Friday, September 19th, 2PM.

There was a purple gem to investigate, and a whole morning of missed classes that needed studying. Of course, he could go to college now and attend the afternoon classes but, without knowing what they did in the morning it was kind of a waste of time. Time that was better spent studying the gem, postponing the studying of the college courses to sometime in the future. There was a whole weekend to get back to speed after all, which meant that he didn’t need to worry about anything until at least Sunday.

Sunday was after Saturday, the day of the club, something that was not lost on Albert. His mind kind of divided time into two: whatever was before the club and whatever came after. Saturday evening acted like a separation of sorts, and the two parts did not communicate. Studying had been placed on the other side of this divide, which meant that it was well out of his mind and didn’t affect how he felt at all. That was a problem for post-club Albert to deal with.

And yes, before anyone asked, he was very well aware of the fact that he was making a whole fuss out of this club thing when he really didn’t need to. It was just a normal night out, just in an abnormal setting. He just couldn’t not think about it in every single moment of free time that he had, that’s all. Magic kept him busy though, and that was always good. Was it good to use magic / study / work or whatever people used as a coping mechanism? Of course not, but at least his coping mechanism made him stronger and gave him cool supernatural powers that he could use to perhaps make his life easier down the line!

Mother was with grandpa at the hospital. She had called while Albert was on the metro headed back home, and he could hear from her voice that she was ecstatic at seeing her father out of danger. She wasn’t a religious person by any means, and neither was Albert, but the word ‘miracle’ was only omitted out of a strange sense of repulsion for all things religious. At the same time, especially during the call Albert couldn’t help but feel the strange sensation of guilt that one feels when he’s almost been caught red handed doing something he shouldn’t do. He knew he should feel good about it, with how his mother was crying of joy and released stress. But he still felt the pit of his stomach lurch and somersault in ways that made him nauseous.

Luckily he didn’t need to see his mother for a while still. She said that she wanted to spend the afternoon at the hospital even though her dad was feeling better, because the scare of having him almost die on her without any warning made her realize things. Life was finite. Or was it? With magic promising to heal all ailments, was life really that finite and fragile?

She also said that she thought it would be good idea if her dad came to live with them for a while, at least until his leg was healed. Albert knew it wasn’t her idea, but indulged her and pretended he didn’t know.

Shaking the feeling of wrongness out of his system was not easy, and the attempt made him spend a good half hour staring out of the window by his bed. He knew that he did a good deed, yet he was not still used to operating outside of the laws that governed everyday life and thus felt like he was out of place, doing things he was not supposed to do. He stared at the gem, at his own reflection on its surface, a reflection that seemed to stare right back at him. But it wasn’t him in the gem, it was the other Albert, the one in the videos. Always watching. Perhaps he was one and the same with the system, rather than just the subject of the recordings. In fact, perhaps the videos were not videos at all. They were strangely responsive to Albert’s actual situation and environment to surely make him think that way.

Whatever was the case, there was only a quest pending and it didn’t involve any video reward. Albert made a mental note to try and interact with his doppelganger as soon as another video was available, and put the matter out of his mind. Back to the quest: it was about creating an Appraisal skill, something he was struggling with quite a lot. Today he was surely going to crack it, however, even if it took him all afternoon to do it.

Sitting on his bed with his legs crossed, he closed his eyes. Keeping his eyes open and staring at the gem with a stern gaze and watchful mind had proven to be useless, prompting Albert in the direction of rethinking his approach. Appraising something using magic was not a matter of staring at it. In fact, it did not involve any senses at all! That was the realm of [Perception] and it was not what he wanted to do. What he wanted was for magic to do all the heavy lifting, giving him a description of what the thing was that went beyond what he was capable of seeing with his own two eyes.

The world slowly took shape. Albert felt the flow of magic, that revealed previously hidden information about the room he was in. Namely, information that was unavailable to him with his eyes closed. Within moments, a rough understanding of the shape of the room appeared in his mind. Objects began to also pop in, to emerge out of nothing in his consciousness like he was looking right at them, but without the need to focus on any one of them in particular.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Finally, the gem.

As the last piece of the room fell into place, a notification also appeared.

[Skill proficiency increased.]

* [Perception III] -> [Perception IV]

* Albert’s notes: can perceive nearby objects like a sonar.

Ah, well. This was totally not what he was trying to accomplish.

***

It was after dinner that Albert decided to try again, this time focusing on other aspects that he might have overlooked. The problem with the afternoon session, he felt, was not that he was going at it wrong on a conceptual side, but that he got sidetracked trying to do it. He gave in to the incoming sensations and let the room take shape in his mind, instead of trying to be proactive in demanding an explanation about the item he wanted to scan from the universe itself. This is where he did wrong.

This time he was ready. He flexed his mental muscles and tried to take control of magic and make it do his bidding instead of just asking gently. He wanted information and he wanted it now. He pictured the gem in his mind, gently opened his eyes and let the small purple stone be the only thing in his focus and yanked hard at the magic floating around him, routing it through those parts of his brain that hosted the categories of being instead of the perception centers.

To say that it worked like he intended would be an erroneous statement. Something happened, in fact exactly what he wanted to happen happened, just not in the way he expected. There were no parts of his brain doing things, there was no routing. It was just as if the information was always there, and he simply needed to lift some sort of veil and peer beneath at it.

He only had access to what lied beyond for the briefest of moments. Moments that were enough. Enough for him to see something. Something that wasn’t quite describable. Something that didn’t even wedge itself right in his memory. Something that after a fleeting moment was gone, the only thing that was left was a feeling of gentle befuddlement. And dread. Dread about what? He couldn’t know. There was a void in Albert’s hippocampus right where the memory should have been.

It didn’t matter, his brain shouted at him. He had better things to focus on. He didn’t need to dread things that could not hurt him.

[Purple Hazegem. When activated with a burst of mana, this gemstone will emit an anti-entropic field capable of temporarily reverse the flow of time for its user. Reusable]

[Skill acquired: Appraisal I]

[Quest: Overanalyzing complete.]

“Huh?”

Too many things happened at the same time, momentarily stunning Albert in place. But then the heft of something in his hands captured his attention: it was the book called ‘magic in the mundane - how to create magical items to aid your everyday life’, the reward for creating an Appraisal skill. He fought the urge to immediately open it, and instead looked at the gem with a newfound admiration for the seemingly unassuming piece of rock. It was, according to the system, a powerful artifact of untold power.

He needed to test it, immediately.

He clutched the gem in his hands, focused and let a small amount of mana flow into it in a controlled way. He didn’t want unexpected things to happen, after all.

He didn’t, but they did anyway. How could anyone expect to know how it feels when time begins to flow backwards, after all? And time did indeed flow backwards. For the price of his whole mana pool – a far cry from the controlled outpour of mana he was going for – the gem glowed and heated and tingled in his hands, while outside the window time rewound itself back to the late afternoon. Cars drove backwards, the sun undid its descent onto the water of the bay, and the room returned to the state it was five hours ago.

The process lasted no more than a few seconds, ending just as quickly as it began. The gem, having completed its task, darkened and refused to accept any additional mana. This told him that it could not be used multiple times in a row even if he did have the mana for it. Still, it was not gone forever. It was reusable. Which meant that Albert now had access to five extra hours every single day (he assumed the gem had a one-day cooldown) he could spend however he wanted!

A while later, during which time he did some experimenting with other things, the sound of the door opening reminded Albert of the chief problem that came with rewinding time. Other than a slew of other problems that his scientific mind was throwing at him, of course. For instance: how come the book on magical items was still there even though it did not exist in the past, at the time when Albert appeared after using the gem? What would happen if he had placed the book someplace he knew was not empty space at the arrival point in the past? Would the book yield, or would the object occupying the space move? Or reality could glitch, which was not a good outcome at all. What happened to the Albert of the past? Did he disappear, was he replaced? Perhaps this was a parallel universe, and reality was split at the time the gemstone was used.

There was no way to know.

What Albert did know, however, was that his mother was once again returning home from her stay at the hospital, and that she would once again make dinner. He was hungry, five hours were more than enough to fully digest a meal, so there wasn’t any problem with eating again, but he better remember this feature of the gem in the future. Whenever he used it, whatever choices and decisions he took would get undone for everyone except for him. Which meant that he should delay doing stuff that matters until after the gem’s activation or at least until the five hours had passed. This was important: he could see himself doing a great job at something, perhaps surviving going to the club with his friends tomorrow evening only to then rewind time without thinking and having to do it all again. It was good for undoing mistakes, though.