Juncture 2.4

Derry was a quick talker, and on top of that, she had a thick, native Irish accent. Both of these combined so that I could maybe, just barely, understand every third or fourth word that escaped her lips. The Major General didn’t seem to have the same issue, as he nodded along with what she was saying. I, on the other hand, had to sit and interpret her every sentence. It was like my dyslexia took on audible form.

“Ouch, that doesn’t look good. Come here and let Derry take a look at it,” She said quickly. “It’s just a normal break. Right, that should be quite simple.”

Major General Siegfried nodded.

“Yes. Broken bone, mild concussion. Nothing difficult.”

Derry nodded. She took a pair of shears and began hacking away at the cast on my arm. Little bits of plaster and fabric kept getting caught in the blades, and Derry swept them off quickly.

“Now how did this happen,” she asked, “Car accident?” I flinched. “No, that wouldn’t only break your arm. It was some blunt impact. Hard, too, if it gave you a nasty knock on the noggin.”

I gulped, trying to parse through the individual words she was saying.

“Um, the Major General kinda pushed me out of the way of a moving car. I hit the curb pretty hard coming down.”

It was Derry’s turn to flinch. As I described it, I realized how painful it sounded. I mean, direct skull-to-curb contact sounded sickeningly awful.

She continued cutting, quieter now. After several more minutes, the bandage came off. A putrid, nose-wrinkling smell wafted through the air and assaulted the nostrils of the congregated group. We all simultaneously gagged – I even audibly retched at the smell. It was awful, sweet like rotting flesh, mixed with sweat and blood.

Derry recovered admirably quickly. She pulled out some moist towelettes from a desk drawer and began wiping down the putrid arm. When she finished, she placed both of her hands gently over the break, humming a quick, wordless tune.

“Um, Major General? What’s she doing?” I asked. He just chuckled, and leaned back in his seat. Derry’s humming got louder and louder, eventually becoming a deep-throated open-mouth drone.

Suddenly, she stopped.

“All done!” She exclaimed cheerfully. “Give it a whirl! Swing it around, here, give me a high five, I did a fantastic job!” She held her hand out and grinned.

I moved my arm tentatively. No pain. I went a step further, clenching my fingers in a fist and bending my wrist back and forth. No pain. Happily, I slapped Derry’s hand. There was pain. I misjudged the distance, hitting her hand hard and sending a stinging sensation down both of our arms.

“Fuck, that stings!” I swore. Then, I laughed. My arm wasn’t broken!

“Thank you Derry, always a pleasure. But I’m afraid we must be going, as there’s plenty more for Marc to see, and not a lot of time.”

“Aah, you always leave too quickly, Siggy. We never get to catch up, you and !. If you gotta go, you gotta go!” She said loudly. I stood up and walked over to Major General Siegfried, and we walked out of the room.

“So what the hell just happened in there?” I asked Siegfried. I was still feeling the excitement, remnants of being exposed to Derry’s crushing exuberance. “How did she fix my arm?” I wiggled it around for emphasis.

“Oh, Derry’s TA? She has quite the useful capability. She can take a small amount of organic material, and revert it back to a former state.”

“TA?”

“Temporal Affectation. It’s the term that the OST uses to explain different agents’ and subjects’ abilities. There’s a whole complex mode of categorization, but that will be explained to you as you learn here.”

“Cool, cool,” I said, feigning nonchalance. “So my arm is, like, my arm from two weeks ago?”

The Major General nodded, not turning to face me.

“Precisely. There are, of course, complex technical details involved in the process, but we – that is, myself, Derry, and the researchers here – all think that her TA involves a mental node being sent back in time, then taking the cells from a different possibility and replacing them with the ones in the current reality.”

I nodded, and we kept walking down the long hallway. At one point we passed a large logo sign, reading the name of the Organization, the initials larger than the rest of the individual letters. We turned and continued walking.

“…So where do these powers come from? And do you have one?” I asked, my curiosity and the quiet of the hallway egging me on.

“We don’t know, exactly. There are theories, but none have enough evidence to claim as fact,” The general spoke, “You see, it’s not a recent phenomenon. There are members of the OST from every age of humanity.”

“Huh?” I spoke, confused.

Siegfried was silent and pensive for a moment, planning out what he was to say next.

“You are from the early twenty-first century. Most people here are not. Derry, for instance; she originally hails from Ireland, in the late sixteen-hundreds.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I am from what you refer to as the twenties. I was recruited from my home during World War Two.”

“Yeesh, that must have sucked to live through.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” He muttered, almost as if to himself and not to me.

Major General Siegfried stopped near a door. It had three clocks, laid out vertically on the wall next to it, each one showing a different time on its face. He pressed some form of identification against a panel underneath the bottom clock, and the door opened with a low whooshing noise.

The interior of the office – I assumed it was Major General Siegfried’s – looked like a comfortable library. It was a place I could see myself sitting in, relaxing, and maybe watching a movie. There were too many books for my comfort, though.

Major General Siegfried walked over to the desk in the leftmost corner of the office. There, he pressed several buttons on a keyboard, and spoke as he did so.

“Sit, if you want. We won’t be in here long.”

I sat on a nearby armchair, surprised by just how much I sunk into the soft, plush fabric.

“What are we doing here,” I asked. “Are we waiting for someone?”

He lifted a hand and waved it in the air in a noncommittal gesture.

“We’re heading back,” he said.