"Inventing the Future"
"Chapter 37: Insight, Pt2"
Lin had no choice but to watch the next twelve years of Jaming's life play out in snippets, and in spite of the determination she had to hold on to her hatred for the man this boy would become, she was finding it difficult to do so.
Even though Jaming was homeschooled from about the age of seven on, he frequently came home from outings with torn clothing. One of those times he had a bloody nose, which he concealed from his mother, and the start of a black eye, which could not be so easily hidden. It was only when Lin saw the injuries that she realized why his clothes had been torn on those other occasions.
As Lin watched, Jaming eventually confessed that some of the neighborhood children had done it, but he was too afraid of retaliation to call any of them by name.
Jaming was often seen tinkering with machinery, taking apart his toys, and later the house appliances, and putting them back together again. Occasionally he got into a bit of trouble for this, but it could not be denied that he had an affinity for figuring out how things worked, and he was almost always able to perfectly reassemble things.
More than once, the objects functioned better than they had before, and his mother took him under her wing and let him help her out in her garage. Lin thought that this was an odd sort of role reversal, the wife being involved with technology and the husband working as a teacher, but it was a formula that worked for them.
After receiving an acoustic guitar on his twelfth birthday, Jaming got heavily into music. When he wasn't building something he was teaching himself how to play music, and he picked it up more quickly than most.
At the age of fifteen, Jaming encountered a young girl his own age at the market when his mother had sent him out to buy a chicken for their supper. He had clearly noticed the girl, but he was too shy to speak to her. He began to find excuses to go to the store, and every time he saw her he tried to get up the nerve to say something. Then, one day, the girl caught him looking at her and said 'hello' to him before moving off.
Lin frowned as he went home with a big smile on his face. He must have missed something in the girl's expression, because Lin thought that she looked uncomfortable rather than pleased to find him staring at her.
The next time Jaming saw the girl, Lin saw with a certain degree of dismay that she was right. Jaming saw the girl with a group of her friends on one of his trips to the market, and he approached them with a little more confidence than he had shown before. The girls immediately stopped chatting amongst themselves when they saw him, and several of them looked disgusted.
Jaming ignored all but the one who had (in his mind) greeted him before, and he cleared his throat as he stood with his hands in his pockets. "Ummm...hi."
A couple of the girls giggled, but the girl he had spoken to looked like she wanted to sink into the ground. "Hi?" It sounded more like a question than a statement.
"I, uh...I was wondering...maybe...if you..." Jaming mumbled, wondering why he found it so difficult to string the words together in a cohesive sentence.
"What?" the girl asked when he trailed off and stood opening and closing his mouth like a guppy as he tried to finish what he was saying.
"Would you...I don't know...want to get lunch sometime?" His blue cheeks darkened to an odd purple shade.
This was clearly too much for the girl, who was mortified that her friends had been there to see this, otherwise she might have been much kinder. She scrunched up her face as if he had held something smelly under her nose. "Ugh...dream on, Blueberry. And get your teeth fixed!"
Another girl jeered, "Creepo, get away!"
Lin's jaw dropped at the shocking cruelty she had just witnessed, and as he retreated in humiliation the girls whispered together before exclaiming in disgust and laughing like a flock of harpies. She watched as Jaming, unable to hold it in anymore, ducked into an alley and sat on an old crate with his face in his hands. It had taken a lot for him to gather the courage to talk to a girl, and she had shot him right down.
He went home empty-handed, having forgotten all about buying some fish for dinner. His mother took one look at his face and told him that she thought she would just make spaghetti that night, and when she asked him how that sounded he merely shrugged and went to his room. He refused his dinner, and his guitar was heard playing for the rest of the evening.
"These are things that many of us go through, though..." Lin said to herself.
Then, when Jaming was almost ready to turn seventeen, something terrible happened. His house caught fire in the middle of the night, and Lin heard him coughing and hacking as his father half-dragged, half-led him to the relative safety of his front yard.
Jaming, coughing hard and barely conscious, looked up at his father as he lay in the grass. "F-Father...what...how..."
"Stay there! Your mother's still inside!"
Jaming's father ran back through the front door, and his son got unsteadily to his feet and tried to follow him. Before he could reach the door, however, the roof caved in. Lin's cry joined Jaming's as he was forced back by the blast of heat.
"Father! Father! Mother! Somebody help me!" he screamed.
Lin watched as he tried in vain to find a way in, and time skipped ahead to show her what had happened when the neighbors came out to investigate. From what had gone before, Lin knew that Jaming's family was not well-liked. His father was brusque and defensive from years of fending off his son's tormentors, and his mother did not socialize much at all.
Worse still was the fact that Jaming's physical appearance had a way of inspiring fear and distrust, and when they saw that he was the sole survivor and that he was largely unharmed and completely expressionless due to shock, the conclusion they jumped to was that he must have set the fire on purpose. Less than an hour after losing the only two people who he cared for and who cared for him, Jaming was forced to flee for his life.
He hid in the town junkyard, where he spent the rest of the night loudly grieving the loss of his parents, and for the next several days he hardly did anything at all. It was later found out that the fire had originated in his next-door neighbor's house, and that it had been due to faulty wiring in the walls, but even though his neighbors had reached out and tried to apologize to him, he refused to acknowledge them at all. He was done.
Lin was in tears by the end of it, and as the next several years flashed quickly before her eyes, she saw how holding on to hatred could transform a person for the worse.
There was a montage of Jaming at his drawing board, clearly in his early twenties. By then, Griffon's forces had well begun destroying towns. The blue-skinned inventor, who had put himself through college and graduated early, had lost what innocence he had possessed and hardly ever smiled.
Lin saw that he had also begun to nurse a huge grudge against the world, and that he longed to show 'them' how wrong they were to treat him like a sideshow freak. Like he was nothing. Aeroharmonics was in its infancy at this stage, but not for long.
There were several failures. The first few didn't bother Jaming all that much, but as time passed he grew increasingly desperate. Finally, when he was about twenty-nine, he got a third platform off the ground before it went on a rampage and destroyed his workshop. Just like the others.
It was then that a silver-haired man with pointed ears approached him, and Lin recognized him as being the other man on the ship. He wore a large, strangely-colored sword at his hip, and he walked with the deadly grace of a jungle cat.
"Well, well, well..." Silver-Hair took in the swath of destruction wrought by the platform. "This is quite a mess."
Jaming turned and cocked his arm back, ready to throw his wrench at the one who dared to infringe upon his misery. Something stopped him, though, probably some sort of instinct that told him it would be a very bad idea. "Who are you, and what do you want?"
"My name is Gaspard. And you are Dr. Jaming. Am I correct?"
Jaming's monocle whirred softly as he stared at the intruder. "Yes. And I'm not in the mood to entertain company today. Or any other day, for that matter. Leave my workshop at once."
Gaspard narrowed his eyes. Mindful of his task, he kept his temper in check. "Now, that's no way to treat someone who's come to make you a generous offer."
"Whatever it is, I'm not interested," Jaming growled as he tossed his wrench uncaringly into a corner and surveyed the mess that would no doubt take him days to clean.
"Not even if it would help you achieve your dream? Aeroharmonics..." Gaspard meaningfully enunciated the word as he approached Jaming. "An idea that is very close to becoming a reality. You crave respect. You want people to look at you and say, 'Now, there goes a man of intelligence'. Isn't that right?"
Jaming suspiciously gave Gaspard the side-eye. It was an attractive thought, but he didn't trust this stranger. "What do you know about what I want? And how did you learn about my Aeroharmonics theory? I haven't discussed it with anyone!"
"My master has taken an interest in your abilities. He can make your dream a reality."
"Your 'master'?" Jaming scowled. "Listen, I don't have time for this. I will tell you one more time to get out."
Gaspard stared calmly at Jaming before turning to the platform, drawing his sword, and slicing down at the floor with the wickedly-curved blade. It was then that Jaming (and Lin) realized that it was no ordinary sword; a strange beam of energy traveled along the floor, and when it made contact with the platform it sent the craft flipping through the air like a pancake.
"What...what have you done?" Jaming grew pale as he backed away from Gaspard. "How?"
"Don't be afraid," Gaspard said in a mock-soothing tone. "That was but a demonstration of the power Emperor Griffon can grant to those of us who swear fealty to him."
"Emperor...Griffon!" Jaming's visible eye grew wide. "The one who is turning our world into a wasteland with every passing year? That's who you work for?"
"As regrettable as that is," Gaspard said in a tone that demonstrated how little he truly cared about that, "it is a means to an end. This world is a cesspool of greed and violence. Emperor Griffon intends to purify it. You work to better yourself. He sees that. He can give you access to better materials. You will have only to name the things you need, and you shall have them. Aeroharmonics will no longer be a gleam in your eye, but something the world can see and touch. No one will ever look down on you again. You will be the one looking down on them. Literally."
Jaming looked away from Gaspard, and as Lin watched he walked slowly over to his platform, stroking its scorched side with his fingertips. It was almost as if he was saying goodbye to an old friend. In that moment, Lin realized that he really was saying goodbye to something. He was putting his misgivings into a box and shoving it deep into the back of his mind.
"All right..." Jaming looked at the soot on his fingers before turning to Gaspard. "I'll do it."