Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 254. Blink of an eye

Dr. Lawrence smiled.

"It is, isn’t it?" She reached her hand out, quietly demanding the original silk paper back.

I obliged, and she put it away like a treasure.

"Now, Henry, please start. Because we don’t know what your power exactly does, we will test it on many surfaces, and then we will search for commonalities." The blond doctor stood up, and we followed.

"Just poke them, like you did with the table. Don’t completely destroy them." She reminded.

Henry stood in front of the first stony square.

"Here I go." He hummed, one hand fiddling with his collar, while he wrapped the finger of his other hand in the shadowy energy.

Dr. Lawrence hadn’t commented on Henry and his jewelry, probably thinking it was something I had taken from a memory, while he didn’t hide it under his clothes, like he could, but still wore it as a choker to let everyone see it.

She had brought along around fifty samples, all in a square format, a few centimeters thick. Some of the surfaces he touched melted, some corroded and broke, some turned to ashes, and some sizzled strangely, but he managed to destroy every one of these materials.

If I hadn’t thought it would be this way, I wouldn’t have let him do this test. We can’t let them discover a material they could use to restrict him. And if this was really about understanding his power better, then they would have enough data after this test.

If they want him to continue doing that with NASA materials or something, we’ll stop cooperating.

"Fascinating.... We will look at the samples under the microscope... However, ’power of destruction’ is probably the accurate term."

Ah, the cringe factor at this cheesy name. I grimaced, and Henry looked at me, chuckling at my expression.

"Now, back to you, Kenny." She faced me, having dropped all formalities by calling me by my nickname.

"Come with me."

We left the room again, Henry inviting himself to hang onto me as he followed along to another room, this time an even bigger one than before, with laboratory equipment. It didn’t seem like a room we should be in, as if it was for the staff that worked behind the scenes.

She brought us to a seat with a huge machine on the table, looking like a microscope or something.

"I ordered it in the evening, and it came today." Dr. Lawrence said with excitement before she pulled out another silk paper, a black one.

I stared at the black silk paper with annoyance. Couldn’t I have gotten that instead of the pink one? Did she do it on purpose?

Henry nudged me, his shoulders shaking suspiciously, as if he had read my thoughts.

The blonde doctor put the black silk paper on the table, under the machine, before she tapped a few buttons on the connected laptop.

"Please touch it without taking it out from under the lens or covering it with your hands."

"Sure." Instead of sitting down, I just touched the corner of the paper before looking at the doctor.

"That’s enough?"

I nodded.

"Good. Now, please produce the black silk paper." She stared at the laptop.

I obeyed, conjuring it up and holding it in my hand.

She pressed a few more keys before letting the video of me touching the paper play.

This time, we only saw a frigid picture of the black paper with my fingertip touching its corner...that was until it flickered for a moment.

"Marvelous." She entered a command before turning around to us.

"Look at this."

Again, there was only the still picture, but then, all of a sudden, the black silk paper disappeared from the white table before reappearing once more.

"This machine produces extremely slow-motion videos. What you are seeing here is the paper disappearing for about 0.0001 milliseconds. For reference, the human eye wouldn’t even perceive something that disappeared for 1 millisecond."

What did that mean? I really had always held the originals in my hand while they would disappear in the past?

Wait... didn’t that mean I had taken Henry out of the place he had been for 0.0001 milliseconds after I conjured him up?

"Then how do these things repair themselves to a certain extent after I conjured them up and put them away?"

"Probably because otherwise a time paradox would be caused. Let’s say you have received a pen as a gift and used this specific pen for years. Then you conjured it up from the memory where you had received it. If you then gave it to Henry to destroy it before it was ’put back’ to the past—and that without it repairing itself—what have you used to write with all those past years?"

The world’s physical laws are repairing my stuff for me; nice to know.

"Yet, you still pay a minimal ’fee’ for damaging things from the past, because if not, the damage or usage that would have occurred in the ’future’ would be denied, which would cause another time paradox." The doctor continued.

Ah, got it.

"If I gave Henry the pen and he destroyed it, yet the pen returned to the past a hundred percent unharmed just as it had been before, did his action of destroying it ever happen?"

"Exactly. There should have been damage from the first time you ripped the pink paper, just that it was on a molecular level, not visible to us."

"I only destroyed the pen because I was told to." Henry murmured in my ear, making me chuckle.

"So? You are still the scapegoat in this scenario."

"Kenny." Dr. Lawrence’s face turned stern.

"Don’t repeatedly take out things from the same memory. We wouldn’t want to cause a time paradox at all costs."

I better not tell her that my soul and injuries had traveled back into a solitary cell when I had been gravely injured by Henrietta, aka the stabbing of fifteen times. At that time I probably had been more dangerously close to pulling a paradox-thingy than with anything I could do now.

But even back then, there was this strong feeling that I couldn’t act out, couldn’t betray my ability that was doing its utmost to save me.

"How many times have you managed to rip the paper?" She asked.

"Over a thousand times." I answered; the action was so meditative and relaxing that I thought of continuing that in the future to keep my hands busy.

Dr. Lawrence visibly relaxed hearing the high number.

"Then never take one thing out for more than a thousand times."

I nodded.

"Then I want cigarettes and a lighter delivered. That’s what I conjure up the most." Gun and kitchen knife not counted.

"Consumable items... Let’s test that next, though I already have a theory about that." She ushered us out of the laboratory room back to the room we had been in before and told us to wait.

The samples Henry had punctured with his finger were already gone from the room.

We both sat down.

"A thousand times..."

"Would it have been nicer if it were unlimited?" I sighed.

"Maybe it would be if you leveled up more or had your power more under control?"

I stared at the table in front of me. True, Henry had no idea why the giant had become a giant. For him, the giant could have been just another lifeform that had been born that way—though that would mean that there were more giants running around somewhere.

He had no idea how many counterparts he had killed and how powerful he had exactly been. I doubted that there would be anything I couldn’t do as long as I flipped the table and used the giant’s power.

I had probably already become something akin to a god.

"Yeah, but the time paradox thing won’t go away in either case."

"Well, strictly speaking, this only concerns things you destroy each time you take them out; then you can only do it a thousand times. As long as you don’t do that, you can take them out endlessly." Henry said, his hand grabbing mine and transferring it to his lap, mimicking the position we had sat in yesterday.

"True." I nodded.

I felt his fingers sneak to my wrist, feeling for my pulse.

"Hm?" I asked, turning to him.

"You had a fever last night; do you remember?"

Ah, kissing and stuff. Well, it was a long night.

"Mhm." I said, looking back at the table.

"You even passed out... When I woke up today, you were alright again." He explained, apparent anxiousness breaking out of him after he seemingly had held it back.

"You said that the fever we both had before wasn’t normal. What can we do? What exactly is wrong?"

Right, we hadn’t finished our talk about this the last time.

"Too much power because of my last fight, I think."

"Hmm....How about we do a private blood drawing to get a bit of that power out?"