sophie.

Chapter 13

So apparently, nothing of relevant note was going on during the seventh day of June, as Adrien had explained to me. We were walking through the dark club,  the smell of patchouli and cheap beer lingering in the air. Loud music from a nondescript rock band was playing far on the other side of the bar, and as we took a booth in the back, in a room where it seemed you had to know the right people to gain access to, I finally allowed myself to rest. I was sort of in awe at everything that was going on around me: the people, the atmosphere, the music. For a moment I even passed a television, but it was just reporting some local grocery store robbery, nothing very relevant in the long term. We made ourselves comfortable in the seats, with Valentine on the inside of one booth and Adrien next to him, and myself opposite to Adrien. Now again, I was dazed, and just out of my mind for a moment.

"You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" Adrien said, and his voice caught my attention, so I turned to face him. He fondly placed his hand over mine across the table, and smiled. I affirmed with a nod. "You probably have a lot of questions, too. If you like, me and Robert can try and answer anything you have in mind. Like Daemon." I was about to speak up about this, but Robert had his own interjection.

"I already made her aware of Daemon's suspicion of you and Trunc," he explained, and Adrien nodded his head and thinned his lips, an expression I wasn't actually that familiar with, and looked back up at me. I think he was about to talk, but more questions were formulating in my head, and I couldn't help but bring them up first and foremost.

"Right. But I do have other questions.  And to be honest, pretty big ones at that. I know Wilhelm is the creator of the truncane or whatever you guys call it, but how is it all even possible? How are we in 1984, how were we in the future?" I started to feel myself word vomit, but before I got too far, Adrien's hand held mine a little tighter and it calmed me down. "I mean, stuff like this doesn't happen. But it has, and I don't know how." There was a moment of silence, and Robert looked over at Adrien, who gave him a peculiar nod and both turned to face me. 

"Luckily you have yourself the man who knows everything here, Soph," Valentine explained, and I furrowed my brow and turned to face Adrien. He looked down for a moment and back at me, apparently formulating some sort of speech with a bit of strain. He knows everything, does he? I remember thinking to myself. I didn't ask, though. He was about to speak.

"Wilhelm Trunc, the creator of the truncane and the following time travel manual, was said to have lived in nineteenth century England -- that's all I know about his time frame. In fact, I was the one he'd told this information to, but that's not very relevant at the moment. What we know about him was that he was a doctor by day and an artist at night, and that in his time, what he painted and drew was widely unappreciated and fairly unheard of, save for by his family, friends, and a colleague or two. A third title he also went by, and to a much smaller crowd of people, was a prophet, or a medium. But it was never a ghost or a god who he spoke to, and for the larger part of his life even he didn't know what he was talking to. But what was certain was that whenever he created an art piece, it was through his connection with this ethereal being that they were brought to life. Massive pieces of work, they were. He drew them mainly in thick pens -- a hard thing to do when you had to work with a quill -- that spanned from one side of the canvas to the other, and then he'd draw another line and another, until eventually all the lines would stray into waves and jagged bolts, then blend into an eye-straining optical illusion.

"Apparently these lines were the voice of the being he was connected to, and it wasn't until he created over twenty of these pieces -- all unsold to buyers -- and lined them up next to one another, that he identified them as an ancient and alien form of blueprints, to which he discovered that only he could translate. It turns out, as he wrote down the translation to these art pieces, that the being he had spoken to was Time himself, a revelation that sent him spiralling into life as a recluse for five or so years. He dropped his practice, threw away his pens. How he lived in those times, even I'm not sure of, but when he finally put himself together, he took the instructions he acquired from the blueprints and invented what we call a truncane, a device named after Wilhelm Trunc himself.