One could hardly say that Rei Hino wasn’t used to learning things from the Great Fire: she’d been consulting it for several years, now. Nor was she unaccustomed to sensing strange and unusual forms of magic—that happened fairly frequently, too. No, what made the miko sit up and take notice this time was the timing and the nature of the magic. The timing was bad enough; the Senshi were right in the middle of fighting off the Dead Moon Circus and their monsters, and almost every new magical burst Rei felt turned out to be bad news for them.
But more importantly was the nature of the magic: quite frankly, Rei had never felt anything like this before. While most magic merely harnessed the latent power of mana or life energy to achieve fairly predictable effects, this… this felt like tearing and mending the very fabric of reality itself, so alien was it to her experience. This… can’t be good, the miko thought to herself as she got up and walked towards the nearest telephone. She had to tell the others—now.
Naru wasn’t particularly surprised that her boyfriend no longer needed his comically thick spectacles in order to see the world clearly; it was, after all, what she had wished for. And she was reasonably certain that this new change would have the effect she had intended when she made the wish: it was perfectly obvious now that supposedly dorky-looking Umino was actually pretty cute—even handsome. The other girls at Juuban High were going to be kicking themselves when they found out that they’d been overlooking one of the best-looking guys in the entire school the whole time, and while a tiny part of her was worried that someone would try to steal her beau away, for the most part she was glad that Umino was going to get a confidence boost.
However, as Naru and her boyfriend sat in the Gurio living room, speaking in hushed tones, the redhead had to wonder if he wasn’t exaggerating his situation a bit. “Umino, you can’t be serious. I mean, obviously, your vision’s better, but superpowers?”
“I am serious. I mean, everything’s so clear….”
“Are you sure that it’s not because you’re so used to being nearsighted?”
“Look I’ll prove it,” Umino said as he looked around for something to use in a demonstration. After a bit of searching, he grabbed a newspaper. “Here. Open it to any page and stand on the other side of the room.”
“Okay…” Naru said uncertainly as she got up and started to walk across the room.
“No, not in front of me—off to the side.”
“But… you’d have to use your peripheral vision to read it—that is what you’re planning to do, right?”
“Yes, it is, and yes, I would.”
Once his girlfriend was off to his side on the other side of the room, Umino had further instructions. “Just point anywhere on the page… not at a headline. Part of the main article, in the smaller print.”
“Okay…” Naru said as she randomly pointed as she held up the paper and randomly pointed at a block of text.
Umino stared straight ahead for a few seconds, and as he continued to stare, he began to read: “‘Ito, 24, was a 17-year-old high school student when he established Yappa in December 2000. Despite his family background as the son of the former president of a well-known Japanese meat processing firm, Itoham Foods Inc., the young CEO said he initially did not dream about going into business. Indeed, he studied neither business nor economics at school.’ Should I keep going?”
Naru looked where her finger was pointing and saw that Umino had recited the sentence of the article perfectly. “No… I see your point. Your peripheral vision is just as good as your direct vision.”
“Which is a whole lot better than 20/20 now. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m seeing more colors—or rather, I can see the differences between colors a lot more clearly than I could before. And I know I’m not colorblind… I mean, I wasn’t colorblind. Plus, my depth perception’s gone into some sort of hyper mode, too.”
“How did that happen?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know what I should do with this, or even if I should do anything.”
Naru took a deep breath and made a mental note to squeeze Mihoshi for more information as soon as she let the blonde genie out of her bottle again. “Well, I think you should see an eye doctor first—just to make sure that nothing’s wrong.”
“Yeah… that’s a good idea.”
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(Posted Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:46)
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