#❪ based on my own experience but using she/her cause disassociation haha ❫

[riggedtraps]

Mandy Writes #1

trigger warning for: self harm, semi-graphic description, burning using a cigarette & a lighter, r slur, f slur, internalised homophobia & ableism, don't read this if you struggle with any of this i don't want anyone to be triggered

content warning: mandy smokes a cigarette then burns herself. third person pov (she/her). haven't edited this/re-read it.

The smoke curled around her lungs in an uncomfortably comfortable way, a mini tornado swirling in her chest as it wreaked havoc on her breathing. Ash weighed her down so much that, for a few moments, she believed she could sink right down through the Earth and burrow herself underground. Six feet, preferably.

She was scared. A long time ago, she'd done it before—but not with a cigarette. With a lighter.

She couldn't remember it, but she remembered that it must have been a warm sensation singing all her arm hairs off, and she remembered that it must have been good because she hadn't stopped for quite some time. It was curiousity that lured her in that time. Right now, she wanted the pain to quieten her mind.

Hands shaking, she held the cigarette beside her arm. It was terrifying but she wasn’t sure why. She'd burnt herself on hot glue before, then scraped it off—alongside a few layers of skin. That was easy. Fun, even. So why was this so hard?

She just had to take the leap.

It was a predictable yet delicious sting as she pressed the cigarette's ash to her arm. The shock of it caused her to jerk her hand back, the remainder of the ash hitting the dirt underneath her feet. Wiping off the muck from her arm, she could see a soft pink mark.

She wanted—needed—more.

Again, again. More, more. The pain soon receded and it was like a sort of experiment to her. How many burns could she resist? Too many. She would have gone farther, but the cigarette was burning close to her finger. Not brave enough to put it out on her pretty pink mark, she took a final, long drag, enjoying the lightheadedness that came with oxygen deprivation, and then stubbed the cig out under her chunky boots.

When she looked down again, there was no more pretty pink mark. Instead, there was an ugly, gutclenching blister filled with yellow pus.

Panic roared through her for a few moments. Her first burn and it was already infected. Was she stupid? Fucking retarded? She knew it was wrong to use that disgusting word on herself, but it was true. Fucking fag couldn't take a fucking fag, either.

Slowly, the worry subsided. It was done with now, there was nothing she could do. Telling someone was not an option. Seeing a doctor was not an option. She would have to see what'd happen, keep a close eye on the ugly mess she'd created.

She did it to herself.

[overwatch-does-stuff]

A Summary On Chronal Disassociation and Gravitic Fluxes

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WINSTON’S NOTES- DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU ARE WINSTON!

Athena suggested that I try to write out my line of thinking in simpler language, as to get the basics down before I get into the “nitty-gritty” of the matter. It reminded me of something that Dr. Winston said to one of his co-workers back on Horizon, something along the lines of “if you can’t explain it to a five year-old, you don’t understand what you’re talking about”. Wise advice indeed! While I don’t have any five year-olds around, and anyone I would show this to certainly wouldn’t be five, haha, I figured it was worth a shot just to get my ideas straight.

So, where to start?

Let’s start with Lena. It’s always good to start with what one knows rather than what one doesn’t. Anyway.

Lena has acute chronal disassociation. Chronal disassociation is a condition where the particles that make up the body spontaneously detach themselves from their current time and place and reappear in a different time and place. To the extent of Lena and I’s observations, this does not include inter-dimensional or alter-dimensional travel. Even if there were such things as alternate timelines, her disassociation through space and time would not create them due to the transient nature of her travel, but that’s getting beside the point.

My chronal accelerator design (it’s not really an accelerator, per say, more of a harness, but the name seemed to stick) keeps Lena in this current timeline by. . . hmm, keeping it simple simple. . .  kind of in a way that a quantum computer works. (No, that’s not simple! Think, think. . .) Quantum computers work by having infinite states of existence, which the computer infrastructure is able to control what state is active at which time. The chronal accelerator uses very much the same principle- it essentially “tells” Lena’s particles where to exist and in what state.

Now, that status is programmable, allowing Lena to alter her state at will (within certain safety parameters, of course!). With the aid of the accelerator, she can manipulate when her particles exist (such as restoring herself to a younger and undamaged time) and where her particles exist (such as moving herself on the X and Y axes, although it must be someplace she could reasonably get to using her own two feet. She cannot fly, for example.)

Now. . . here’s where things get. . . interesting. Lena, I hope you’re not reading this without me.

Chronal Disassociation is transferable. Not contagious! Lena is not dangerous to herself or anyone around her, even without the accelerator! But it is transferable. She does have the ability, with familiarity and practice, to disassociate other particles and reassemble them in another location. This idea is obvious to anyone who thinks to ask the question of why her clothing and weapons travel with her whenever she blinks or recalls. In the early days, in fact, we ran several experiments with the accelerator to make sure that she wouldn’t teleport the oxygen molecules out of her lungs, since the air she breathed wasn’t the same air that was involved with the Slipstream incident. I was genuinely concerned that she might suffocate should she ever try to blink!

I digress. The fact of the matter is, Lena can control the timeline of particles around her. Not just her own bodily particles, but the particles around her. While she herself is hesitant to acknowledge it, her condition isn’t just a condition- it’s a power.

Which leads me to the next, far less pleasant topic, and the real reason why I’m typing all this out.

Dr. Siebren de Kuiper underwent an unknown procedure of events and has now arrived under my study with the power to control gravity. To make matters worse, in between that unknown event and now, Talon got to him first and already constructed a kind of “harness” for him. A “harness” that’s highly invasive and shoddily built compared to my inventions (and that’s saying something, my chronal accelerator notwithstanding!) I’ve been working night and day not only to understand the basics of how his power works, but also how that harness is supposed to function in relation to that.

What I’ve got so far is pretty crude. I think Dr. de Kuiper has some kind of control over quantum gravitons, aka the particles that transmit the force we all know as gravity. The more gravitons he creates or gathers on an object, the more gravity exerted. Similarly, he has the ability to destroy or scatter Earth’s normal gravitons, which reduces the amount of gravity exerted on an object. On the large scale, it functions almost as a kind of basic telekinesis from a superhero movie.

If that theory is correct, de Kuiper must have an astounding amount of control. We’re talking septillions, octillions, maybe even nonillions or decillions (stupid huge numbers, forgot to keep it simple) of individual graviton particles that he’s manipulating here. The crude “harness” that Talon strapped into him (I mean literally INTO him, into his brain) must help him with that in some regard. Whether the technology controls the particles for him or if it simply helps him “feel” or “visualize” them better, I have no idea.

According to de Kuiper himself, aboard the ISS, he experienced what he called a “singularity”. Now, his language was very. . . flowery and unscientific, but given the subject matter he’s trying to describe I don’t blame him. Most disturbingly, however, it matches Lena’s description of the Slipstream incident almost perfectly. Lena (the much more reliable narrator of the two,) described the sensation as being “everywhere at once, “not knowing which way was up or down”, and “feeling incredibly old yet only lasting a few seconds”.

Lena doesn’t talk about the Slipstream accident. I highly, highly doubt she said anything about it to de Kuiper before he recounted his story for me. While his testimony is dubious, the events he described were too close to hers for me to dismiss them as coincidental storytelling.

As a result of this seemingly identical incident, he now has control over his own particles and the particles around him.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though! Lena’s powers and de Kuiper’s powers are two fundamentally different things. De Kuiper exhibits no control over any other subatomic particle, only the gravitons, which is an important distinction. Lena’s power is indiscriminate- the reason she can’t “fly” like he can is that she takes the gravitons in her body with her when she teleports and can’t separate them out. She certainly doesn’t have individual molecular control, whereas de Kuiper might, but only for gravitons as I mentioned. And then there’s his “melody”, which he claims is related to the fluctuations of his power, but that’s likely just to be how his psyche deals with the associated trauma. I mean, Lena isn’t crazy enough to report hearing music.

But. . . it is important to remember that time and gravity are related quantities. I haven’t been able to tell de Kuiper’s physical age in the very same way that it’s impossible to tell Lena’s based on DNA testing. It’s common knowledge that the greater the gravitational field, the slower time passes within that field. I suspect that de Kuiper is physically younger than the amount of time that has passed since his supposed death.

Does this mean that de Kuiper could have control over time? Does this mean that Lena could be unwittingly manipulating gravity? I have my doubts. There’s a lot of caveats with this “theory” that are only visible when talking about the more complex science. 

Regardless, I’ve cautioned Lena over and over again not to let de Kuiper use his powers on her, just in case. Even if their powers aren’t connected, I don’t want to discover any sort of strange reaction that could cause Lena to disassociate for good. I just hope she listens. 

Alright. Let’s get back to work now on the real science of it. I’m not sure how useful this exercise really was, but I suppose I can use it as a quick reference or something.

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