching him clean in the face, before speeding up his injury to make it even worse.

Smirnoff fell backwards, collapsing onto the floor after one good sucker punch to the chin, and Nao stood triumphantly as he began to feel that world around him collapsing. Though he had finally discovered a little bit about time travel, he knew deep down inside he wouldn’t be able to use it to bring Shu back. She was gone from this world, and he couldn’t use time to change that.

Nao would return to the top of the sky tower, and finding that time had not moved since he had gone. Instead all that had happened was that the piece of the gem of time that he took had become absorbed into his body, and he was experiencing an out of body experience to learn how to use it.

Nao smiled softly, looking around, before jumping back down from the roof, with Charlie looking at him with confusion. But after a little while the griffon sort of guessed what had happened, and would leave Nao to focus on honing these skills.

WC: 315

Secondary training: Complete!