SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 5: Bent Time - @bloodsword

Bent Time

by bloodsword

Fionn ducked behind a corner, his breath ragged. He could hear his pursuers shouting to each just a few yards away as they tried to find him in the maze of alleyways behind the tenements of his home. While he was hidden for now, he knew it was just a matter of time before they found him.

A matter of time: the phrase had more irony to him now than it ever did. It was trying to fool Time that got him into this mess in the first place.

"Wait!" a hard voice hissed in accented English from just around the corner. "I've picked up the bender's trace. This way!"

Fionn gathered himself, quickly checking to see how many of his homemade weapons he still had left. A few, only a pitiful few. He could only hope they were enough to see him back to safe ground. Then he was running as hard as his exhausted legs would carry him down the litter-filled alley. As he did, he thought of the past few hours.

It was several hours previous that Fionn unconsciously hunched his shoulders as the shouting in the alleyway three stories beneath his window exploded into loud banging and the grunts and dull thumps of fist fighting.

This was Hell's Kitchen, New York in 1897, home to poor Irish and Italian immigrants working the Hudson River docks. As well as some of New York's most notorious gangs. No-one in the Kitchen used a spittoon without their permission or paying their due. Violence was a way of life here, a reality most grew hardened to or moved somewhere else.

This was the world 18 year old Fionn O'Malley had been born to. This was the world he was desperate to either change or get away from. Hopefully before it killed him.

Thankfully the young first-generation American of Irish-born parents had seen a way out, due in no small part to Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, and Nicola Tesla, innovators in the new field of electricity. Like Faraday, Fionn had a clever mind despite the lack of formal education, and he found himself absorbing whatever science coming out of each amazing discovery the three men had made. Until his brain felt like it was on fire from the thoughts seething within it.

Incredible devices, both those made by the scientists, and others that he couldn't recognize, filled his dreams at night. And frantic building and experimentation in what little spare time he had, with 'borrowed' materials, made those devices come to life.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" he quietly urged himself. With the worn candle beside him his only light, he was carefully but as quickly as he dared, wrapping copper wire around a rough wooden ring. It was the first part of a small electrical generator he was building.

"Fionn!" a hard voice snarled from just outside his door. "Did you fetch that coal I sent you for? Or are you still fiddlin' with that damn wire contraption of yours?"

"The coal's in the bin downstairs, da," Fionn replied somewhat distractedly, his focus still on the coil. "Someday we won't even need coal, da," the young man went on to say, quickly surveying the parts of his generator by the light of the candle. With the newest coil completed, it had all its parts. Now, all he had to do was assemble it.

"Electricity will give us all the free power we need for everything."

"Aye, maybe," his father grudgingly conceded from the other side of the door with a noncommittal grunt. "But that day ain't today, boy!" Then, with a final bang on the rickety portal, he was gone, stomping down the short hallway that ran down the center of their crowded tenement apartment.