Omnipotent #OnceUponNow #JustWriteIt

The Blasted Ring

"...new way to use the magic," Mavok said with the spark in his eyes that usually appeared when he'd solved a particularly complex problem.

At the words, though, terror shot through Aladdin, and though he tried to cover it, he was sure Mavok had noticed. Mavok was an observant man; most Djinn were. Otherwise, they wouldn't have found the ring.

"What do you mean by that?" Aladdin asked as he urgently focused again on the melodies, searching in Mavok's direction. "I thought you were trying to create a new metal that would help make cars safer? You know, using our powers to help humanity?"

~ (o) ~

Thomas sat at the cafeteria table as he unconsciously struggled to get the ring off his finger. It didn't work. It had been a week since the incident, yet he could still vividly remember the horror of seeing the dead man. The man he killed.

Timothy had walked outside when he didn't show up. As he glanced around, Timothy found Thomas lying by the side of the road, missing his new shirt and shoes. Looking closer, Timothy noticed that Thomas's head was bleeding as if he'd been punched in the head. As he called for help, he saw a pile of clothes next to Thomas filled with some sort of dust. Suspecting magic had something to do with it, he quickly hid the clothes in some nearby bushes to avoid awkward questions.

Some patrons of the restaurant who had just finished called 911 and helped Timothy make sure Thomas was all right. While waiting for the ambulance, Timothy looked through Thomas's wallet and found that almost everything had been cleared out. To everyone else, it seemed like a mugger had taken the things and run. But, having seen the strange pile of clothes, Timothy hadn't been so sure.

Thomas felt some pain in his finger and realized he'd drawn blood without realizing it. Again. He forced his left hand, the one without the ring, under the table and away from the ring.

He hated it. He hated the ring. He hated the power that it brought, the ability to kill. The pulses kept trying to force their way into his head, but he shoved them out. Never again would he use the power. Never again would he kill.

The two boys still weren't sure exactly happened, but they were able to guess at several things.

As part of their experiments, they'd found that strange things happened when trying to affect life. The extreme level of complexity and how hard it was to be familiar with the life had led to the most disturbing of their experiments when Thomas had tried to move a mouse they'd caught and it ended up dead and horribly mutilated. Those experiments were very quickly brought to a stop. Fortunately for Thomas, it appeared that he was familiar enough with his body that teleporting it had caused no serious damage. His old clothes and wallet had also come with him, but things like his brand new shirt hadn't made it. Unfortunately for the man, holding on to Thomas had somehow resulted in being changed as well. The result had been horrific.

Realizing he'd finished his food several minutes before and was just sitting at the table, staring into space, Thomas grabbed his backpack and got up. As he walked away, he left a dollar underneath his food tray. A while ago someone hadn't felt like putting away his food tray so he just put a dollar under it for whoever did it for him. The idea caught on, and now anyone who wanted an extra dollar could just look around the cafeteria for a dirty tray and put it away for the money. It was surprising actually how rarely people violated the rule. It was just such a nice option for when someone was rushed or tired. Thomas had been doing it a lot lately.

He walked out of the cafeteria and set off for where his physics class was going to start in a half hour. His pace was slow, barely more than a shuffle. Physics. He hated physics. If it wasn't for physics he wouldn't have found the blasted ring. He wouldn't have worked with Timothy to get their "probability anomaly detector," or as they liked to call it, "magic item locator," project approved, and he most certainly wouldn't have succeeded in building the blasted device.

He got to class and just sat in the chair, staring at the whiteboard. He knew he should have been doing homework, but he didn't care anymore. He was mentally and emotionally drained. The nightmares didn't help. At least his teachers were nice, giving him a by while he recovered. It helped that the head bandages were so obvious.

The other students trickled in as it got closer to one. Most were there five minutes early, but there were always those who waited until the last minute, or afterward, to arrive. He still couldn't decide if they were slackers or just busy. Probably some combination of both.

The teacher, Professor Larson, arrived a minute before it was time to start, frantically getting the projector set up and all his notes out. Somehow, despite his last minute attitude, he always managed to start on time, jumping right into the complex theories surrounding some of the anomalies of space that Thomas usually found so fascinating. Though Thomas was terrible at math, he'd found he enjoyed trying to grasp the overall concept.

He had really found his niche when he started working with Professor Larson on building little devices to test some of the theories they were learning about. That was what had led Thomas to ask Timothy, his roommate and the class's residential math whiz, for help to test one of his own theories. The theory predicted some sort of physical manifestations of probability scattered throughout the universe. While nobody knew what that would imply, it was something that Thomas believed he could detect. Shockingly, not only did the detector seem to work, but it seemed to be detecting one very nearby; on earth, in fact, if the device was to be believed, despite the theory predicting only about one per galaxy.

After double, triple, and quadruple checking the everything to try to see if it was a false alarm, the two boys created a more precise device that could hopefully lead them to the anomaly. Deciding that, if the new device could be believed, an upcoming 3-day weekend would give them enough time to find the oddity, they set off in the direction that the second device took them. They'd ended up in Montana, and it was there that they found the ring.

In the past, the memories of those days had always been pleasant, a tale of two friends finding the magical item. But now they just reminded him of how much he hated the ring. He tugged at it some more.

Class finished, but as Thomas grabbed his backpack, not needing to put anything away since he hadn't bothered taking notes, he heard a call from the front of the room.

"Hey Thomas, do you have a minute? I have something I want to show you."

It was Professor Larson. Despite just wanting to get home and try to sleep, Thomas walked up there with the shuffle that had become his usual method of travel lately.

"Just wanted to show you the next stage of the prototype you helped build," the professor said, holding out a black rectangular box with lots of wires sticking out.

Thomas took it glumly, looking it over. He recognized the parts he'd designed, noticing where they'd been changed to work better and be less likely to blow up. The box was going to be part of a larger system that would help the university be among the first to verify some finding that MIT made a few months before.

"I was hoping it would spark your interest again. We could always use someone as talented as you on the team," Larson said quietly.

Thomas handed it back. He couldn't handle the thought of building at the moment. "Sorry sir, but right now is not the time for me," he murmured.

"Well, Thomas, we miss you, and hope that you will be up and at it soon," said the professor.

"Thank you, professor," Thomas replied.

Somehow he made it through the rest of the day like he had every day for the past week. Friends and teachers offered their condolences, the dinner ladies gave him an extra scoop of ice cream, and Timothy left another dollar under another tray. He even got a letter from the soup kitchen he enjoyed volunteering at as they told him they missed him. Back at the apartment Timothy tried to draw him out but without success, and Thomas ended up going to bed having only spoken a few dozen words all day.