That’s the title of Yurodivy’s new story! Here’s the excerpt:
They’ve taken over your home. But you can fight back, because you aren’t the person you thought you were. You’re a dragon … Written as a request for Aleph.
Click here to read it! And stay tuned for possible worldbuilding info and more stories set in this world, as Aleph seems to want more. ^.^
Do you? Let us know!
It was quite a nice day for a festival, especially a moment as auspicious as Unification Day. The street vendors had already set up, music was blaring from every which way, and the Federation of Light soldiers had already made their first appearances, intermingling among the human police.
The police were just figureheads by this point, Francisco was sure of that much. It presented a darkly amusing contrast, seeing their primitive shotguns and kevlar next to the full-body, face-covering armor of the aliens.
He wished they would just go away. There seemed to be a feeling of mutual discomfort between him and the aliens. Most of the normal people would stare in awe at the Federation soldiers, even if just for a few seconds, as if it were an instinctual reaction. Something about them drew the gaze of every human around them.
Except for him, it seemed. He’d tried to fake that reaction, of course. But there was just something missing, a level of respect or fear he simply didn’t have. And they noticed, he was sure of it. He could feel their stares beneath their helmets as he passed by.
And that was all the more reason to go straight home. A break from his classes was much welcomed, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of it.
He passed through a street filled with performance artists. Wincing at the cacophony of noise, he picked up his pace, weaving through the crowd of dancers, singers, musicians, and observers.
He was nearly in the clear when something caught the corner of his eye. Maybe it was because he hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night, maybe it was just a trick of the light. But he was sure he saw some sort of bird-human thing, sitting upon a blanket and playing a guitar.
He did a double-take. His eyes must have been fooling him, because there was just a normal person sitting there. The musician, noting the sudden attention, glanced up expectantly at him, his eyes briefly flicking down to a hat set out in front of him. It was empty, barring a few coins.
Francisco fished out a few bills and dropped them in his hat. And when he looked up again, he was staring at a pitch-black bird. “Thanks, man.” Somehow Francisco got the impression he was grinning at him, despite the fact he had a beak.
He blinked. And there was a human once again. “Y-yeah. No problem.”
The tips of claws plucked away at guitar strings, the strings somehow keeping intact. “Enjoying the festival?”
He smiled nervously. “Not really.” He heard the familiar soft clinking of Federation-issued armor. “I mean, not that I don’t like it, I was just heading home.”
The guitarist shrugged. “You don’t have to sound guilty. I’m just here to play. Gotta eat somehow.” A passerby tossed a coin into his hat without even a sidelong glance. “Doing pretty well so far. I’ve already got enough for dinner tonight.”
Francisco stared at his tail, which was fading in and out of view. “That’s good.”
“Anyway,” the musician waved his hand at him, “don’t let me keep you. I’ll be taking a break soon.”
“Yeah.” He felt a strange sense of familiarity looking at him, the same he got from meeting a distant relative he hadn’t seen in years.
The musician arched an eyebrow. “You alright?”
Francisco broke his gaze as a dull pain struck at the back of his head. “I’m fine. Just a headache. I, uh…” He tried to concoct a way of asking ‘do you ever look half-human, half-animal?’ without sounding as if he had lost his mind. He failed. “Um, bye.”
He rushed away before the crow-man could give any kind of farewell, wanting to take the incident out of his mind altogether.
***
He was nearly home when he heard the crackle of a voice synthesizer coming to life. He slowly turned around to face a trio of Federation soldiers, mere feet away from him.
“This area is off limits.” The one in the center said in a robotic voice.
The street ahead was oddly empty, come to think of it. Only a few soldiers walking around, but no humans. And they looked even more armed than usual.
The soldiers exchanged glances with each other. “Leave now. This area is off-limits.” It repeated.
“You could take them.” A tiny and probably insane voice in the back of his head said. But the dull whir of their energy weapons charging up quickly disabused him of that notion. “But my apartment is that way.”
He felt a strange presence in his mind, one which evoked the same kind of feeling he got whenever somebody was staring over his shoulder at his computer monitor while he was in the middle of an IM conversation. And then, without any warning, it was simply gone.
Even if their faces weren’t visible, he could tell the aliens were becoming agitated. One of them started tapping frantically at a device on its wrist.
He started feeling a very strong compulsion to run away, for he was certain nothing good could come of this. And before he could make himself consider what an incredibly bad idea running was, he did. He was not an especially athletic person, and a broken nose that had never quite healed properly made it difficult for him to breathe, but he was beyond caring about that for he was sure that it would be far worse on him to stay. And he didn’t dare look behind them, but he could hear their synthesized voices commanding him to stop. And perhaps it was the work of an overactive imagination, but he thought he heard them firing off a warning shot. That just made him run faster despite the burning in his lungs, and to take more turns through the streets in a desperate attempt to lose them, hoping all the way he wouldn’t end up trapping himself in some dead-end alleyway.
***
He ran blindly until he couldn’t see them anymore, or hear their demands for him to stop. When he finally did come to a halt, it was just outside a plaza, filled with market stalls and people milling about.
“Perfect.” He breathed a sigh of relief and tried to catch his breath. “Maybe hiding in plain sight will work.” His stomach growled. “And it’s not like I’ll be able to go home anytime soon…” Then the reality of his situation sunk in. “I can’t go home. I don’t know when I’ll be able to go home again. The Federation probably thinks I did some kind of horrible crime and if they catch me they’ll probably lock me away forever in a spaceship or something and I’ll never be able to escape and it’s not like I could prove them wrong even if I wanted to because I can’t afford a lawyer and my life is over.” He would have sunk to his knees if it wouldn’t have been so conspicuous.
“Calm down.” The insane side of him said. “Your life obviously isn’t over if you’re still standing here. But it will be if you don’t get something to eat.” And the smell of food was very tantalizing.
He went for the very first stall he saw without much of a line. “Wait. I can’t let anyone get a good look at my face.” He pulled the hood of his jacket further over his head, grabbed a candy bar, half-threw a few bills at the cashier, told him to keep the change, and found a tree to sit under.
***
The midday sun had been painfully bright, and so the shade was a welcome break. The candy bar was even more welcome, and probably had enough sugar to keep him going for another two hours. And with his blood sugar up, he was feeling better– though that wasn’t saying much.
He reclined back against the tree, looked up towards the sky, and daydreamed about flying away. He’d never liked mundane life as far back as he could remember, not that he’d let anyone know. But the nagging feeling that there was so much more to it than trudging through a school and going through the motions of social activity with people he had nearly nothing in common with was always there, and it had been getting worse lately. And it was accompanied by half-remembered dreams of somewhere far away, so painfully beautiful it made him want to cry, but these dreams eluded his grasp despite his best efforts to recall them in detail.
He knew what his family would say, that he needed to get his head out of the clouds and face reality. But it couldn’t hurt to dream just a little, could it? If he couldn’t get joy out of living in the real world, finding it in a dream world was better than nothing. And though he’d always dreamed of adventure and being a hero, this mess wasn’t quite the adventure he’d been hoping for.
His thoughts were interrupted, as that same peculiar feeling of being invaded he’d had earlier that day struck him again. He jerked his head up, and started walking if only because it seemed like the sensible thing to do. He couldn’t afford to stay still for too long, after all– the more he moved around, the less likely he was to be found.
“Citizen Francisco Gonzales.”
His blood froze in his veins, but he forced himself to keep going. He tilted his head just enough to see a squad of Federation soldiers, and found himself walking faster. It was a common enough name, after all. All he had to do was blend in, and everything would be alright. They’d never even know.
“Citizen, you are ordered to come with us.”
But now the crowd he was in wasn’t moving anymore. They were completely frozen in place, like human statues. And he had little choice but to freeze with them.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see them circling around their human flock. He felt the gaze of one of the soldiers on him. Unable to take the pressure, he ran, trying and failing not to shove the people in his way. The people he did push simply fell over like ragdolls.
He thought he was making good time until pain lanced through his shoulder. He crumpled to the ground, and try as he might to force himself to move, he couldn’t.
The aliens seemed incredibly tall up close, and even more intimidating. One of them effortlessly picked him up, and he got a very good view of the group of humans. Their blank stares were fixed on him.
His heart hammered in his chest. “Why won’t they do something? Why won’t anyone help me?“ He drew in a ragged breath, wanting nothing more than to make something move under his own power. “Why can’t I do anything?”
In that moment of desperation, he felt something growing inside of him, like a tiny spark becoming a flame.
Or maybe even a dragon spreading its wings.
Whatever it was, it caused him to surge back against his captor, kicking it away. And whatever part of him that was not reeling from shock realized that, somehow, he was flying now, and furthermore for the first time since he was a child, he was able to breathe clearly. That part of him then had to go from that to figuring out that it wasn’t in his best interests to question his fortune and that flying away would be a capital idea. Therefore, it took him a couple seconds and at least one energy blast before he finally tried.
The fourth realization was that flying was difficult, especially when you were being shot at. The energy blasts might not have been paralyzing anymore, but they still stung, even though he was covered in some kind of blue, chitinous plating. He flailed around in mid-air, panicked even more when he lost altitude, and dropped like a rock.
On the bright side, he at least landed on a soldier. Even if it wasn’t the most graceful of landings, it did break his fall and he had the comfort of taking one of his pursuers with him. But through the stars dancing in his eyes, he saw the others advancing on him. He stumbled to his feet, and backed up. His tail thudded straight into a wall, and if he hadn’t had more pressing concerns he’d have wondered when he’d gotten a tail. The soldiers were closing in on him, and the one he’d fallen on was now getting up. He got the impression from the way they moved they weren’t afraid of him in the slightest. Amused, perhaps, but certainly not afraid.
His eyes darted about, searching for an escape, but they had formed a half-circle around him. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” That left fighting back as his only option, and he had nothing to use against them.
The tallest soldier in the group leveled his gun at Francisco. He bared his fangs, for what little good it would do him. But he’d made up his mind to go down fighting. He lunged at the alien, his claws scraping uselessly against the armor. The squad immediately opened fire on him, but he dove to the ground, taking the soldier with him, and the energy bolts skimmed over him. He grappled with the soldier, knocking its gun out of its hands. He felt the tiniest surge of hope until something stabbed into him. The very tip of a blade was poking through his arm, dark blue smoke seeping out of the wound instead of blood.
He reflexively jerked back, though he wasn’t in that much pain. Somehow, he’d figured getting stabbed would hurt a lot more than that. He couldn’t help but stare at the hole clean through his arm with the same morbid fascination one might experience from looking at a car crash. And while he was distracted, the alien, now with a blade protruding from its wrist, kicked him in the chest, knocking the breath out of him. He staggered back, and clenched his fists.
It felt as if he was holding something. He stole a quick glance at his hand, and saw a sword, the same blue color as his armor-like skin. “Come on,” he urged himself, “use it!” He pointed the sword at the nearest alien’s throat. “B-back off!” Now the soldiers seemed more hesitant. Encouraged, he continued on. “Or I’ll…”
They opened fire on him. He dove to the ground in a desperate attempt to avoid the first volley, and it mostly worked. A few shots clipped through his shoulder, but he could still count himself among the living for now. There was a low whining sound as the guns recharged. With that tiny interval of opportunity, he scrambled to his feet, gashed through one of the aliens with the sword– peculiarly, it left no sign of injury, even though he was sure it’d gone right through the armor– and trampled over it as it fell to the street.
He jumped up, trying to fly again, only to find he couldn’t. And for the umpteenth time that day, he ran for his life, smoke trailing behind him. He could hear thunderous noises behind him. As his mind was clouded with terror, it took him a moment to work out what they were. Gunshots, the kind that used bullets and not energy bolts. And since when had anyone used those? Weren’t they illegal or something?
On top of that, he could hear shouting now. And howling, and roars. “That can’t be the aliens.” He could hear shuffling footsteps, though they were headed in the opposite direction of him. Something whooshed past him– he could have sworn it had spots. Or that could just be the dots swimming around in his field of vision. He’d been hit pretty hard, after all.
“Can’t stop now.” He was so close to the outskirts of the city, and didn’t hear any armor clinking behind him, maybe they’d finally decided to leave him alone. Meanwhile, there were other things rushing past him now– things that walked like humans, but had tails, fur and claws. And they were carrying guns.
The few humans left in the part of the city he was in were breaking out of the trance that the Federation aliens usually put them in. In fact, they were downright panicked, and an outright riot of animal-people, humans, and aliens was forming. One of the aliens took aim at the crowd mobbing him, but the instant it was about to fire, a tawny-furred feline creature bludgeoned it over the head with her gun. The soldier staggered back, and the cat-person tackled him, tearing at his armor with her claws in search for a weak point.
Most of the crowd scattered, revealing another scuffle going on– a much more one-sided one. Another soldier had a human by the throat in one hand, and a blade in the other.
Francisco didn’t dare hesitate– there wasn’t enough time for that. He charged at the soldier, shouting “Hey!” as loudly as he could. The alien had just enough time to see who was attacking it before his sword cut through its helmeted head. The soldier crumpled to the ground. Peculiarly, it still was breathing after what should have been a fatal blow, though he was still too giddy with his own successes to think too much on the properties of his new weapon.
“What did you just do?” The human he saved asked, a shrill edge to his voice.
It took a few moments for Francisco to recognize who he’d just saved– the guitarist. “I remember you!” He threw open his arms for a hug, but the guitarist jerked back.
Francisco blinked and tilted his head. It wasn’t quite the heroic welcome he’d been hoping for. But a cursory glance at his outstretched arms explained why.
“Sorry.” He sheepishly withdrew his sword-bearing hand. “I forgot I had this.” He unclenched his hand, but the sword remained levitating just above his palm. “Um.” He shook his hand around, but the sword refused to budge. “Aaaah, how do I make it go away?” He flailed around wildly while the guitarist gave him a look of utter disbelief. He ceased moving. “Don’t you remem– oh.” He tapped his rock-solid skin with his free hand. “Um, I know I don’t look like it, but you know me. Sort of. I mean, we met earlier today. I was just different then. I gave you some change…”
Francisco thought he saw a brief flash of familiarity in the man’s eyes, but then it was gone. “No.” The guitarist said under his breath. “No way.”
“Look, I know this seems crazy, but it’s true!”
“Crazy, that’s it. I’m going crazy.”
“No, that’s not it either, it’s just…” Francisco trailed off. On second thought, insanity did seem like a likely explanation for all this, especially since he didn’t have another one. But insanity didn’t explain his wounds. “Well, I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure?” His volume rose with each syllable until he was shouting at the very end. “Doesn’t anyone have a clue about what’s going on here?”
“I know as much as you do!” Francisco grabbed his hand and dragged him along behind him. “But the Federation is after us! Now let’s go!”
Though he wanted to get both of them as far away as he could from the Federation soldiers, his injuries were finally starting to catch up with him, adrenaline was draining from his body, and he was getting incredibly tired. His steps grew gradually slower and slower, then he couldn’t move at all despite his best efforts to the contrary, and the world around him grew dark.
The next sensation Francisco was aware of was pain, and the next thought he had was “OWOWOWOW oh hey I’m alive?” He opened his eyes– he was well away from the city, in a small forest of some kind. And his sword was finally gone.
“Welcome back to the world of the living.” It was the guitarist’s voice. “Not that I’m sure I want to be right now.”
He turned his head to face his companion with what he hoped looked like a smile. The bird’s image seemed to be stable now, instead of flickering from human to crow. “You…”
“Yes, me.” He said. “And I have a name, you know. Though I guess we weren’t ever properly introduced. I’m Gabriel.”
“Francisco.” He paused. “Have you noticed that…well…”
“This?” Gabriel pointed to his beak. “Yeah, it’s kind of hard to miss. You were out when it happened. But you’re not looking quite right yourself.”
Francisco stared at his claw-tipped feet. “How bad is it?”
“Just…” Gabriel pulled a compact mirror out of his pocket.. “See for yourself.”
For a moment, he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. But it had to be him, the thing in the mirror was making all the same movements he did. He looked reptilian now, with deep blue scales that covered his body in plates like the shell of a beetle, though it was pockmarked with holes where he’d been shot. And the longer he looked at his new self, the less unusual it seemed, like this had been what he was all along and he just hadn’t known up until now. He flexed his muscles and grinned. There was something oddly handsome about his new self too, in an otherworldly sort of way.
“You’re not taking this seriously!” The guitarist hissed. “I mean…what are you? What am I?”
“I’m not really sure.” He dropped his arms to his side. “And I don’t really think it matters. Whatever we are, we can help people now.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re about to say we can overthrow the Federation.” He sighed.
Francisco deflated a bit. “Well, maybe we can find other people to help us? I mean, it can’t be just us. I saw others back in the city, I’m sure of it!”
“I did too, but there weren’t that many of them.” He ran his hand through his feathers. “And the Federation outnumbers humankind, and if they outnumber humans they probably outnumber…whatever we are.”
“But we’re able to resist them.” He protested. “There are no coincidences. We must be like this for a reason, and we can’t let what we have go to waste.”
“That doesn’t mean we should go charging off blindly, though.”
“Exactly!” Francisco nodded. For a moment, Gabriel looked relieved. And then Francisco continued. “We need to find the people who were fighting them back in the city.”
“The crazy ones doing all the howling and screaming and waving guns around?”
“They were probably just trying to look scary. I don’t think they’re bad people.”
“How can you even tell?”
“I saw one of them saving a group of people from the Federation,” he said quietly. “She attacked a soldier when they were about to get shot.”
He fell quiet for a few moments. “You’re probably right. This is…” Gabriel sighed again. “I just can’t believe everything that’s happened. Weird doesn’t even cover it.”
“Maybe they know what’s going on. Look,” he pointed back to the city, which now had a few spaceships hovering over it, “it’s not like we can go back now. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
He was silent for a painfully long time. And then… “Fine. I just want answers, though.”
“Great!” Francisco sat straight up, and immediately regretted it. “Owww…”
“You’ve still got holes in you, you know.” He deadpanned in the way that only someone who’d seen considerably stranger things in a very short period of time could say. “We should be staying the night, at least.”
Francisco shook his head. “We shouldn’t. What if the Federation finds us?”
“Okay, point taken. But you’re still hurt.”
He examined his skin– there was no longer blue smoke coming out of him. “I’m not bleeding.” He ventured. “I think. And I can still move.”
“But we don’t even know how to find these other…people, or whatever they are!”
“Oh, that won’t be a problem.” Francisco said cheerfully. “They stand out.”
“Fine.” He threw up his hands. “If you’re crazy enough to do this, let’s go. But if you faint again, we’re stopping.”
“I’ll be fine!” He hopped off the tree root he’d been resting against. “Let’s go! There’s not a moment to lose!”
This had been more of the adventure Francisco had been hoping for– even if the odds were impossible, he had a purpose now, and at last he was no longer alone.
To be continued…
Has it really been two weeks since a story was posted here? It’s time to rectify that, times two! This week we have a commission by Yurodivy, called Mixed Blessings:
Stephanie desperately wants to be a mage, just like her brothers and the rest of the world around her. Unfortunately, a rare disorder has robbed her of the ability to do so. So when a mysterious stranger comes along to offer her what she’s always dreamed of, she’s hard-pressed to refuse. But all decisions have their consequences, intended or otherwise…
And a commission by me, Feathertail, called Crystal Core!
Would you rather come back to life as an anime robot designed by an iElectronics company, or as a walking fursuit? Find out how Creator-Unreal’s character chose!
Just click on the names to read them! And we also have a delightful piece of art created by Virmir to show everyone … I’d say fanart, but Yuro and I asked him to do it as the cover to her story’s book. Click here to see the illustration he did for Bat Girl!
And that’s all for this week. Next up: I’m working on a commission from Kickahaota, and Yurodivy’s going to be getting to work on our (extremely long) request backlog. We’re both still taking commissions, though, so visit the commissions page if you’re interested. ^.^
Stephanie glared menacingly at the blue screen, though despite her best efforts it refused to retreat and go back to the online encyclopedia she’d been looking at mere seconds before. Rolling her eyes at the all-too-familiar problem, she jammed the restart button just a bit harder than necessary. The blue screen faded to black, then to a colorful splash page with a load bar crawling its way towards completion. And then blue again.
Knowing fully well it was futile, she looked inside the computer case and was met with a confusing mass of crystals and wires and goodness-knew-what else. Her eye twitched. “Come on…” Restart. Black. Blue. Curse. Kick desk. Fist-to-keyboard contact.
“What did you break this time?” Her brother, Alex, was poking his head in through the door she thought she’d locked, a smirk playing across his face.
“I didn’t break it.” Her voice was defensive in spite of herself. “It’s just…” She struggled to come up with a technical-sounding term, before deciding simply on “…blue-screening.”
“Right.” Alex hovered over her shoulder. She forced back the urge to punch him in the jaw. “Should be easy enough to fix.”
There was a long pause, punctuated by Stephanie drumming her fingers against the edge of the desk. “Well…?” She finally asked. “Are you going to do anything?”
“What’s in it for me?” He fired back. “Reagents are expensive, you know. I can’t be using them on just anything.”
Stephanie knew quite well this was a blatant lie, considering that he’d run off with her other brother and a group of their friends to test out spells that involved explosions, ones which she heard from half a mile away. She also knew quite well it was not going to do her much good to argue with him and it certainly wouldn’t do her computer any good to make him angry. “I’ll clean up the living room for this week.”
“Deal.” Given the size of her room, it took him about three steps to get out the door and out of sight.
A few moments later and he returned, dragging his backpack behind him and holding a stick of charcoal in his hand. “Move.”
She obliged, sitting on the bed and inadvertently waking up Bonnie, who opened her one good eye and yawned, before relocating to Stephanie’s lap. Stephanie smiled down fondly at the kitten and stroked her fur. Bonnie purred loudly enough to nearly drown out her brother’s incantations.
There was a sound much like someone slamming an eraser against a chalkboard, followed by shrill electronic beeping. The beeps decreased in volume and pitch, then simply stopped altogether.
“And that should be it.” He dusted the charcoal off his hands. “Have fun.” And he disappeared out the door again, leaving an unsightly ring of black dust on the carpet.
“Great. Thanks.” She muttered, half-sincerely. She carefully ushered Bonnie off her lap and with a spare shirt attempted to clean the charcoal off the ground without success. She sighed. Too late to get the vacuum now with her mother in bed, it’d have to wait until tomorrow.
The computer was indeed working now, at least. So she re-opened her browser, and went back to reading about mages and thinking about how wonderful it’d be if she were normal.
Sure, she knew what other anaetherian activists would say. She’d lurked on the message boards, even posted once or twice, and written about anaetherian rights in the privacy of her own blog which nobody ever read. “People without the Gift are just as capable as mages, because lacking the Gift does nothing to hurt our mental capacities. It’s society that restricts us. We don’t need a cure, mages need to stop gearing everything towards magic-users blah blah inclusiveness blah…”
It was true on some level, she was very aware it was right. Still, it seemed so much easier to just change one person than change all of society. So, just maybe…
She skimmed through the “Anaetherian rights controversy” page, listing false cure after false cure, fraud after fraud. Or maybe not. A false hope was better than none, but there didn’t seem to be much insight.
“Oh well.” She closed the tab. “No use dwelling on what can’t be.” So she spent the rest of the night skimming through pictures of baby animals, reading news feeds, and talking to people hundreds of miles away she’d probably never meet. Time slipped past her, and once she finally decided to check her clock, it was five in the morning.
She sighed. Though she wasn’t tired, Mom would be up any time now, and the last thing she wanted was to get caught up this late again. She issued a few quick goodbyes to the few people still up, and half-fell into her bed, with Bonnie curling up beside her.
* * *
The mechanical droning of an alarm clock woke her up, and the sunlight streaming in through her window conspired to ensure she stayed awake. Despite the fog enshrouding her mind, she had just enough in her to slam the snooze button and take a bleary glance at the clock. Two o’clock. She groaned and slammed her head on the pillow.
“At least Alex is in school now.” She reluctantly kicked the blankets off. “Nobody can yell at me for sleeping in so late anymore.” She made it into the kitchen before realizing something odd. She hadn’t kicked off a kitten along with her covers. She was put at ease for a moment when she considered that Bonnie obviously had gotten up before her.
But there was something else wrong. All the while telling herself she was being too paranoid for her own good, she took a look back at her room.
Bonnie’s food bowl was empty, except for a few crumbs she was sure were left over from last night. And Stephanie was sure Bonnie would have woken her up well before two. A hungry cat was a nigh-unstoppable force, as she’d found out.
“Bonnie?” No response, not even the clicking of claws across the hardwood floors of the hall. She poured a bit of cat food into the bowl, rattling it as loudly as possible. Still nothing.
With deepening dread, she stepped out onto the porch, “Bonnie?”
She heard a high-pitched and familiar mewing, and her paranoia dissipated. She knelt over, and her kitten ran straight into her arms. “Don’t do that again, alright?” She sighed. “You scared me.”
She then found another reason entirely to be afraid when she turned around– a very tall man dressed in the robes of a high mage. She jumped backwards, almost dropping Bonnie.
“Don’t be afraid.” Stephanie figured his tone was supposed to be soothing, but it wasn’t doing much to banish her contemplations on where her mother had left the guns. “I’m here to help you.”
She was certain she’d seen a scene just like this in a movie, right before the female lead was kidnapped and almost murdered. So she took a few careful steps backwards towards the house, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Who are you?”
“We’ve met before.”
She reached for the handle of the door.
“You’re a member of several Anaetherian Rights forums. So am I.”
Her mind spun, trying to remember what kind of information she’d disclosed that would help him find out where she lived.
His eyes flicked to her hand on the door. “I’m only here to help. I promise.”
“Why should I trust you? You…” She tried to come up with a creative way to tell him off, like her brothers always could. Nothing worth saying came to mind.
“You don’t trust me.” He paused, looking thoughtfully to the sky. “What if I told you that you wouldn’t be the first person I cure?”
A million questions buzzed in her mind. If he really had a miracle cure, why wasn’t he telling anyone? Why wasn’t it all over the news by this point in time? How could he have succeeded where scientists had failed? Who was he in the first place? Unfortunately, she couldn’t manage to come up with anything more articulate than “Prove it.”
“As you wish.” He bowed his head slightly and flickered out of view.
The closet, that’s where the guns were! She rushed inside, almost tripping over the rug. It was right about when she threw open the door she remembered the gun rack was locked. And not without reason, they’d been expensive, not to mention hard to find in the first place. After weeks of scouring mainstream stores, her mother had finally given up and had them special-ordered.
Her mother had also been exceptionally paranoid and reinforced the locks on the rack with magic, reasoning it was the only way to deter potential thieves. In retrospect, it was ironic– the one equalizer she had she couldn’t even use without other mages around.
There was a strangely polite rap at the door. She cautiously peered out from behind the door. It was the mage, a familiar woman beside him.
“Rose?” Her jaw dropped. How long had it been– several months? All the things she’d been warned about, how a mage could easily create an illusion of someone she knew or trusted, and she’d have no way of knowing, dropped out of her mind. She stepped outside to meet her.
Rose smiled shyly at her, the same smile she remembered from pictures and webcam conversations. “Sorry if I worried you.”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, she’d been at the back of Stephanie’s mind ever since she disappeared from the boards. “What happened?”
“I was cured.” She held out her hand. It contained a tiny flame of raw aether. “It’s real, see? I can use magic now.”
Stephanie’s eyes widened. Her hand shaking slightly, she reached out to touch the flame. It wavered and flickered as she drew nearer.
Rose snuffed out the flame before Stephanie could. “I’m…” Her voice sounded shaky. “I’m really sorry I left without telling anyone. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, you know how most of them are. They wouldn’t believe me, or if they did they’d say I was a terrible person for wanting to be cured. They didn’t understand what it was like to be that bad.”
“I know.” She sniffled and forced back tears.
“Things have changed now, though.” She brushed at her eyes. “His cure really works. I can already use elementary-level magic. This could turn my life around. It’s already changed so much.” Her voice cracked. She took a deep breath. “And it could change everything for you too.”
“It’s alright if you can’t decide now.” The mage stepped in. “I will give you time to decide.”
“Okay.” Was all she managed to get out through the growing fog in her mind. This was all too much.
“I will be back tomorrow.”
“W-wait.” She protested, her hand subconsciously reaching out for the mage. “Could you–” Could she stay? That would require some extremely awkward explanations. After all, she’d kept her online life secret from her mother, and her mother had never taken kindly to the possibility she could be talking to forty-year-old men pretending to be teenage girls or weirdos who write poems about killing themselves, or everyone at their school or both, the only people she seemed to think existed on the Internet.
“What is it?” Rose asked.
Stephanie heard the sputter of the school bus’s engine drawing close. “It’s nothing.”
And then the two of them disappeared from sight.
She trudged back inside, collapsing on her bed just in time for her brothers to go barging in the hall, arguing about something-or-another. She’d long since learned to shut them out, and paying attention to their arguments wasn’t going to help her figure all this out. She just needed to calm down and clear her mind.
Easier said than done. The conversation she had kept going through her mind over and over again, and all she could think of was what she should have said, what she should have asked, what she should have done.
She grabbed her laptop and brought it out of sleep mode. Maybe a little distraction would help. And as soon as she logged in an IM window popped up, from someone named Maranatha. ‘Hey there. 
How’re things going?’ It took her a moment to recognize the username– it was one of the members of the Anaetherian Rights message board.
‘Hey. ^_^’ She rested her chin in her hand. Now there was something that was going to be difficult to give a straight answer to. ‘I could be better. Lots of things going on.’ There. Honest, yet not direct.
The reply was almost instantaneous. ‘Aww. :/ What’s going on?’
She tapped her hands on the trackpad, trying to figure out how to dodge the question. ‘It’s a long story.’ Cliché, but effective.
‘Ah, alright…’ The person typed back.
There was a long pause, and no indicator Maranatha was typing a message. She bit her lip. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to at least bring up Rose. But she still had to close her eyes while typing the message. ‘Do you remember anyone named Damask from the forums?’
Maranatha took a few moments to respond. ‘I think so, yeah. She hasn’t posted in a while though.’ Another pause. ‘Did something happen to her?’
“Yeah, something happened to her, alright.” She muttered. ‘She’s doing fine. I just met her today. She just needed to take a break from the forums, I guess.’
‘Yeah. I can’t really blame her. After that whole flame war over the cure issue.’
Stephanie winced. She remembered one (or several) flame wars erupting on the site, but only had the vaguest understanding of them– she’d always made it a point to stay out of the controversial topics. They’d always gotten extremely heated, and it usually took no more than a few posts before someone got called an idiot (or some more colorful iteration thereof.) ‘I know she was pro-cure…’
‘Well, her and a bunch of overzealous parents. Versus a bunch of overzealous people with a lot of pent-up anger. Nobody came out looking good.’
‘And then she just stopped posting…’ No wonder she’d seemed so worked up about accepting a cure.
‘Yep. :/ That topic was the last I saw of her. Is she thinking about coming back…?’
‘No.’ And with good reason, she thought. ‘She’s had some other things come up.’
There was an awkward break in messages. ‘Are you anti-cure?’ The question came out before Stephanie even had time to think about how stupid it was to ask something so controversial. That was always the advantage of a forum. You had time to think about what you were saying, and you could always just take it back by deleting your post. Then again, if you did put it out there and couldn’t do anything in time, everyone saw it.
Maranatha didn’t reply for a while, which left Stephanie to pace around her room, trying to figure out how she could defuse what would most likely be an explosive argument. And then her computer pinged. ‘In a sense, yes. I think saying that we need to be cured is saying we’re inferior people. And we aren’t. I’ve always agreed that we’re only disadvantaged because of how almost everything in society is so dependent on magic. Yet things don’t have to be like that.’
Once Stephanie could have believed that. Now she wasn’t so sure. ‘But if there was a cure, no strings attached, and you could choose to have it…would that be better?’
‘I don’t believe in no strings attached.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘If there was. Just hypothetically.’
‘Then all anaetherians would be pressured into getting it. We’d lose the insight we get from having to go through life without magic. Think of all the anaetherian inventions and scientific discoveries and progress we’ve made, gone. And those who they can’t pressure into taking their cure would be even more marginalized.’
‘It’s easier than having to change the world.’
‘But is it really better?’ Maranatha replied without missing a beat.
Stephanie could feel a headache coming on and she wasn’t sure if it was from stress or the fact she’d barely eaten or had anything to drink the entire day. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Just think about it, alright? Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile.’
‘Yeah.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘And I’ll BRB. Time for dinner.’ She left without checking to see if Maranatha bid her farewell.
Dinner, however, turned more into a thirty-minute hunt for decent food and ingredients, followed by another thirty minutes of trying to cook it, followed by another bout of picking at it, then trying to hide from her mom arguing with her brothers, then playing with Bonnie to calm down, followed by a massive video game binge into the early hours of the morning. She finally crashed at three in the morning into a deep sleep.
* * *
The doorbell dragged her into consciousness. Her clock indicated it was twelve, but she felt like she’d barely slept at all. She trudged to the door. Her heart skipped a beat when she opened the door to find what she thought was a complete stranger until she realized it was the mage. Rose was nowhere in sight.
“Have you decided?” He asked.
“Yes.” Her voice was shaking, and she couldn’t manage to spit out her answer.
He arched his eyebrow. “And it is?”
“I…” She prayed she wouldn’t regret what she was about to say. “I want to be cured.”
“As you wish.” He nodded. “Please follow me.”
She didn’t quite understand why they had to use the woods behind her house for this. The mage had rambled on about leylines and some other things she vaguely remembered from her brother’s textbooks. Then he traced out a circle around her and started sprinkling powders, scrawling runes in the earth and muttering incantations. All-in-all it was nearly an hour before he finally said things were ready (and considering it was starting to glow faintly, it was fairly obvious things were.)
He told her he had to leave now, but all she had to do was just sit in the circle until it was done. Easy enough. It was so quiet and peaceful out here, dead silent except for the wind and the faint sound of bird wings flapping overhead. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes, and couldn’t resist letting her mind drift away.
* * *
Something jabbed Stephanie in her knee. She lifted her head up, her eyes snapping open, and immediately regretted doing so. It was painfully bright, despite it being sundown. Everything was like there had been a dimmer on the sun that had been on low, and now someone had turned it all the way up. Furthermore, it seemed like everything she could make out without going half-blind had a green-blue ambient glow around it. The circle she was sitting in was especially bright.
She covered her watering-up eyes with her hand and felt something strange. Something soft and downy, something that definitely wasn’t human skin. With a sense of growing dread, she let her hand travel to the center of her face. She had what felt like a delicately curved beak. Her blood ran completely cold. “Where is the mage?”
She tried to stand up, but stumbled, nearly falling forward onto the ground. There was a weight on her back, something that felt like it was jutting out of the very bone of her shoulder blades. She reached her hand behind her back and tugged at it. It moved, and she could feel muscles and tendons stretching as if it were another limb, along with a covering of the same downy substance on her face. Feathers.
“I have wings.” She realized with a sense of awe and horror and shock all mixed together. “And I’m some kind of mutant bird-thing.”
The next few moments were a whirl of disjointed and panicked thoughts. She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. “Okay. Okay, it’s going to be alright. Transmogrification is a normal magic discipline, it’s reversible. I’ll just have to get the mage somehow.” She tried to speak, but her words came out as harsh screeching.
She clamped her hands (talons?) over her beak, and took a few deep breaths. And then she tried again. The screeching was quieter this time, but still nothing remotely human.
She hobbled around, trying to pace to help herself calm down and think straight, but movement was far harder than it should have been. So she settled for her mounting frustration by kicking around some leaves. And then within the circle the mage had created, she unearthed what was most likely the source of her problem– a single owl feather. She’d heard of minor contaminants and mistakes causing catastrophic results. Just her luck.
With an irritated sigh, she collapsed on the ground. “What am I going to do now? And what am I going to tell everyone?” There was always the off chance it was just a temporary issue. Or maybe she was a shapeshifter, like they always talked about in fairy tales. Owl-creature by night, human by day.
“Or it’s just punishment for wanting something I never should have wanted.” She thought bitterly. That seemed to be the way things always went, after all. Or maybe Maranatha was right– there’s no such thing as no strings attached. And now she had to deal with them– it was just a matter of how.
She began pacing anew, her steps slowly becoming more and more natural, though she still had to hunch over. Still, it was proving hard to think through her headache, and therein one course of action revealed itself. Go back home and get some asprin.
“And try not to get attacked by my family. They’d probably think I’m some mad mage’s latest transmogrification experiment.” And the irony of it was that it was half-true. She collapsed underneath the biggest, shadiest tree she could find. Best to wait until nightfall. Maybe then they’d just think she was a very malnourished bear and not a monster.
She tried to start speaking again in an attempt to pass the time, but even something as simple as going through the alphabet was hard. Vowels proved to be much easier to enunciate than consonants. “At least speaking Japanese won’t be a problem.” Then she remembered how long it’d been since she picked up the books and DVDs she’d gotten to help her learn it in the first place, and cringed.
The sun was getting lower and lower now, and her surroundings got a deeper and deeper tint of red to them. It had to have been a beautiful sunset, and she couldn’t even look at it. The upside was that it was almost dark enough she didn’t need to shield her eyes anymore. The leylines were still bright, but at least they were nowhere near as bad. And the world was coming more and more into focus. If anything, now she could see even better than she used to.
“Guess I should get started now.” She hoisted herself off the ground and began the walk back, taking in the sights of the forest as she went. Everything was as clear as, well, day, and despite it having been months since she’d gone for a walk in the forest. Of course, the fact her house lights were still on helped.
She winced at the flourescent lighting, and tried to take a look inside. She couldn’t see anyone in the main rooms, which meant her brothers were probably playing video games, and her mom was in bed, a stroke of minor luck after several major misfortunes. And she was finally getting to the point where she could form actual words, something that made her happier than it should have considering her situation.
She couldn’t resist taking a quick look in the window glass to assess the damage done to her. A bipedal barn owl stared back at her with wide, pitch-dark eyes, its tawny feathers stirring slightly in the wind. She traced a talon around its…no, her heart-shaped face, trying to force her mind to register that the creature in the glass was her. And when that proved to be a depressing prospect, she tried to force herself to remember it didn’t have to be permanent.
She broke eye contact with her reflection. “The sooner I get this over with, the better.” Steeling her nerves, she carefully opened the window and attempted to slip inside. Though she might have been able to do this as a human, she failed to take into account she now had wings. The result was an audible thump much like the kind one would hear if a bird flew into a windowpane.
She didn’t even bother to check and see if anyone was coming. She ran the best she could, ducked behind a tree, and huddled there until she stopped feeling like she was about to die of cardiac arrest. When she recovered, she opted instead to go through the back door, and the sudden change in light made her flinch.
Inside, she could hear the faint sound of the TV in the basement. She breathed a sigh of relief– they probably had their game up too loud to hear much of anything. She poured herself a glass of water and after a struggle with the bottlecap, finally managed to fish out a pair of asprin. She then raised the glass to her mouth, and tapped the edge against her beak, splashing a bit of water on the ground.
“Aaaawh, come on…” She muttered. She glanced at the basement door. The game’s sound effects were still audible even with it closed, but that did nothing to quell her uneasiness. “Don’t have time for this.” She took the asprin dry, tried to ignore the horrible aftertaste, headed back for the door, and almost tripped over her kitten.
She stopped dead in her tracks, and almost fell over on her face. Bonnie was staring at her with wide eyes. The kitten fluffed out her fur and hissed, backing away from Stephanie. Stephanie felt her heart sink, and fresh tears came to her eyes. She stepped over Bonnie, and opened the door. Then she felt a cold nose poking at her heels, followed by purring. Bonnie rubbed up against her leg and mewed– her usual call for attention.
“Good girl.” She stroked Bonnie’s fur as gently as she could. A lump was rising in her throat, and she was reasonably sure it wasn’t because of the asprin. “I gotta go now, okay? I’ll see you again soon.” She sincerely hoped she wasn’t lying, and slipped out the door before Bonnie could react.
“At least someone recognizes me.” She thought dourly. She tried (and failed) to formulate any other upsides to her current situation when a glint of light caught her eyes. There was a ladder leaning against their shed, and thus an idea formed in her mind…
* * *
She carefully ascended the ladder onto the roof and looked below her. It looked a lot higher up than she thought it would have, and she felt her hands shake a bit at the thought of having to jump.
It was about this point in time she remembered that owls were hollow-boned, and that a fall would not bode well for her skeletal structure. She sighed and sat down, her feet dangling over the side of the roof.
She looked up again at the sky. She could see bats darting erratically about chasing after moths, and even another owl.
More than anything, she wanted to join them. To be free, and get away from the dismal situation she was in.
So she sat for a few more minutes, staring enviously at the owl and the smoothness of his (for she was almost certain it was a male, though she wasn’t able to place a reason why other than simple intuition) flight. So she closed her eyes, let her instincts take over, and jumped.
And after a few seconds in, after she was certain she hadn’t broken anything or otherwise hurt herself, she opened her eyes. She could see the world below with so much more clarity than she had as a human, right down to the crickets leaping from grass blade to grass blade and mice scurrying about. Part of her thought that the mice would make a nice midnight snack, but it was drowned out by sheer exhilaration.
Half-delirious with joy, she pumped her wings faster. The world below grew smaller, her house farther away, the crisscrossing leylines began to blend together, and the blasted, lonely, middle-of-nowhere town that’d felt like a prison for as long as she’d been there started to fade, and even if just for a moment, everything she’d been through was worth it. Even her bizarre new body.
* * *
She flew until she felt as if her wings were about to fall off, and made a somewhat rough attempt at a landing. After plucking some twigs from beneath her feathers, she trudged back to her house, daydreams of a nice warm shower dancing in her mind.
And she was preoccupied enough with those daydreams she didn’t notice a few irregularities inside. Firstly, the lights were still on even in the middle of the night, when her early bird mom and not-quite-as-night-owlish-no-pun-intended brothers would have been long since asleep. Secondly, there were some aether leylines planted in the ground that hadn’t been there before– not that she would have noticed, given she’d never looked at her house with the Sight before.
Not being entirely disconnected from reality, she realized the two unfamiliar shadows skulking about did not bode well. With her heart rising into her throat, she slowly, carefully, and as stealthily as she could crept up to the window.
The lights inside were far too bright for her tastes, but she could make out who was inside. The mage and Rose. Her feathers fluffed out in irritation. “So now he decides to show up.”
Instincts were telling her there was something very wrong with this situation, and reason was quickly filling in the blanks as to why. She knew for a fact that her mother wasn’t a light sleeper, that the doors were supposed to be magically locked at night, and the mage’s body language was far too casual for someone who’d just broken into another person’s house.
And most importantly of all… “What’s he done to them?” He couldn’t have just waltzed in there without anyone noticing. Horrible ideas of what he could have done to ensure nobody saw his entrance ran through her head.
“You can come in, you know.” She stifled a screech of shock– how could the mage have heard her? “I know you’re out there.”
“He’s bluffing. I hope.” Not to mention being in a room with just him was the last thing she wanted right now.
He sighed. “Please be reasonable. I just needed to see you.”
“Reasonable!” She said in a low hiss.
“Yes, reasonable.” She saw him nodding from her vantage point near the window. “And before you say anything, yes, I can hear you too. Please, come inside. I don’t feel like talking this loudly.”
“Tell me what you’ve done to my family first. Or…” She trailed off. What could she threaten him with?
“Oh, them. Don’t worry, they’re fast asleep. Very fast asleep as a matter of fact.”
The thought of punching him entered her mind before she remembered how much frailer her bone structure was now. “What’s that supposed to mean? What have you done with them?”
“It was just a simple sleeping draught, now will you calm down? You’re being very unreasonable.”
“You drugged them? Why? Why are you even here?”
“I just needed to get your attention, seeing as you’ve been avoiding me. And I’m sure you don’t want your family to see you in the state you’re in. Now will you please come inside? It’ll be a lot easier on both of us.”
“Stephanie, please.” She could just barely make out Rose’s voice. “We just want to solve this problem, and we can’t do it while you’re out there.”
“Fine.” She’d hoped what she was saying sounded defiant. The self-conscious side of her told her she just sounded petulant. And to ease a little bit of her frustration, she gave the door a jab with her clawed foot to make it look like she was kicking it open.
“Thank you.” Despite her new appearance, he was staring at her impassively.
Rose, on the other hand, was not. She let out a tiny gasp of shock and jumped back slightly. “What happened to you?”
“Something must have contaminated the spell circle.” The mage answered for Stephanie. “This could be difficult to fix.”
“Really.” Stephanie tried to make her displeasure as readily apparent as possible.
“Really.” He intoned back. “It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you’d just turned yourself into this after you’d become a mage, but now being a whatever-you-are and a mage are…intertwined, so to speak.” He paused thoughtfully. “Incidentally, did the rest of the spell work?”
If Stephanie had lips, she would have been scowling at him. “You’re worried about that?”
“Well, did it?”
She threw up her hands. “Yes, it did! I can see leylines, I tried to tap into one, but that’s the least of my problems now!”
The mage was stroking his chin, oblivious to her distress. “Well, that much is good. Shame illusionism is such a complex matter, otherwise I could at least make you look human.”
“So you’re saying there’s no way I can be human again.” She wondered how long it would take her to get to the phone and call the police. Probably too long. But maybe if she could just get him to keep rambling on…
“Oh, there certainly is.” He nodded. “Actually, I’d rather prefer that solution, it will be easier on everyone.”
There was a pause, most likely engineered by the mage for dramatic tension. For the most part, it was just wearing down on Stephanie’s already frayed nerves. “And it is?”
“Reverse transmogrification. Basically, I could try to turn you back.”
She tapped her claws on the dining room table. “This sounds too good to be true.”
The mage clenched his jaw ever-so-slightly. “It can be a slow and painful process. For whatever reason, your transformation was unusually fast, but now I’ll have to work much more deliberately to make sure I don’t take away your new gifts, or anything else.”
“Have you ever done this before?” The tapping was quickly turning into a drumbeat from her favorite metal ballad.
“It’s an experimental procedure.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you won’t mess up again?” She tried to glare at him, but couldn’t quite manage to meet him in the eye.
“It wasn’t my fault!” And that was the loudest she’d ever heard the mage get. “It was just an unforseen error. Trust me, nothing like that will happen again.”
“Trust you!” She snapped. “This is the second– no, third– time you’ve randomly shown up at my house! And this time you’ve broken in! And you drugged my family! And you’re acting like this isn’t even an issue! What is wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” He turned away from her. “I can see you’re not going to listen to me. Shame some people just don’t know what’s good for them.” He took a small cloth from somewhere within the folds of his robe.
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
He upturned a small vial, dabbing the cloth with a pungent, clear liquid. “Oh…and don’t bother trying to run.” He returned the vial to his robes and with his free hand snapped his fingers. Stephanie felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach and knocked the breath out of her. “I’ve just activated an anti-magic forcefield. As long as its up, you’ll be unable to use any kind of magic or leave here.” He continued. “Last chance. Will you undergo the procedure or will I have to force you to do so?”
“Stephanie, please.” Rose said softly. “I didn’t get my powers the first time around, just do what he says. He’ll be able to fix this.”
“No.” Her voice might have been shaking, but she was sure in her convictions. “This was a mistake. All this was a mistake. I never should have…” She stopped herself before her voice started to crack too much. “If anyone’s going to fix this, it’ll be me.”
“I see.” He advanced towards her, an impassive look on his face. “If you insist.”
She flattened herself out on the counter, her talons splaying across the cold surface, the very tips of her claws scraping against a frying pan. And without taking any time to even consider the potential consequences, she grabbed the frying pan and slammed it into the mage’s head as hard as she could.
The impact jarred even her, but needless to say the mage had it much worse. He crumpled bonelessly to the ground without a sound.
* * *
Stephanie bundled her covers around her, trying to lull herself into sleeping. Being questioned by the police had been exhausting, yet unnervingly enough she couldn’t get it out of her head long enough to rest. Then again, ever since she’d changed she’d been quite literally sleeping all day. It hadn’t taken much to get to that point given her previous sleep schedule, but that didn’t stop her mother from griping about it.
Still, if that was what she chose to gripe about, Stephanie was fine with that. It was already something she was quite used to hearing, and she’d take any semblance of normalcy she could. She was sure her family was horrified by her change, seeing as how they were avoiding her even more than usual, but at least they weren’t talking about it, and more importantly they weren’t asking her questions about what had happened. They just avoided her. So had Rose, for that matter– she’d only heard from her once in the past few days. She seemed to be coping, but barely. She’d overheard in the police station that there was some residue of magical tampering with her mind and memories, and it’d take a while to recover from it.
At least Bonnie was taking things well– she had a near-infinite supply of feathers to play with now. And things were easier that way, being left to her own devices with the one being in the world she knew could care less about her appearance. Still, she couldn’t say the past few days had been easy at all. The police station had been particularly bad. At least her mother had teleported them straight to the station, but Stephanie still had to insist on wearing a very heavy raincoat, the baggiest pair of sweatpants she could find, a hooded sweatshirt underneath that, and a wide-brimmed hat to hide as much of herself as she could. It was hot as blazes, but it worked.
Then once they were done interviewing her, they had to do a physical exam of her. The horrified look on the nurse’s face the moment she took off her coat and hat was burned into her mind and would be for a very long time, though the actual exam was a blur. And the second it was over, she hid in the bathroom and cried. Her mother took her straight home afterwards, but the damage had already been done. She was certain her mother at least felt bad for what happened, because once she woke up from a fitful sleep, she found a cheeseburger from her favorite restaurant with her name literally on the styrofoam box in the fridge.
If she didn’t find something to do, she’d just get more depressed. As of lately, escapism had been proving to do her a lot of good. There were even times, however brief, that she could forget about what had happened, usually when she let herself get lost in a story.
That was something she fully intended to do right now. It wasn’t hard to find her computer, all she had to do was follow the glowing leylines. As she was skimming past the numerous sites on transmogrification reversals on her bookmark list, someone IM’d her. “Who’d be on at this hour?” She squinted at the font on the screen– Maranatha was, apparently, greeting her with the usual ‘Hey there! ’
‘Hey.’ She might as well be civil, even if she didn’t especially feel like talking now. Besides, it’d give her a chance to practice typing with claws again.
‘How are things going?’
She sighed. Not this again. ‘Kind of rough. Not sure if I want to talk about it.’
‘Ahh, alright. Well, I remembered the talk we had about the cure, and I was just wondering if you’d seen this…’ A link to a topic on the Anaetherian Rights forum followed. Out of morbid curiosity, she clicked on it. Her blood ran cold in her veins when she recognized the title– it was a headline from their local newspaper. Someone had posted an article about the mage’s arrest.
‘They haven’t said much about the reason why,’ Maranatha continued, ‘they just cited reckless endangerment and unsanctioned magical experiments. But the rumor is he was trying to find a cure.’
She stared blankly at the screen. How could word have spread so quickly? And more importantly, how could they have found out?
‘Anyway, it was in your area…I was just wondering if you’d heard more about it.’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ She replied, and subsequentially realized she was probably just leading on Maranatha.
And surely enough, his response came back within mere seconds. ‘Try me.’
It might be nice to talk to someone who wasn’t a police officer about everything that had happened. If she’d had more sleep, she might’ve had the sense to decide against doing that. But she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours and her mind was frazzled from stress. ‘Yeah, he was doing experiments. They had side effects, that’s probably why they’re not giving out details.’
‘That’s not so unbelievable. I mean, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think those kind of experiments happen more often than we like to think. The side effects must have been pretty severe, though.’
‘Oh, they were.’ She sighed and looked at her hands. Now she was almost getting used to seeing them there.
‘Do you know if the people he experimented on are alright…? :/’
‘Yeah, we’re alright.’ Something registered about that sentence as being wrong, but it took her a few moments (after she pressed Enter, unfortunately) to work out what. “We’re.” Just the wrong pronoun to use, even if it was true. She felt her skin heat up beneath her feathers. Maybe she could just claim it was a typo?
‘Wait, we?’ And Maranatha noticed. Just her luck.
She took in a shaky breath, and after a great deal of struggling for the proper words, came up with ‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’
There was a break in messages. She was almost to the best part of the chapter when the message alert started flashing. ‘Can I tell you something?’
She scratched the side of her head. “Okay…?” ‘Yeah, I guess.’
There was another long pause without so much as an alert that a message was being typed. And then, finally, ‘It might be easier to show you.’
She received a webcam invite. Her curiosity piqued, she accepted it.
Her breath caught in her throat. Looking at the webcam, a weak smile on his face, was a huge, humanoid bobcat. “H-hey.” His voice was barely audible, and on top of that it was scratchy and sounded barely-human. It almost reminded her of hearing a parrot talk.
Fortunately, the webcam conversation wasn’t two-way or he would have caught her gaping at him.
“Um, I know this must seem really weird to you. I can explain…I think.” He cleared his throat. It inexplicably brought to mind Bonnie when she was trying to cough up a hairball. “I guess you can tell I had some, uh, side effects too.”
Her hands quavered as she typed. ‘Did someone do that to you?’
“You could say that.” His tufted ears twitched. “So,” he laughed, or tried to do something that sounded like it, “how’s this for side effects?”
“It can’t be.” Then again, it probably could. Who knew how many other people the mage had gone after? She desperately wanted to ask how and who and why, but couldn’t quite work up the courage to do so.
“I’ve gotten used to it, though.” He went on, his voice growing more confident. “And there are other people like me out there. It’s a bigger community than people think. And there’s a lot of support for people who live with magic-related disorders other than anaetherianism.” He cast his gaze askance. “I guess I just wanted you to know you’re not alone.”
She brushed tears away from her eyes, self-consciously straightened out a few stray feathers, and sent a webcam invite of her own before she was able to process what she’d done enough to regret it.
She knew the moment he accepted, because his jaw dropped open. “I…did…” He took a deep breath. And then another, just for good measure. “Did you ask for someone to do that to you?”
She stared blankly at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know.” There was a desperate look about him. He gestured furtively to his tail and ears. “Right?”
She shook her head.
He sighed. “I guess it really was an accident for you.”
Stephanie found herself gaining a new hatred for people with an aversion to straightforwardness. “What are you talking about?”
“Shapeshifters. Or anthros– I mean, anthropomorphic animals. Some people like…um, like me, we turn ourselves into them with transmogrification. Or try to.”
Stephanie had a vague recollection about seeing a news segment on them. For the most part, it had played up how insane they had to be to undergo the difficult rituals needed to become one, and other alleged deviant aspects of their lifestyles. The report had seemed thrown-together and sensationalistic, like most news reports. “You wanted to be that?”
“No! I mean, I wanted to be like this sometimes. I was just going for shapeshifter, but something went wrong and I couldn’t change back. So,” he pointed to his muzzle, flexing out the claw on his index finger, “I’m stuck as an anthro. And I didn’t want to be. I mean, I really didn’t want to be. You’d be amazed at how hard it is to get used to not being human. Everything’s made for human mages.”
“Tell me about it.” There was a smile in her eyes– faint and bitter, but there.
“Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. I don’t get to talk to other anthros much.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You probably think I’m a hypocrite. All that talk about resisting a cure and being yourself, and look at what I did to myself.”
She shrugged. “No. You’ve just got more personal experience than most anti-cure advocates do.”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” He returned the smile. “Um, if you’re interested, there are some forums and places I could show to you.” His voice grew quieter and quieter as he went on, making the last few words difficult to make out. “Everyone’s really nice, and they won’t care you didn’t change on purpose. And they can help you deal with it. They really helped me out.”
The bitterness in her smile started to fade away. “I’d like that.”
His ears perked up. “Really? Um, hang on a second, let me send you the links.”
She sorted through them, the other part of her mind on the outside. Dawn was breaking outside, and she could feel exhaustion creeping in, the edge at last taken off her anxiety. After everything that had changed, the sky hadn’t fallen, and the world was still there. She could fly again any time she wanted.
For the first time she could remember, she finally felt free.
What would you do if you lost your family, your face, and your life … and simultaneously got enough money to buy the planet?
Some people would make that trade willingly. I didn’t. Here is what happened to me.
* * *
Everything’s dark. There’s nothing around me. I can’t see, hear, or feel anything, but I’m not distressed and I’m not bored. I just am.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I’m not sure it matters. I’m okay with being here. I’m okay with being myself … whatever I am.
I see a light. Am I supposed to go towards it? I try, but I can’t move. I can’t feel arms or legs or anything.
All of a sudden, this distresses me. And the light’s starting to move away. Come back!
It shines on other things for awhile, then on me. Now it is coming towards me. Shadows are in the way, but I can feel the presence on the other side of the light. It’s excited, but in a bad way, more “scared” than “happy.”
I’m scared when I realize this. Something horrible has happened. What’s happened to me?
I feel its heart nearly stop when it sees the place where I’m at — it was hoping it’d never find this. Or that someone else would. I feel the shock of confronting death, and I know that I must have died. And it makes me want to cry, but I can’t. I can’t do anything. I can’t even shield myself from the awful feeling of horror and fear, any more than I could keep myself from getting wet underwater. It’s just there, and it’s all over me and all through me, and I can’t do anything but feel it until I’m numb with the pain. I know that my life is over, and I can only sit here and feel how tragic it is.
I feel it searching, looking for- what? I don’t know. It’s just doing this automatically. There’s no emotion behind it. Then it sees me, and something in its heart leaps. Hope?
I begin to fall asleep, but I let the hope touch me, as its hand lifts me off of the place where I rest. Maybe things won’t be all bad … maybe some good will come out of this.
* * *
When I wake up, I see soft, glowing lights, and feel people around me concentrating on something. Concentrating on me. They’re doing something to me. What is it?
I sense that I’m moving. I can’t feel any of them next to me, but I think that they’re making me move. I’m drifting downward, inside of something, and then I land and it’s soft and comfortable here. Is this my new body? Is that what is happening?
Something locks onto me to hold me in place, and for a long moment all I feel is the breathless anticipation of the people around me. Then something’s switched on, and-
* * *
I wake up after five minutes.
Not five minutes of sleep. I wasn’t unconscious. Just five minutes of laying there, not feeling my arms or my legs or being able to see anything. Sort of like how I was before.
When I explain it to people, they think it’s terrible. But it’s not. It’s actually kind of refreshing. It feels genuine somehow, like meditation or introspection. I always “wake up” wishing that I didn’t have to.
I used to enjoy physical activity. Not so much anymore.
I’m sitting in my dad’s chair, at his desk. To one side is the closed door. To the other are floor-to-ceiling windows. The sun is rising, and light plays off of the zen rock garden and black-and-white paintings. Waves are crashing against the coast. It’s high tide.
The computer in front of me looks like a screen that is floating in midair. It’s not, but they made it look that way. My dad was very proud of it. It’s got his company’s logo, on the metal frame at the bottom.
I look at it, and correct myself. Not his company … my company. The one I own a majority stake in, now. The one that made almost everything that I use in my daily life. My phone … my computer, both hardware and software …
My body.
The screen fades to black, since I haven’t touched it in awhile. It’s glossy and reflective, and I can see myself in it almost like I could in a mirror. There I am … can you see me? The gem, set into my bracelet. The one that doesn’t come off. The gem is deep blue, and if you turn off the lights and cup your hand over it you can just barely see it glow.
That’s me. That’s my soulcrystal. It’s all that I need to think, feel, and remember. Which is good, because it’s all there was left of me after the plane crash.
I still fit into all my old clothes. They’re loose on me now, because I was starting to gain weight from being at college. And I still look like I always did … just more stylized. More plastic. Like a girl crossed with an iPom.
I’d make a great dancing silhouette. I just wouldn’t be able to feel the movement. Not like I could before. Nothing feels right. I didn’t notice it when I stepped on a rock, but five minutes of using the mouse and I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was the same with using the keyboard. I had to adjust the sensitivity, and now I ixxasional
Um.
I occasionally make typos. Because my hands don’t feel the keyboard that well. And my sense of balance works, more or less, but there’s a hair’s-breadth delay between when I lean to one side and when I feel the new direction of gravity. It’s just long enough that it feels “off.”
There are all kinds of other things like that. Maybe they’ll fix them in the next model. Maybe they’ll fix me. They’d better.
I’m going to have to have a new model built for me, because I don’t like how this one looks. Not liking how you look … that’s something all girls can relate to, right? And that’s how I felt while I was designing this one, back when I still had a flesh-and-blood body. I had this long list of things that I didn’t like about myself. My nose was too pointy, my hair was too messy, my toes were crooked …
My toes! Can you believe it? I had flesh-and-blood toes, the only set that I’ve ever had, and I couldn’t stand them because they were off-kilter a fraction of an inch. And this was a big deal, because if a guy saw me with flip-flops on he’d think “Wow, she’s genetically flawed. I’d better pass her up as a potential romantic partner.” Or something like that. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.
So now I have perfect toes, and perfect skin, and a perfect face. And I look at the reflection in the blank, shiny screen, and I don’t recognize myself.
I look like an anime character.
I look like an action figure.
I look like a doll.
Has it ever occurred to you how creepy dolls are?
My brow furrows, and that looks genuine. But it’s not my face. I’m doing that, but it’s not me. It’s like I’m remote-controlling someone. Someone with a giant plastic hair ornament, and bracelets that don’t come off. They have to be there, and I have to have this cord plugged into the side of this thing’s neck so that I won’t have to recharge.
I’d normally have to recharge for a couple of hours each day. But I haven’t for the past week. Because I’ve been sitting here the whole time on the Internet.
I remember what it was like to get uncomfortable with how I was seated. I remember needing to get up and get snacks and things. But I don’t anymore. And you know what? I don’t care. I’m rich now. I can do whatever I want. I can spend an entire day watching cartoon hamsters if I feel like it. Boy, can those things dance.
I want to dance.
I stand up and unplug the power cord. There’s no rush of blood from my head, and barely any disorientation. One second I’m seated, the next I’m not.
As I’m setting the cord on the desk, I notice it’s covered in dust. Then I notice my arm is covered in dust too. And my bracelets, and my hair, and that thing on the back of my head. I run my finger over it and I can’t feel much, because I turned fingertip sensitivity down. But I bring my hand back in front of my face and the tip of my finger is gray.
Has it really been only a week? How long have I been in here?
I feel like I just crawled out of a grave. I jump away from the desk and shake myself vigorously, running my hands through my hair, dusting off my shoulders and arms, trying to get this stuff off of me. I’m scared and weirded out at the same time, and-
I fall over.
Too much delay, I guess. Too much lag. I couldn’t feel which way was up in time to stabilize myself. Now I’m sitting here on the floor watching dust settle around me, the sun at my back, and thinking how otherworldly it is. The whole room is silent. No breathing … no heartbeat.
You know that sound that you hear when there’s no other sound? That high-pitched whine? I can’t even hear that.
I’m so weirded out that I don’t want to think about it. Instead I get up, reach for the phone on my desk, brush the dust off of the glass screen / faceplate and touch the on-screen controls. There’s an external speaker on this thing … I want to hear some music.
I put on one of my favorite songs, one that I’ve always loved dancing to. The kind of dancing you only do when there’s nobody else around. And I try to dance, I really do. But I stumble and stagger and fall, just like last time.
I try to adjust my rhythm. I slow myself down. I swing myself more deliberately, more consciously, trying to feel the movement. But I can’t. The feelings just aren’t the same. It’s like eating an unsalted corn chip, or drinking watered-down juice. I don’t know how to explain it. There’s no rush of movement … there’s just movement.
I sigh, but even that isn’t satisfying. And I’m leaning against the wall, but I’m neither worn out nor excited.
I go to pick up my phone, and it occurs to me that the screen is all fogged up. How can that be? I touch the screen to unlock it, and watch the fog melt around my fingertip …
Wait. I think I get it.
My phone runs hotter than my (or my dad’s) computer does because it’s smaller.
The fog is melting around my fingertip because it’s heated too. It has to be … PomPhones have a capacitive touchscreen. That means that they detect body heat. My body is made by the same company, so I have to have warmth in my fingertips in order to use one of our phones. But aside from that, I don’t have any internal warmth. My body temperature is the same as room temperature.
I’m standing here in a freezing room in probably late autumn, and I only just now realized it.
I feel an almost physical chill. As though I walked into a room with a dead body in it. Except this is worse, because it’s my own.
I walk over to the window. There are no birds. There are no animals. There’s just sand, and rocks, and a sunrise over the sea. There is a tree, but it’s dead.
I take a deep breath — my first in awhile — and exhale onto the window. Nothing. No fog.
No heat. No life.
Just a room full of objects.
I want to cry, but I can’t.
* * *
I sit, motionless, on the backless couch in the foyer. My hands are clasped in my lap.
I can’t hear anything except the clock ticking. I can barely feel my clothes or my weight pressed into the seat. I’m not uncomfortable. I don’t want to fidget. My nose doesn’t need scratched. I blink, but it’s automatic. Besides that, I’m perfectly still.
I’m mentally retreated way inside my own head … or soulcrystal, anyway. I’ve disassociated myself from the person-shaped object that I’m attached to. It’s carrying me around, but it’s not me and it’s not alive. I’ve accepted that. It’s taken me a few hours, and they’re going to need to replace the upstairs windows now, but I think I’ve accepted that.
My hands and knees are still scratched up. I hope that my friends don’t notice that.
The clock ticks.
I hear an electric car outside, softly prowling up the curving driveway to stop in front of the porch. Car doors open and shut, and flip-flops crunch gravel beneath them, then step on the stones leading up to the house.
Somehow I can’t bring myself to get up, even though my friends are here now. I just want to sit here. I’m not sure why.
The doorbell rings.
The servant’s shoes click, louder and louder, then she walks past and opens the front door towards me. I can’t see through it.
“Come in,” she says. I hear flip-flops slapping inside.
My old roommates step into view, and I feel like I’m physically tensing up inside. How is that possible? Is it like the feelings you’d have from a phantom limb? Either way, I can’t bring myself to look up at them. My eyes find the floor and their flip-flops, and my hands start to fidget with nervousness. What do they see me as?
I feel a hand on my shoulder. The tension leaves my body … or at least my spirit.
“Are you okay, Claris?” Lena asks.
“I think so,” I say.
I stand up and look at her. She’s a bit shorter than I remember her. She and Sam are both wearing loose shirts and knee-length shorts, but she’s dressed in light colors to compliment her hair. Her aquamarine soulcrystal hangs on a pendant around her neck, and unlike mine it glows visibly.
Sam’s wearing a band t-shirt, and her soulcrystal is nowhere to be seen. She brushes her unkempt black hair out of her eyes, before handing me a gift-wrapped box. “Got you something.”
“Um … ” My eyes flick around, at the marble floor and the black and white modern art on the wall. Then I see Sam’s impassive face, and I know that she knows what I’m thinking.
I take the box from her and open it up, the glossy wrapping paper squeaking and crinkling under my fingers. Inside is a dome-shaped hat, like a cold weather cap, with faux fox ears sewn onto it. It has no tag.
It’s whimsical. It’s silly. It’s also hand-made, and the kind of present we used to exchange when we were rooming together. I take it in my hands, setting the box aside, and it feels soft and organic and real. Then I put it on, and I look in the mirror that spans the wall behind the couch. I like it.
“Thank you,” I say, and glance at her face in the mirror.
“Welcome,” she says, and examines the couch. Sam never was much for speaking.
I look back at myself. Something about the sight of this object wearing a hat just seems off.
“Your house is nice,” Lena says, grasping at straws conversationally.
“It was my dad’s house.”
“Ah yes, I’m sorry … “
“It’s okay.” I’m still looking in the mirror. Lena’s face is nervous, but mine is impassive as I try to figure out what doesn’t look right. It’s not the hat, I decide. It’s this robot body, and its undetachable accessories and the way my old clothes look different on it. The hat is the kind of thing I always used to wear … it’s very me. But this thing it’s on top of is not.
Looking in the mirror, my appearance matters to me in a way that it hasn’t since high school. But this time, I’m not worried about what others think. I’m worried about what I think. I want to feel comfortable with my appearance.
Seeing this thing that looks like me but isn’t makes me uncomfortable.
My friends are uncomfortable too, because I’m staring into the mirror with a blank expression on my face. Out of the corner of my eye, Lena coughs. “So, well, um, you invited us here … “
“Yes. I did.”
“What would you like to do?”
I look at the doll that my self is attached to, for another long second. Then I decide. “Let’s go shopping.”
Lena is taken aback. “Shopping? We, um … “
“I’ll pay.”
“Are you sure this is such a … “
“Heck yeah.” I give my fox-eared self an annoyed look. “Let’s go.”
“Our car or yours?” Sam looks up.
“Yours. I shouldn’t be driving right now.”
We walk out to Lena’s sedan, and I glance around at brown grass and dead trees, and at the rocks of the curving shoreline. Wind blows past my ears, and I watch my roommates shiver before climbing in the back seat, remembering what moist, salt air smells like.
For a second there’s this terrible pang that almost makes me double over, as I realize I’ll never feel that again. I choke it down, though, because I don’t want to have to deal with it right now. Instead, I shut the door and look out at it, and remember.
My friends climb in next, and shut the doors and buckle their seatbelts. With the doors shut, the crashing of the waves is as muffled as my physical feelings are.
* * *
We spend the next half-hour driving. At first I feel nervous, because of what I am and because this is the first time I’ve spoken with my friends in awhile. But Lena can tell what I’m going through, and distracts me like the good friend she is. Pretty soon we’re talking about her vegan cooking experiments, and Sam’s crush on the lead singer of this new indie band, and that one crazy professor we all love to hate.
“He wears his soulcrystal in his class ring!” Lena exclaims, while driving. “It’s like the school is his life or something.”
“I think you could say that he has no life,” Sam chips in, from the seat next to me.
“I’m not even alive anymore, and I have more of a life than he does,” I say.
They laugh, and they aren’t self-conscious about it. It makes me feel like myself again, just a little. I’m glad for that, but I still feel uncomfortable with my appearance. I’m hoping that this trip will help with that.
They go on talking about something else. But right now I’m looking out the window, at the buildings and cars and people everywhere. We’re headed to a downtown mall, and there’s a lot of traffic and there are a lot of stops and starts. Swarms of pedestrians cross the street at each red light, and the sun glints off of windows and worn soulcrystals. I rub my finger across mine, and remind myself that as long as I-
Huh. That’s odd.
Two of the people out there crossing the street are wearing anime cat or fox ears, like I am. And I think one of them’s wearing a tail. Is there an anime convention in town and I missed it?
We drive past, and I look back at that one. Yep, he’s wearing a tail.
Something inside me feels lighter, as we turn to pull into the parking garage. I may not feel like myself, looking like this, but something tells me I won’t feel out of place.
* * *
As it turns out, I do.
When I get out of the car, I stand there watching a woman getting something out of the trunk of her car beside us. And she glances up at me, then does a very quick double-take because I’m watching her. After that she won’t look in my direction, and her hands are shaking with nervousness.
Sam gets her cellphone out of her messenger bag and checks the time on it, and Lena arranges her purse and shuts the car door. “Alright,” she says, “let’s go.”
We walk past the woman and her baby’s stroller, and I look back at her. She was watching me go, and she turns back to face her trunk, embarrassed.
“Did anyone see that?” I say, quietly.
“See what?” Sam asks.
“Never mind.”
We get inside, and the two of them go to freshen up while I stand there at the directory. I fold my arms, feeling awkward. And while people are still coming in and out of the building, I have the directory to myself the whole time. I guess everyone else knows where everything is already?
I know that I’m not imagining it when we go into the first store, and the clerk there ignores me. She’s talking to both of my friends, laughing with them, but she doesn’t look in my direction even when Lena introduces me. She just sort of nods her head at me. Is this what it’s like to be a member of a minority race? Or wheelchair-bound, or autistic. To be aware of yourself and your surroundings, but ignored by everyone else around you.
My friends take me by the hand and smile at me, and we head out into the racks of clothes. But I am still thinking about that, and I’m quiet because of it. And they hold up different items of clothing next to me, and talk and laugh with each other about it, but all I can think of is children playing with dolls.
I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of them. I’ve always been like this. Sometimes I go quiet for seemingly no reason. I’m glad they didn’t try to prod me to talk to them, or start to act uncomfortable that I wasn’t. Some people do that because they’re oblivious, but they do that because they are comfortable with my presence, even when I’m not talking to them.
I’m not really depressed, anyway. Just sort of resigned. And standing here now in the changing room, trying on all these clothes, I feel like I’m playing with dolls myself. It’s like I’m the biggest, most expensive doll ever.
If I disassociate myself from the object I see in the mirror, it’s actually kind of fun. But it’s fun in a horribly depersonalizing way. And in the end I just stand there staring at myself again, and not thinking anything. Detached from my body, detached from myself, detached from the world around me. A non-person, inside and out.
I remember the ocean floor, and wonder if it might not have been better for me to have just stayed there.
A knock on the door. “Claris, are you okay in there?” It’s Lena’s voice.
I don’t say anything.
“You should come show us how you look,” she says, nervousness in her voice.
At that I start changing clothes again, putting back on the things I was already wearing. When I come out, I hand her the pile of things they picked out, and she takes it all, confused.
“This was a bad idea,” I say. “Sorry.”
Then I walk out, and stop in front of the store, waiting for them to put everything back and apologize to the clerk. I’d feel bad for them if I weren’t overwhelmed by-
That guy walked right past me wearing a tail and ears. And his girlfriend was wearing them too.
I look after them, and way out down the walkway I see what looks like someone wearing one of those sports mascot-style costumes. It looks interesting. Why can’t my eyesight zoom in on things? I’m a robot, aren’t I?
I want to go look, but I’m waiting here for my friends. Either way, I’m fascinated by it. Something is definitely up.
“Sorry,” Lena says, hurrying out with Sam to come join me. “I-”
“Does anyone know if there’s, like, an anime convention in town?” I’m not looking at her, but am watching to see if that suited person will come out from behind a kiosk.
“No, why?”
Sam coughs.
I glance over at her. “Yes?”
She seems awkward, and looks away. “There’s, um, this thing, for like, artists and costumers and stuff … ” Her voice trails off.
I’m looking at her expectantly. “Yes?”
She stumbles over her words. “They, like, draw people as animals, and dress up as them … “
Lena’s eyes light up. “Is this that furry thing you were talking about?”
“Yes.” Her face turns red.
“What’s that?” I say.
“It’s a convention Sam wanted to go to,” Lena says. “But you called us and asked us to come over there, and we hadn’t heard from you in over a month.”
Sam kicks at something on the floor.
I glance back over my shoulder, briefly, trying to see the costumed person. Then I look back at Sam. “Did you want to go to it?” I ask.
Sam coughs, and this time she sounds a bit more confident, even though she’s not looking at me. “No, I’d like to spend time with you.”
“I’ll come,” I said.
She makes a sound like she’s choking. “Er, what?”
“Sounds like fun!” Lena says. “Can we go get something to eat first, though?”
“Sure thing,” I say.
Lena leads the way, and Sam looks like she’s in a daze. I find myself wondering why.
* * *
Piles of fried noodles and vegetables behind glass, and a woman’s accented voice asking people to accept free samples. I can scent grease and sauces, but it seems dry and distant without being able to inhale the warm, wet steam.
Sam and Lena are hesitant about getting in line. “You don’t have to wait here while we’re eating,” Lena says.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I wanted to look at something, but I’ll come back once you’re sitting down.”
“Okay,” Lena says.
I walk back towards the entrance to the food court, around packed tables and people carrying trays of food, trying to find a place to sit. Most of the people are my age, and a lot of them are wearing ears and a tail or some other animal-themed accessory.
I reach up to the top of my head, and feel the ears-hat as best as I can with these fingers. I look like I’m here for the convention, I realize, even though I’m not a “furry.” And I don’t have one of the badges these people have, with the illustrations on them, but it’s plausible that I could be hiding mine somewhere.
Can an object be a furry, I wonder? What do these people think of me?
I look out at an emptier spot in the main corridor, near the information booth and the motorized cart pool. There’s a person there wearing a gray wolf … no, fox suit. And he’s hugging people and doing a pantomime routine for them. There’s a girl standing nearby him, watching, and I wonder if they’re some kind of duo. Like how they have the buddy system for outdoor activities.
I stand there watching for some time, from far enough away that they don’t notice me. There’s a strange feeling inside me as I watch, and I’m not sure what it is. The sight just seems fantastic, in the literal sense … like something straight out of fantasy.
How is that, I wonder? How come it feels real … how come these fabric suits and accessories seem so magical? Is it just because I don’t normally see people wearing them? Or is it because somehow, it’s just close enough that it feels like it would in real life, to be around such characters? Even though they’re not really real … they’re just people wearing an object-
Something clicks.
This robot shell has been driving me crazy, because it does such a bad job of pretending to be human. But I don’t have to pretend to be human.
People are scared of me because I’m handicapped. I’m scared and nervous and frustrated with myself, because I’m handicapped. My body’s an inferior copy of a real human one, in so many ways that it’s aggravating. And imagining going through life like this is driving me to despair.
But I don’t have to do that.
I don’t have to be less than what I was. I can just accept that I’m different.
And for the first time, I’m starting to see how being different could be very, very fun.
They’re starting to walk away now. Without thinking, I stride towards them, trying to catch up.
“Excuse me … ” I say, within about ten feet. They don’t hear me.
I step around them, towards the girl that the suiter is with. “Excuse me,” I say.
She’s a little surprised, and he feigns shock, acting like he’s taken aback and putting one paw over his muzzle. “Yes?” she asks, smiling at me.
“I, um … ” I can barely look at them, I’m so nervous.
The costumer gestures with his hand-paws, to invite me in a cheerful way to continue. I take my hat off and clutch it to my chest, wringing it in my hands as the words spill out. “I was, um, in a bad accident recently … as you can tell … “
He puts both paws to his muzzle, as though he’s sorry to hear that.
“And I’m not really a furry, and I’m not even going to the convention that you are, but I thought … I, um … “
“Yes?” the girl asks.
I close my eyes, and force myself to hold still. “It’s so frustrating not being human anymore. I want to cry sometimes, and I can’t even do that. But I’m looking at the costumes that people are wearing here, and … “
“You want to get your own fursuit?” she asks.
“No.” I shake my head, and look up at her. “I want to … I … “
Now, I know my new body can’t cry. But I must have sounded like I was about to tear up, because the fursuiter spread his arms wide just then.
I hugged him tight, pressing my face into his shoulder and imagining myself crying on it.
Sort of like how he was imagining being a fox …
But for me, and for him, and for the people around watching us, that was enough.
* * *
I have a tail. I can feel it behind me, laying on the same hard surface I’m sitting on.
But I don’t have a head. It’s a little disorienting.
I kick my feet and swish my tail experimentally, and I feel my tail brush up against things. I swing it more vigorously, and I feel them being knocked away and sent flying. This is fun! I keep doing it for a few seconds until something raps on my knee, and it occurrs to me that I’m probably interfering. I hold still.
I feel something lower onto my neck, and a second later there are hands on my shoulders, holding me in place as something locks onto me and is tightened. Then-
*blink*
I’m inside Sam’s parents’ basement. There are stone walls, and windows up near the ceiling. I can see Lena’s arm holding me still, and Sam standing there holding a tool of some kind, and wearing overalls. She’s folding her arms, and giving me an unamused look.
“Welcome back!” Lena says, just outside of my field of vision.
“Thanks,” I say, and swish my tail happily. It knocks something off the table and onto the floor, rattling and clanging.
“Stop with the tail!” Sam exclaims, and goes to pick it up.
I put one hand behind me so I can turn around and look, careful not to bump my tail. I can see my muzzle in front of my field of vision, but it’s blurry because I’m not focusing on it. I blink twice while looking at the jar of tiny nails that Sam sets back on the table, and there’s a rushing, disorienting sensation as my eyesight zooms in until I can read the label.
I blink once to go back to normal vision, with another rush of false movement, and shake my head to clear it. “I think the zoom lenses need to be calibrated,” I say.
“Feels like you’re accelerating?” Sam asks, tapping controls on her tablet.
“Yes,” I say, and nod.
“That isn’t hardware-related.” She looks up for a second. “It’s ghost sensations from your soulcrystal. You’re used to being inside a body that feels that way when it accelerates, so even though your accelerometer stays still your core thinks you’re whooshing forward.”
“Interesting … “
Lena steps back and looks at me. I feel a little self-conscious, and start kicking my legs off the edge of the table again. I want to see what I look like, but I haven’t been offered a mirror yet, and I’m too nervous to just look down.
There are interesting displays along the edge of my field of vision, though. (I asked for them this time around, because I wanted to see what was going on with my hardware instead of having it isolated from me.) One of them looks like a gauge, and this red line is rising on it.
“Um … ” I look over at Sam. “I think I’m starting to overheat.”
“That’s because you’re a gaming PC on stilts wrapped in a fursuit, and I haven’t turned on your cooling systems yet.” She taps the screen on her tablet with what looks like a pen. “Engaging air cooling … “
I’m startled by a sudden rush of breath, as air comes pouring in through my nostrils.
” … and now, liquid cooling.”
I hear a gurgle of flowing liquid, and look around to see where it’s coming from, finally taking hold of the tube that’s plugged into my back along with the cables. A moment later I feel the extra weight, and the cold flow of liquids inside me. It feels like drinking a glass of ice water, after a day in the sun.
“When it gets too hot, it’ll evaporate out through your fur and your breath,” Sam tells me. “You’ll need to refill it with bottles of liquid coolant, although water will do in a pinch.”
“How do I refill it?” I ask, in between breaths.
“I’ll set up the external tank in your house, and show you how to use it. If you’re out and about, though, you can just drink it. Carry a bottle with you, so you don’t have to-”
She goes on about galvanic corrosion and tap water, but I’m just sitting there kicking my feet and swishing my tail a little, and grinning like an idiot. I know all the parts that went into me; I paid for them myself. There’s nothing special about them. But sitting here feeling my chest rise and fall with each breath as delicious, cold fluid pumps through me, I feel something that I haven’t in months.
I feel alive.
And I have a tail now. I run my hand over it, and feel how fluffy it is. I’m not going to get over that anytime soon.
“Would you like to see yourself in the mirror?” Lena asks.
I nod to her, and Sam unplugs me from the coolant tank and her PC. Then they both help me down, and I try to walk on unsteady legs. It feels like I’m walking on the very tips of my toes, and my brain- well, my soulcrystal thinks they can’t possibly support my weight. I stumble and catch myself on the table, and Lena catches my elbow and helps me back upright. But then I take the leap of faith, balancing on digitigrade feet as my tail swishes behind me, and it works just fine.
I walk, slowly and carefully, around the table to the full-length mirror, as my friends follow behind me. Then I stop right in front of it, hesitating even though I’ve already seen my new hardware from outside. It was so beautiful, and the thought of facing the fact that I am that now makes me nervous.
“Go ahead,” Lena says.
I hold my breath, and step in front of the mirror.
There I am, looking for all the world like a bluish-gray fox fursuiter. One with a swishing tail, and twitching ears, and eyes that track what they’re looking at. Artificial fur covers me from head to toe, soft and luxuriant, except for my pawpads and the soulcrystal set into my chest. I suddenly want to hug myself.
I turn around every which way, staring at myself in awe, admiring the craftsmanship and unable to get over how it moves when I do. The realism is striking … I lean in close and stare at my face in the mirror, watching my eyes track and muzzle drop open. I look almost like a real animal. But what I resemble most is a life-sized, very high-quality plush toy. I’m safely outside of Uncanny Valley.
“Is it to your liking?” Lena asks.
“One second … ” I take a deep breath, and then exhale on the mirror.
It fogs up.
I want to cry now, but I still can’t do that. So instead I just hug them both. “Thank you,” I say.
It feels like hugging an enormous plushie, and is the best feeling I’ve ever had. Because this time I’m the plushie, and I can’t think of anything else that I’d rather be.
See that link up there that says “Worldbuilding”? (You can’t if you’re on Dreamwidth or LiveJournal, but … you know what I mean.) Just click it, and it’ll take you to a big sourcebook of worldbuilding info that will allow you to write stories set in any of our worlds. At least, it will once we’re done with it!
Right now the only article up there is the source document to the Rebirth universe, which is the world that Bat Girl was set in. Here’s that universe’s premise, in a nutshell:
What if you died and came back to life as an anthropomorphic animal? You might never be able to go back to your old life … but would you want to?
It’s kind of a superhero-y thing. Go check it out!
And yes, we really do want you to write stories set in this world. Half the fun of writing TF fiction is letting other writers share in it, and we want to do that too. Come write with us!
What if you died and came back to life as an anthropomorphic animal? You might never be able to go back to your old life … but would you want to?
The Rebirth universe is licensed CC-By-SA by Jared Spurbeck, aka Tachyon Feathertail. Read on to find out how you can write your own stories set in this world.
Worldbuilding Summary
Stories set in this world
How to write a story set in this world
So what is the Rebirth universe like?
Have you ever watched the TV show Heroes? I’ve only seen bits and pieces of it, and I’ve heard that its recent eps aren’t very good. But I loved the idea it started out with, of a realistic take on a world where people suddenly got superpowers.
Rebirth’s world is a lot like that one, except that there are a lot of people with superpowers compared to how many there are in Heroes. Like maybe one in a thousand, which means there are thousands of them in most first-world countries and millions of them worldwide.
This is the first generation of people who were born with superpowers, and while most of them aren’t as flashy as those featured in comic books they’re all cause for concern … at least, among “normal” people. How do we keep supers under control? There should be a law …
Where does rebirthing come into play?
‘Morphs, short for zoomorphs or anthropomorphs, are one of the most common kinds of superpowered individuals. Remember how the cheerleader in Heroes could recover from any injury? ‘Morphs are sort of like that. Even if their heart has stopped and their brain has stopped functioning, they’ll all of a sudden “wake up” several hours after their deaths, taking in gasping breaths through newly-patched lungs and remembering their demise in vivid detail. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is not uncommon in ‘Morphs who have rebirthed.
So why call them ‘Morphs? Well, their bodies don’t just heal themselves; they also assimilate foreign DNA rapidly, like by absorbing it through the bloodstream. It has to be reasonably close to human DNA, however. Insect bites and infections won’t turn you into bugs or bacteria.
All ‘Morphs are born as ‘Morphs, but they don’t know it for awhile. Sometimes they find out when they suddenly start growing the features of their family pet, or of people or animals that they work with. Other times their abilities lay dormant, even their healing factor, and are triggered all at once by their rebirth. Imagine waking up after being mauled by an animal, only to realize that you now look like your attacker …
What’s it like being a ‘Morph?
Once a ‘Morph has absorbed a particular genome, she finds it easiest to be in a physical form that is a cross between it and her other(s). She can assume any combination she likes, with a bit of practice, but if she is killed (temporarily or otherwise), she will revert to a form that is a cross between all of them. ‘Morphs also revert to this form while asleep.
‘Morphs can change shape rapidly, as their forms are extremely plastic. Their feet can change shape from planti- to digitigrade in seconds, and they can store tails inside their spines, extending them when needed. They can’t conceal extra limbs, though … ‘Morphs can grow wings (and regrow lost limbs), but it takes at least a week or two, as they have to eat and replenish the nutrients needed. Once a ‘Morph has wings, she has them for life unless they are amputated.
Sadly, having easily-mutable DNA comes at a price … ‘Morphs are very susceptible to cancer and other genetic diseases, and often don’t live past their teens. The longest-lived ‘Morphs are in their thirties and forties, and are already coming down with geriatric conditions. Eating organic food and avoiding synthetic chemicals and plastics might help, but “natural” things can contaminate their DNA also, and it may be awhile before anyone figures out a way of helping them.
How do other people see ‘Morphs?
Most people are too confused by the sudden appearance of ‘morphs (and other, more powerful supers) to have very concrete opinions about them. Plus they’ve got an economic meltdown to deal with, on top of things. But there’s no law against discriminating against ‘Morphs … in fact, they aren’t allowed to perform certain jobs, legally.
What kinds of jobs? Well, when people found out what ‘Morphs could do, they were quickly barred from any profession involving children, the elderly, hospitals, blood banks and animal care. ‘Morph teachers and nurses lost their jobs in most countries, and pet owners were forced to give their animals up for adoption or put them to sleep.
These laws are debated, yes, but what few debates there are are always along the lines of “How do we keep these things under control?” And if there’s any opposition to them, it’s on account of those laws might infringe on other people’s rights.
There are some European countries that aren’t quite so hostile towards ‘Morphs, but even in more tolerant ones they’re starting to implement mandatory genetic screening for all citizens. Canada and the UK have already made it a prerequisite for receiving government health care. There is no genetic screening in the United States as of yet, but people are gunning for it.
That seems a bit harsh!
Don’t think that these laws exist for no reason … there have been recorded incidents of ‘Morphs taking DNA forcibly, even from endangered species and other human beings. Environmentalists are up in arms about it, as are animal welfare advocates and park rangers.
Many ‘Morphs — possibly most — changed by accident. There’s a lot of ignorance of how they can have their genes contaminated; just because blood is the easiest doesn’t mean it’s the only way. There are a lot of cat and dog ‘morphs. But they’re not as sensationalized, so there’s a lot of distrust.
‘Morphs aren’t arrested on sight for being criminals, even if they appear animalistic. But they’re seen in about the same way as a punk with a purple mohawk, twelve piercings and tattoos up and down each bare arm. People look at you and they just know you’ve been up to no good, and they want you to stay far away from them.
Any questions?
If there’s anything you’d like to ask, just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you! I’d be happy to help authors write stories set in this world.
The good news: We’re doing writing and we’re still alive! This week’s story is for Yurodivy, and it’s called “Bat Girl.” Here’s the blurb: “Peter Parker could do backflips untrained after he got bit by a spider. Would a real animal-themed superhero have things so easy? I don’t think so!”
You can read it by clicking here!
Anyway, Yuro’s finishing up a commission, and I’ve got two more that should take me to the end of November. Which leads us to …
The bad news: Things are a lot more hectic than we expected, and neither of us have much time for writing requests. We’ve got like a dozen people who want stories, and some people really want them … but not all of them can pay, for reasons from “Don’t have the money” to “Living in a repressive military dictatorship.” I wish I was kidding.
These people have waited months for their stories, and I don’t think they’re getting them anytime soon. But we want people to be able to become their fursonas, even if they can’t pay for a story. So what do you think we should do? I’ve got some ideas about it, but I’d like to hear your thoughts first.
And don’t forget to read the new story!
A light rain misted onto Carol’s glasses, as she removed her helmet and put down the motorcycle’s kickstand. What she could see of the sky was gray, and all around her was the sound of water showering on thick forest leaves.
Gravel crunched under her feet, as she walked around the ranger’s jeep and past the sign that said “WILDLIFE RESCUE.” She took a moment to steel her nerves, before walking up to the front porch and knocking on the old metal screen door.
Footsteps, from inside the building. Then the ranger came up to the door. She didn’t look much older than Carol, but she was a lot taller, and her khaki uniform made her seem much more professional.
Her voice sounded like it had on the telephone. “You’re Leslie, right?”
Carol nodded, a little too quickly, and looked away.
“Well, c’mon in!” The screen door pushed open with a creak, and Carol held it open before stepping in. It was not much warmer inside.
“Let’s see about getting you set up.” The ranger went deeper into the building. Carol adjusted her glasses and looked around. It was an old building, dusty but with lots of natural light, and it smelled like zoo animals …
Oh. That was why. The imported Egyptian Fruit Bat hung silently inside its floor-to-ceiling cage, which took up about a third of the room. Toys dotted the floor, covered in newspaper clippings, and pieces of oranges and shards of rind hung on a string made the room smell faintly like air freshener.
Carol’s gaze, though, was fixed on the bat itself. All she could see was its softly-furred backside, and its brown wings wrapped tightly around it. It was only about half a foot long, and there was a metal mesh cage in the way. But Carol thought it was beautiful.
Footsteps came up from behind her, and stopped. “You like the Rousette, huh?”
Carol blinked and turned around, broken out of her reverie. “Huh?”
“The Egyptian Rousette. The bat.” The ranger was carrying an armful of medical paraphenalia, including a syringe.
“Oh. Um, yeah … ” Carol was looking at what she was carrying.
“You know they’re the only large bats that use echolocation.” The ranger tore open a package, and affixed a needle to the syringe.
“Yes.” Carol couldn’t help but watch.
“You like bats?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I think they’re cute.”
Carol just nodded, and swallowed.
The ranger finished what she was doing, and started wrapping a long elastic cord around Carol’s arm to cut off the blood flow. “Okay, Leslie, now hold still. This is going to sting a little, so we only want to have to do this once.”
Carol felt the pressure build up uncomfortably, and watched as the ranger got the needle ready. She closed her eyes and clenched one fist as it pierced her arm; then it got pulled out, and immediately a cloth bandage was pressed over it. “Hold that while I get you a Band-Aid.”
Carol held it in place, and let out her breath. While the ranger’s back was turned, she pulled the gauze away and stole a glance at her arm. A drop of blood had soaked into the gauze, but her arm had already healed.
She hurriedly replaced it as the ranger came back, and put an adhesive bandage over the gauze. Then the ranger untied the cord holding back her blood flow, and put it back in the first aid kit before holding up the syringe, partway full with Carol’s blood.
“It’ll take us a day or two to get the test results back,” she said, squinting at it. “You can start volunteering before then, though, so no worries about that.”
The ranger went back down the hallway carrying the first aid kit and syringe, and Carol followed, stealing a glance over her shoulder back towards the bat as she went. A little ways down the hall was an infirmary, and the ranger put up her gear there, and set the vial of Carol’s blood inside a rack next to empty vials. Carol took note of that.
“So … what will I be doing, here?” she asked, struggling to find the words.
“Oh, it depends. See-”
The phone rang.
“Hold on one sec.” The ranger left the infirmary, and went down the hall into another room.
Carol’s eyes fell on the vials, and on the first aid gear right beside them.
* * *
Carol unlocked the bat cage, with the key that she’d found in the ranger’s desk, before quietly stepping inside. The ranger had a loud voice, and it carried all the way out here and drowned out what she was doing. It sounded like she was on the phone with a friend … or a relative. Or an ex-boyfriend, judging from her tone of voice.
The bat stayed sleeping and motionless as Carol tore open the wrapper in her mouth, and got out one of the long needles. Affixing it to an empty syringe, she approached the bat and held still for a second, conflicting thoughts in her head.
It’s so cute, all huddled and sleeping like that …
I wonder where I ought to stick it at.
Just a tiny bundle of fur and wings …
How much should I draw? Will I hurt the thing?
I want to pet it, right now.
I need to do this. But how?
Taking a deep breath, she stepped forward and took hold of the bat in one hand, then stuck the needle in it with the other and drew out a tiny amount of blood. It turned to look at her, eyes wide with shock, and she sweated as she withdrew the syringe and unclipped the needle from it.
Carol had almost gotten to the door when it started chirping at her, loud. Now she was really sweating. She tried to get the lock back in place-
“You can’t turn your back for one second these days, can you?”
Carol froze.
Heavy, booted footsteps came up the hall behind her. One hand grabbed her shoulder and turned her around, hard. “Alright,” the ranger said. “Let’s see it.”
Carol’s heart was beating so hard it felt like it would give out. Slowly, carefully, she reached into her pocket and withdrew a vial of blood, then handed it to the ranger.
The ranger snatched it up without looking. “I don’t know why I give people the benefit of the doubt anymore. I was just telling my friend the other day that we shouldn’t judge people like you. Now I’m not so sure.”
There was a long moment of silence. The ranger did not speak again until Carol looked up, and saw her hard, stern face.
“Get out.”
* * *
Carol hopped down the wet, wooden steps and out into the rain, filled with adrenaline and trying to keep from showing it. She was scared, and she didn’t think she would stop being scared until she’d gotten ten miles away. Her guilt barely registered, she was so scared.
But she was also excited, because she’d gotten what she came for.
After getting back on her motorcycle and pushing the kickstand back up, she checked in her pocket to make sure. The tiny vial of bat blood was still there. And the vial of her blood was not, anymore.
The screen door pushed open, and Carol hastily threw on her helmet. A second after she’d gotten it in place, a rodent-like snout pushed out the front beneath the visor.
“Hey! What do you think you-”
Carol took off, kicking gravel up from her tires, and sped back towards the main road, a whiplike tail trailing out behind her.
* * *
Carol knew she couldn’t go out the main gate, so she took a barely-marked dirt trail out through the west side. After making sure she was not being pursued, she unwrapped another needle and injected herself with the bat’s blood, wrapping the needle and syringe up afterwards and pocketing them to throw away later.
She forced herself into human form and got back on her motorcycle, at the edge of the park where the dirt trail just met the road. No cars were coming, and there were no traffic noises for as far as she could hear. Just water dripping off leaves.
Carol grinned to herself, inside her helmet, and noted the time on her watch. It’d been fewer than three hours since she’d set out. At this rate, she’d be home by dinner.
The drive to the wildlife rescue had taken two hours. The drive back took six.
She didn’t take the main roads, for fear of being spotted. But in under an hour Carol started to feel lethargic, as though she’d been running all day. At first she dismissed it as being the effects of stress, and tried to settle into her ride and enjoy herself. But after not too long, she realized that she could barely keep her eyes open. It was the middle of the day, and she was starting to fall asleep.
Carol pulled off the road at a fast food restaurant, somewhere on the edge of a town in the hills, and almost let her motorcycle fall over she was so tired. There wasn’t a line at this time of day, so she walked up and ordered something small just so she could sit down. While getting a straw she noticed they had a free newspaper sitting on one of the counters, so she grabbed it on the way to her seat.
She only managed a few bites of her snack before realizing that she was about to faceplant on top of it. Stretching out in her seat, she took off her rainjacket and used that as a pillow. Then she covered her face with the newspaper, half-sitting and half-laying down.
Carol only meant to rest for a few minutes. She was used to feeling drowsy in the middle of the day, and laying down for a half-hour or so and feeling much better afterwards. Besides, it wasn’t like it would be easy to fall asleep on a hard bench like this …
* * *
She tries to wrestle the gun away from him, but he is too strong. He slams her against the wall, scraping her knuckles across the brick. Then he kicks her away when she lets go, smacking her into the concrete.
She looks up through the haze and the ringing in her ears, up into the barrel, and he-
* * *
“Ma’am?”
Carol gasped for breath, her dream cut short.
There were sounds all around her. Sounds of sizzling, and beeping, and people talking and eating and walking around. And deeply interesting smells, of grease and dead things that were good to eat. Where was she, again?
“Ma’am.”
Something shook her shoulder and she recoiled, jumping to her feet up on the hard plastic seat and putting her hands against the windowblinds. The newspaper fell away, as she stared in fear … down at the middle-aged woman, with a restaurant uniform on and a cleaning rag in one hand.
If the woman was startled, she gave no sign of it. “Ma’am, we’ve let you sleep there for hours. People are coming in now, and you’re making noise and it’s scaring them.”
Carol’s heart was still beating fast. She could barely remember why she was there. The gunbarrel seemed more real, and she felt like it was still pointed at her.
“You need to order something if you’re going to stay here longer. And if you’re going to sleep, you need to get yourself home or to a motel. Okay?”
The words were starting to make sense. She realized that people were looking at her, and it would’ve scared her if she hadn’t just been afraid for her life.
“Okay?”
” … okay.”
Carol slid back down into her seat, as the cleaning lady went on and washed the next table. She took a deep breath to center herself, still ignoring the people looking at her. Then she looked down, and her eyes fell on the meal that she’d barely touched.
Putting her rainjacket over one arm with shaking hands, she got up and wadded up her trash and tossed it into the bin. Then she went into the ladies’ room to clean up, her face turning red as she tried to ignore the stares on her back.
There was no one in there. Which was good, because when Carol saw her reflection she jumped up and gasped, and dropped her coat on the floor. Her face was a hybrid of bat and opossum features, darkly furred with radar dish ears and a pink nose on a long snout. Her arms were covered with fur, and her tail was whipping against the wall in her panic.
She fought to control her breathing, as the reality of what had just happened struck her. They saw me! They all saw me! I must have scared them to death — I must have seemed crazy to them — they probably saw me flailing my arms and things and … and …
She took a deep, shuddering breath, and made herself hold it for a few seconds before letting it out. I’m going to be alright. Everyone knows that people like me exist. No one’s going to try to hurt me or anything … not here, not out in public. I’ll be okay … I’ll be okay.
Even so, she locked herself in there, until she was satisfied that everyone who’d been in the restaurant just then had left.
* * *
Carol didn’t eat anything else there. By the time she got home, she was famished.
She walked her motorcycle up to the driveway, after cutting the engine a couple of streets down. The streetlights were on outside, over the suburban lawns. A couple of dogs barked at her from inside their fences, but dogs were always barking at something.
The gravel driveway was empty, just like it had been since her parents had left on their cruise. Carol went around back and leaned her cycle against the outside wall, then unlocked the side door before stepping in. The house was dark, even though the moon shone in through curtained windows.
Now that she was inside, Carol let the changes come, and found it a lot easier to see afterwards. She tried clicking her tongue to echolocate, but nothing happened as far as she could tell.
She shut the door quietly and went into the kitchen, without turning any lights on. The refrigerator was whirring, and the noise made her ears flatten. She opened it, squinting inside, but the scent of old grease and leftovers no longer smelled as good as it once had.
Looking over at the table, her eyes fell on the fruit basket. She shut the refrigerator door and ate three bananas, before realizing that they were brown. Oh well, she thought. I would’ve just made banana bread with them anyway.
Washing an apple in the sink, she looked out the window at tree silhouettes. Things were moving between them, little flying things, and Carol knew what they were.
She turned off the water and opened the window a crack, listening through the screen, and her ears perked at the sounds of clicking and chirping. She could hear more of the bats’ calls now, the higher-pitched parts that human ears couldn’t detect. Her heart leaped at the sound, and she held her breath in, listening and waiting for an epiphany. An understanding of what their calls meant.
After a minute or two of holding still and breathing quietly, she finally stopped and sighed and went to go get a knife for the apple. Something about their chirping did call to her. But she wasn’t sure if it was because of her nature, or just because of her bat ears. She felt like they were talking too fast and speaking a foreign language, one that sounded like one she knew but was too different for her to interpret. Maybe if I lived in Egypt, she thought.
Carol had a long dinner, plowing through most of the fruit basket (peels and all) and half of a jar of peanut butter. She finished with a tall glass of milk, not questioning her cravings but taking the time to satisfy them. She knew what was happening to her, and that it would take awhile to finish … awhile for her wings to grow in.
As it turned out, “awhile” was “about a week.”
It was slow and painful at times, and she was lethargic and sleepy for most of it. She slept for almost the whole time that the sun was up, and if she couldn’t get back to sleep around noon she read one of her manga until her eyes were too heavy again. The nights she spent eating and drinking almost constantly, gulping down gallons of milk and bringing a snack to eat on the way to the store. After a little while, she didn’t even try to hide the bony protrusions sticking out of her back, or to hold her animal features in. She just smiled at the cashier, and hoped that it didn’t look like she was snarling.
She took two multivitamin pills daily. Her shopping basket was filled with dense, nutrient-rich foods; avocados, a couple of pomegranates, and lots of citrus fruit. Meat was too expensive, so she stacked tubs of cold, wet tofu into her cart, and ate peanut butter and bananas while marinating it at home. It wasn’t half bad, although after a couple of tries she found that she liked it better when mixed into fruit-and-milk drinks than when fried up with soy sauce.
The few hours she didn’t spend eating, cooking and shopping, she spent surfing the ‘net on her laptop, with the lights off and brightness turned all the way down. (And the window open to listen for bats.) Mostly she looked for videos by other ‘morphs, and blogs with tutorials on how to deal with a changing body. Links to recipes started to fill up her favorites list.
Every now and then she browsed for news stories, about First Federal or her disappearance. They hadn’t talked about it for a while, in the town that she had been working in. And apparently, no one had caught the killer.
Carol did not like to think about that. She spent one day in a haze of half-awakeness just because her dreams were so terrible. The whole time she was asleep she spent trying to run, or to fight him off. And all she could think about while she was awake that day was the feel of the cold gunmetal, or the way her hands clawed at his until they were slammed into the wall.
She had been shot only once, but she’d relived it six times now, each one just as horrifying.
For all that, she found that revenge didn’t drive her. She tried to think about her death as little as possible, because all that she felt about it was fear. Likewise, her plan was not an obsession. It was just something that had to be done.
She wanted it to be over soon. Preferably before her family came back. Then she could reveal herself, to them and her friends online and her boyfriend. She missed every one of them, even the annoying ones. But she dared not call them, or pick up the phone, or log in to sites with her old accounts. She didn’t even surf the web without using a proxy server.
Soon this will be over, she thought, doing pushups while stretching her wings to their lengths and trying to feel their tips. And soon I’ll be able to fly.
* * *
Despite exercising whenever she could, Carol still put on a bit of weight, and it wasn’t just in her wings. She used a flashlight to look down at the scale, frowning to herself and being glad that she was sewing her stealth outfit with some give to it.
And that she was going to be getting a lot more exercise, soon enough.
That night was the first time she tried flying, as her wingspan was already greater than her height. There was a creek beside her house, behind the suburban neighborhood, and there was an open area in the trees behind it. After wading the creek, she ran as fast as she could into the clearing, then started flapping her wings wildly. But it only drove her to crash in a tumbling heap.
She rubbed her bruised elbow, the color not fading even as the pain did. Then she got up, took a deep breath and tried again. I don’t care how many times I’ve got to do this, she thought. Being shot didn’t stop me. This isn’t going to either.
Carol tried five more times to get up the speed to fly, and to hold her leathery wings at the right angle to produce lift. On her last try she almost did, and her heart leapt as she felt her wings carry her feet off the ground. But then they clipped a tree, and she rolled to a stop, instinctively curling her wings around her.
She looked up at the tree in dismay. Then she started climbing it.
It took her ten long, agonizing minutes to get up to the branch that she wanted. Her wings kept getting caught on things, and trying to get them out without being able to see behind herself brought her close to tears in frustration. But she closed her eyes and took a handful of deep breaths, then continued and finally freed herself.
Crouching on the thickest branch, twenty feet off the ground, she looked out at the creek and the clearing and at her house’s distant roof. Then she closed her eyes, and jumped.
Her wings caught the air, and she soared.
It was just like the first time she’d managed to ski. The same feel of gliding, over ground that she’d once had to tread. And the same feel of silent exhilaration, the only sound in her ears that of wind rushing past. It was hard to hold her wings out rigid, but she barely noticed she was so excited.
After a couple of seconds, she realized that she was dropping slowly and tried flapping her wings to compensate. But she underestimated how much force she would need to apply against the stiff cushion of air beneath her, and her wings folded up and she dropped like a rock, falling into the creek with a splash.
This is what she was thinking right afterwards.
Aghpttb-
I flew! I was flying! I …
AGH, there are rocks stuck in my knee and it stings!
I still remember what it felt like. I want to do it again …
Cold! Wet! Pain! Cold!
That was the awesomest thing EVER!
She finally stood up off of the slippery rocks, and finished brushing the pebbles off of her skinned knees, her hands moist with blood and water. Then she looked back up at the tree she’d jumped down from, and thrust her fist into the air, before shivering.
Hugging herself with both arms and wings, she managed a grin in spite of chattering teeth.
That was so worth it.
Carol wanted to try it again right away, but decided she’d better not. That turned out to be the right choice. She spent the rest of that night shivering and sniffling, and drinking a warm mug of lemon tea.
The next day (or next night, given her sleeping schedule) her back and her wings ached all over. She could barely even move her arms, which made sewing her stealth outfit hard. She had to rest that day, and the next, stretching her stiff wings when she could and making a couple of feeble attempts at doing stitches. It had only been a few seconds of flight, but she felt like she’d tried to lift a car.
The day of her parents’ return was approaching, and she still wasn’t ready. It looked like there was only one thing for it: She spent the whole last day packing and cleaning up, then got on her motorcycle and drove back to the city she’d worked at.
It was a long drive, especially with a sore back and wings, and she had to share the road with humans who couldn’t see as well as she could at night. Worse, the prices at the downtown hotel were sky-high. But as she flopped down onto the big, cushy bed in her room, she thought it’d been worth it for two reasons:
One, the generous fruit basket on the table.
And two, the lights of First Federal, right outside of her window.
* * *
Midnight. Still not as dark as she would’ve liked. The lights of the city shone red on the clouds behind her, as though sunset had never ended.
Carol finished hauling her bag up to the rooftop next to her, and looked out at the bank building as she got her things out. There weren’t too many lights on in it, and there weren’t any other large buildings nearby. The office that she was headed for was on the other side of the building, so she couldn’t see in it, but she’d made sure to check when she’d driven back with snack food and energy drinks. An hour ago, the light had been on.
Her fingers were unsteady as she strapped the gun to her hip. She wondered if it’d been a good idea to drink so much liquid sugar, or if she was just nervous. For a second, she thought of just climbing back inside. Then she shook her head and dismissed it, and finished strapping her gloves and her gear to her night-black stealth outfit.
There wasn’t a lot of gear to strap on, because she had to pack light to be able to fly. Stepping up to the edge of the roof, she looked out across the street at the lower ledge of the bank building … a flat platform with air vents and boxy things on top, to the side of the main part of the building.
Carol swallowed as she looked across at it. It seemed so far away now. And the lights of the streetlights seemed brighter, and the noise of distant traffic seemed louder. Every now and then a car drove past below, and she felt silly and conspicuous, like everybody could see her.
She clenched her fists, and told herself that if she did this right, nobody would.
Carol went to the center of the roof, walking lightly on bare paws, the noise of the central air conditioning getting louder in her ears. She stretched her arms, legs and wings, and did a basic warm-up routine. Then she looked out at the bank building and took a deep breath, before running towards it and leaping over the edge of the roof.
It was like doing a pullup while wearing a full-sized backpack. The first time she’d barely noticed, because the feeling of flight was so novel and she didn’t have any place she was flying to. But this time she immediately panicked, her breaths fast with fear and exertion, and as she looked up into the rushing air she realized that she was not going to make it.
Do I flap?
She couldn’t bring herself to, because she knew she would certainly plummet. So instead, as the roof of the building approached she put out her arms and
SMACK
One second she was flying, the next she was grappling with the ledge. She felt it beneath her arms, then her forearms, then only her hands were holding onto it as her footpaw-pads slipped on squeaking glass.
Heart racing, breaths rapid, brain telling her I am going to die, she fought to clamber on top. Her foot gained traction on scratchy concrete, and she just about tore its pad off getting the other one off the glass and pushing with all her might. One elbow got above the ledge, then the next, then she flung herself over the side and landed on top of the building.
Carol’s heartbeat was so rapid she thought she would die just from it, and trying to catch her breath felt like fighting to keep from drowning. Her tail and her wings were squashed underneath her, but she didn’t care. She could barely feel them.
She wasn’t there long before her ears perked. There was a squeak, of skin on the glass of the window she’d been kicking. Like someone had pressed his hands or his face up against it.
Carol jumped back to her feet, blood rushing to her head and making her stagger, as pins and needles crept into her wings and her tail. Then she shook her head, trying to clear it, and looked around for an entry point.
She had to rest up against the side of the door for a second, before taking out her glass cutter and carving a square through the inset window.
* * *
Carol crept through the dark hallway, towards the light spilling out from the open door.
A woman’s voice, laughing. “Are you kidding me? Those mortgage bonds are backed by the country’s top three lending institutions! Of course your money’s safe. It’s safer than it’d be in our vault.”
She got out her phone from its belt case, softly closing the magnetic cover before switching it on and turning on the Voice Memo feature. Carol pointed its microphone towards the door as she crept closer, quietly, holding her gun at the ready.
“Well, okay, maybe not that safe … ” Carol’s pointed ears heard a trace of the other voice on the phone. “But you know me, Ron. I’ve never let you down before, have I?”
She stopped outside the door, recording for a second.
More laughter. “And you’ll never let me forget that, will you?”
Carol let them finish their conversation, and waited for the phone to hang up. But a second later she heard it being lifted off the receiver again, and a number dialed into it. This time a man’s voice spoke, a deep one that sounded like plaid shirts and facial hair. “Hey, Mark. Remember those subprime mortgage bonds that I told you about?”
Carol’s ears perked.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” A chuckle. “Yeah, those’re the ones. Anyway, I think they’re going downhill.”
She holstered her gun, and crouched down low to hold a knife out around the corner. In its mirrored surface she saw feet under a rainforest wood desk, along with an energy bar wrapper on the floor next to a wastebasket. The feet moved, kicking the wrapper out of the way, as the chair swiveled to face away from the door.
“Heh, I know. Sorry for getting you into that mess. And First Federal has spent a ton on them, haven’t they? Listen, maybe we should … “
Carol’s pounding heart drowned out the man’s words as she stepped into his office, the scent of central heating and pretzels and peanut butter and wheat-oat bars all assaulting her nostrils. His desk was messy, his suit jacket was tossed over the guest chairs next to the plant, and there was a screensaver going on his PC as he twirled the phone cord in his finger.
She stepped closer, crouch-walking, holding her wings pressed to her sides. She crept around the side of his desk, closer and closer to his high-backed leather chair. Finally she stood up, between the chair and his desk, and put her gun to his head. “Don’t move!”
Carol had tried to make it sound forceful. Then she realized the person on the other end of the line must have heard. There was silence for a long moment, and then her heartbeat drowned out a question on the phone.
“I’m going to have to call you back,” the deep male voice said, cracking. He hung up the phone, slowly and carefully, without turning his head.
Carol waited another long, painful moment, sweat running down her sides, before he spoke. This time it was silky and young. “The voice sounds familiar, but I’m afraid I can’t place it. Can I at least look to see who is pointing a gun at me?”
“G-go ahead.” Agh, she thought, I stuttered!
She stepped aside a pace or two, holding both arms straight out to aim at him, trying to keep them from trembling. The white-shirted young man in the chair spun it slowly to turn and face her. When he saw her, he looked confused. “Carol?”
She nodded, too quickly.
An incredulous look, for a second. Then he burst out laughing, and she really began to sweat. “Carol, you- this-” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.
She said nothing, and couldn’t help but wonder just how dumb she looked.
He reached for a tissue, and wiped at his face. “Well, Carol, congrats on your rebirth! Welcome to the club.”
“I know what you are.” All of a sudden she wanted to cry, and she knew it came through in her voice.
“Yes, I know.” The man regained his composure and looked up at her. “And you’re lucky that you weren’t dumped in a creek. Did you know that?”
She said nothing, and he went on. “And now that you’ve got your life back, you’ve decided to … to dress up in a costume and come up here and kill me. For revenge, I guess. Is that it?”
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“What is it, then?”
“You’re going to tell everyone what you are.” She shook the cameraphone in her hand. “I’m going to take a video of you changing. Then you’re going to say how you cheated everyone. And killed me.” Carol tried her best to keep her voice level.
“You’re wasting your time,” he said.
“Y-you’re not going to talk?”
“No, I mean this is a waste of your time.” He gestured at her. “Just look at yourself. You risked your life getting in here, and for what? To put some small-time corporate con artist away?”
“Murderer.” She growled at him.
“Yes, well, there was a reason for that. And as you can see, you’re not dead, now are you?” He clasped his hands underneath his chin, leaning his elbows on the arms of his chair, and smiled at her.
“I didn’t come here just to put you in jail,” she snarled, anger taking over where fear left off. “I want you behind bars so that I can go back to living my life, without having to worry about you killing me again.”
He shook his head, sadly. “Rule number one of rebirthing. You don’t get to have your old life back.”
“I will if you’re out of the way!”
“No, you won’t,” he said. “Think about it. What are you going to tell your family? Your life with them will never go back to normal.”
“They know I’m a ‘morph. They just don’t know all what that entails yet. And they already think I’m weird.”
“Do you really think you’ll get your old job back?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Do you really think I want it?”
He leaned back in his chair, and put his hands behind his head. “You have all the answers, don’t you?”
“And now, I want answers from you.” Carefully, without taking her eyes off of him, she thumbed the controls on her phone and set it to record video.
“Ask me how I survived the last person who tried to kill me,” he said, smiling.
“H-” She coughed. “How did you survive?”
“I didn’t,” he said, and spun his chair around slowly.
“Don’t move!” she said, and waved her gun helplessly at the back of his chair.
When he came back around, he had the face of a cat, with glossy black fur and emerald green eyes. His hands pressed together beneath his chin, and sharp claws came out from them and tapped each other. “I didn’t survive,” he repeated. “But I have nine lives.”
“Wh-”
He screamed as he sprang at her.
* * *
Carol had seen her cats get into fights before. They were so fast she couldn’t even tell who was winning until one broke off and ran. There was just an explosion of fur, and then two cats would run out of it, one of them chasing the other.
Those cats meant business. So did this one. One second she had a gun trained on him, the next it went off and she was rolling around on the floor, crashing into furniture, trying to get this whirlwind of blades off of her. It was like being attacked by a million pairs of scissors, and it was all she could do to keep them from cutting her open. Fur went everywhere, and so did pieces of fabric and upholstery, and after only a few seconds the room was a cloud of flying debris.
If someone had watched it in slow motion, they might have seen her grabbing his arms, and then him pulling his hind claws up to her stomach, and then her pulling away while still holding onto him and the both of them crashing into the plant. But Carol couldn’t watch in slow motion, and so she could barely tell what was going on. Except that everything in the room was being destroyed, and she wanted to keep this from happening to her.
Hadn’t she been holding a gun at one point? There it was, on the floor. She grabbed it in one hand, and he grabbed her arm, and she swung the gun into the side of his head and it went off as she did so. Plaster and insulation clouded the room from the new hole in the ceiling, followed by potting soil as she grabbed a handful of it off the floor and flung it in his face.
Clutching his face, blinking dust out of his eyes, he dropped to one hand and swung his legs in a clawed spin-kick. Carol dove towards the door, but he caught her tail and it stung and threw her off-balance.
There was a pause of about one second as she stood there leaning against the doorway in pain, looking into the clouded room and then down the hallway, as two men in security outfits rounded the corner. Then he pounced her again, and they were in the hall tumbling and kicking holes in the wall. And people were shouting at them, but she couldn’t hear, because he was screaming. (Or was she?)
Then a gun went off again, and she didn’t know if it was hers or someone else’s, but blood sprayed across her as he recoiled and let go. She didn’t stop to think but took off, down the hall, stumbling and staggering but running as fast as she could. There was another gunshot as she rounded the corner, and she couldn’t feel anything but didn’t know if it was because they had missed or because she was so high on adrenalin.
All Carol knew was that she had to get away, right now. And that running footsteps were chasing her.
* * *
He approaches the man from behind, unable to see his face in this light. Or his tail.
“Sir! Are you alright?”
The man just stands there clutching his chest, taking deep shuddering breaths and coughing. It looks like he’s bleeding.
“Sir!”
He comes up next to the man, and something taps his leg. He looks down, and it’s a swishing tail. He looks up just as something hits him in the side of his face, and he loses consciousness.
A cat in a tattered, stained shirt leans against the wall and grits his teeth for a second, before something tiny and metallic PLINKs from his chest to the floor. He wipes at his muzzle with the back of his hand, then lurches forward, unsteady at first but soon settling into a run.
* * *
Carol turned sideways to slam into the crossbar on the door, going through without losing momentum, then stopped at the head of the winding staircase. Stairs! was all she could think.
Running footsteps, rounding the corner behind her. For a second, she had a vision of herself jumping over the railing and floating down dramatically, wings outstretched. Then she had another vision, of herself smacking into the concrete. She winced.
Carol jumped, as a shot bounced off the door, and took off running again.
It occurred to her, in between smacking into the wall at each landing and scrambling to take off down the next flight, that this had been a long night and she really wanted to go home. Hey, maybe I’ll get to go home now! she thought. Having to be with her family seemed downright happy compared to that cat fight.
She grabbed the rail of the last flight, trying to round it without smacking into the wall, when a gunshot from above bounced off of it right next to her hand. She fell backwards, landing on her wings and tail in a heap and so filled with adrenalin that all she could do was flail and kick her legs, not sure which way was up.
While she was doing that, a cat was knocking a person out several stories above her. Then she got back on her feet, just as a dark-colored blur dropped down between all the stairs. It rolled to a stop as she ran down the last flight, then came up at the end of it while she was about halfway down. A shaft of light from the window behind her shone on his fur, and his glowing eyes.
And on the gun in her hands.
Oh right, I’m still carrying this! She held it pointed at him, the stairwell silent except for their echoing breaths.
Carol remembered their last standoff, and how badly it’d ended for her. But whatever had happened between then and now, it looked like he’d gotten the worst of it. She felt exhausted, but he looked even moreso. And as she watched, he dropped to one knee, gasping for breath and not even looking at her.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” she ventured, “haven’t you?”
He just nodded.
She wanted to lean up against the wall herself, but she was afraid to show weakness. They stood there for a couple of moments, long enough for Carol to feel dizzy as the adrenalin started to wear off.
“Bet you can’t … ” The cat gasped for breath. ” … finish me.”
“Huh?” Carol blinked.
“Got to do what it takes … ” He took several breaths. ” … to stop me. From going after you.”
“Y-you’re going to go after me?”
“Didn’t you?” He glared at her.
As she watched, he rose to his feet, a murderous look in his eyes. And then he began to climb the stairs towards her.
“Stop,” she said.
He went on.
“I mean it!”
The next few seconds would have ended badly for Carol, no matter what she had decided to do. But just then, she heard cars screeching and pulling up outside. Sirens wailed, and colored lights shone in through the windows.
The cat turned to look, and his ears flattened.
Carol looked between him and the door, her brain frozen. Then somebody pulled the door open, and without thinking she turned around and shot out the window on the landing above her.
“Don’t move!” someone shouted. But she wasn’t listening.
Pounding footsteps, gunshots, screams and noises of fighting echoed off of the walls behind her … as Carol ran through the window, jumped off the ledge, and flew.
* * *
The next day, the phone rang at her parents’ house. On the other end was a voice that sounded like their daughter’s, or like hers would if she were in massive pain. It wanted them to come get her, at a certain motel in a town in the next state, and to get her motorcycle at another motel in the same town.
They got there around noon. Carol had been up the entire day, unable to fall asleep because of muscle pains in her arms, legs, back, side, wings … pretty much everywhere. And she hadn’t taken anything for it, because she didn’t have anything to take.
She was still part-bat and part-possum, and was still wearing her torn stealth outfit. At least the color helps hide the bloodstains, she thought, gritting her teeth against the pain as they helped her into the car. A couple of tablets of painkiller and a pillow bought from the motel helped her fall asleep on the drive back, and the last thing she thought was I hope it isn’t too hard on them when the police catch up with me.
As it turned out, she needn’t have worried.
Carol woke up that evening when her mom walked into the living room and turned on the TV, after letting her crash the entire day. The lights were off and the volume was low, but it was loud enough for her to hear.
She winced, still wrapped up in blankets, and tried to shut her ears to it. But then she heard something about First Federal … and slowly, trying not to move her neck too much, she looked back over at the TV set.
She expected to see footage of the place where they’d fought. Of the torn-up office, and the stairwell where she’d flown off. But instead they were interviewing people, about how the bank had gone belly-up. Apparently they’d bought too many worthless loans from other banks, all so a ‘morph with ties to the others could profit from it. The police had him in custody now, on charges of fraud and assaulting a police officer, and the bank was closing down.
Carol’s heart sank as she watched, because she remembered that she’d left her phone there. It had everything on it … but was it even still working? Were her fingerprints recognizable? She didn’t know. And over the next few days as she recovered, nobody called them or showed up asking about her. Eventually, she forgot. And to all appearances, so did her parents. They never asked her any questions, and she never told them anything.
* * *
Halloween was that weekend. Carol spend the late afternoon giving out candy at the door, and the evening talking with her boyfriend and friends online. She didn’t have any proof of what she’d just been through, and it seemed almost like a dream. But somehow, it was one that she kept reliving.
It had been scary at times, but it had also been exhilarating. And she kept coming back to the fact that she’d done it, that she’d made her plan and carried it out and kept from being killed again or captured. She’d never known that she had it in her. And it made her wonder if maybe she shouldn’t be looking for a new line of work.
The next weekend, she heard how another ‘morph somewhere in New York had brought down the gang that had “killed” him and his family. And when she looked, she read similar stories from all over the world, of ‘morphs and people with other abilities. Everyone was suspicious of them, but they were doing things that no one else could.
People like her were making a difference.
The next evening she said goodbye to her parents, and rode off into the night. Somewhere, somebody needed her help, and she wanted to be there for him or her.
And maybe get a pet dog …
Comments Off