Observations

Saien changed the world subtly. The changes where small and simple when just looked at them as changes. It was what these changes where made to that made the big changes. A few numbers here, a switch of symbols there, an inversion of a mathematical operation here, the numbers flowed around like fish in a pond. Saien gently massaged the fabric of the world, the most basic fundamental points. He considered the atoms, the nucleons, the quarks, and other building blocks even more fundamental that no one had a name for yet. Simply ob observing them, he changed them. But they changed in ways he couldn’t control. But in the realisation that he was making these changes, it became easier for his brain to get around the concept that he could make such changes, and so he began to look deeper into these building blocks, into the laws of maths that governed them. It took a few seconds for him to choose a suitable subject for his test.

     He changed the laws laid down by Newton, warped and bent the principles of relativity, and put a new slant on the concepts raised by Hawking. Slowly, with a gentle grace, he changed numbers. The only law the fundamentals knew was in maths. They followed set rules and set patterns governed by constants and variables within many equations. Simple tweaking a few of these would have a massive effect on the world as a whole. And in Saien’s own little bubble of reality, it was he who decided these equations. He chose one. A law governing gravity. He added a few lines to the equation which represented the inverse square law of gravitational field strength. He decreased the gravitational constant a little further. Surely enough, the new law of gravity he had created, simply by adding some numbers to an equation resulted in hair slowly rising slowly upwards, though, by all technicalities, up was a now a relative term, meaning ‘opposite direction to the ground’ rather than ‘the direction things fall’. In Saien’s world, things now fell ‘up’, or down meant towards the moon.

     He switched his attention to another equation, realising he was feeling a little too warm. The laws of thermodynamics. He altered the specific heat capacity of the air, then switched around a few operations and lowered the Boltzman constant. Things suddenly became much cooler as the air suddenly realised it couldn’t contain all the heat. There was a flash of light in which the excess heat was dispersed. Even Saien couldn’t destroy the energy. Sitting in his little reality, he slowly continued to change the fundamental principles of the world so they where more to his liking.




Marsin was thinking. He did it a lot, and as a result had become very good at it. He could think until the cows came home. It was one of his favourite pastimes. Sometimes he would think for weeks at a time to the exclusion of all else. Right now, he was thinking about a tree. He was fascinated by it. If the tree had been a person, it would have been a stereotypical villain. It was old, looked half dead, and was twisted and gnarled, like a shattered bone protruding out of a wound. Marsin cocked his head and stroked the bark again, feeling the rough texture of it.

He had been at this tree for six months now.

     Six months, without sleep, food, or another soul to call company. He just studied the tree. He climbed it, sat on it, leaned on it, punched it, kicked it, scratched it, watered it… Exactly why he couldn’t say. He didn’t need a reason. He just found the tree interesting, so he looked at it in great detail. He had all the time in the world, all the benefits of sentience, and none of the drawbacks of life. He was immortal, and his mind worked in a completely different way. He didn’t have any particular need of anything, no food, no sleep. So he just wondered around indulging in his passions.

     He couldn’t understand mortals. They where always in such a desperate need to do things as soon as possible, before they didn’t have time. Marsin could not appreciate the mortals view on this thing they called time. Even if he understood their necessity to have it. He knew time passed, but mortals needed to label time, organise it and distribute it. A mortal’s view of time was really just a distortion of what time actually was. It was fluid, could more fast or slow, and didn’t stop or run out. It just kept going. But for an immortal like Marsin to elaborate on this concept to a mortal was almost impossible. Someone would ask him why he hadn’t bought the latest model of such and such. His response was the same. There would be another one out soon. Then another, then another. He didn’t need it anyway. Mortals got the latest model knowing this too, but because of their perception of time, months was a long time to wait, but not so short as to warrant not buying the upgrade. Then there was the whole materialistic thing. He couldn’t understand why people got so attached to physical possessions. He thought it was somehow related to the concept of time. Maybe more and better possession was a mark that a mortal has used their time effectively. Marsin, who didn’t need to ration and control time, didn’t need proof that he’d ‘spent’ his time well. After all, he couldn’t really spend what was in infinite supply.

     But despite these attachments, people still discarded possessions, sometimes for a new model, sometimes because they where just bored with it. Marsin always felt this was like a sad expression of the way they wanted to experience everything, but because they only had so much time, would never be able to. So mortals bolted from thing to thing, trying everything, but never really getting into it properly because they needed to jump to try the next thing. It was exactly the same attitude a mortal child had at a birthday when they opened their presents and didn’t know which to play with. So they bolted around them all, not really paying special detail to any singular one. Marsin was amused that they found this so funny, and then didn’t realise they where doing it themselves. So he had spent twenty four hours a day for six months learning everything about this tree. He had discovered in his life that even if he was to live forever, everything else was transient and so needed to be appreciated while he still could. It was the opposite to the mortal approach. They needed to appreciate something before they went, for mortals seemed to posses a lower life span the things they went after. Marsin needed to appreciate things before they went rather than vice versa. Mortals never really appreciated anything. Marsin had figured out it took at least a year of constant examination and experimentation to truly appreciate something that was apparently as simple as a flower.

     Finally, having finished analysing the tree, Marsin set it on fire and wondered off. He slipped up on his walk and lay on his back for the next three years, simply because he wasn’t really too bothered about getting up. He just lay there are thought about how a mortal would have instinctively just got up and carried on with what they where doing, obsessing with getting it done before some imposed limit of time meant they had failed their task.




To say someone is unbalanced is not really something to be bandied around lightly. It’s a comment on someone’s state of mind that can cause quite a lot of offence. To say Kriik was unbalanced however, would be an unfair comment for a completely different reason.

Kriik was, by every definition of the word- a complete psychopath.

     He listed his hobbies as Robbery, Rape, Arson, Torture and Murder. Sometimes all visited on the same subject. Sometimes not in that order. But Kriik was considered relatively normal by his immediate friends- his tribe. They viewed his vampiric tendencies, violent outburst, perverted pleasures and penchant for violence as outward marks of a healthy young man. Everyone else thought he needed to be killed, which suited Kriik fine. It meant they came to him so he could kill them, rather than him needing to find them.

     He wasn’t afraid when people came to kill him. Even when they where in groups. Kriik really didn’t know the meaning of fear. Well, he did, but he didn’t understand it. Someone had explained to him that, many people, when faced with danger would feel a need to protect themselves and get away from that danger- that was fear. Kriik new this, he knew the definition, he has asked the person how it felt, and that was not the answer. He ripped out the scholar’s throat with his bare hands for wasting precious time that could have been spent murdering. Kriik didn’t fear the people stronger than him, he just didn’t try to kill them because he knew they’d kill him. And he didn’t want to die because if he died, he couldn’t kill anymore. When he asked if that was fear, he was told no, shut up and sharpen your weapons, you’ve got people to kill boy. So he let it slide and killed some children to take his mind of things. He was told by his tribe it was a good way to stop thinking such unhealthy thoughts, and he was just a confused teenager trying to figure out the way of the world. Delighted by this, he killed one of his brothers with a pebble.

     He couldn’t understand why some people not of the tribe thought this was horrific behaviour. But they did, so he just tried to educate them by explaining things as he killed a few of them. They still didn’t get it, so he put them out of their misery. His tribe was very impressed with the way he had tried to make them realise they where wrong, then taken mercy on them when he couldn’t.




Think about it.