94 Chapter 94 - Time
After getting kicked out of my own home I quickly discovered a very important and unnerving fact. I didn't have a lot of friends. Arnold was busy with his own things and all my other 'friends' were in my house.
I could easily wander the haven seeing what other changes had happened since I fell unconscious. I didn't want to though. There were a lot of people that I didn't know and wandering around was bound to get me involved in something as the head of the haven. I didn't want to deal with all of that at the moment.
Instead I walked back to the house and leapt up onto the roof to find a bit of privacy. I had a lot to think about.
Yet despite having the intention of trying to work out some of my issues, like how the haven was going to be run, I couldn't concentrate on anything.
How did the nobody main characters of the novels become incredible leaders to the people under their care? I couldn't figure it out. I was a loner by nature, at least that was what I believed. Was that the problem? My own perception of myself? I shook my head, no, it shouldn't be. I was willing to take charge and get things done when it was needed, but I didn't have the mind or patience for the day to day decisions that came with command. Megan had started a good system by delegating many of those tasks to those better at it. I didn't think it was enough though.
Unfortunately I didn't have a better answer than taking it all onto myself, which was actually the worst decision for both them and me. Maybe a council? That didn't seem like a bad idea. A council that could take care of the day to day while I backed up their authority. There would have to be some thought on who would be council members, how many council members, and my veto rights. There was already a semblance in place with the delegations. Megan had probably already thought of this, or maybe it had been suggested to her. She was incredibly smart, enough so that I kept forgetting that she was only eighteen. I winced as I realized that if her birthday hadn't already passed, it was nearly here.
To much to think about. For the council I needed to talk to Megan, Momma, and Kelly. I could ask Megan about her birthday too. Then again I had no idea when my other wives birthdays were. Another fail on my part I guess.
Frustrated and unsure why, I took a few breaths and tried to calm my mind. I had an idea what was wrong. I had expected the girls to be more excited by the proposal, instead I had the feeling that it had been a mistake. Maybe I was overthinking things but I couldn't shake the feeling.
I knew that continuing to brood on the subject wasn't going to help me, instead I decided to change gears. I had a lot of different things I needed to go over and learn when it came to my abilities. I had glanced over the information of the bond and elemental lord information but didn't understand most of it. So instead of going over that information again I decided to try and look into another worry I had. My wives limited lifespans. Maybe it was premature as Annitte had said, but they were women, if I waited to worry about it when they were starting to wrinkle and gray they would forever hate me. As several of my wives were older than the rest, it wasn't impossible. I wasn't sure which of them was the oldest but Tracy, Monica, and Rebecca were all close to thirty, give or take a few years. With the number of years Monica and Tracy needed for their schooling and Emily's age, I didn't think I was too far off. Their age didn't bother me, but I knew that it would bother them with some of my other wives being almost ten years younger than them.
It also gave me a good excuse to delve into my time ability. I hadn't used it for much and didn't know much about it.
From my video game experience I knew some things about how time could be used. Slow, haste, and stop were perfect examples of time associated spells. Then there was peering into the future and past to see what had happened, which led to the time travel abilities that were highly debated as incredibly dangerous. Those were the extent of what I could understand about time magic before I focused on the skill.
It was not nearly enough, much more was linked to time than I had ever expected. Sure all that I had mentioned was there, slow, haste, and stop were all magics that affected the flow of time around a single or group of individuals. However it alone wasn't as useful as a change in your perception of time, much like the movie effects where everything slowed down so you could see what was happening in a fast moving chaotic situation. This kind of spell could allow the user to slow, or in an extreme case, stop time so that they could understand all that was happening around them. Adding on the space ability with the stop time perception would even allow me to move around my surroundings and see everything beyond my own area of perception. In fact if I cast in now I could move around the entire haven to see where everyone was and get an idea of what they were doing. Downside was the spell cost a lot of mana to cast and keep running, at my level I doubt I would be able to keep it going for more than a few minutes, no that didn't take into my regen.Wait! Time had stopped so there wouldn't be any mana regen, would there? More to look up.
Walking into the future wasn't that dangerous, just not necessarily useful. The future was fluid and constantly changing, the very act of going into the future to see what would happen would change it. Walking into the past was also not very dangerous. Apparently it was like walking through a museum of steel figures. I could observe what had happened, but the time around the events had solidified and hardened making changing any of the events that had happened in the past very difficult to manipulate. It was possible, but the amount of mana needed to make even the smallest changes was enormous as it was like a strand of web connected to a much larger whole, each little change would affect the larger picture so changing even the smallest thing cost an enormous amount of energy, changing big things was impossible for me at the moment, though the demigods might be able to have a greater effect with their superior power. An interesting thing to note though was changing the past became easier the closer to the present it was. Mostly because less would be affected.
I understood the idea of how it worked but as I tried to understand exactly what the mana would be used for to change something in the past and how if affected the bigger picture I got lost. It seemed that by shifting or changing anything in the past I would need to adjust everything that the object interacted with from that moment on. How that worked I had no idea, but since moving even a dolly on a table would take a great deal of energy as it would affect not only the dolly but also the person or being that would next interact with it and the degree that would change how time flowed. If it simply meant someone would have to stretch their arm a little further then the cost was low, but if it were to cause or prevent an accident thereby changing the next event drastically and the butterfly effect from that change, the price was astronomical. Dropping a bomb on someone in the past to kill them was so prohibitively expensive that I had a feeling only beings on the level of gods, could do it, and that was for a nobody shut in like myself. A public figure that everyone knew about and made many appearances? Not even worth thinking about.
Simply viewing something without interacting with the environment though wasn't nearly as bad, it only got more expensive the farther back in time you went, and space had to be used in conjunction unless you were standing in the exact spot that the event happened.
Time travel was good and all, and gave me a much better understanding on time, but it hardly helped me at the moment. Looking into the future wouldn't help me unless I had a specific event I was interested in, and as there were many pathways into the future, seeing what I wanted to see wasn't necessarily beneficial. Peering into the future to see the most likely outcome and what needed to be done to change the outcome to the one you desire required a skill, or affinity to the element that I didn't think I had, and even then it needed a great deal of practice. Stopping time to see what was happening around you seemed far more useful. Unfortunately this meant that I couldn't just peer into the future to see how long my wives lived as there were to many other variables that came into play.
Another branch I had never thought of was healing and aging. Rather than just restoring a limb time could be used to increase the speed of healing, or restore a lost limb back to a condition it was before. The cost of the later was more expensive but still useful as no one could naturally regrow a limb. On the opposite side was aging, a set of spells that could age, wear, or decay a person or object till it turned to dust. In fact a time blade could be used to kill with that exact concept, however it would be less effective against objects that took a great deal of time to age or decay. It would be completely useless on Annitte, or anyone from my parents world as they didn't age at all. It was an interesting concept but a spatial blade would probably be more useful.
Finally I discovered what I was looking for. A way to measure the amount of time within the blood of someone. It didn't have anything to do with the magic of an individual, just their natural lifespan. Finally I had something I could use.
