You could be forgiven for being confused as to what the worst thing to ever happen to me was. I've died by violence twice, once in a one-on-one fight with a man whose name I stole so as to more thoroughly erase him, and once in a larger fight with a man who was now locked in a cage.
But... well, I got better from both of those pretty quickly. It didn't even hurt that much, and certainly not for very long.
If you asked me, the worst thing to ever happen to me was long before I started my Jumpchain, when I was sixteen years old. I lost nearly all of my friends in one fell swoop. That'd be bad enough, but... it wasn't just losing friends. It was that this was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my fucking fault.
And, well. The best, and some would say only, apology is changed behavior, and... what exactly could I do to make it up to them? What kind of changed behavior could you perform for someone who quite explicitly never wanted to see you again?
It was just... going to hurt, for a long time. A weight I'd have to carry for the rest of my life. Always lurking in the back of my mind, telling me to slow my roll, to be careful, to restrain myself, to not be who my instincts wanted me to be, because I'd seen firsthand that my instincts would hurt people. It's not the sort of thing I could, or even should, just 'move on' from.
I didn't deserve to move on, and nobody I would go on to interact with deserved to deal with my shitty behavior that'd only continue if I didn't move on.
But... also, I couldn't just sit here for the rest of my life, doing nothing for fear of hurting others. As much as I knew it kinda sucked... I had hobbies and interests that didn't require other people, and which should, at least for now, make the hurting stop.
Writing was right out- everything I used to do that was hurting and broken, and so would everything I made with them. So... what else?
...I eyed my electric guitar, hanging on the wall of my bedroom. As long as I didn't plug it into an amplifier... it'd be just loud enough for me to hear it, but I wouldn't be waking up my parents.
Well. I didn't buy that thing so it could hang there doing nothing. I wanted to learn to play the guitar, and if this was what it took to make me go back to practicing, then so fucking be it.
---
A song drifted through my head, unbidden. A bit beyond my skill level, but... maybe not for that long. I was learning fast; that hadn't been too big a surprise to me, honestly. When I first picked up the guitar, I made some real good progress in my first month, enough to impress Ethan's dad, who'd picked up the guitar when he was in the army, and then taught it to his sons, and thus probably had some good, solid intuition for how a casual player learned and progressed in skill level.
And this time around, I was unhindered by the problems that'd slowed me down the first time- my fingers didn't hurt and have angry red lines carved into them by the strings, and I didn't really sleep anymore, so that was another eight hours in a day, which... well, no reason to not stuff 'em with more guitar practice. It ate enough attention while I was doing it to keep my heart at ease, even if the hurting never truly went away.
I thought some more about the song; I hadn't invented it, I'd heard it from somewhere, and was wondering... where...
...Ah, son of a bitch, it's more of those fucking hallucinations.
I was pretty sure that I'd had a Trigger Event, the night it happened. A Trigger Event being a deeply emotional moment that, somehow, caused a person to develop powers- the question of what a Trigger Event was exactly was one shrouded in a lot of conflicting information. Nobody really knew anything for certain, except for people who'd been through one, and what their own was like- and, well, because it was a personal event with high emotions, that meant there was both incentive to lie about it as well as not that much of a way to fact-check it, especially since people with powers tended to be quite camera-shy as regards who they are when they're not wearing a costume. I didn't have any real way of knowing that everyone's Trigger Event was traumatic- although given that "trigger" was a term of art in PTSD discussion, referring to something that sufficiently reminds someone of their past trauma that it triggers a severe reaction, I had my suspicions that someone in the know certainly thought so- and could only say with authority that mine sure was traumatic.
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I wasn't totally sure what my power was, but I had suspicions. That it was about time, seeing people's personal timelines, being able to push them back along their own personal timeline to erase what happened between then and now. And that incredibly specific suspicion was not founded on any experience actually using my power, as I'd spent the past week or so not using it, and instead simply going about my routine of school and a fuckload of guitar practice in my bedroom, but on the incredibly detailed and obviously nonsensical memories of what I can only assume to be hallucinatory past lives.
I tried to ignore them, to varying degrees of success. Some of them were, uh... kind of troubling, like the incredibly vivid memories of being a fucking Sith Lord and killing a lot of people without feeling all that bad about any of it. Sure, most of the people I'd been killing were other Sith, but anyone who can take another person's life without feeling bad about it is, at the very least, incredibly dangerous to be around.
And, well. The nature of these nominally being past lives was that, clearly, these people were a lot like me, in a few essential ways. I could've ended up like that, if I was unlucky enough, if I went down the wrong paths. My fucked up psychosexual hangups, time and again in these past lives, charted a clear and unpleasant trajectory: I could either languish in mediocrity, doing nothing with myself, or I could become a predatory, dictatorial monster who consigns people to death by the millions, only learning their names if it was necessary or convenient.
That was my choice: mediocrity or monstrousness. My artistic spark, my passion for the simple and pure act of creation? It's not that it didn't matter, it's that it mattered in the worst of ways. I could either remain yet another small-time hobbyist, writing stories nobody read and playing songs nobody listened to and building furniture nobody used, or I could create things that ruined the fucking world.
It was an awful choice, not just for me, but for everyone around me, too. They didn't really have much of a say in what I decided to do with my time, after all, and yet if I decided to act on impulses that ruined the world, well, they lived in the world too, and would fill out the casualty ledgers when the streets inevitably ran red with blood.
So. Mediocrity it is. I'm sticking to my six string. Although... I mean, I don't have to stay mediocre. I could actually improve my artistic abilities- get better at guitar, to the point where people did want to listen to me play it, and... maybe make something of that.
For that, though, I'd need a guitar I could easily take with me to places, and... well, they're not exactly small, y'know? Sure, a guitar's scale length was only a touch over two feet, but most guitars also had headstocks and bodies that continued past the ends of the scale. The typical guitar was more like a meter long. Although, it didn't strictly need to be that way- I remember seeing travel guitars where the bridge and the nut, still twenty five inches apart, were the ends of the guitar, with the tuning pegs being on the back of the body, and the bridge and nut being effectively reversed.
One of those would probably fit in a backpack just fine, but... well, one of those would also be expensive. Multiple hundreds of dollars, which is a bit much for what was effectively an impulse purchase. If I had a cheap guitar I didn't care about ruining, then sure, I could take a hacksaw to it and make it into a makeshift travel guitar, but...
...well, I don't have one on-hand. It would be pretty cheap, though, and in all honesty, only the neck and the headstock needed to be in any kind of working order, which would lower the potential price even more. And, hey, pawn shops are definitely a good place to go for a cheap old beater guitar that nobody cares about. So it's not like I don't know where to start...
Alright, I guess I'm going to a pawn shop and buying a cheap guitar.
---
When I got to the pawn shop, I froze at the glass door. This place was being held up at gunpoint- I could see the guy threatening the clerk from here.
The rational part of my brain told me to back away and call the cops.
The, uh... less than fully hinged part of my brain told me that I had a duty of care to my fellow man to do what I could to protect them from harm, and also that this dude had a shaved head and a swastika tattoo on his bare bicep, and my duty of care very much involved breaking every bone in the body of a Nazi.
For some reason I couldn't articulate even if I was on a therapist's couch or in the chamber of the most effective interrogator (meaning, not using torture and instead using a strong working knowledge of psychology and gentle nudges, so still a therapist but without the duty of care towards my health or privacy), I decided to listen to the Paladin in my brain and walked through that door.
Well, no backing out now.