My head feels fuzzy.
"Charlie?"
I feel someone poking my cheek.
"Charlie?"
I groan try to open my eyes. It hurts. Lin is hovering in front of my face, too close to make sense of him properly. I raise my hand to my head.
"Are you ok?"
I groan silently again.
"I think so," I find the will say. My mouth is dry. "What happened?"
"You don't remember?"
"I remember... colours? And floating?" I try to dig through my brain but everything I seem to find there is too weird to get a hold on. The thoughts slip through the net of my conscious thoughts like a cube of ice slips through cold fingers.
"I don't know about colors, but you did float. You floated almost up to the treetops, and then started speeding through the forest. I almost couldn't keep up with you. That went on for a while, and then you collapsed to the ground. You've been sleeping for the whole night. It's almost noon."
I stare at Lin for a moment, then push myself to a sitting position, holding my head.
"Are you okay?" Lin asks, looking a bit worried.
"Just a little dizzy," I answer, closing my eyes and shaking my head to clear it. "You think you could find me some water?"
He nods, then zooms off. A minute later he returns, with a small cup filled with cold, clean water.
"I think I may have given you a bit too much of the potion," Lin begins, and I cut him of with a scowl. He already accidentally got me stuck here, and now he accidentally gave me too much of a super-potent potion? "Hey, it wasn't my fault. This is the kind of potion that if hard to tell how much to give a person. It's like magic: it affects everyone differently," he looks thoughtful for a moment. "It's actually not like magic. It is magic. It helps you tap the power that is naturally in you. And suddenly accessing the magic is what people react to differently."
"Right," I say. "Now what?"
"We try again," Lin says.
"Right," I say.
~x~
We do find me some breakfast first. And by find I mean go steal more from the altar. Someone has already come leave some offerings there this morning. I still don't like it, but there's no other way for me to get any food without stealing it from someone who might actually want to eat it themselves. So I eat. Lin tries to make me feel better about it, but it's not working very well.
And then we get back to work. We don't get straight to the potion. First I simply concentrate.
"Okay, so thinking about haze didn't work," Lin says as I sit down on the cold ground. "So let's try something different. Imagine... Hm. A mental journey. You close your eyes, and you imagine traveling home. Have you ever been farther away from home than the village?"
I nod. "We went to visit my aunt some years ago. She lives two day's travel away. Mom has been talking about going back, but we've never found the time."
"You remember what it felt like on your way back home?" he asks. I nod again. "So imagine that feeling. You're moving from somewhere where home isn't present to somewhere where home is present. The being present is the relevant thing here. You imagine what it will feel like to journey from somewhere where home isn't a thing to somewhere it is."
"That doesn't make much sense," I say, but I close my eyes and imagine.
"You can combine the haze from yesterday to this too. You can't feel home, because the fog is in the way. So to journey home, you need to push the fog away."
I nod. I concentrate. I try to imagine. A minute passes. Two minutes.
"I think I've got it," I say, opening my eyes.
"Okay, time for some more potion," Lin says. He hands me the bottle and the spoon. I pour myself some, less than yesterday. I look at him, unsure. He nods.
I take a deep breath and take the potion. Going down it feels just like yesterday. But it doesn't hit me as hard. There isn't as much of it, and maybe now that I know what to expect it doesn't come as such a surprise. The feeling of good and relaxed flows over me again. I also feel the distractedness, but not as strong as yesterday. I'm able to tuck it down, take all that restless energy and concentrate it.
I close my eyes again, to be able to concentrate all my energy on what I'm doing. A journey home. It's just a short distance away, I only have to push the mist away and I will see it.
I feel something.
And then it's lost.
I try again. I was definitely doing something right. So I try to imagine the same thing again. I feel something streaming through me, and I try to channel it to what I want to do. Push the fog away. Get home.
Something shifts. I'm not sure what it is. The air feels different. Real. I open my eyes. I blink. Something feel weird. Lin appears beside me.
"That went well," he says, with a confused look on his face. "You know, except..."
"I'm in the Faerie Realm," I say, as I realise why the world is wrong.
___________________________________________________________
The topic for tomorrow is Radiation.
~matu
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