--donation bonus (day #15, post 1/5)--
Rather than simply coating the attacker in metal, Hector decided to try something more elaborate. First, he stomped down the door to the apartment and then forced himself between the two. He earned a hatchet in the chest for his trouble. His lack of concern for it, however, brought the altercation to an abrupt standstill, and he seized the opportunity.
Metal gathered around the attacker’s torso, accumulating and crawling all over the man’s skin like a million fleas before two cylinders took form, one for each arm, with iron rungs binding them together. Gray dust extended down his back and stomach, completing a kind of straitjacket.
It wasn’t the most impressive thing in the world, he supposed, but it was certainly one of the more intricate things he had created. And though not altogether intentional, he had added little protrusions from the neck down. They served no function, and for a moment, he wondered why he even put them there. Then he realized that he had unconsciously mimicked a straitjacket’s buttons.
After the assaulted woman called the police, Hector turned to leave, but Garovel made him wait around a bit longer.
‘Just being diligent,’ the reaper said. ‘We don’t actually know why this guy attacked her.’
‘Does it matter?’
Garovel shrugged. ‘We’re uninformed intruders in this situation. For all we know, she could suddenly decide to kill him after we’re gone.’
‘You think so?’
‘No. But that’s not the point. We’re making assumptions about the situation which are PROBABLY correct, but let’s at least wait until we hear sirens before leaving, eh? Better safe than sorry, y’know.’
‘Hmm. Alright.’
Sirens soon arrived as expected, however, and Hector took his leave.
His mind returned to those unintended buttons again. They’d seemed like a minor thing, just a collective error on his part. But as he thought about it, he began to understand; they were not an error. If anything they were the opposite. They were extra. He’d created something which had more to it than expected.
And that had never happened before.
A dark serial novel. Set in a modern fantasy world called Eleg. Mature language. Updates every night at midnight PST by ~400 words.
First! Tee hee always wanted to do that.
ReplyDeleteOne another note. Is Hector starting to loose it? I mean he did experience an overly traumatic event. That forever changed his life. How I'm thinking that is due to him creating something without meaning too. I dunno purely speculation on my part.
Yah, it may be speculation... but you might be right.
ReplyDeleteI think what happened here is that Hector never tried to create something specific since his last life or death fight... We know his "iron" (I still think it's an alloy, and not iron)summoning powers got a boost, but during the fight, he kept using it crudely, focusing more on speed and ammount than form. He did this because his subconscious needed that extra bit of speed. He needed the spikes to grow fast, the walls to appear out of thin air in a matter of less than a second. He wasn't even trying to CONTROL his forms.
This is the first time he actually tried something, and, as it happened during the fight, his subconscious mind adds some details, except this time there's no pressure to be fast. It wasn't life or death anymore... not after having a hatchet logged in his chest. The fight had already stopped, and he had already inmobilized the alleged attacker. Furthermore, he WAS trying to make a straight jacket, not just undescriptive restrainment.
I could go more into how memory works. Those protuberances are buttons, no doubt about that. When you THINK about a straight jacket, those buttons are prominent in your memory, because they're unusual. They're not buttons at all, but leather buckles. But unless you STOP and think about it, you only remember some kind of brown bulge at some points. Hector here didn't stop long enough to make them more precise, so they ended just as bulges.
In fantasy, it's pretty standard procedure that magic works on imagination and intent. I suppose Hector's ability is a kind of magic. So he thinks "I want to do a straightjacket", and he has a picture in his mind of what a straightjacket is supposed to look, so his iron reacts to his imagination and creates what he has in mind.
ReplyDeleteI don't think he's going crazy, though I don't see a real reason why he did a straightjacket, he could have done handcuffs with the same result. Actually, this might work as well -- if he had done handcuffs, would they have a keyhole? There would be no real reason for that, except that the picture of handcuffs in his mind probably has a keyhole, so there would also be one in the thing he created with that picture.
Also, yay for the navigation links above the text! :)
You may be spelling it this way deliberately, and that's fine, but the preferred spelling is "straitjacket." This is because the metaphor involved is a "strait," which is a narrow place in water. (This is also the case with the phrase "in dire straits," which is commonly misspelled as "dire straights.")
ReplyDeleteI can stop being pedantic any time! I'm not addicted!
Aha, fixed. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteAnd oh no, please, pedantry is much appreciated here. I'm a bit of a stickler for details, myself. I actually didn't know it was spelled that way, as I'd never given the word much thought, so thank you for correcting me. Glad to have learned something new.
Hmm, the process is becoming instinctive.
ReplyDeleteAh so he finally notices that his power got a significant boost. I was expecting something like this to happen after that crazy fight with Geoffrey
ReplyDelete