A/N:
This arc will feature a "guest cape", Yomiko Readman from Read or Die, in a sort of mini-crossover. For those unfamiliar with the series, no knowledge of it is required, as Taylor will remain the PoV throughout, and Yomiko is the only crossover character to appear. In PRT terms, I'd call her a ~Master 6 "paperbender", for lack of a better word. Given how perfectly her power fits into Worm's, I always wondered how she'd do in the Wormverse, so I couldn't help but inject her here. Rest assured that you can still expect other Worm characters to make appearances in this arc as well!
Another Tuesday morning, another English class. Even after my morning coffee-two coffees, if I was being honest-I only felt about fifty percent human. I'd let myself stay out way too late roaming the streets with Lisa, and now, I was paying the price. Well, it was worth it.
I pushed aside the mental fog sat and up in my seat as a woman I didn't recognize pushed through the door to the classroom. She looked to be in her late 20s, with an owlish expression behind her thick rectangular black glasses. Long, straight black hair spilled down past her shoulders to her back. She was dressed rather oddly for a teacher, and wore a long, light tan trench coat over a brown vest and a white dress shirt with a vivid red tie. A dark skirt covered her legs past her knees.
The oddest thing about her, though, was that she'd made her way into the classroom while completely absorbed by a book that she held in her right hand. She'd even opened the door with her left hand without glancing up. She closed the door behind her, then stood at the front of the classroom, utterly engrossed in the book. She'd flicked through twenty or thirty pages before somebody a few rows behind me finally cleared their throat.
The woman jolted and tore herself away from the book, stuffing it into a pocket at her side. She looked up at us, blinking, like a deer caught in the headlights. There was a faintly Japanese cast to her features, but when she spoke, it was in elegant Queen's English.
"Er, sorry about that!" she said. "The protagonist's husband was just kidnapped, and she-never mind. I'm Ms. Readman. I'll be your substitute teacher while Mr. Peyren is out."
She turned away, picked up a dry-erase marker, and began to write her name on the whiteboard. I noted with some bemusement that she'd retrieved the novel with her other hand and had begun reading again while she wrote.
"Ms. Readman, we can't read Japanese," someone said.
"Oh! Yes! Excuse me," she said. She hastily erased the Japanese characters she'd written on the board and scrabbled out her name in English. She turned back to us, the novel falling to her side.
Between the outfit, the singled-minded fixation on her novel, and her accent, she had to be the most bizarre substitute I'd ever seen, which was really saying a lot.
"Ah, what will we be discussing today?" she said. At first, since she was the teacher, I assumed the question was rhetorical, but she just stood there blinking, with that same befuddled look.
"Don't you know?" a classmate asked. Others snickered. Once a substitute showed weakness, you could always rely on students to pounce, like hyenas circling a wounded lion. This woman had set herself up to fail.
Her face fell.
"I forgot to take the lesson plan with me," she admitted. Undoubtedly because she'd been engrossed in her book. More students were choking back laughs now. I decided to take pity on her, and spoke up.
"We were going to discuss The Great Gatsby," I said.
Her face brightened.
"Oh, thank you!" she said. "What a lovely book. But it's been so long since I've read it…"
She appeared to search her memory for a few moments, then beamed and clapped her hands together.
"Now I remember! How wonderful!"
Belying her seeming confusion of a moment before, she launched into a monologue about the novel whose verbosity was rivaled only by its interminable length. By the twentieth minute of the verbal torrent, even those who had laughed at first sat reeling in their seats, mouths agape.
Forty minutes later, the harsh electronic screech of the bell cut her off mid-sentence. Somehow, she hadn't paused for more than a moment the entirety of the class. At some point, she had even managed to produce a copy of the book itself, and had brandished it like a weapon at the students in the front rows.
She looked up at the clock, blinking, her face crestfallen. "Oh dear, is it that time already?"
My classmates rose to their feet and filed out in dead silence, no doubt still attempting to process the literary bludgeoning they had just received. While I also found Ms. Readman's bibliophilic sermon somewhat overwhelming, particularly in regards to a piece of assigned reading, I had to respect her enthusiasm.
I slung my bag to my shoulder and walked out with the others. I gave a faint smile to Ms. Readman as I went. It turned out I needn't have bothered, as she had already glued herself back to her book. I hurried on my way, a rueful smile on my face. Yes, she certainly was the most unique substitute I'd ever met.
The rest of the day passed utterly uneventfully by comparison, and at the ring of the closing bell, I was off like a rocket. During my usual lunchtime PHO check, I'd seen that Lisa had messaged me to say we had a new case, but being Lisa, hadn't offered any details. She derived far too much enjoyment from keeping other people in suspense.
As I hurried across the blocks of Downtown to our office, the heartbeat of the city pulsed around me. Towering skyscrapers bathed in the heat of the afternoon sun as they stretched towards the heavens. At their base, glittering glass atriums disgorged streams of immaculately-suited men and women heading for either a late lunch or an early end to the workday. Cars and trucks of every description clogged the roads in a discordant symphony of growling engines, screeching brakes and blaring horns. What they hoped honking might accomplish wasn't entirely clear, but they were no less enthusiastic for it.
A brisk stride carried me through the congested heart of the corporate business district in good time. I passed the last of the skyscrapers, hurried across the street just in advance of a lumbering delivery truck, and arrived in front of our office.
I'll admit, thinking of it as 'our' office still felt a bit odd. The events of the past month or so had transformed my life so abruptly as to leave it almost unrecognizable. Why Lisa had gone so far out of her way to help me I still couldn't say. She'd become a friend to me-my only one, sadly enough, but I tried not to dwell on that-but I didn't need her power to tell that she'd deliberately avoided exposing much about her prior life. That left me at a disadvantage, given that there was nothing so futile as trying to keep a secret from her. I couldn't do anything but wait, though, and trust that she'd tell me when she was ready.
I shook the introspective thoughts from my mind, and made for the office. It sat at the bottom of a stairwell which descended from the cracked concrete of the sidewalk. The stairwell ended at the foot of an unmarked metal door. Frosted glass obscured the view from outside, and, in a desultory gesture towards what Lisa liked to call 'operational security', we did not have a sign marking the office door. Other than that, anybody who knew the office's location could just walk in.
So, walk in I did. I pulled open the unlocked outer door, then passed into the waiting room. A pair of battered wooden chairs with peeling upholstery sat against opposite walls in an otherwise spartan chamber. Lisa could've afforded far better, of course, but she liked to cast the woe-begotten furniture as another key stone in her carefully cultivated image of the down-on-their-luck private eye. A wooden floor in desperate need of a wash completed the image. On the far side of the room was the inner door. Like the outer one, this too sported a frosted-glass window, upon which had been emblazoned "Shamus, P.I." Lisa loved to correct people that it stood for Parahuman Investigator, not what they always assumed. She'd no doubt had the logo fashioned that way specifically for that little joke.
In what had become habit, I settled my usual living tripwire of bugs across both doors as I swung open the inner one and pulled it shut behind me. The windowless room that we called our office seemed even more chaotic than usual. Lisa sat behind her desk, though I'd discovered this via bug mapping, not my eyes. Towers of paper had been piled up high enough on her desk to completely obstruct the view, especially given that each one had been crowned with a different laptop, making for four separate computers open simultaneously. Even more papers, manila dossiers, and accordion folders lay strewn around her desk in heaps which seemed haphazard to me, but undoubtedly slid perfectly into whichever incomprehensible system of organization Lisa had devised.
My desk, by contrast, sported almost nothing by way of accoutrements. I'd need to scatter some notebooks and pencils on it, for appearances' sake if nothing else. I did notice that my brass nameplate holder now displayed an engraving of my chosen cape name. Having chosen a name didn't leave me feeling much different than before, but I had to readily admit to clipping out the small page-five article in the Brockton Bay Gazette which made reference to a new cape by the name of Flutter helping to apprehend Circus. Keeping the article might be a bit vain, but I felt justified. It was the first real memento of my career, after all.
"Heya, stranger," came Lisa's voice from behind her Great Wall of Paperwork.
"Can you move behind all that?" I asked.
"Barely," she said. "It's a research day, but you could probably already guess that much."
"Research day? What's the occasion?"
Lisa groaned. "I've got a complete mystery on my hands, and it's driving me nuts," she said. "I'm not making any headway at all."
"None whatsoever?" I said. "I bet you're ready to scream."
She grinned.
"The idea has some appeal, but it wouldn't do wonders for my headache," she said. "Better for me to seethe in quiet frustration for now, I think."
"So, what's the case?" I said. "Maybe I can help with some of the thinking for a change. As long as that headache's keeping you grounded, at least."
Lisa's delighted grin belied the amount of pain she purported to be in, but then, she always loved a chance to do some expositing.
"Think Indiana Jones," she said.
I admit, I wasn't entirely sure where she was going with that one.
"Like the Ark of the Covenant? Holy artifacts? What would that have to do with us?"
Lisa waggled a finger. "An excellent question!" she said. "And no, not the Ark of the Covenant, although that does sound like a great deal of fun. I guess you'd call this more of an illuminated manuscript. You know, those elaborate books from the Middle Ages that the monks would spend their whole lives copying in some dank, dreary stone cell. Takes all kinds, I guess."
"So there's some kind of rare book?" I asked. "Is that really something that calls for parahuman assistance? I would've thought they'd just hire a private security firm. Doesn't it seem like a lot of trouble to go through?"
"It raised my eyebrows too, I'll admit. Still, I couldn't pass up the chance to get involved in some genuine intrigue." Lisa beamed. "Especially since they thought they were pulling one over on me! Nobody gets to make Shamus dance like a puppet. And yes, I know I just referred to myself in the third person, but our alter egos are artificial personas anyways, so I can get away with it."
I quirked an eyebrow. "I'm not so sure about that," I said.
"Oh, let me have the convenient delusions, won't you?" Lisa said with a laugh.
"So, something made you think the client was lying to you?" I said, intrigued by what Lisa had said. "And who was our client, anyways?"
"He was an older guy, Chinese, maybe in his 50s. My power twigged on to something he said or did. I'm still not entirely sure what, which I hate to admit." She tapped her forehead. "Hence, the head splitting. I'll figure him out, though. Just wait."
I eyed the tremendous tome on Lisa's desk. Gilded characters in a foreign language adorned its inch-thick leather cover. The language looked to be Chinese or Japanese, I thought, but I wasn't sure which. "Did he come to the office and hand you this? I'd be suspicious too."
"He didn't exactly twirl his mustache and cackle, but he certainly was a bit odd," Lisa said. "Could've been playing the part, though. People try that against Thinkers sometimes, you know. The theory is something like fouling up the input to pollute the output." She scowled. "It does work on me sometimes, which is frustrating as hell."
"It's our secret," I said.
Lisa let out a theatrical sigh. "Everybody wants to read minds, but nobody appreciates what a headache it is," she said. "And that's both figuratively and literally. Some days, I almost wish I was one of the acorn-brained flying bricks throwing people through walls."
"I've had the same thought. It'd make life so much more direct, wouldn't it?"
Lisa smirked.
"Yeah, but then I remember how fun it is to be a world-class sleuth. Bug powers aren't so bad either, right? You've done some incredible stuff these last few cases."
I shrugged. Praise still didn't feel entirely natural.
"I'm glad we've helped people, at least," I said. "That's got to count for something."
Lisa pooh-poohed me with a gentle smile. "So modest. You've saved my ass at least twice already, and trust me, that means a hell of a lot to me. Though I daresay there's a few people very disappointed by my continued existence on our lovely little planet." She tapped an unpainted fingernail on the grimy leather cover of the book. "So, partner, are you in for this one? I doubt it'll involve helping any unfortunate souls, but if you're still interested, it'd be a real relief to have you watching my back while I figure out what's irking me."
I only had to think about it for a moment. Lisa had promised to keep from involving me in anything unsavory, but this hardly seemed to be hurting anyone. If anything, we might have an opportunity to root out somebody with less-than-pure motives before they raised some kind of unspecified havoc in my hometown.
"I'm in," I said.
And then, all hell broke loose.