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Stories from the Verse
Garden of Versers
Chapter 28: Hastings 144
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Chapter 27: Beam 7
As Lauren lay in the uncomfortable bed that night, she wondered what else she could do. Staring into the darkness, she remembered that she had more than once reordered her mental sensory processing to intensify one sense at the expense of the others. The first time she had done it was to see if she could smell an undead creature, but as she considered it she thought if there were anything to smell here she probably did not want to smell it. She had later given herself strong night vision, but there wasn’t much to see in this room. If she was going to test this, the best choice was to attempt to draw in sounds from the other side of the wall. There were people there, probably other patients, certainly workers on the night shift. They would talk with each other; she could hear them.
Her effort accomplished nothing.
Of course, maybe she just had not succeeded. It was not a skill she recalled using recently, although of course she had practiced it some back on the tropical island over those years of training time. On the other hand, it might be a skill that didn’t work in this world. Bias was funny like that, and she was no expert on it. She would have to try again another time.
What else could she do? Could she raise a force wall, create a blade? Could she heat things, cause fires?
Could she block memories? That might prove quite useful here, if she could do it, but it would be risky to try it. She should wait until there was a memory she had to erase, and not play with people’s brains too much before that.
She should also think about her magic. So much of it was geared for fighting holy wars against undead creatures of evil that she wasn’t sure what would work against ordinary misguided people, but there were probably some prayers and spells that worked even in worlds like this. She drifted off thinking about light spells, healings, hyperspace travel, and things she had learned from Merlin, and dreamed of combat against spiritual monsters.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #280: Versers Reveal. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
