Friday, August 12, 2011

Reflection on Partial Paralysis

I really, really should have been more careful with the magic mirror.

Well, okay, maybe “magic” isn’t the best word for it. And it isn’t really a mirror. It doesn’t even exist when one of us isn’t looking through it. Except, when it does exist, it can only exist in one place at a time.

No, I don’t understand it either. But now that I’ve seen it, I know how to look at it.

It’s another tool that the Watchers use. Well, some of them, anyway. According to Kate, the Watcher who’s supposed to be teaching me about this stuff, it’s mostly used to help train new Watchers. Experienced watchers have other tools (heck, I have other tools), but this one helps build a certain sort of concentration.

And I fumbled it. I was trying to use it to watch... well, someone else... and it kept drifting to the side. I tried to bring it back to the front, except I had to keep my attention on where it was now or else it would cease to exist, so the spot I was focused on was drifting too.

Kate smacked me in the back of the head just as it lurched into my left arm. That, naturally, broke my concentration. At that point the mirror ceased to exist, right before it would have caused me to, um, discorporeate... messily. As it was, my entire arm went numb: I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t move it. It wasn’t like it had gone to sleep; it was like it just wasn’t there. Which may not be absolutely the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me, but it’s somewhere awfully close.

It’s taken a bit over a week to recover. On the plus side, Claire did eventually decide not to kill me - but she said she might reconsider if I ever do anything like this again. On the minus side, that’s over a week with only one working arm - and no time off work. I don’t need my arms to watch, at least not according to Kate. Also on the minus side, when I first started being able to feel it (a few days later), it tingled for about two days straight. Then it started twitching, and I was able to move it - or at least make it jerk around. Now I’m finally back to the point where I can type with both hands. That’s good, ‘cause that’s the only way I know to type. (Claire says I’ve obviously been hanging around the wrong sort of websites.)

So that’s what happened, and that’s why I hadn’t posted until just now.

Reflections of a Deranged Cultist is a work of fiction. No sorcerous divinations were practiced in the writing of this post.

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