Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm baaack for another review!!
First Impression: Well, this was a pretty nice ending to this chapter, you do a really good job of bringing across the experience that Matthew has here with this device, and its a pretty unique purpose here for this device, not the first time I've run into things like this in stories, but you've put a really interesting spin on things here.
Anyway let's get right to it,
Sunrise is a fitting word because, at first, all I experienced was the purest expression of blinding light.
Blinding may not be the best description for what happened since my eyes were not involved in the whole situation, but that's the best way I can describe it.
I have never been on LSD, but I can imagine it would be similar to what this felt like. The following sections are my best attempts to communicate to you what it felt like - not even that, my best attempt to communicate to you of what I remember it felt like. Enduring it was so much... more, my brain didn't have the capacity to keep most of it once I left it, only a slight longing and remembrance of the more.
Hmm, I think this is a pretty good description of how mind-blowing and crazy that experience must've felt there, the fact that he's simply kind of running out of words to capture how the experience really shows have completely out of the ordinary this new invention is.
To say it did not engage any of my senses would be misleading. True, I did not feel the light in my eyes or the warmth that came from it in my skin. But that's not because it was below the sense. It would be more accurate to say the experience was above them. I felt the light directly, not through silly medium-like eyes. But I also heard it, and felt it, and smelt it, and tasted it. But once again, not through my ears, skin, nose, or tongue, it was directly into feeling.
Like all other feelings were shadows, and this was reality.
Hmm...this is starting to sound a bit like a passage I read in an Arthur C. Clarke novel once about some very futuristic VR technology...and I love it...as potentially scary and death inducing as this sort of thing is...you will at least die with a nice big smile on your face.
It was like I had only ever listened to middle C, and now I heard a C chord played in harmony on every octave. The reality was translated directly into experience, no middle man of my body.
But back to the light, it was, for lack of a better word, blinding. It was just pure light. I forgot who I was or what I was as the light shone through my reality and became me.
But then the tiny core of my being remembered what I came in here for and sorted itself out.
Alright...well looks like he's finally stopped taking in the new invention and remembered that he's going through this because he's on a mission to find something. By this point I'm very interested to see how time is going to act here, is it going to be like he spends twenty minutes by his knowledge, which is also twenty minutes in reality or perhaps its going to feel like twenty minutes and actually be multiple hours.
Once I found myself distinct from the light, the light also focused more. Like white light through a prism, it almost split into beams. I had to choose which beam to follow. I tentatively reached out for one at random. As soon as I touched it, it was like falling into a quickly moving stream. I was swept up.
Images impressed themselves upon me like I was the ink and the page, not the one viewing the picture. The images engaged all of my reality, but once again, not through the messy medium of my body.
I saw a small boy, probably 5 shoving a larger girl, around 10, and yelling.
Ahh..time travel technology, making it convenient for authors to showcase a character's backstory since 3004.
I felt his frustration at her, the burning mix of hate, love, and longing that spread out through his chest. He just wanted her to think he was cool and hang out with him. She wanted him to go away.
The images shifted, and now I was a larger tween reading a book while leaning against a tree. The book was on the Alexandrian conquest. I felt the interest that was...
Ahhhh...I am really loving this sudden memory highlight reel flowing through here, it really gives you a sense of this person travelling around time and almost experiencing all of the time they've spent in this world all at once. At the moment it sounds like these are simple memories being brought into focus...but I get the feeling these are real moments in the past that we're seeing here and not necessarily only Mathew's memories.
Before I could focus too long on that, I had swept away. I now felt more solid and finished. I was a young adult. I was standing on a college campus. Feeling so alone and exposed, but with that sharp excitement of a potential.
He was me. They had all been me. This was my timeline.
It was beginning to move me again, and I realized if I continued down this path, I'd end up at the radiance. A well of infinite light and energy. It was the source of all the lights and also the sea to which they all flowed. It was drawing me like a thirsty man to a well.
Hmm, well, this is fun to see, it looks like we've got a bit of a pull going on here, that could potentially escort Mathew to Cuckoo town if he doesn't play carefully here...definitely a really fun little element of risk being introduced there.
But I couldn't, I had another job. I pulled myself out of the current beam of light. My consciousness was being flipped over and spun about.
Images flashed. Fire.
My leg is hurting.
A women's face.
My dad cursing in dutch
The smell of wet dog.
Then I was out.
Gunfire.
Well, that was an adventure
At least I don't have to vomit anymore.
That particular sequence of images escalated quite quickly and also quite mysteriously, I wonder what that's trying to tell us here...I feel like some of those lines were less random thoughts thrown in here and more meant to be some clues that are doing some foreshadowing.
II focused my mind on the question I had come in here with, letting my instinct for truth guide me, following paths of numbers and ideas. It reminded me of when I had gone canoeing in Tennessee with my church group as a kid. We had been practicing for weeks. At first, it was easy, rowing along and letting the river carry you, but soon we were in rapids. You had to quickly row to avoid rocks, dodge big rapids, speed up at some moments, slow down at others, make sure you didn't spin around and hit a rapid backward.
But these rapids were above and below me, to both sides, inside me, flowing all directions, and sometimes made me forget that I existed. So the metaphors are not perfect, but you get what I'm saying.
Hmm, I think I actually do get what you're saying Matthew, maybe you are actually good at this after all, it certainly sounds that way at the moment, although one cannot be too terribly certain just yet.
I can't define what time was doing with me while I was in Destinies Touch, but after slipping and sliding between rocks, pushing through realities I hadn't come here for, I found the correct stream of truth.
I followed it, passing through visons and paths of numbers. Through the things I can never describe no matter how hard I try, shapes with too many sides, pools with too many colors, I found it.
It was a pulsating mass of energy, so much knowledge, I tentatively touched it.
Ahh here we go, this is the moment where he's going to end up learning something here...and I'm certainly very interested to see exactly what that is going to end up being right here.
Knowledge flooded into me, I pulled out.
Oh my, that's a lot.
I have to go in, I realized
Please don't fry my brain.
Are those going to be his last mental words, it doesn't seem like it considering he was alive earlier, but phew....that sounds quite vicious right there...which I suppose is quite fair...sometimes knowledge really does come at quite the cost.
And like jumping off my canoe into a churning point of water, I dove in.
I was marinated in math, knowledge, ideas, and reality.
It was too much to keep track of, I pushed it all away from me, but it crushed back, squeezing my consciousness.
I became a medium for the reality to flow, uncomfortably fast and powerful. I barely caught a glimpse of what was passing by. Like a drowning man, I caught onto a string that looked like what I had come for and pulled on it.
Hmm, well this is kind of sounding a bit like every description before it so, the whole uniqueness of the experience is a tiny bit lost by this point...I feel like maybe you should tone down on some of the descriptions before cutting to the main event, cause after some point, it does get a touch boring to see the same sort of overwhelming knowledge feeling be repeated every time Matthew touches a new area of this device.
I saw Athena in all her glory standing before me, and her radiance drowned me.
I needed breath, but I could not find it.
I was lost in her, and soon so much of that light would be within we'd be one.
It was not pain.
Nor was it a pleasure.
It was a great return.
It was entropy at its finest.
"How do you feel-?" Charlie began
"Did it work?" Josh interrupted a high pitch note sounding as he took the mike from charlie.
"It did," I replied, "But I'm going to need a whiteboard," I said.
Oooh..well, well, it did end up working out after all...well I can't wait to see what this solution is going to be here.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
Overall: Overall, a solid chapter this one. For the first experience of this device being used, it did not disappoint at all, and it seems like this is something really quite powerful here. I'm not sure how all of this will eventually tie into time travel itself, but for now this is all very impressive.
And now for the overall, overall thing of what we've got so far. Soo...characterwise, we only really new Matthew, we've seen glimpses into the others, but we don't know enough to really judge them, Charlie and Josh have shown what their motivations are and how they think, but no too much beyond it yet, the Gabriello fellow showed his own plans, but again, he's still a bit of a mystery but my this point, we know a lot about Matthew, you can see what drives him to do what he does and the sort of opinion he has on himself. We also get a good sense of the kind of skills that he has.
Moving to the plot, this is a bit of a slow paced one, we've taken a long time to get here...since that first starting paragraph which had some interesting stuff going on that acted almost like a cold open in a tv show, this has slowed down a lot and showed Matthew gradually getting into things and that's fun. This quite a complex concept you're trying to show, so this gradual method works well and I think this went from relatively boring introductions and explanations to the actual thing in action at about the right time, chapter seven is just about in the sweet spot for not dragging things for too long or dumping things on us too fast. So....yeah, so far, this plot looks good. At the moment, the we've got a couple of motivations to read on and that's the cold open and also to Gabriello's little subplot there. I dunno how long this is going to take to get to said cold open, but I have a feeling this story isn't really going to kick into gear until then...cause I mean what else would explain the title of this book...so I'm guessing this an introductory phase still...and that's going along well.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
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