“If one of these sparks an idea…”
OK, then, check that box. (Vignette follows, based on the last picture)
Her hand tingled. In that very particular way — or rather, in one of all those myriad ways that were all different and yet all the same — so that even as she crossed alertly in front of the standing streetcar, Nell glanced down at her right hand, and the wand she so often held.
And saw, as expected, the lovely invisible-except-to-her fireworks on the focal point of it, a beautiful quiet pageant of light that meant her Gift was being called upon by the wide Universe that’d given it to her.
Now she’d need to go be someplace that wasn’t on the cobblestones of a busy street. (Of course they were all busy, at almost any hour, here in what the BPT’S useful but uninspired naming called Hong Kong 1753 of the mid to late 20th Century, for a decade or so longer till the prospect of a Second Sino-Nipponese War re-shuffled the streamlets of time here once again.)
But, in a Euro-pan-Asian varietal Hong Kong so like her native own, there wasn’t likely to be much delay or bother finding somewhere nearby she could sit down and close her eyes and sort through her perceptions, look long on the particulars of her wand’s display, all to get her bearings relative to this latest hint from an omniverse she’d at last learned to Walk.
Perhaps the Cafe Parisienne? It wasn’t all that truly authentic in detail; but it caught the spirit of this time-strand’s French Republic capital to a heartwarming degree. And they did know there how to mind their own business, as the British and Americans said. And only six streets east and two north from where she was walking. Well, more like one and a half north, by now.
Nell smiled. Almost a metaphor, that, for navigating across planetime.
Some people, only a few, were time-sensitive in some small way. Could feel those little jumps and skips as they passed, usually quite spontaneously, from one discrete streamlet of time to another. Found their memory taking careful (if often uncomfortable) note of the differences, as they did…
And only a few out of all those few were properly planetime-sensitive or truly planetime-active; who could clearly perceive both the warp and the weft of time, the past-to-present flowing of ortho-time, and the shifting of chance and fate and circ*mstance that was para-time. Or even use that flow of immaterial but potent energy between all the filamentary, atomic strands of history and being, that across much of human history many had been pleased to call ‘magic’ — to travel freely, as the old quote said, to wander freely at will rather than dwell in perishable, narrow worlds.
People like Nell Alexine de Ruyter Antonelli Volkovna Chang, to give her most proper and correct name by the standards of the Bureau des Plusieurs Temps in Paris-Zero, whose France was an Imperial Republic wrenched from the grasp of the Bonapartes sometime around 1879. And who held sway (even if very loosely) over much of the nearby, and thus comprehensible, World.
In the dozen years since reaching adulthood and inheriting her powers, she had been a courier, a lifter, a finder, a fixer, a fetcher, a scout, a hunter, and once or twice even an assassin (ought ‘merely’ helping to kill a really-bad-guy actually count?). Most of it at and in the service of the BPT, or anyways with its blessing.
But this was what she liked best of all — commissioned not by officials in an office, but by the raw, native call of the World of Worlds, itself. Being a fixer meant understanding how someone somewhere, somewhen out there was in the kind of trouble only a Walker could fix… and then helping them.
Already, she was starting to feel it; likely someone female, brave, in an odd timeline-specific way some sort of knight or paladin equivalent, in a setting that would almost-surely have scoffed at any such idea. And yet…
Those tiny fireworks on her wand were the cheery but eerie light of a Very pistol of sorts; a flare fired across the skein of histories to call for help… and even a kind of summary or digest of who and what, and where and when and how. Exactly the co-ordinates that someone like her needed.
Nell smiled, again, and quickened her pace along HK’s bustling sidewalks.
