This Evening

It's 7:30 pm. It isn't raining. It might be a little cold out, but there's always a way around that - ignoring it. When did you last go out for a run? Four, five days ago? Easily long enough to recover. And it was probably a rather vanilla session too. You'd remember if you'd done a decent sprint or two. Your legs would know. And they would certainly have reminded you when you carried Carolina around, or even when humping her. Perfect time to get some exercise done. Fresh air will help you think. Maybe get the shadow of a plan. Or it'll poison your lungs; you live in the City, it's full of cars, and at this time of year everybody who has to travel even a few miles drives. Damn lazy, cowardly bastards. Never mind. Let's pretend it's like the air in the countryside at mum's.

You get changed into some jogging stuff, add a pair of woolen gloves and a beanie to keep from freezing bits off, and out you go. You trek right across town, into the older blocks, where the houses are tall and thin, stacked up side by side, with ancient facades, where relics of architecture tell tales of the various artsy currents of the last few centuries. You arrive at one of the many parks in town, this the largest, a huge square containing enormous trees of various exotic species, a playground, a small stage for bands and theatre acts, a kiosque, a small zoo full of local wildlife specimens like small fallow deer and feasants, a garden, an oval-shaped sand-path specifically there for runners to train on intermittent acceleration and rest, and a small gym area with bars in every possible position to monkey about from, weight resistance machines, and minor obstacle courses. Not to mention the footpath that goes right the way around the entire thing and is almost invariably full of people, like yourself, running. Still, by the time you arrive you decide you're not quite warmed up yet. You usually stop just a few minutes on arrival, before doing whole laps around the park at varying speeds. On this occasion you opt to run straight through, out the other side, across the street, and up onto the small road that goes right along the canal for ages. You figure at some point you'll know you're ready, and can take one of the many bridges to the other side, and run back to the park from there.

Only, the moment never comes. At no point do you even begin to feel ready. By the time you arrive in parts of the City you've never seen before, you're tempted to try and deliberately wear yourself to pieces. You've run more or less non-stop since leaving the student residence (not accounting for traffic lights and other obstacles), yet you feel no more tired than if you'd simply gone for a little walk, taking a detour on the way back from class or something.

You see a pedestrian bridge crossing the canal up ahead. You take it, get to the opposite side, and turn back toward the park, which is now a good couple of miles or more away now. You kick up the pace. You run a little faster. You breathe a little harder, and take shorter breaths for fewer footfalls. You run still faster yet. You run in small, ever faster movements, pummeling the ground, kicking it away and behind you. Then you run in great leaping bounds, basically throwing leg after leg forward as hard as you can, and using the ground to yank the rest of you along. It all feels like nothing. Soon, far from any exhaustion pains or bodily injuries, your main concern is not to crash into runners coming the other way, or even any of the slower ones going in the same direction. Bridge after unfamiliar bridge flies by, and you wonder if you're just going past too quickly to recognize them, or if you've already gone into unknown territory way beyond the park, opposite where you got to before turning back.

You slow down just a bit, and pay a little more attention to your surroundings, worrying a tad less about colliding with people. You almost immediately peg down where you are relative to the park. Won't be long before you reach it. You're not out of breath, your head isn't throbbing, you can't feel any cramping in any of your limbs, your chest feels fine, no compression there. Your forehead feels mildly warm as opposed to hot and slick with sweat. Your beanie isn't causing even the slightest discomfort. After purposefully pushing way beyond what should be the limits or your ability, you should be a total wreck. If anything, you feel like something is holding you back.

You arrive back at the park. You could go through the motions, run right around the perimeter on that little footpath, snaking past the other runners, doing a progressive acceleration when you get back to the starting point, but, it doesn't look like it would do any good. It wouldn't put any particular stress on you. You don't expect it to exhaust you to any degree after a trip all the way to the edge of town along the canal failed to do so. You see a bench with no one sitting on it. You stop, and settle down. Need to have a think.

I mean what is there to think? You're more enduring than you are able to tire yourself. Your body is more resistant than it is able to wear itself out. You raise a leg and bring a foot onto your other knee for inspection. The shoe is a mess. The underside has been more or less worn almost completely away. You can see glue peeling off the soft canvasy stuff your foot rests on. You need new shoes. And if you run again, they'll die shortly too. Damn.

Park looks a bit emptier now. It must be late. There are huge long stretches in the path devoid of runners.

You have an idea. You freeze time. A crow just ten feet in the air stops mid-flight, and... does not plummet to the ground. All good. You get up and stand in the middle of the track.

Next to no obstacles at this point, and now the few left are all stationary. You can see them ages off, and within a couple of laps you'll have memorized them so you won't even need to think about dodging them. No possible reason you can't go as fast as you need to get at least a bit of a burn in the old chest. You decide to set off at something like a third of your top speed, top speed now being the highest speed your humanoid body is physically capable of providing on two legs. On your mark. Get set. Go.

Several seconds go by. You are not running. You can't see, you can't feel anything. You have no sense of direction, no idea where is up and where is down. The ground has disappeared from under your feet. And then you come gliding back to Earth on your back. One shoe goes flying off your foot upon hitting the floor. Friction on the dirt shoves your pants down and rips the back of your jacket to shreds. Finally you roll over backwards and come to a halt face down, minus one shoe, bruised buttocks exposed to the elements, and lacerated back covered with dust and tiny stones lodged in open wounds.

The pain is unbearable. You don't even scream as even breathing, taking in air and making your thorax expand causes great sheets of pain. Quickly however, it fades, and soon the only sensation on your back is that of the nightly chill. Relieved, you let rip with a groan. Feels good to be alive. You lie right there for a bit. No need to rush.

You discover that your beanie is what blinded you. It's one of those with a sort of rolled up flappy bit that you can pull down to cover more of your head, and the back of your neck when it's really cold. The flap got pushed down. Add to that your wearing gloves, and the rest of your jogging stuff, there was very little skin uncovered apart from the face, so when the wool came down it was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. That doesn't explain the rest though. You took one step to run, launched yourself forward, and then the ground was just gone. Have to get up and look what happened.

You rise to your feet, and plant both of them true on the ground before reaching up to uncover your eyes, pausing only note the surprising sensation of your bare left foot on the dirt. The first thing you see when the flap goes up is a long, long skid mark with shreds of cloth, going back a good half-dozen metres - to a wrecked shoe. And way, way beyond that point, you can just see a statue of some mythological deity, near where the bench you were sitting on was, and where you were going to start running from after stopping time. You turn to look in the opposite direction. The park boundary is marked by a low wall with a huge iron fence with spikes at the top. You stopped less than ten feet short of it, it seems. Good thing the park is so bloody big.

So what did we already know about you? You can halt the passage of time and be the only one unaffected, that we established. You have the power to create a literal empathic bond with someone by fucking them while time is halted, that we established. And now you have superhuman endurance in real time, and it looks like you have physics-defying raw power and ability to heal injuries during frozen time. All of that in one day. By tomorrow what will you be?, an immortal demi-god with the ability to move entire galaxies by sheer willpower....?

Seriously though, where is the limit? How far can you go with this? What is the extent of your body's ability? How strong are you? How high can you jump? Oh well, that last one is easy to answer.

Before you know it you're crouching down and readying yourself for a massive leap. At the last moment you doubt yourself, thinking of your briefly lacerated back and wondering what would come of smashed bones. You try to abort the launch. You still end up flying. One leg managed to go flailing out of control while the other gave a confused, but still somewhat substantal push against the ground. You go into the air, a jerking mess of half-controlled limbs. When you realize you're off the deck you're upside down and still turning. You feel the cold on your back, and your backside, and your legs. You forgot to pull your pants back up. Now they've gone completely. Still flying, you try to get your bearings, work out what direction you're going in. Far away you can see lights, some of them are little dots, some are large squares, some are close together, some are far apart. You can see textured bits caught in the lights, and little black shapes, shadows. Something hits your leg and you hear a raucous cry as a some black bird starts flapping all of a sudden, probably the only animal on the planet apart from you not frozen anymore. And then the world starts coming up to meet you, lights getting further and further apart, squares becoming rectangles and vice-versa, shapes becoming people, lumps becoming cars. You're going down.

An unbelievably enormous fir tree breaks your fall, and promptly finishes stripping you of all remaining items of bodily covering, shoe torn off and into small pieces, already wrecked jacket put out of its misery and ripped away, beanie skewered on a branch, never to be recovered. Dragging a cloud of brown, dead spines, branches, and bird nests, you crash through and land in the soft grass under the great wooden sky-pillar.

Doesn't feel too bad actually. Sure, you are covered in little scratches, and there are shards, spines and other tiny hard objects stuck under your skin, but, no horrible lacerations,no broken bones, no excrutiating agony of doom. You are still in the park, in the opposite corner. Your saviour is the one with a little bench under it and a plate giving its age nailed to the trunk: 550 years old. Of course the plate itself has seen a bit of time. Tree must be nearer 600 and a bit by now.

You start walking your naked self back toward the footpath, but stop when you see the size of your crash site. It goes well beyond the few square feet of little branches and shed spines where you hit the grass: there are whole branches hanging half out of the tree's lowermost limbs, pieces of wood littered everywhere within a dozen or so feet around. And just a few meters away, on the footpath, is a whole limb of formely live branches, still covered in dark green spikes, possibly the first part of the tree you hit on the way down, knocked clean off the trunk; and somewhere under all that is a person in jogging gear.

It's a girl trapped under there, and she's an awful mess. She's lying face in the dirt with her arms folded up under her stomach. One shoulder is fucked up, not bleeding but knocked completely out of shape; perhaps that is where the branch landed on her. Her right leg has bent way beyond its natural range of movement. It's impossible to tell whether she's alive just from looking.

You lift the wreckage off her and toss it aside. It weighs next to nothing - almost unsurprising: it came from higher up and so was hardly one of the biggest growths. It's still a good four inches thick where it hit the unforntunate runner. Perhaps under normal time you couldn't have lifted it...

She's a small, very athletic redhead with a lot of cool gadgets. On her smashed wrist the reamains of a digital watch, which would have told her how far, how long, and how fast she'd been running. On her arm, inside a stretchy harness type thing, her smartphone, intact save for the screen being cracked. There's a little plastic nodule plugged into the headphone socket with no cable; looking to her ears and seeing wireless earpods, you conclude it must be a transmitter. You turn on her phone. Yes, she was listening to music. She would've been a lot more obsessive about running than you are.

You feel her neck to try and see if it's broken. Not that you would know really, you've never knowingly handled a broken human neck, and so don't know what to look for. You note that the head feels surprisingly heavy, but there's nothing else your untrained hands can tell you about the region. Little doubt is to be had elsewhere. The shoulder is absolutely ruined. You can feel bone moving where it shouldn't, and just the overall shape of the area is wrong, viscerally, you can feel it more than see it, a subtle deformity where the arm joins the body. The same goes for the leg and the wrist. It's a wonder the wandering bones haven't pierced skin. And they might yet cause internal bleeding.

What of her? What's done is done. You flew in the sky, and brought a huge piece of wood down on a complete stranger on the way down. There's no way to trace it to you if you don't want there to be. This was a tragic accident. What of it?

It takes a certain amount of incoherent mental rambling as you stand staring down at the girl, but a brilliant idea hits you. What of it?, well this is precisely the sort of situation you needed to be in. You know you need to find further use of your powers, to determine their extent and nature. You have inadvertently caused harm to an innocent bystander, harm that you yourself would probably survive without much trouble. You know you have a way of bonding with people on at least a mental, emotional level, and there's a chance, just a slim chance that you could use that to transfer your physical abilities to repair inflicted harm. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you can cover your tracks with ease, but if it does... Basically, you have a moral excuse for further experimentation.

It's an awful leap of faith, though. What happened to you and Carolina, so far as you can tell, was on a completely different level. But then, at the time you didn't have manifest indications of superstrength and healing. What if you did? Would Carolina be a leaping, speeding monster like yourself? And you don't know if she isn't endowed with your ability to stop time. For all you know she's been doing it herself all day. Also, what of the reciprocal aspect of the bond demonstrated earlier? What if you just absorb the girl's injuries and both of you end up dead?