Tinkering and Pain

Less than an hour later, I was home. I called out to my sister, who was still in her room like she normally was when I wasn't home.

"Kiara! I'm back."

My voice carried itself through the house well enough that Kiara heard it every day when I got back. She opened her door just a bit to check but once she saw me, she opened it fully to stick her tongue out at me. It wasn't long before she closed the door again, causing me to sigh.

So, I went to my room, tossed my backpack next to my desk, and sat down in my chair. Leftover watch parts lay strewn across the surface, remnants of my work that morning. I reached into my backpack and pulled out my engineer's notebook. It was filled with the schematics of everything I'd built, fixed, or taken apart over the last year or so. Hand drawn by yours truly.

Flipping through the pages, I landed on the first available page, pulled out my pencil, and started sketching the layout of the watch from memory. I'd always been good at remembering how things went together, better than almost anyone else, so this came easily. It was when I got to the third layer that things started to seem off.

I hadn't paid too much attention to the parts in my initial fixing of the watch, simply replacing the gears as I went along, not really looking for any abnormalities outside of broken parts that I recognized were broken from looking at my mom's old watch.

As the layer drawings came together, I noticed multiple blank spaces within my drawing. Places where I couldn't remember exactly what a part looked like, yet I could tell the watch would function like a normal watch regardless of whether it was in the final build or not.

I came to the conclusion that those blank spots must've been parts that enabled the whole Temporal distortion thing. It was a strange phenomenon, but I decided I'd look more into it when I'd completed sketching the rest of the layers I remembered.

By the time I was finished, I had about fifteen-ish layers sketched out. I was no watchmaker, so I didn't know the terms for anything, but I was sure that fifteen was an abnormal amount. And right in the middle of all of them were layers with at least thirty blank spaces all together. I didn't exactly want things to come to this point, but I had no choice.

Taking a deep breath, I began removing the Timepiece from my wrist, the alarms from before blared in my head, giving me a clear warning.

"Warning. Removal of a synced Timepiece can cause problems with your temporal field. Under mortal risk, I encourage the synced Timekeeper to not keep the Timepiece removed for more than four hours at a time." Unit 27's warning just reminded me of what my timeframe was. I was confident in my ability to disassemble and reassemble the watch in less than four hours.

The first time I fixed it, it had taken me just over 3 hours. Now that I was doing it for a second time and the only thing changing was sketching the parts I didn't know, I wasn't worried about the four hour limit.

It wasn't long before my focus sharpened, and the watch practically dismantled itself within my hands. Going through the process once more, everything seemed so much simpler. Even the parts I hadn't seen before just made more sense, and I learned something I don't think I would've if I wasn't sketching out the parts.

The Timepiece didn't have a power source. I ran on nothing except for blood, somehow. Even if it had a normal watch battery within it, that battery wouldn't have been able to power it for more than a few months, just because of how small that battery would need to be. The Timepiece was truly filled out with tech, barely any negative space existed in the metal frame of the watch modeled device.

With a sigh, I leaned back in my chair, the Timepiece back together and laying on the table. To be honest, I was scared to put it on again. The technology was daunting, even more so after I'd taken it apart and looked inside of it. Most of the parts I couldn't even begin to understand. There was no context for each part, they just kinda were there. It was like taking apart a piece of tech from the Old World. The pieces inside of the tech were so obscure that it was simply impossible to know what each part was for unless you got the original blueprints. Of course, this was the exact opposite of Old World technology, this stuff was just so advanced that I'd never seen even a glimpse of anything like its machinery.

When I finally stood up, my legs were numb, and I had a strange pulsing pain in the back of my head. When I'd been lost in my thoughts, I hadn't noticed it, but now that my mind was clear, the pain was almost debilitating. The day was tiring, too much had happened too fast, and it was annoying. I was used to large workloads, but nothing like the one he'd just experienced.

"I should get some rest."

Thoughtlessly, I went to my bed, collapsing in a limp heap of a body. Sleep clawed at my mind, and the dangerous hands of unconsciousness finally grasped me, pulling me from the waking world.