That you only met Roxy this evening (the truth)

You know you have to lie anyway at this point. It's a miracle that Roxy has been put in a coma, because it means that there's a chance for you to get to her before anyone else does. Still, the lie you drop now could make it more or less difficult to... subdue the redhead.

At present Nurse Watkins is staring at you, waiting for you to respond.

"I - I'm sorry, I can't really help you there, you see we met only this evening, w - we were both running at the park, the one east of the old square, you know. She hurt her ankle a bit when she tripped over a tree branch that had fallen from the old fir in the corner. I offered to accompany her home, she agreed, um -" come on, what next? Oh, maybe some gang **** bollocks. We have a few gangs in town, and these are suburbs, just got to gamble Roxy lives in one. You continue, "we got beat up on the way 'cause we landed on some gang's turf. They took my house keys and knocked Roxy over with a bike."

"And you carried her all the way here by yourself? This is a respectable neighbourhood. You could have rung a doorbell and asked to call for an ambulance. How far was this? You might have worsened the girl's injuries."

"I don't know. Not very far." Damn. She does not look satisfied. Which does not detract from her attractiveness. Not that you'll be in any position to enjoy her any time soon, time halting or not. What is with that pecker? Maybe it needs sleep.

"Nevermind. We shall have to wait until somebody capable of providing the relevant details calls us, or until the patient can be woken up. It shan't bloody go down in the books well. Another night of calling the bureau a hundred times..." At this point Watkins is basically talking to herself, no longer focused on you. After a little absent-minded muttering she returns briefly to the question of you. She informs you that since you insist on your being perfectly fine, you will be expected to leave the premises. She takes your name and contact information, in case the authorities need to contact you (although she probably thinks you are going to contact them yourself, to leave a complaint against the gang), then leaves you to finish your hot chocolate in peace.

You make a point of getting as much sleep as you can. By the time you arive home it's pushing 10 pm, which is a disgraceful time to be even preparing to sleep (yes, I know to most students it is probably laughable to be such an early sleeper - or to be a sleeper at all, for that matter, but one who has the slightest semblance of common sense makes an actual effort about these kinds of things). You cook, stuff yourself, take time for digestion, cleanse. You freeze time. You unfreeze your phone, which you had the good sense not to take with you jogging, and set an alarm for three and a half hours from now, then lie down and turn out the lights. You don't expect to sleep in such short a time, but you know even prolonged tossing and turning constitutes rest. In fact, you actually manage to start dozing by the time the alarm goes off. You let loose the rest of the universe, your fridge resuming its wheezing groan like some improperly geared time-space machine, and go to sleep, properly now, and like a log.

Morning. Pitch black. In bed. Awake. No alarm going. Did you stop time somehow again? Oh no, there goes the fridge. Just a bit early, as usual. You rise out of bed and get to the window, pull up the shutter about half-way. That's better, a tiny bit of light, moslty lamppost orange, but also some daylight. The sun must be just shy of the horizon, not quite poking out of it yet. Just enought to gently stimulate your eyes while you lay the groundwork for breakfast and choose your clothes for the day, that they not be blinded when you switch on your own lamps.

You check the time: 05:57 am. Bit earlier than strictly normal, but at least consistent with what time it looks like outside, so there should be no crazy shenanigans. It means you can lag all you like, actually, without having to use your power, lag, drag, let the bits come together on their own terms, let yourself gather the relevant information for the day as it comes.

Yes. We would have had sociology, basically all day today, but you're not going. You need to attend to Roxy, heal her broken bones and make her yours. And you need to do it before the Nurse gets a chance to speak to her, before you get busted. There's something fishy with that nurse, Nurse Watkins. She looked at you funny when you used Roxy's name. You still don't know if that is actually her name. Maybe Watkins knows the girl after all. Maybe she was bloddy testing you for friend or foe. She may need to be dealt with. She's a liability.

When you're ready it's 06:40, 06:45-ish. It's cold outside, but you opt to wear minimal clothing, jeans, trainers, sleeveless t-shirt, long-sleeve t-shirt, pullover, then small jacket, as opposed to say, an ankle length greatcoat of ancient wool and boots. You need a little mobility, to be able to bend out of shape, get past corners quietly. Time stopping, though practical to obtain a lot of static information, doesn't render you invisible. The type of spying you need to do is made only a little less impossible by the power.

You venture outside, making sure to greet the receptionist on the way out, going through the sliding electric doors, making sure you are seen to have left the building normally, presumably to get to class, whatever class that may be. You don't want to draw attention to yourself, the residence is small and people know who's who. Once clear of the building, you look around. It's still fairly dark, the clouds have seen to that, and there's no one outside but you. You also can't see any lights behind the windows of the various rooms in the two residential blocks on the grounds. You stop time, and start walking. You walk fast, as always, and in this weather you would tend to walk briskly anyway, but this is a test. You start insisting a little, pushing up the pace, trying to find the point where it's uncomfortable to keep up the pace. When that doesn't come you start running, and running faster, and faster. You went out of your way this morning to well hydrate yourself. You should be sweating horribly by now, and making your multilayered clothing all damp and sticky, but nothing comes of it. You arrive at the first traffic crossing on your itenerary, a wide road going up and down a boulevard with two lanes in either direction. Half way across you try to snake between the cars, but it slows you down awfully, so you opt to try and jump over the next. You give what feels like a gentle push against the ground, barely harder than each footfall running. The flick of your right foot at the ankle sends you up, up in the air, over a C4 citroen, and back down onto the pavement on the opposite side of the street. Perfect landing. You carry on accelerating. You do what you did in real time back along the canal yesterday, trying anything from short, fast steps, to great leaps, only now everything you do is exagerated tenfold. What would be at most a jump one or two meters forward now covers at least ten, and for about the same effort. Soon you disregard the intended path for pedestrians at any given location. You know what direction you need to be travelling in, and let that guide you. Nothing can get in your way unexpectedly, all is still, fixed, eternal and predictable. You fly over several vehicles at a time, first only two, then three, then push over four. It's when you try and clear anymore than five that you start getting problems. Previously the distance was short enough you could put more **** into moving forward than up, as by the time you went down you would be beyond the obstacles. Now you have to go high, and on the way down you bring not only the forward motion, but a lot of downward inertia as well. After crumpling into a heap a couple of times, you learn to transfer the energy by rolling several times, then springing back into the air.

You're nearing the old town square. In fact, you're bounding down the hill in the street leading to the south-west corner gate. You make one final leap to reach the square; you aim to pass over the awning* of the last café in the street, coast down beyond it, use the gate itself to slow you down by swinging from one of the ornate horizontal bars, and then touch down rolling onto the flagtsones. Mid-leap disaster strikes: your stomach turns over inside you; you become unable to distinguish objects by size and shape, all seems to shift from being fat and bloated to ridiculously thin or vanishingly small. The absolute dead silence of the frozen city is broken by that constant ringing you get after exposure to an irresponsibly loud metal concert. You're overcome by nausea and go tumbling out of control just as you clear the café. Your dead weight sends you head first toward the part of the gate you were going to swing from.

A dark room lit by candles. And a few electric torches on their last sliver of battery power. Some candles are on the floor, some are on little stools, some on shelves. Some are in little metal trays to catch the melting wax, some are just allowed to melt themselves away all over the floor, as have a couple already, leaving a transluscent stain here and there. There's a lot of furniture in the room, a modest-sized sofa, a large cupboard, a table, a large wooden chest, and various chairs and stools, only it's all been shoved to one side, and quite hastily without care for collateral damage. There's a long scratch mark going from where one of the main table's legs would have been to where it now lies, half on the ground and half on the sofa. Dead centre of the big open space made by this displacement is the main attraction. A long narrow bed with one end slightly higher than the other, the feet resting on a small wooden box. A naked, ****-looking man on the bed, head protruding from the lower end. His hands and feet are bound to huge brown ropes tied to four enormous iron hooks forcefully embedded in the walls. This would have been done within the last few hours judging by the amount of plaster and wallpaper on the floor. From another hook in the ceiling rope hangs down and loops behind the man's head, holding its weight where the too-short bed can't. Straddling the man at the crotch, hips gyrating, dark mass of hair loose, swaying with a life unto itself, bosoms heaving, is a woman kneading her own bare breasts, relentlessly rubbing herself down below in the throes of climax, rocking back and forth across the link of flesh between her and her seemingly unkowing, utterly unresponsive partner. She tips her head back, mouth agape as she moans, lighting her face in orange beneath a weak, dying electric torch dangling from a piece of string nailed to the ceiling. It's Carolina Dahl.

On a high stool beside the bed is a huge, ancient book with almost brown pages, ink almost the same shade, barely discernable, open on a pageful of runes, small illustrations, and text in various incomprehensible languages. Surfing back down the wave from her last orgasm, Carolina leans over and picks up the old tome, bringing a particular passage into the dim light of the torch above. It looks like she's trying to see if she's forgotten something. She puts the book down again, and then, absentmindedly shifting her hips this way and that with hard meat still embedded within her, she calls out a name.

"Markus."

He opens his eyes, blinks a few times, adjusting to the dim light. His face remains slack for a long while, no particular display of emotion. It looks like his awareness of himself begins in his head, and slowly spreads down his shoulders, arms, chest, and eventually to the junction of his and Carolina's body below. When he lifts his head off the rope and looks up to the woman riding him, it is as if he were merely confirming something he already knows is there.

As he rests himself back in the rope's cradle he whispers "Mistress, Dahl is it? Miss Dahl?"

"Queen Carolina." she answers, and then, without the slightest slur or accent, "Well done Markus. You are quick to acclimatise. I worried my preparations were too rushed, or the old words misspoke, that you would reject me. Yet here you you are. I feel you now."

"I could never reject you, my Queen, I love you. I think I always loved you. Yours and my will are one."

She smiles, "Thank you Markus, my will and yours, and mine first. Never forget that. We are as much one as I permit."

"Of course, my Queen."

"Use my first name. I only meant to correct you as to the nature of my standing, not the form of address."

He closes his eyes and murmurs "Yes, Carolina."

You would kick yourself if you had a body with which to it. No, you wouldn't, if you had a body, you would remark on the fact that you would kick yourself if kicking yourself (with any substantial ****) wasn't anatomically impossible.

How did this escape you? How did you fail to pin down your true enemy from the start?

"You couldn't possibly have known, John. It is pure bad luck, for you, that you chose to mate with me."

Markus cranes his neck to look all around the room. He hasn't heard anything, or seen anything, but he knows something foreign is in the air. He asks "Carolina, who's there? I feel it in you, something's wrong."

She's gone completely still, nostrils flared, one arm frozen reaching for the old book on the stool. She shuts her eyes and grits her teeth, then, relaxing a little, "It was prying in my mind, but I blocked it out. It couldn't help itself, it's aura is entangled in mine. I can't push it out, looks like it has nowhere to go."

She opens her eyes and stares right at you. Well, she fixes a point in the far corner of the room. You study it yourself. You find a collection of thoughts, memories, wants, pictures. More of them are clustered here than anywhere else. It's you, whatever you are.

"Something is broken and I need you to help me fix it." She's speaking in her own language. That's why she's enunciating so perfectly.

"Was this planned? Is this why you made me?" asks Markus.

"If I could have controlled my own time, done the necessary preparation, gone through all the steps, read the literature, then this would probably have been on my list of things to plan for, but no, you - we - I did not bond with this in mind."

What is it that's broken though? What does she mean?

"Markus, shut your eyes, and do with your imagination what I tell you to."

"Yes, Carolina."

You know you're missing something, something really obvious, but you can't find it anywhere. Does she really need him just to kick you out? You reach out to one of the smaller fragments of you in the room, dragging the rest with you. It doesn't come naturally, physically moving non-physical stuff...

"Imagine a spherical chamber at your core, roughly in the center of your abdomen, the place that you breath from. Imagine a hollow sphere right there, spinning as you take in and exhale air."

"Yes, I can feel it. We both can..."

"Good. Now imagine the ropes around your wrists and feet are pathways, and that through them your body begins to absorb energy. It flows into you from the knots on your flesh and through your blood vessels. I'm going to tighten the ropes, and you're going to feel it flow faster, more intensely."

She reaches behind her and pulls on a rope connected to a complex system going through the hooks in the walls and ceiling; the knots shrink and Markus' skin turns white around the cord.

That's right, you had lost it while flying right over a café. You meant to swing from the gate. You must have failed. There's no memory beyond. Let's have a look elsewhere...

"Now, feed that energy into - oh wait." she's become aware that Markus has turned limp inside her. She starts rocking her hips back and forth again, then, "Yes, feed the flow into the sphere. See it begin glowing, turning red, orange, yellow, then white. Feel it heat up inside you, make it spin faster and faster."

There is literally a ball of really bright light in Markus' stomach at this point. This is fortunate for anyone wishing to do anything requiring light in the room, like, say, read from an old book with extremely old ink, because the candles have all but died, and the dangling electric torch barely offers more than a spark's worth of photons now.

Markus is having trouble breathing. His face is a mask of concentration, eyes fixed on the ceiling as he tries at once to suck in enough air to live, and not to scream in pain. Carolina has almost all her attention on the text in the book, and she starts when Markus calls to her and she finally feels his suffering herself.

"I am only the carrier, not the wielder! My veins will burst!"

She dumps the book and nods, "You're ready. Move the sphere down, down toward me. You'll know what to do then."

Still unable to put your puzzle together you watch as the ball does indeed shift down from Markus' waist - upwards and to the side in fact, until it reaches his crotch. Through laboured breath he grunts and growls, nashing his teeth, turning into a beast as climax overtakes him. Were he loose from his bonds he would surely pull Carolina into his arms, squash her against his chest till she's barely able to breathe and, preferably, have her come just as hard as him. You think to yourself, it's odd knowing exactly what a person deeply wants, viscerally in a moment of pure passion.

"John, I can't let you in that way either. Get out of his head and put your things together." As she speaks you feel like you're being thrown headlong across the room, while also not actually moving very much. You can still see the bed and Markus and Carolina in the middle of the floor from he same perspective. It makes a change though. It's the first true physical sensation you've had for several minutes.

Carolina has resumed staring at that larger cluster of your disembodied presence. Markus except as an extension of herself, has completely excited her thoughts. She climbs off the bed, paying no heed to the immediate bubbling drip of cum running from her soiled pussy down her inner thighs. She walks across the room still staring at the corner, and, at you, and raises her open hands, palms facing forward, forming a T shape with her arms either side of her, as if she were pulling two massive, invisible sheets of fabric forward. You start to lose your bearings. Markus groaning in the sleepy aftermath of orgasm on the bed, and the shuttered window disappear from your perception, you can no longer see them. Your memories, thoughts, wants, assorted elements of personality begin to coalesce. Finally you are complete, reassembled, fixed - trapped. Your spectral being forms a brown, rolling cloud of smoke.

Carolina stands before you, features slack in their most curmudgeon natural state. You know she's only concentrating, but she looks livid; perhaps she consciously tones it down in class.

Dahl is speaking, but you no longer understand the words. The sounds are familiar though, the vowels are still characteristic of her diction. She must still be speaking her native tongue, but you just don't have access to the part of her brain that previously translated it for you. It sounds like she is reciting an incantation as there are repeating patterns, and you think she is making an effort to accentuate certain syllables more than others. Whatever she is doing it is working. You feel smaller and smaller, being squashed in three dimensions, into a tiny ball. You fall from the wall and she holds you in both hands. Somehow, you can feel her skin, even though you are not strictly a material being. Because you are so small, you can feel every pore, every bump, every imperfection, every tiny wrinkle. It feels more like scales than human keratin. A final phrase is whispered from somewhere above you, and Carolina slaps her palms together.

You fly through her, through the walls of her apartment and out into the street. Through the city, through building after building, flying through solid mass after solid mass at incredible speed as if through a vaccuum. In a straight line you arrow across town, the world going by too fast to tell whether it's still frozen or not. You're still travelling when you start to feel your body, first your legs, then waist, then arms, and then a searing pain in the middle of your forehead.

You open your eyes, your real, physical eyes, and see the clouded-over morning sky. You are lying on your back on cold stone. The old town square, of course. You rise and sit up, look around. You landed just a few feet beyond the old gate at the south-west corner. The street, the square, the city as much of it is visible, is more or less empty, passersby countable on one hand. They are also completely unmoving. Your work was not undone then. You pull yourself up to your feet, and reach up to your head as the pain lingers in waves. Your hand touches something wet. There's blood all over your fingers. And then there's less blood. And then there's none. Yet when you touch your head they come back stained again, though much less. You look at the gate once more, the part you had wanted to swing from to slow yourself. You must have hit it. But at that velocity the damage would be immense... You must have brained yourself.

Your body was destroyed, your spirit leached onto your other half, and she then repaired it. Her mending **** is only finishing its job now.

Queen Carolina. _Rival _Carolina. She is acting against you. She is seeking an advantage. Let her have the edge and she will assimilate you, as she assimilated Markus. It was bad luck, she said. Trust you to take as first subject someone who's already a damned witch, complete with Necronomicon and spells.

She kept you alive. She needs you, but for now she can't take you. Not from a distance apparently. That or the energy required was already used up in taking Markus and fixing your caved-in head.

You know where she is. You don't know where she is, you know how to get there. You feel it, you still viscerally have a grasp on the path you travelled on the way back from her apartment. A few leaps, a little running, a little caution with regard to solid objects, you could get there now. She's drained, as you were yesterday when you wanted to take Roxy, but not right now. You have the upper hand. You could waltz over there, storm her keep and steal the book away. Maybe burn it, maybe learn it, master it, assimilate it. Then burn it afterwards. You don't absolutely need it to get your way. You just need it out of her hands.

Is she drained? Markus mentioned something about being the carrier and she the wielder. Perhaps he is her backup. Why would she assimilate him otherwise? Not to do as you did; she had a plan. She said their wills were the same, but hers came first. She wants to simply use him. Perhaps for the very purpose of keeping you out of her hair while she assembles her forces.

Then again, you were drained in one act, creating the intial link. She has acted twice, her first assimilation, and also reviving you. She may yet be weakened. She said herself, she was rushed and had insufficient time to prepare. _'If I could have controlled my own time.' _She meant if she could have frozen time herself. If she hadn't been waiting for the first chance to pounce, when you were both strong and at a time when you used your power, when the link is strongest. When the bonding process is possible. So long as you maintain real time, she is powerless. That is why she will try to consume you.

* awning: the sort of protruding wood, canvas or other non-rigid material roof, sometimes with walls, used to protect people eating/drinking outside from the rain or the sun.