Power Details

The next morning, the ring wakes Jasmine up to breakfast… having already washed, brushed, dressed, and otherwise handled the mundane boring parts of maintaining a live body.

Looking down at her breakfast of sausage, pancakes, sliced strawberries, and orange juice, the host to the ancient wizard smiles contentedly as she smells the fresh food, “I could get used to this…” and as she starts in on her food, she sees the new ring… no longer plain, it now looks like someone wound some super skinny blue thread around it.

As the host pauses eating to examine her hand, the ring explains the new item, “Just tap it twice with the thumb of that hand to turn it on, twice again to turn it off. Use your other hand if you want to toggle the speed and uniform independently: Pointer finger for speed, thumb for the uniform. You can use it as much as you like, but keep in mind it's changing your personal time. If you use it to run five miles to the store, it's still going to feel like you ran five miles. As far as you're concerned, it will still take an hour or whatever, you'll be exactly as tired as if you ran there honestly, and so on, even if - as far as the rest of the world is concerned - it took a single second. Equally of note is that you're effectively jet-lagging yourself doing it: Your subjective need to eat, rest, breathe, drink, and so on remains exactly the same whether the ring is turned on or turned off: If you leave it on and spend twenty-four hours of subjective time working on a project, you'll feel like you just stayed up for twenty-four hours. Additionally, the time effects do not extend very far, so if you fell asleep with it turned on you would suffocate… except that I'm going to keep you moving if I'm on you when that happens, because your sleep time is my active time and the ring won't work if you're not wearing me as well, so I don't even know why I brought it up.”

“You did get the arm cannon thing in through, right?” The woman grins as she taps the ring twice, and watches as she's wrapped in her forest green and black colors… including the ring itself changing to black and green.

“Oh yes,” the ancient entity chuckles, “when you deliberately throw, punch, kick, and so on, the object or entity on the receiving end will feel it in their time frame, while you feel it in yours. So if the speed ring is active when you throw a ball at fifty miles an hour from your perspective, it will hit your target at many times the speed of sound. If you punch someone in the chest, they're likely to literally explode in a shower of gore and shattered bones, which may hurt secondary targets. Be very careful about what's behind your target, be sure you are OK with destroying your target, and most importantly: DO. NOT. MISS.”

“Thank you,” Jasmine smiles. The woman finishes her breakfast normally (just hanging out on fast time), then pauses, picks her fork up, and carefully lets it go.

The fork seems to just hang there.

The vessel of the ancient power just sits there for several minutes, watching the fork fail to fall.

Eventually she gets up, walks to the bathroom, turns on the light… and it doesn't light up. “Oh, the bulb burned out? Bummer. I just replaced that with an LED like a month ago….”

The ring chuckles, “Oh, it's probably fine. There's a slight delay between when power reaches a bulb and when it starts emitting light, and the bulb isn't inside the time field. It's going to be a while if we stay in fast time.”

Jasmine considers, “But my phone will be in our time, right?”

The mage laughs, “It will be in our time, but it won't be able to make calls or browse the Internet or anything, because….”

He trails off as she simply turns on the flashlight, and uses that to look at her uniform in the mirror, “Oh, a mask, huh? Looks nice.”

“Do keep in mind it is JUST looks,” the mage continues after a moment, “it's an illusion, along with the rest of the uniform. This means it will never catch on anything, will never tear, can't be yanked off your face, and so on… but it also means a small number of people will see right through it. At some point we should probably make a real costume that you can change into manually… a pair of gloves and a hair net, at a minimum.”

The woman nods and walks into her bedroom, pointing the phone's flashlight at the ceiling, examining the strange, intricate symbols now seemingly painted on there in blue.

“So that's a beacon?” She shrugs, “doesn't look too bad, and most people don't spend much time looking at ceilings anyway.”

“It's not like we use the bed much anyway,” the ring chuckles, “Your mind sleeps while I'm active, and a little magic solves your body's needs.”

The woman looks down, “Oh, you updated the sheets, I see.”

“Should feel a bit better than those older cotton ones,” the mage agrees.

“When is it ever going to matter anymore?” The masked hero squints.

The ring chuckles, and then the woman's cheeks burn….