I used the August picture prompts (small versions shown below) for this one, after a minor bout of blank-brained panic.
20 Minute Megan (417 words)
The power for the gateway went out for twenty minutes. It should never have been able to happen, there were backup systems in place but budget cuts and privatisation of the London gateway network and transitional difficulties and changes of management and blah. Someone in TransTech was reluctantly seen off with a golden boot up the arse.
All Megan remembered was the star buckles on her red shoes twinkling as she ran for the gateway, late for school as always, running as always, always wanting to be faster. Her mum waving, then shouting as the indicator lights on the gateway slid to zero. A blink of black, then she was outside her school in Tokyo as usual, running as usual. She was famous for a while, the girl who was lost in the portal system, nowhere for twenty minutes.
She still ran everywhere the gates could take her. But now sometimes she liked to stand still and look, to compose her view. She became an explorer and a talented imagist.
When she was awake, all she remembered of the twenty minutes was that blink of black. But in her dreams, her feet still twinkled in stardust.
#
Cambrax had settled long ago in a grassy spot with a big sky. The young ‘uns liked to trundle from place to place, but Cambrax reckoned standing still was the way to see things. He was so old that the stone was coming on him, but he didn’t mind. He breathed once a year, he drank a little rain and he sat firm in the ground. He was still enough that he could sense the magma sloshing about far below his feet, and hear the echoes between the stars. Everything he saw and heard was engraved on his quartz brain.
One day when he was stilled and his spark had gone back to the magma, they’d chip his brain out of his head and put it with the other Archives. And if you sang the right note, and looked the right way you’d see what he’d seen, the ordinary, the strange and the impossible. Like the comet that had blinked into the night sky, run a short arc, and blinked into blackness again. But you wouldn’t feel its love of speed like he had. It had blazed through Cambrax's veins. He still stayed on his grassy spot, but now sometimes he rumbled around on his axis. He liked to get some fresh scenery and a different angle on the sky.
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