What to do with a Needle
Welp, now I’ve done it. I ripped through the spacetime continuum and destroyed the universe.
Now, it's pretty boring, just floating in empty, perpetual darkness.
I can't see anything, seeing as I was ripped apart into fundamental elements with the rest of the universe, but for some reason, I can still think. I believe it is because my atoms are still entangled through that quantum experiment I did in 12th grade, (which was useful because I could just move my finger forward and my whole body would move with it) but that would be scientifically inaccurate. Then again, so is ripping the fabric of the universe with a needle, but still, it happened. I guess I either threaded it with the threads of time or poked the fabric of space and ripped it… but… whatever.
Vwummmmmm…
The hum of electricity arching through the air disturbed the many top scientists working at the Massive Electron Time Architect, or META. They all looked up, except the ones in HAZMAT suits handling dangerous materials that would explode if dropped. The tesla coil on top of the Architect was lighting up with lightning like a porcupine having a bad hair day.
A Teaspoon of Magic
The silhouette of the massive autonomous birds against the sunset was a surprise.
The entire world had been experimenting with steam engineering, gears, and, of course, a teaspoon of magic, but flying? The world’s best minds had scoffed at the idea of human flight. Human flight, of all things! It was dismissed as impossible… but now, the world sat wondering as their bronze and blue mech suits updated their minds. Now, the clearing, in the middle of the Forest of Night, discovered just after the invention of the steam engine and known to many as the inspiration of Mirkwood before the public knew about it, was filled with the humming of gears. People flocked the spot to see these beautiful new wonders as they glided without a care in the world.
It all started with a shout.
A blue beam struck the ground in front of me, almost shooting me, literally, in the foot. A yell sounded as the now sinister behemoths with their black, unseeable profiles, began to fire. This was the beginning
The once-formidable battle suits, powered by the burning of coal, were laid to waste as the strange ellipses razed the land and burned it to a crisp. All regular mech suits were accounted for, each on a different body, and each human being had one that automatically fit them… So that meant, without a doubt, that these invaders were not humans. After they had completely taken over the world, the first stepped out of its capsule.
“We come in peace.”
“What?”
“We come in peace!”
“But you just took over the world!”
“So? I never said we came in peace for humans. Humans, of all things! You haven't even gathered a ladle of knowledge! Not even a spoonful! Humans! Ha! I just said we come in peace.”
"Well, what are you here to do?"
"Have you ever seen an empty bucket?"
"Well, yes, but I fail to see-"
"And when you dump water into that bucket, it overflows, and most of the original water is lost."
"Yes."
"Your mind is a bucket."
"Yes."
"And knowledge is the water."
"Oh, hell."
Everything was suddenly drenched in a torrent of knowledge.
My first journey started just like any other day.
A desert village needs its water, and I was the water boy. Every morning was spent bringing buckets out to the well and filling them up, and every night was bringing those filled buckets back home and distributing them. Sometimes, I took a bowl and filled it up with water to power the water clock at the center of a village. In the monsoon season, right after August, a water boy wasn't needed, so my second job was cleaning the dust from the sandstorms out of the mechanisms in the clock. I spent hours sitting in the clock, just polishing gizmos. I became familiar with the most intricate mechanisms in the clock, and I grew to love the delicate inner workings. My dream as I grew up was to be a clockmaker, and I taught myself clockmaking using drops of water and small scraps of metal from the blacksmith. One day, while polishing the clock, one of my arms was caught in a gear. The bones in my entire right arm were ground into dust, and it hung limply as I attempted to free my trapped appendage. After spending several days in the infirmary and getting the crushed limb amputated, I was told that I could no longer be the water boy, nor the clock keeper, because the use of both arms was required for those tasks. With nothing left to do, and having been publicly shunned for being a useless drain on resources, I grabbed a few canteens, a pair of clothes, and my favorite pair of pliers. I walked out, and I never saw my village again.
I woke up half-buried in sand, with dust in my eyes and grit in my ears. A sandstorm had passed while I was sleeping, and any traces of caravans or footprints would have been erased. I had been looking for a caravan for a while, since I got out of the village, actually, because I knew that my resources wouldn't last forever. I was on my last canteen of water, and my clothes hadn't been washed in a week. My missing arm still sometimes ached with vestiges of pain, and the tourniquet had begun to tear. My only food was the occasional scraggly cholla cactus, which was absolutely covered in needle-like spines which I had to labor to pluck off, and I was beginning to get dizzy from the constant heat and lack of nutrition. I looked up at the sky and wiped my forehead before taking my very last sip of water. I had only been traveling for about a week, but my water had run out fast in the desert, and I sweated off much of it. The sun seemed to grow bigger every hour, and now the waves of heat off the ground were making me woozy. I saw a puddle of water on the horizon - although I didn't need any water right now, I could fill up my canteens and maybe clean off my wound. I walked towards it, speeding up as I neared it. I tripped on a dune and fell on my injured arm. The pain made my vision start to fade, and right before I blacked out, my face landed in the patch of sand where the puddle had been.
The sound of coarse whispers grated on my ears. I tried to open my eyes, but they just twitched. A yelp sounded, seemingly on my right side, but I couldn't tell with the ringing in my ears.
"He's awake!" The voice screeched like two gears getting stuck. A couple of surprised noises went up, proving that I was in a room with at least three other people. A pair of hands grabbed me by my left arm and jostled me before prying my eyes open and making me sit up. The spike of pain in my already throbbing head made me gasp, but no sound came out. My throat was so dry that I could feel the skin sticking together when I swallowed. There was sand in my ears which cascaded out around me as I straightened and some grains that had previously been stuck in my eyelashes fell into my tear ducts, which were also as dry as a sun-bleached rock. I opened my eyes to see three people, two of whom were bickering, and the third in my peripheral vision on a chair with his head propped on his fist. I focused my minimal attention on the bickering pair. They seemed to be a man and a woman, both gesticulating wildly as they tried to make their points and talk over each other. They seemed to be talking about... Me? I tried to listen in on the argument. "He's clearly dehydrated and injured! You can't just treat him like that when he clearly needs medical attention."
"Yeah, I know, but how else should I have gotten him to open his eyes?"
"I dunno, but not like that!"
I tried to tilt my head to the side to look at the third person, but my head hurt so much that turning it was a chore. I managed to get his attention by tapping on the bed, and he swiveled his eyes toward me. Now that I saw his face, I realized he was a young boy. He couldn't be older than thirteen. "Water..." I managed to get out with minimal pain.
He quickly swiped up a glass of water from the old wooden platform beside him and handed it to me, but my grip strength was too weak to keep a hold of it. The glass fell and spilled on the coarse sheets, mingling with the sand and turning into a dilute, grainy mud. As it seeped into the fabric, a startled gasp came from the arguing pair. The woman was looking at the muck. She shut her eyes in concentration and stuck her arms straight up before rotating her right arm clockwise straight down against her side. I thought that the last thirty seconds were fully rewinding until I realized that nothing but the glass was changing - the water extracted itself from the sheets, flew into the cup as it righted itself, and hung suspended in the air. The boy picked it up nonchalantly and nudged my head back to pour the water down my throat. It was unpleasantly warm from the desert heat, but refreshing nonetheless. My throat cracked as I swallowed, sounding like ice dropped into a hot liquid. I coughed, and another spray of sand flew out of my mouth and nose. By this point, small piles were beginning to form. The grains of sand were trickling out of my hair around my eyes, and one eye was tearing up due to a speck of sand under my eyelid. Once I had drunk enough water, I opened my throat to speak.
"Thanks," I groaned like a dried-out frog.
"Oh, don't mention it!" Replied the lady who had saved me from being soaked. "All in a day's work for an acolyte of the Timekeepers Envoy."
If that time magic is what an acolyte can do, I hope I don't anger one of the higher-ups, I thought to myself.
"The Timekeepers Envoy? What's that?"
"Well, we-" began the woman before being cut off by the man who had shaken me awake.
"Hey, you said I could do it this time!"
"Fine, fine, go ahead."
Edits:
go into detail
use phantom limb as a conflict
To Be Written For This:
He makes a mechanical arm for himself
He asks of their origins - they are members of the timekeepers envoy, tasked with moving the sun across the sky.
they take him to the purveyor of clocks, where he is given some kind of quest
his arm has rusted up, it is jammed from the sand