my god so many cool long reviews. all emotional now. snif.
Part Six- Catalyst
Outside the abandoned warehouse, the breathless afternoon wore on. Inside, the cool, damp air rose and circulated in the heat from the roof, creating a slow cycle that stirred the dust on the floor and set long wreaths of cobwebs drifting lazily from the crack-crazed walls.
Escher was trying to brush her hair, fine strands of it standing out from her head as it crackled with static from the brush she'd found in her bag. The bristles yanked sharply on a tangle, setting off an odd reaction; she started to sneeze uncontrollably.
She was still free, in a manner of speaking - after that first implied threat, there had been no further mention of restraints. Apparently deciding that he'd told her enough, or perhaps too much, Doctor Octavius had simply turned and walked off back to his desk in the far alcove.
There, he had once again applied himself to the whatever-it-was he was making. Escher guessed that the anger that she had seen building in him as he talked had inspired him, and started to feel more than a little worried about what sort of end product could possibly be born of such rage.
Stifling another sneeze, Escher got up and walked towards the desk. She was a naturally inquisitive girl, and the flickering welding light drew her towards it like a moth to a candle. As she got nearer, she squinted at the thing Doctor Octavius was working on, a vaguely familliar shape surrounded by tangles of wiring and exposed circuitry.
'What is that?' she asked, fascinated.
Otto reached for another strip of welding alloy, wondering how much to tell her. She was unique, in his experience, in that she had been exposed to the media coverage of his story, and then heard his own version of events, and still apparently had no qualms about talking to him. From his own tongue, she had heard all the evidence she needed to condemn him, but still…there was no fear in her voice.
It was puzzling - but, he had to admit, not unpleasant. He remembered the desperation in her eyes as she'd pleaded with him to save her sketchbook, and surmised that she might be able to appreciate the value of what he was trying to create.
Despite the cautioning whispers in the back of his mind, he reached a decision.
'An upgrade.' he said, and let her see.
Escher studied the half-finished invention, her head on one side. Remove all the wiring, and it would have looked very similar to a pair of the large, round-lensed black radiation goggles that the Daily Bugle had taken up as a sort of visual trademark of "Doc Ock". The goggles had thick, flexible metal side arms which fitted above the wearer's ears, continuing into an elasticated band to prevent them falling off. On this pair, the side arms had been trimmed back to wafer-thinness, and were now half-rebuilt, the metal layers studded with complex patterns of jewel-like microcircuitry. Tiny wires snaked from the delicate green boards, most of which curled back behind the band and fed into a small articulated tube of oily, yellow-ribbed grey metal. This part was about six inches long and looked like a simplified version of the tentacle design.
Escher felt the muscles behind her eyes begin to ache with the detail of it. In the centre of each side arm, just about where the wearer's temples would be, a smooth metal stud about the size of a nickel tapered into a trailing thing as thick as a hair, only visible where the light caught it, glinting silver.
These were fixed so that they pointed inwards, and Escher couldn't understand how there would be room for them when the wearer's skull was in the way. Unless, and she grinned at the ludicrous thought, they actually went into the skull…
She stopped grinning.
'Wh…what does it do?'
Otto chuckled despite himself. Carefully, as if handling the most fragile glass, two of his smart arms flexed over and lifted the goggles a few inches off the table.
'Ah, well, nothing yet, I'm afraid.' he said. 'The fun doesn't really kick off until this part here,' and he picked up a pair of tweezers and touched them to the thick bridge between the two lenses, 'is finished, and that won't be until tonight. I'm missing a vital part, you see, and it's not exactly the sort of thing you'd find in a 7-11.'
Escher scrutinized the black metal nose bridge. It had been filed down and fitted with connectors, rebuilt so that there was a small shape missing from the middle of it, a rectangular cavity about the size of a bottle cap.
'It's that thing in the Science Museum, isn't it.' she said, slowly. 'You're going to try and break in there again.'
'No, luckily enough I won't have to.' said Otto. He had hardly believed his good fortune when, during his long trawl through the restricted depths of the Internet the previous night, he'd cracked an encrypted server and discovered that the unnerved senior management of the Mindmap Project had decided to remove their precious creation and drive it across downtown Manhattan - in a single armoured van, no less - to the airport at Teterboro. It seemed like the first stroke of luck he'd been dealt in months.
The girl looked unhappy. Disappointed, possibly, at his amoral intentions. She chewed her lip, staring at his invention as he lowered it gently back onto the scratched varnish of the desktop.
'It…does look amazing…' she said, eventually. 'But do you really have to steal the thingie? I mean, why?'
'Why?' he repeated, clearing his tools aside as he stood up. 'Why? Because I've made far too many miscalculations, Escher, and I'm tired of it.'
Escher stood her ground as Doctor Octavius swept past her, his long coat breezing out behind him in the chilly, disturbed air. It was the first time he'd used her name.
'Too many mistakes.' he continued, pacing. 'For far too long, my life has been nothing but one dreary, disasterous catalogue of errors. Which, incidentally, includes you.'
'Oh, thanks.' she said.
'You know what I mean.' The pacing continued. 'My arms are designed to be infallible. Something goes wrong, it's the fault of nothing but my own bad judgement.'
He closed his eyes, assailed by a sudden image of a scarlet-suited figure, wrenching at a wall of huge power sockets. Shaking his head, he scattered the memory.
'That…or Spiderman.'
Escher tried to steer the topic away from what she percieved as dangerous waters. 'Well, that's not exactly anything you can fix, is it?' she said. 'How does that old thing go? "To err is human…"'
Otto smirked.
'Is it? The human brain is the most perfect calculation device imaginable. It's processing power surpasses that of the most powerful supercomputer. But, like with any advanced machine, there are viruses. We give these germs names, we call them things like 'hesitation' and 'conscience' and 'consideration' when really all we're doing is making pets of the…parasites that cripple us!'
The arms extended, lifting him off his feet as he lead their movement in long strides over to the far wall by the gantry. 'If there's one thing that all of this has taught me,' he spat, glowering at the paper collage, 'it's that all these so-called 'feelings' are nothing but glorified diseases, the flaws that make us falter, fail, and die.'
The arms whipped around, landing him heavily a few yards from where Escher stood, watching him nervously.
'And there certainly have been times when dying seemed a very attractive idea.' he murmured. 'But why should I give this city the satisfaction of my corpse? No, life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.'
'"Frankenstein"?' said Escher.
'What?'
'You're quoting "Frankenstein"?'
'Well, it's apt enough, isn't it?' He strode past the girl back towards the desk. There, he once again picked up the incompleted goggles, his own distorted reflection a nightmare shape in the heart of each black lens.
'If New York delights in painting me a monster, it's clearly up to me to show them just how…monstrous I can be.'
Escher looked down at her shoes. She felt completely useless in the face of all this resentment and pain, compelled to speak, but terrified in case she said the wrong thing. Which, given her previous record, seemed quite likely.
She didn't see Doctor Octavius as a monster, not in the slightest. What she did see was a man driven so close to the brink, so completely exhausted by the terrible things that had happened to him, that he had come to believe that the evil pit over which he was balanced was a way out in itself. She wondered if the artificial intelligence which shared his mind was contributing to this torment, or if it really was helping him stay sane with its cold, constant reason. And she wondered, because it was bothering her, what he had meant by "an upgrade".
'What about Spiderman?' she said, at length. 'Aren't you worried about him beating you again?'
The tentacles twitched testily. She tried to ignore them, focusing instead on the man's shadowed eyes. 'After all, the last time you fought him, he nearly got you. I saw it, remember?'
Otto placed the half-completed goggles proudly on their dust-repellent stand. 'Ah, but next time I meet Spiderman, these will be finished.' he said. 'And, no, far from being worried, I have to say I'm looking forward to it.'
'Why?'
'Because this time, I won't make any mistakes.' said Otto. 'This time…we'll win.'
His eyes narrowed in anticipation.
'And then, we intend to teach this city a little lesson on the nature of truth.'
Escher's reaction to this ominous statement was surprising, not least to her. As always, she simply opened her mouth and found that there was a bit more in there than she'd thought.
'I'm sorry you feel like that.' she said.
Otto blinked. He had expected defiance, or fear. Something in the area of you-can't-do-this, or perhaps the classic you'll-never-get-away-with-it. Something he could ignore. But instead, her sad little sentence scored a direct hit on a mark he couldn't quite place, an atrophied target he'd thought had shrivelled away months ago.
The trouble was, despite his strongest resolve and reservations, he was beginning to like the girl. Her being there, regardless of all its interruptions and distractions, was such a change from the solitude he'd grown used to. Of course he hadn't been lonely, not exactly…
How could you be 'lonely', Otto? reminded the whispers, swiftly. You are never alone.
…But he'd been a complete recluse from a world that believed him dead and gone, and although he'd pretended that such isolation suited him, in truth it had started to gnaw away at the corners of his embittered mind like the rats that his tentacles hunted as he slept.
Escher's arrival, and the problems of her unwilling presence in his narrow enviroment, had forced him to use parts of his personality that he'd locked away, parts judged useless to the person he'd become. She questioned him in a way his arms never did. She had opinions, real opinions based on her own beliefs. She said the stupidest things, and yet in the next instant she was suddenly as perceptive as any adult he'd ever met. She had even admired his new invention, after a fashion.
And she felt sorry for him.
But…
But he had a plan, and it was a good plan, and it was far too late to turn back…even if he'd wanted to. Things like empathy and friends belonged to a different man, a person who had lived in a world that couldn't have been more unlike the one he inhabited now. A man who, these days, was only alive in his memories. In this stark new world the rules were different, and he had only one way to show his thanks and pay the girl back for her pity.
'Escher…' he began, carefully. 'Hypothetically…if I were to let you go…'
Escher said nothing, but he sensed the sudden shift in her posture and guessed at the surge of hope it concealed.
'…I imagine that a lot of people would be very interested to hear about, well, me.'
'Uh-huh.' said Escher. With a quick glance to make sure he wouldn't take offence, she sat down in the high-backed chair, a little way from the desk. Her feet didn't quite reach the floor.
'And…hypothetically…I think that some of them would probably offer you a fair amount of money to, uh, talk to them.' He rubbed the back of his hand against his temples. 'I suppose you can understand that I don't want any further details of my activities to reach the…uhh…popular press.' The inflection he placed on "popular press" was similar to that of "bubonic plague".
'Right.' said Escher. 'Well, hypothetically, if you let me go…and I would like that, I mean, I miss my mom, and I'm even starting to miss my little brother, which is one hell of an achievement…but hypothetically, if someone were to offer me something along the lines you just mentioned, and considering that little display you got over there, then I think that I would probably tell them to go suck on a sewer pipe. Hypothetically.'
Otto nearly smiled.
Human beings are odd creatures of habit, and there is something about the stresses of travelling lomg distances away from the places that are familliar to us which make us increase our needs for ritual and predictability. Suddenly taken hundreds of miles out of their natural habitats, hundreds of normally sane men and women become prone to the most bizarre patterns of behaviour. These vary from the mild quirk of leaving towels and other objects out all night by the pool to secure prime ray-catching space the next morning, to the full-blown loss of any spark of individuality that they might usually have, resulting in the mindless agreement to being sheparded, zombie-like, from one inane attraction to another by red-suited female Hitlers with clipboards.
A focus point of these strange routines is the common-or-garden hotel room. Most people have a set of actions programmed into their brains for the moment when they walk into their hotel room for the first time, usually something along the lines of;
1) dump bags by the door, walk directly to the bed, and fall over on it,
2) get up, remove most cumbersome items of clothing/put on extra layers (dependant on climate), collapse on bed again,
3) manage to make it into the bathroom to 'freshen up', a process which involves removing everything that is not nailed down (wrapped soaps, shampoo, towels, shaving mirrors, small stone statues etc.) from said bathroom and stowing these articles in own luggage,
4) open the minibar, admire contents, spot price list, close minibar,
5) make feeble plans to visit local beauty spot/art museum/cathedral/llama farm in remaining hours of daylight, and finally,
6) locate least crumpled items of clothing in suitcase, put on, leave hotel room in search of culture and make it as far as the Hawaiian-themed bar in the lobby.
If any of the staff of the upper-Manhattan luxury five-star Una Maravilla Hotel had been able to watch the actions of their three newest guests, however, they would have seen something rather different. For a start, the two women and one man that had arrived on a late pre-paid-booking and checked in at around noon didn't talk as they rode the lift up to the seventh floor, they didn't speak as they walked down the long, cream-painted corridor or as the taller woman unlocked the door of their beautifully-appointed V.I.P suite, and once inside they fanned out, silently, each taking their own roles in a wholly unusual set of actions, which went;
1) walk straight into the bathroom, open the mirrored cabinets so each glass pane faced the wall, and leave them that way,
2) inspect each elegant brass light fitting, the interiors of the heavy oak wardrobes, and each ring that held up the long peach-tinted linen curtains,
3) pick up the phone and listen to the dialtone for exactly three minutes, before unplugging the cord from the wall socket and putting the whole device into an empty drawer,
4) move slowly in a 180-degree path in front of the window, staring at every feature of the stunning view as if trying to commit it to memory,
5) do something interesting and fiddly to the doorway, involving a couple of tacks, a length of high-tensile wire, and a small black thing with two red buttons on it, and finally,
6) open minibar, remove entire contents, and line them up on the scrolling oak sideboard.
It was the shorter of the two women, whose dark, somewhat scruffy clothing jarred against the soothing pastel shades of the suite, that performed this last action. She did so with the dedicated anticipation of someone with a job to do.
'Hell, Schafer.' said the man, leaving his vigil by the window and walking up behind her. 'You planning on sharing any of that?'
'Get your own.' But she angled her cheek back against his long, squirrel-blond hair. He kissed her neck, his thick fingers moving smoothly down to her waist…
The taller woman appeared in the bathroom doorway. She rolled her eyes. 'Get a room.'
'Looks like we already got us one, Spring.' said the man, easily. 'And it sure is fine.' He spread his arms like a snow angel and fell back onto one of the king-sized beds. The structure protested as he bounced on it.
'Grow up, Murph.' snapped the woman he'd called Spring. He stopped bouncing and sat up. Behind him, there was a sound like the death of a small mouse as 'Schafer' cracked open a miniature bottle of tequila.
'Do I detect,' he said, in mocking seriousness, 'that Big Sis has a problem?'
Whatever composure Spring had managed to retain throughout the long cab ride downtown from Harry Osborn's apartment slipped at her brother's maddening words. She stormed past him, grabbing a beer from the pick-and-mix on the sideboard as she went, ignoring the yelp of protest this provoked from her booze-hoarding colleague.
'You bet I got a problem, you dumb ape.' she yelled, her slender, furious figure outlined in the golden magic-hour light from the window. 'What are we doing here? This job's chickenfeed. It's nothing. One guy, unarmed, no proximities? We took hits like this when we were in goddamn…high school. What in the name of creation made you start kissing that rich brat's ass like that?'
'Hey!' Murphy was on his feet, a threatening finger stabbing at his sister's nose. 'I won't take that kind of talk from anybody, you hear me?'
'Get that hand out of my face while it's still on your wrist, Murph.' hissed Spring, fast and low.
After a tense few seconds, the big man took the hint, his expression thunderous. His sister sighed, leaning against the flowing peach drapes, her long fingers massaging the bridge of her nose.
'Just tell us you got a reason.' she said. 'Tell us you know something we don't. What is it about this join-the-dots amateur charade of a hit that makes it worth becoming the laughing stock of the big league?'
'How 'bout the money?' said Schafer. She had dealt with the tequila inside of a minute and was starting on the Bud. Doritos scattered to the floor as she ripped open a family-sized bag. 'Did you see the size of that cheque? I never thought there could be so many zeros in one place at the same time.'
Spring rounded on her. 'You know, that's just typical of you, Schaf. The only time you ever drag your head out of the fridge it's to check your wallet.'
'Oh yeah?' The shorter woman got up fast, showering the deep-pile carpet with crumbs. 'Well, I guess that's better than having it stuck up my-'
'Ladies, please.' said Murphy, his former good mood reappearing quicker than a faulty TV signal. 'If you girls want to go one-on-one that's fine by me…long as I can watch. But you might want to hear me out before you start. I'd hate to see such a fancy place trashed for no reason.'
'You don't start talking sense, Murph, I'll trash you.' said Schafer, her eyes still fixed warily on Spring's face. Murphy grinned.
'Baby, I love it when you get nasty…'
His girlfriend turned towards him, and there was a certain steely glint in her eyes which warned him that now, possibly, was not the time. His sister, too, was glaring at him in a way which could only be described as murderous. He decided not to push his luck, adopting instead an enigmatic, knowing expression.
'Uhh, heh. Look at you two, huh?' he smirked. 'Pride. Money. You're both missing the big picture.'
'Which is?' Spring tilted her long neck on one side. She still sounded frustrated, but there was interest there too.
'Think about it, Springie. If we do this hit, and I mean do it tight, then we get a prize way bigger than any crummy little cheque. We get us something that we can use any way we want, any time we want, for the rest of our lives.' Murphy leaned forwards, enjoying his partners' spellbound expressions.
'We get Harry Osborn.'
Dusk descended on New York, lengthening shadows chasing the engorged midsummer sun as it sank lazily to the west. Pockets of golden-treacle glow lit up the busy streets in patchy slits and streaks, escaping from between the high buildings and making the windows they fell across shine like spun sugar. The flow of traffic lessened slightly after the work-end rush, clearing the streets and making room for the suggestion of a cooling evening breeze.
Up above the streets, however, the breeze was much stronger, a reckless current chasing itself in spirited eddies around an endless rooftop playground. A pigeon, flying momentarily from the perpetual all-you-can-eat buffet of the nearby park, rode the turbulent air and dropped onto a handy TV arial. Its mad little bird eyes blinked beadily, the soft grey head twisting in an Exorcist-style scan.
Something was worrying it. Sounds carried much clearer up here, the mingling murmur of the city drifting up from the congested roads. The pigeon was about as intelligent as a spoon, but even so, it could sense another sound, growing under the noise…
wham.
Wham.
WHAM.
The panicked bird took off, whirring into the darkening sky like a demented, feather-shedding bottle rocket as a huge, sinuous shadow fell across the roof where it had perched.
WHAM.
WHAM.
WHAM.
Escher felt sick. She felt dizzy, and cold, and nauseous, and she was blind. Her rucksack was cutting into her shoulder, and the tarnished metal of the claw that encircled her was bruising her waist, the pressure of its chunky joints digging into her through her shirt. Her mouth was bone dry and her skin was clammy with cold sweat, and her own heartbeat had become so loud in her pounding head that it was drowning out the whistling wind currents that rushed past her ears.
And she was loving every second of it.
Now she understood the confused memory of flying that had lingered with her when she'd woken up in the warehouse. The blindfold made it better; in the orange-splotched seclusion of her own eyelids, every jerk and turn and sudden burst of speed was intensified. The only distraction was the heavy, irregular tread of the arms as they carried her on through an unseen rooftop hazard course, scraping and slamming against surfaces which were only as safe or flimsy as her imagination could paint them.
It was like the best rollercoaster in the world, an amalgamation of all the theme park thrillers she'd never been able to persuade her friends to ride with her. Except it was for real, about ten times more exhilarating, and without the risk of being thrown up on.
It rocked.
Otto paused for a moment, his wear-scarred army surplus boots trailing the gravel-scattered concrete as three of his arms boosted him off the ground. Carefully, the fourth tentacle moved downwards, lowering its passenger until her feet were touching the gritty surface. After several tentative attempts to let go, however, it became obvious that her legs were not going to hold her.
Otto hoped the shock of the journey hadn't unhinged the girl. He had rather been counting on her being able to find her way home by herself, which was going to be sort of problematic if she'd lost her wits.
'Are you alright?' he asked. The upper right tentacle reached to gently grasp the length of surgical bandage that wound round her head, pulling it away. In the claw's close-up view, her eyes blinked rapidly with the sudden light, jet black dwindling against mossy green. Then she ducked away from the tentacle and scrambled to her feet, grinning the crazed grin of a natural adrenalin junkie.
'Thhh.' she said.
'What?'
'Th…that. Was. The best thing…' She drew a shaky breath. '…Ever.'
'Oh.' said Otto, surprised. It had honestly never occurred to him that his tentacles' unique methods of movement, born as they were out of necessity, could be regarded as fun. Efficient, yes, and sometimes even satisfying; standing on this rooftop, seventeen stories above the sidewalk, the shorter buildings around them looked like constructions in a child's sandbox. Fragile toys to scale as he wished.
Yes, as a mode of transport it certainly had its perks…but the expression on the girl's face was that of a pro surfer who had just hit The Big One.
'I'm sorry about the blindfold.' he said.
'That's okay. I'm sorry I yelled like that when we dropped over the edge of whatever that thing was. I was trying to be quiet like you said, it's just that I bit my tongue.'
'Oh, you did very well, considering.' She certainly had. For the most part of the journey, he'd assumed that she had been mute with terror. It was gratifying to learn that she had in fact been trying to help.
Stealth didn't come easily to the smart arms- being built out of solid metal and gifted with enough strength to punch through lead, they tended to have problems grasping the concept of subterfuge- but with his careful guidance and their own ability to sense possible hazards they'd made it across the alley-riddled sprawl of Manhattan without being spotted…
…more or less. A couple of kids, dodging their curfews to set up a skate ramp in a deserted wasteground, had looked up at the wrong moment and glimpsed a sight which had made them abandon their project, go home, and spend the rest of the evening on their maths homework. Some pigeons had received the frights of their lives. And a bewildered cab driver found himself being arrested for drunk driving after telling the police exactly what had distracted him enough to make him crash his cab into a fire hydrant.
These incidents aside, they'd gone unnoticed. Slipping from rooftop to rooftop, in and out of the shadowsides of low buildings and empty passageways, the smart arms carried their creator invisibly through the city. Even with one arm occupied with the safety of its sightless passenger, the entire trip from West to Mid took less than fifteen minutes. Quite an achievement…
Zero hour minus one point three six, Otto.
The warning murmur shook him out of his reverie.
'Come on.' he said, tersely, and the tentacle snaked out to grasp her waist. Escher flinched reflexively from the cold metal. Her elation was fading slightly now that she could actually see the rooftop dropping away from under her battered Converses.
Otto strode to the edge of the roof. A fleeting frown of concentration dipped his eyebrows, and he gave a light shrug which sent the two lower arms flexing obediently out before him, slamming piton-like into the opposite ledge. They contracted, pulling their cargo easily down into the space between the two buildings.
Claw by claw, the alley below grew closer. Otto spread his arms wide, directing his creations in a graceful arm-over-arm movement that brought them to ground level within moments. The fourth tentacle extended in front of him, releasing its burden with a rising gesture calculated precisely against her weight, structure, and relative speed. Escher landed, stumbled a few steps, and came to a halt, hands splayed against her thin knees like a runner recovering from a fifty-yard dash.
'Mmp.' she said.
'What is it now?' Otto touched down neatly, the arms releasing the wall beside him as he dropped the last couple of inches onto his feet.
Escher missed this impressive co-ordination. She was busy concentrating hard on her boots. She flapped her hand vaguely for a moment before she could speak, swallowing several times.
'…I…uhhh…god…you know that thing where you sort of choke a bit in your mouth…'
The sudden clatter of a pneumatic drill from the main street made her look up. She walked (in more or less of a straight line) to the end of the alley and peered around the corner.
'Hey, it's the museum!' she said. 'You're putting me right back where you got me from?'
'Yes, this is as far off-route as we can go.' The combined forces of the city council and OsCorp had been very busy. The damaged museum front was covered in blue tarpaulins and scaffolding, and across the street a recovery team was working on extracting the police car from the glass-littered chaos that- up until yesterday- had been Forest Parks Auto Showroom. Superpowered battles had become something of an occupational hazard in New York of late, and the authorities were adapting very well to dealing with the inevitable cleanup.
Otto remembered a time, several years ago now, when the Science Museum had been threatened with closure through lack of funds. The entire scientific community had pitched in to do whatever possible to help, and none so enthusiastically as Dr. Otto Octavius.
Given the present situation, the irony was sickening. From the shadowy alleymouth, he watched a team of workmen labour industriously to remove a section of ancient marble facade cracked through by the impact of a large, three-digit claw.
It was necessary, Otto. Zero hour minus one point three two.
Yes, of course. We have a schedule.
Escher's voice slowly filtered through his thoughts. She was saying; '…is she going to get a shock when I turn up. I bet she'll pass out or something. If she noticed I was missing, that is.'
'I'm sure she did.' Privately, Otto reflected that it probably wasn't possible not to notice a lack of Escher. Unless maybe you were deaf.
Pushing up the sleeve of her t-shirt, Escher studied her watch. 'It's nearly half eight. If I hurry I can get the subway home before it gets totally dark. I, uh-'
She turned, sensing a change in the texture of the air behind her. Doctor Octavius was walking away, down the narrow passage which led to a maze of smaller alleys beyond.
'Wait!'
He stopped. His tentacles were fully retracted now, hanging nearly invisible under the bulky folds of his long coat. Standing there, with only a slight suggestion of their shapes at his back, he looked almost normal.
Escher shifted self-consciously from foot to foot.
'Thanks for letting me go.' she said. 'I…I hope this all works out for you.'
Otto snorted. 'Hah! I appreciate your concern, but I don't think I'll have any problems getting hold of the chip. It'll be child's play.'
'That's not what I meant.' said Escher, quietly. She held out her hand, sideways; fingers together, palm up.
Otto stared at the hand. And then, on an impulse which he would have been hard-pressed to explain, he reached out. Not with a tentacle, but with his own flesh-and-blood right arm.
'Thank you.' he said, and shook her hand.
Escher, who hadn't really been expecting reciprocation, was startled. She had no way of knowing that her handshake was the first physical contact with a living thing he'd experienced for almost three months. She only knew that a slight shock crossed his face at the first touch, and that he let go rapidly.
Then he turned, and wordlessly stretched his shoulders. The smart arms twined out, following his lead to carry him back up to the rooftop. Escher watched him ascend, the hum and clank of his tentacles fading with every storey.
'Bye.' she murmured.
And then he was gone.
humm. i am just a tiny little bit drunk right now. bleargh…i got gym sock tongue syndrome. note to future self; mexican beer with big black scorpion wearing a sombrero on the label is not a good thing.
anyway, on reflection not much seems to have happened in the way of action in this chapter. never mind, i promise that the next shall verily be packed with the stuff, much cataclysmic goings on, and possibly even penguins dancing. it's all written down on the schedule here. well okay actually i lied about the penguins.