Okay, huff, phew. I’ve been at this calculation for such a long time. While I’m in here, I’ve been patching up the cracks in my psyche. At least, the ones from whatever outside force is preventing me from remembering things. I don’t know how to actually go about tackling any sort of self fragmentation I’ve gone and created over the years by just being my odd little self, talking to myself, arguing with myself, and whatnot. Have I been at this hours, days, weeks, months? I can’t even keep track any more.

You know what would be helpful? A personal computer, no, a server, no, a server farm, no wait, an entire cloud computing supercomputer network. Yeah, some of that stuff from Fakeworld, Earth. Problem is, even if I can just imagine it into being here in my mindscape, it’s still just me doing the processing. I’m already straining my mind too much by trying to bring my timeflow down to almost nothing.

I’m not sure if it’s the process of stopping and holding back time, or if it’s the process of remaining conscious and aware within that stopped moment, that drains me. Maybe a bit of column a, a bit of column b. Maybe both, or maybe I’ve got it all wrong, and it’s just a power that comes out of my mana pool or sorc point pool or something, but because of my whole mana residue sickness, I’m screwing myself yet again. I don’t know for certain.

Okay, as close as I can figure, I first of all got the entire property wrong. I mean, I’ll be spinning in the physical sense, but it’s more like I’ll be flipping positive or negative bits up or down, sort of. Gods, I really, really should leave speed to the speedsters in my families. Trying to break through the realm of physics, with magic, as a layperson, is ridiculously challenging, and probably shouldn’t even be possible. Anyway, since I become electricity, and somehow retain my consciousness, not to mention the entirety of the rest of my being, parts of me have to exist within my time stream that are more than just the electron flow that represents me during my leap. It’s almost more like, I’m using time travel to move to a point barely in my future at all, and bridging the space between those two points with some kind of electrokinesis. In fact, thinking of it in that fashion, it almost makes more sense for me, rather than trying to calculate the fundamental mathematics in a realm whose principals I barely even remotely come close to comprehending.

It’s like, every time I think I make a breakthrough with this power, I find more reasons to limit myself, and my assumption of my understanding of it, because of how risky it is to essentially atomize myself. Which, I guess, fair. It’s only right to be a bit cautious. I’m trying to survive while I gain the powers needed to get us home some day. Some day I’ll be able to cuddle my family again, in a world where we’re not staring down the barrel of one of several apocalypses. While there, I’ll be able to grieve Dawn, and come to terms with my failings, and support Teuila as she grieves and accepts the things that have happened.

Hm, right now though, I need to get through this minor event, let my body collapse, and then be there for Teuila as she awakens, to help her cope with having been used as a bludgeoning weapon to murder several innocent kobolds viscerally. Well, that’s not even an accurate description. It was worse than that. It’s not like she was picked up and used like a club to smash the kobolds with. Te was taken advantage of. She was already in motion, in the air. The most she could have done was increased her gravity in a different direction, but it’s not instantaneous. Her ancillary powers prevent her from doing something that would give her deadly whiplash. I think I even noticed her trying to stop as she was connecting with the kobolds that were moved into her path.

My heart aches with a fierce and consuming love for my beloved Wings. I worry that she’ll fall deeper into the darkest corners of her own despair. I see her in that future, where she has fallen. Her eyes are haunted, the shadows lurking within them casting a pallor over her delicate features. Oh, how I long to reach out to her, to draw her close and shelter her from the storms that rage within her troubled soul. That stormy sea of moving emotion within her mindscape. I’m terrified at the raging torrent it will become after this event.

Now I’m distracted from my task. All I want to do is sink into her arms, to hold and be held by Teuila. Yet even as my heart sings with an all-consuming love for her, my mind is wracked with a fearful worry for her safety. Though I would give anything to protect her from harm, I fear that I am powerless to do so.

And so I watch this vision of the future, with a mingled sense of longing and despair, as she flits from place to place, her movements as erratic as the fluttering of a moth's wings. I see the pain etched into her features, the lines of weariness that will have crept across her face like the grooves of a record, and my heart aches with a fierce, helpless compassion.

Teuila’s path seems to lead inevitably towards the abyss, there is a light within Teuila that shines like a beacon through the darkness, but I’m supposed to be the calming presence of darkness, the secrets whispered in the night. But I’m not the abyss that I see Teuila headed towards. No, I see her headed into an abyss, deeply withdrawn into her own mindscape, to hide away the brilliance of her own light and life in shame for what she just felt. Her compassion, her bravery, her strength, her very essence draws me to her. It all tugs at my heartstrings with an irresistible force. Yet even as I worry for her safety, I am filled with a sense of wonder at the depth and intensity of my own feelings. I fell for Teuila so very long ago now, across the myriad ways in which I’ve lived several lives. Yet my feelings never diminish, they only deepen with each new experience.

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In the end, I know that I cannot save Teuila from the troubles that beset her. But, well, I can love her, fiercely and passionately, with every fiber of my being. So I will, for as long as I draw breath. For she is my heart's delight, my troubled Wings. She’s the source of nearly all my joy at this point in my life. She has been there for me, time and time again. It’s only fair for me to try to be there for her through this. I know she’s worried about my demise. She’s grieving having lost Dawn. She’s worried at the back of her mind that I might blame her if Keeley didn’t make it. She’s disappointed at losing The Brook. She’s even worried about Hellga and Tiktik, and blames herself for their injuries, even though I feel more like their states are both my fault. We’re both pretty quick to try to take responsibility for others. But now, on top of all of those other hard to parse emotions, Teuila now has a guilt the likes of which I can barely comprehend. Well, okay, in a way I know exactly the feelings that she might be experiencing. It’s not like I haven’t killed people, somewhat against my will.

I gulp back sadness and shame. I’m a murderer. How does someone reconcile that? How do you ever move forward without just blocking it out and throwing it in a redacted memory file, hoping to forget it forever? Does Teuila have any of the sense of morality that I thought came mostly from my mysterious memories of Fakeworld? Would Teuila wander through this world as if in a daze, heedless of the dangers that lurk around every corner if she were stuck within her mind, forced to face and contemplate the regret endlessly? Would she court disaster, and invite it with every step she takes by losing her vigilance and awareness?

How can someone who has taken lives ever be a good person, let alone a hero? I need the answer to this before I take the lightning leap. In some ways, to absolve my own guilt about the critterkin I slew that were following Mataalii, in some ways, to have an answer for when Teuila inevitably asks. Okay, I’ve always been hard on myself, almost hateful sometimes, for the wrongs I’ve committed. I own up to my wrath, even though it might literally be some external force outside of my control. I can’t really be certain since my memories of Fakeworld don’t include literal rage-demons that can manifest as clouds of aura, or secondary, tertiary, or quarternary evolutionary stage forms. If I were someone else, trying to comfort me, or, well, what several of my loved ones have said to me over the centuries we’ve spent together in thinkspace, how would I convince Reggie Shellcracker that they are okay, and good?

Reggie. You didn’t mean to do it. You grew up in a world where death and survival were intertwined, where if you weren’t causing one, you weren’t keeping the other. Violence was a nearly daily part of your life, and the safety of your loved ones and acquaintances was always on the line, from one moment to the next. Every life you took was in service of the safety of all of the others. It doesn’t make it right, but there were reasons that it occurred. You lived through that, and the trauma nearly broke you each time. Yet here you are, lifetimes later, an entire world apart, and you’ve taken more lives, you’ve had to. You can feel the guilt, and process it at your own pace. It might never go away, but it could dull with time. If it does, don’t feel guilty for the pain lessening. You aren’t a bad person. You try. You may well have to take many, many more lives on Rayileklia, if you survive, if you are to survive. That might hurt, and feel terrible. It’s okay to feel awful about it. Taking a life is an awful thing. It’s also okay to accept some things as necessary, even if they aren’t right, or good.

Flint and Alanea might be dead, or you certainly would be, if you hadn’t killed those ambushers in The Heart. Who knows how many people the cult of the Bright Lord would have brainwashed or killed if you hadn’t ended the hundreds of lives of those cultists? And yet—. Yet this is a quantum leap in a different direction from the type of guilt Teuila will be feeling. She took lives of people she likely recognized, that she cared about. No, that’s not he right way to frame it. The dragon took their lives. It could have just as easily smashed them into the ground or squeezed them to paste when it picked them up. Teuila didn’t kill anyone. It doesn’t matter where the inertia came from. The choice to end the lives was taken in the dragon’s mind before Teuila had a chance to respond, period. The circumstances surrounding it are going to feel awful, and she’s entitled to process that, but I can remind her that it wasn’t her, or her fault. If I had launched a blast, or if Teuila had whipped out her bow, the dragon may have done the same thing, grabbing bodies to use as shields.

Teuila deserves another chance to see that situation from several perspectives, but would the inevitability of the dragon making its horrid, evil choice just embitter her? Could I use what I’ve been learning about quantum electrokinetic fluctuations to set up a simulation of a quickened thinkspace? Huh. I think I’ve made another leap in the understanding of my capabilities. It’ll be rough for a while, and perhaps a barely noticeable acceleration at first, but I think I have a present for Teuila. Accelerated thinkspace by way of electrokinetic manipulation on a quantum level within a psionically emplaced permanent psychic telepathy enchantment. Hell of a leap Reggie, hell of a leap. Well, sometimes we deserve one, don’t we Reggie? Yeah, yeah we do.

Speaking of, let’s spin that spin into one good turn, and take this quantum-enhanced lightning leap. We’ve been at this for a while, and I’m getting lonely, talking to myself, thinking through all these calculations, mathematically and philosophically. I finish my forward lean, and thrust rearward with my dominant foot, with everything that I can muster, beginning a counterclockwise spin as I coalesce every bit of lightning within me to enter a state of electric transformation.

Here goes nothing. I burst outward slamming from body to body in a vaguely clockwise spiral, the duality of rotating and revolving in opposite directions helping keeping me, well, grounded, figuratively. As usual, it’s still agonizing to execute this ability, but it doesn’t feel quite like I’m going to lose myself and accidentally end my existence every other moment.