Teatime wandered into the infirmary, looking rather dazed, holding a bloodied shirt up to one eye.

"Excuse me," he said to the room in general, "but I wonder if anybody would care to take a look at this?"

And then he fell over.

The woman in charge of the Guild's infirmary rushed over. True, it was Jonathan Teatime - and who i hadn't /i heard the stories about him - but, well, he was still only a boy. And there was quite a lot of blood...

She pulled the shirt he'd been using as a rag gently away from his face, and gasped.

Teatime began giggling. "It's all gone, isn't it? Oh, dear..."

There were lots of things that Teatime didn't understand. He didn't really understand friendship, for one, or fighting fair, or some of the subtlieties of language.

But he grasped the importance of stories very early on. And he was always good at spotting patterns.

Eyes featured a lot in stories and tales and myths. Most of the time in boring, silly ways, but in his favourite ones - the ones with bargaining and trickery and theft from the gods - eyes almost always seemed to be used for the same thing.

A bargaining chip. A price to pay for a direct link to the Fates.

Really, he thought, picking up the knife, it was surprising more people hadn't tried this.

Being down one eye was less fun than he had expected.

He'd anticipated the pain, of course. -That- didn't bother him. But it was harder to -do- certain things - a horrible thing for a hyperactive child to have to deal with. The sight of the small blond boy repeating the same small tasks with a feverish intensity was to become a common sight. The temper tantrums sparked by not getting things correct straight away were legendary, and once or twice resulted in hospitalizations of their own.

Worst of all, he wasn't getting the results he had been expecting (and come to think of it, he wasn't entirely sure -what- he had been expecting).

He felt terribly cheated.

It took a month for Teatime to come up with his new plan.

They weren't allowing him to read for now, in case he strained his remaining eye. Luckily, the fireworks display that was his mind didn't need much outside stimulation; and besides, most of the books he had read were partially memorized anyway.

As soon as he could, he slipped away from the Guild into the streets of Anhk-Morpork until he found a shop that would do. He had to stand on tip-toe to see the woman working at the counter.

"I'd like to buy a scrying crystal, please."

He couldn't use his new eye straight away. The wound was still healing; it needed swabbing twice a day, something Teatime took over as soon as he could, to the obvious relief of thenurse. People didn't like to have to touch him, for some reason.

It felt a little strange to put in, at first: heavy, alien, grating.

But the benefits -more- than made up for it.

In his first reappearance to class, Teatime managed to pin a boy's hand to the wall a second before he even thought of going for his knife.

"Hi!" he said, as the boy blinked at Teatime's mismatched, and suddenly very close, features. "Aren't you pleased to -see- me?"