Giggles and kicks my feet. "Puzzle" for the ask game
you know, i'm realizing i hadn't even been counting gravity assist for these since the writing part is done. but since you asked >:)
Once, when he was a year or two into elementary school, Shou’s mom sat him down at the kitchen table and poured all the tiny, irregular pieces of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle across the polished surface. This is something else we can do, she said. Each of the pieces lifted into the air in a haze of cream-and-white, hundreds flipping gently picture-side-up like tiny stones rolling in the shallow ocean tide. With a wave of her hand, the puzzle assembled itself into a pristine painting of a hot spring in winter. She hadn’t even looked at each individual piece. They came together the way they were meant to, how they’d always been, a reverse time-lapse against the forces of entropy. He used to think about it every time he pushed himself to a new psychic breakthrough. Ideas are piecemeal, but true knowledge comes all at once. Seeing the whole picture in his mind’s eye, he would feel each missing piece until a seemingly complex process became a single organic movement. Storing energy, reversing other espers’ powers; anything and everything he puzzled out on his own by instinct. Shou never did learn his mom’s trick, though he can’t remember why—maybe it was soon enough before his parents split up that they never got the chance to practice together. The context is lost to him, but he recalls the image vividly. He owes his mom a lot, and this lesson is high on the list. With dedicated attention and a final goal fixed in place like the North Star, Shou can do anything. The track record is good. After all, this approach only failed him once.