Post by Valentino Rahal on Jan 29, 2016 18:57:36 GMT -5
The last few days had been confusing. Valentino’s head felt as if it was on a carnival carousal whose controls had broken; it was spinning just a little too fast and wouldn’t stop. Nothing was making much sense and every figure, icon and object was melding into a distinct blur of vague motion.
He felt as if he had no control anymore.
And he hated it.
Valentino had always been able to get the upper hand in most situations. If he needed to react quickly, or make a choice, he’d stop, slow, speed up or reverse time and figure it out. This was especially true in poker.
People had always said to Valentino when he wanted to play poker that you must never play the game. Instead, you should play the player. He understood that sentiment entirely though why would he focus on the mannerisms and behaviours of his opponents when he could simply play the game? When you can stop time, you could… alter the deck to your favour. It made games quite boring sometimes. But it also made for easy money.
Now, however, wasn’t quite like poker. He’d jumped time before; a few seconds into the past. A few minutes into the future, even; and he’d even gone a few days, even just over a year, either way before – those were manageable. He could cope with that. But this time?
He was almost three-hundred years into the past and it felt strange. It had come to transpire that something had gone wrong during Valentino’s journey into the past as he had ended up almost eighteen months earlier than when he needed to be. And, again, he could cope with that.
What he couldn’t deal with, however, was the timelines. Because of the volatile and unpredictable nature of his ability, Valentino had become accustomed to not necessarily landing in the right time-stream as he called them; but it was something he’d usually been able to establish and rectify fairly easily. Time, in essence, wasn’t a straight line. It was a weave of different strands of silk, interlocking and curling around each other in a web of cause and effect. Time-streams were the fibres on each strand; aspects of time that, ultimately, usually had the same outcome – though there were slight variances.
Valentino was usually good at identifying what stream he was in. But not this time.
He’d been in this timeline for roughly three days now and he still had no idea if it was his own time-stream.
There were elements that he was told would be in the past – but also, some aspects were completely new. Helena Rahal, for example. He wasn’t aware that Felicia had ever married Helena. Maybe his mother just didn’t think to tell him. However, he knew all about Fiona – the woman who caused Valentino’s father, Alessandro, to become the way he was three hundred years from now. He wasn’t sure in what breath that was, though Alessandro had always laid blame on her.
Ma was going to be annoyed – she had given him strict orders to not talk to anyone but herself and not make his identity known. As it stood, his mother, his father, his mother’s wife, his father’s friend, and several other people now knew exactly who he was. Butterflies, right?
And that only made things more complicated. Somehow, something had happened – presumably that, at this point, Valentino had corrupted his own timeline, and he couldn’t jump forward in time once more. As he stood outside the coffee shop, looking in at Khalidah, Valentino was coming to terms that he was stranded. His powers still worked; he knew they still worked. They just… weren’t.
He walked into the coffee shop and rather rudely, without but an invite, sat at his grandmothers table and took the book – whatever book it was she was reading – out of her hand, placed it on the table and spoke, “You’re smart as fuck, Ma. How do I tell if I’m in the right time stream? It’s really fucking me off.”
