Transparency 1.06

"You've been sleeping later," Pop commented as I stepped downstairs. "Are you well?"

"I'm okay," I replied even as I yawned, belying my own statement. "Just some cape stuff," I said, hoping that would be enough to keep him from prying too far.

It seemed to work, as he dropped the subject without any further comment. With a perfunctory nod, he directed me towards the dining hall.

I grimaced and grabbed a glass of water first, downing it in several large gulps before I poked my head out to find a busy, crowded room—dinner was served, it would seem.

I had spent the last few days sleeping and working later and later into the evenings, attempting to shift my sleep schedule—the period of time where I was active in Jamie's world—so that I could support her during the day, rather than in the middle of the night like I usually did.

Our reasoning was simple, we were planning a jailbreak of sorts. Several forays into the outside world had revealed the continuous presence of a security guard patrolling the hallways of the hospital/laboratory during the night, but there was no such presence during the day, when the place was busy with doctors and nurses. Although the risk of running into someone would have been higher during the day, we had decided that it would be a better chance than trying to sneak past a possibly armed guard specifically looking for suspicious movements into and out of the building.

Towards that end, Jamie needed help moving around during her escape, which meant that I needed to be in her world during that time period, rather than in mine—hence my efforts to alter my sleep schedule by close to ten or twelve hours.

It did make my life somewhat difficult here. As evidenced by my pop's comments, my parents had been struggling slightly with handling the larger crowds without my assistance. My cape work had suffered as well, although I generally picked up the odd bounty here and there. One might ordinarily think that more crimes occur at night, but for the most part it seemed like thieves and criminals found more success in blending in with crowded streets rather than the darkness.

My sudden schedule change had prompted a confused query from Flurry, a text message which had me smiling fondly that my former team leader was still keeping tabs on me—even as I worried about what I could tell her without giving away my secrets.

Jamie was also working towards shifting her own sleeping patterns—the end result being that we weren't in sync with each other any longer and I was forced to practise utilising her inert avatar more often than I would have liked. I presumed she had much the same problems that I did on that front, but if she did she made no mention of it to me.

One bright news that gave us both hope was the discovery that we were still in the same city. The clinic on her end had no counterpart in my world—instead it was a disused building currently open to developers—but much of the surrounding area was identical, which gave us hope as to a possible place we could escape to.

Jamie had treasured her freedom as an astral projection, as a ghost. The discovery that she was bedridden, even confined to a single building, had been too much to bear for her. She wanted her freedom back, at any cost, and I was willing to do whatever it took to let her achieve that.

...

The past few weeks had seen Jamie burning through her physical reserves each and every day in an attempt to force her body back into some semblance of normality. The results clearly showed; where before she had barely been able to sit up on her own, she could now support her upper body with just her arms and had gained some mobility with her legs. She still wasn't able to support her full weight yet, much less walk, but as time had passed and her rate of improvement had plateaued she had decided to put her plan into motion sooner rather than later.

While Jamie had been running through her protracted exercise routines, I had been experimenting with my newfound powers—attempting to determine how much I could manipulate objects with it.

I could force into motion any objects that had been designed to move around with no more effort than walking. This included not only the wheelchair itself but also nearly every piece of furniture in Jamie's room, each of which had casters mounted under their legs in order for the room to be reorganized into whatever configuration the staff needed it to be.

Unfortunately most of them were too heavy for me to simply lift into the air like I could with books and other small objects. Every attempt I'd made simply ejected me from the objects as I floated into the air without it. This discovery had discouraged Jamie somewhat—apparently her Plan A for leaving the hospital/laboratory was to have me simply levitate the bed out from the second story window and fly off into the sunset.

I couldn't help her out on that front, but there was plenty else I could do. My forays out into the outside world around us had allowed me to discover that we weren't too far from a clothing boutique. Over the course of the week they had suffered a mysterious series of thefts. Unfortunately, security footage showed no signs of intrusion or the perpetrator, although they did capture the clothes in question seemingly walking themselves out the door.

I felt guilty about that, but we had a short time frame and an even shorter list of options. I'd hoped the boutique wouldn't be my sole target for the shoplifting, but without any other alternatives within my tether range I couldn't 'spread out' the damages between other outlets and stores. I did try to focus on relatively cheaper, more utilitarian clothing, with a secondary emphasis on patterns or colors that wouldn't easily stand out on their own.

The really awkward part was helping Jamie get dressed in the appropriated outfit. She did as much as she could on her own, but the relative weakness in her limbs made certain tasks extremely difficult and time-consuming. Let's just say there was a certain amount of fumbling and cursing involved and leave it at that.

ooo

Ready? I sent to Jamie, breaking from my usual habit of vocalizing all of my communications whenever possible.

Jamie lifted her arms briefly, testing the fit of the blouse I'd filched for her and her limited range of motion. She lowered her arms and gave me a nod, prompting me to possess the wheelchair and move to her bedside.

I kept the wheelchair from moving as Jamie crawled across her bed and unceremoniously dumped herself head-first into the seat. There was another few moments of flailing limbs as she struggled to orient herself into the proper sitting position, her legs dragging themselves weakly as she settled down.

The first task was to make sure that the hallway outside was free of any witnesses. A quick peek through the door let me know that Jamie's doorway lacked the sentry I'd noticed several nights ago. Either it had been just a simple night guard who'd happened to park themselves there by chance, or they had been counting too heavily on the fact that she tended to be completely passed out during the daytime.

The door, she sent to me, impatience in her tone.

The lock, I corrected her as my inspection of the door itself revealed that the lock had been engaged. It was a relatively standard key-lock; I knew enough about them to have an idea of how they worked, though I'd never tried to break one until now. Fourteen thin rods were stacked together in seven different columns within the mechanism. Each rod was cut to a different height and pressed against a spring which held them against the bottom of the keyhole. Each column would have to be individually raised so that each pair of rods had their shear points lined up with the rotating plug that handled the lock itself.

I had been worried I wouldn't possess the fine control needed to manipulate each column of pins individually long enough to engage the tumbler. It seemed that my fear had been premature—despite the various mechanisms involved in the lock, my awareness seemed to spread throughout the lock, and even the door, as part of a greater whole. I was able to work the lock and the door handle almost by simply thinking it.

Ta-da~ I proclaimed, swinging the door open with a flourish. The grand gesture was lost on my audience, however, as I realized I had no hands to flourish with.

Jamie, a determined expression on her face, merely settled her hands on the wheelchair's hand-rims and gave them an experimental shove. She slowly made her way past the threshold and I closed the door after her, making sure to relock the door as I did so. Let them stew on that, I thought happily. The classic locked room scenario.

I'm not dead, though, Jamie pointed out. There was a faint strain in her mental voice and I noticed her arms were already trembling with muscle fatigue.

Details, details, I commented as I repossessed the wheelchair and began to propel it forward, allowing her to relax. Keep your hands on the rims, I reminded her, casting my awareness out nervously. Gotta keep up appearances.

The short trip was nerve-wracking. The hallway had never seemed this long on my previous sojourns in the nights of past. Every door we passed made me wonder if this would be the one where a doctor or nurse decided to step outside after checking on the patient within. Every door made me nervously expect a suspicious query as to what we were up to.

This is a lot harder than I thought it'd be, Jamie complained, rubbing her arms briefly before dropping them back over the armrests. I could tell she was feeling just as anxious about this whole affair as I was, but she was trying to distract herself by focusing on her physical aches. I can't wait until I've healed enough to walk again.

It was times like this that I wished we weren't so attuned with each other. Both of us could feel each other's worry and those emotions were like a feedback loop, building up against each other and kicking our collective anxiety up several notches.

It finally happened just as we were making our final approach to the elevator. As we passed the last room before the cross-corridor, the door opened and a nurse paused in the threshold, blinking owlishly at the wheelchair she'd nearly bumped into.

"Oh! Hullo!" she said in surprise. "What are you doing here?"

It was almost a relief to have a focus for our pent-up energy, but part of me felt the sudden need to keep anyone from sounding the alarm about our escape. I disconnected from the wheelchair and dove straight for the nurse, plowing straight through her chest before she could even register my presence.

Even as I felt a faint chill from my passage, the nurse gasped in surprise and I knew our brief interaction had not resulted in the outcome I'd desired—she was still conscious. I felt a surge of irritation and I continued into the door behind her. I quickly took control over the heavy wooden door and slammed it shut, bludgeoning the stunned nurse across her back. The woman was catapulted forward, her head bouncing off the frame of Jamie's wheelchair as she collapsed into a boneless heap on the ground.

I slowly extracted myself from the door, staring down at the woman on the floor in horror. She was still breathing—albeit rather fitfully—yet somehow the knowledge that I had not killed her did not relieve me in the slightest.

"I didn't mean to do that..." I whispered, too stricken to remember to keep my voice from coming out. I raised my head to look at Jamie, my eyes pleading for her to understand that I hadn't meant to assault the caregiver. "It... just sort of happened."

Jamie's expression was cold as she met my gaze. Her eyes flickered briefly towards the unconscious nurse before rising back to me. "She would have held us up," she said as if to reassure me. "Delayed us long enough for others to come and stop us." She pointedly turned to face the elevators, looking away from me. "C'mon, we have no time left to waste."

Still feeling numb from my recent actions, I dived back into the wheelchair and propelled us to safety.

ooo

My mind was still reeling from the sudden violence I had inflicted on an innocent bystander. I could only barely recall minor details of our escape. Jamie had simply boarded the elevator and arrived at the ground-floor clinic, passing through it as if she were a regular patient finishing their scheduled appointment. I'd often heard that confidence can do wonders in allowing people access to locations they aren't ordinarily permitted, but this had been the first time I'd seen it actually put to use.

I only partially remembered moving across the streets and roads through the town—a place that was identical to my own home in nearly every aspect. Certain shops had different store fronts or owners in places, but for the most part it gave us complete confidence in our navigation, reinforcing the I-am-definitely-not-a-tourist-or-a-lost-escapee vibe that Jamie was cultivating.

Our pace was not fast. Despite the fact that our escape would have to be noticed eventually and the possibility of pursuit was rather high, this little outing was as much an opportunity for Jamie to see our hometown with her own eyes, from a ground perspective rather than her usual aerial one.

The fog in my mind slowly lifted away as I took in the highly populated streets of the commercial district. The crowds of tourists meandering through the many vendors and shops as we went through the town gates. We rolled past a lookout overlooking the castle ruins as we headed north and made our way across the bridge crossing the river. The urban buildings gave way to hills and fields as we zig-zagged across the residential town.

Darkness was falling just as we rolled down a particular road just outside the town-proper. The pavement was somewhat cracked and the sidewalks were uneven, but the buildings along the street had recently-applied coats of paint and brilliant signs displaying their logos and names.

I recognized the butcher shop at the corner, with the roasted ducks hanging on racks just behind the storefront window and Old Man Cheung puttering behind the counter as he helped a customer. Next to the meat shop was a general store and sweet shop combination, selling imported candies and a range of flavored tea and milk-tea mixes. At the far end of the block was the random souvenir shop that sold everything from Chinese-made knockoff toys to the latest J-, K-, and C-pop related merchandise, mostly posters of the latest pretty-boys and idols to grace the various rankings.

But despite the familiar sights and bright lights, the moment I had realized just where we were I'd had my eyes focused on the building between the sweet shop and the general store. The building where I had spent much of my childhood, in a different life. The brilliant pink and yellow sign that proclaimed this to be a bakery.

My parents didn't run a bakery.

Jamie said nothing for several long minutes as she took in the sight. Unlike before, when she had first found out about her emancipation, she wasn't emoting internally. She wasn't silently raging and screaming in a place where only I could hear her. Rather, she felt resigned, as if she hadn't allowed herself to imagine anything but the worst-case scenario and discovered that she had not been pleasantly surprised.

"Hey, James?" she said quietly, not turning her head away from the building. "What do I do now?"

I extracted myself from the wheelchair and settled myself in the air just above her shoulder. I had no idea how I could answer, so I said nothing.

"Heh," she chuckled. "We didn't exactly plan this through, did we? All this time focused on figuring out where we were, how we were going to escape... and we didn't even decide on where we should go afterwards?"

I heard her inhale sharply with her nose, then release a quavering breath from her mouth. "We didn't even bring an overcoat, did we?" she asked with sharp bark of mocking laughter. She shivered briefly, tucking her head against her chest and wrapping her arms around herself.

"I guess not," I said quietly. My mind was racing, trying to figure out where we could possibly take shelter. A large problem was that we had no money. We could possibly try going door to door around the many houses in the hopes that a family would feel sorry enough for the sickly-looking girl to take her in, but that might draw attention from the very people we were trying to escape.

Both of us were so completely lost in thought and our self-defeating mood. It probably explained how I completely missed all signs of the person approaching us. It was the scrape of shoes against the pavement that made both of our heads suddenly snap up to find a startled-looking woman standing in front of us. She was holding a plastic bag in her hands with the bakery's logo printed on it, suggesting she had just been leaving the store when she had spotted the two of us loitering at the street corner.

The two of us... I suddenly gulped and shifted my attention to her face. Sure enough, her attention was focused directly on me, her eyes wide with surprise. I slowly edged backwards, hoping to perhaps slide myself back into the wheelchair, but gave up as I noticed her tracking me.

Jamie had also noticed where the woman's attention was and made a small noise to draw it towards herself. "Um, hi?"

"Hullo!" the woman cheerfully responded. It was hard to be certain in the fading light, but she appeared to have light-brown hair falling past her shoulders, tied into twin braids just behind her neck. She looked to be in her late teens or early adulthood, just barely younger than me, although she was wearing the uniform from one of the local schools. She reached up with her free hand to adjust a pair of round glasses across her nose as she leaned in to stare at me. "Is that a hologram?"

I jumped at the possible excuse, doing my best to make any motions simplistic and repetitive. Staying completely still was beyond me.

"Um... yes?" Jamie said nervously. She glanced towards me briefly before she stretched out her arms to wheel herself backwards, except the newcomer simply followed along, still leaning across her to peer more closely at me.

"Wicked..." the girl breathed. "It looks so... real."

This... couldn't be right. I knew I wasn't that great of an actor, shouldn't she have been a tad more suspicious? As I focused closely on her face, trying to find some sign of duplicity, I noticed something about her facial features that struck a chord in my memories.

"Err, if you don't mind," Jamie snapped out, "but I'm trying to have a breakdown here."

"Oh?" The girl lifted her head to appraise Jamie, then turned around to see what she'd been looking at earlier. "Oh! You mean that one Japanese restaurant? Yeah, I think the owners went out of business sometime last year. I miss that place too... It had the best sushi..." She sighed and hefted her plastic bag. "The bakery isn't bad though."

Or maybe she was an airhead. That could have been another explanation for jumping to the oddest conclusions I had ever seen, both for my presence and Jamie's current state of despair.

The smells from the bag wafted through the air and suddenly a low rumbled filled the air. Heads turned to find Jamie blushing a furious scarlet as she looked away in embarrassment.

The girl grinned, "Hungry? Well, too bad, this one's mine. I bought it with my own money!" She stood up straight and clasped the bag to her chest defensively. She paused and looked around for a brief moment before looking at Jamie once more. "Say, where's your ride?"

"I don't think I could handle solid foods anyhow," Jamie grumbled as the other girl dropped her non sequitur. She blinked as her train of thought finally caught up to what the other girl had said. "What?"

"Your ride home? Or are you out here all by yourself? Do you live far from here?"

"I, ah, I don't... have a home anymore," Jamie said quietly. She narrowed her eyes as she regarded the other girl. "Why?"

The girl seemed to take the sudden glare in stride, swinging the bag behind her back and rocking on her heels. "We~ell, if you're kinda homeless and are hungry, I know a place where you can stay... for a few nights at least if you wanted to." She grinned, "I'll even put in a good word for you with the owner, my treat!"

"Why?" Jamie repeated, a definite note of suspicion in her voice.

"Cuz I want to," the other girl kept smiling. She stopped rocking back and forth and extended one hand out. "Name's Karen," she introduced herself.

We could go, I offered my own opinion. Our backup plan was to find some sort of shelter, after all. If nothing else, at least you'd be fed and rested for the eventual backstab, if it comes to that. Besides, there's something about her that seems—I don't know—familiar.

You assume she'll actually feed me. Jamie stared at the hand warily for several moments, until her stomach grumbled in protest again. She sighed and grasped Karen's hand, pumping it once before letting go. "Jamie."

The streetlamps lit up, the light reflecting off of Karen's glasses and hiding her eyes briefly as her smile grew. "Great!" she exclaimed. Without any further prompting she took a long step and a short hop to place herself behind Jamie's wheelchair, grabbing the handles and spinning her around to face the other way down the street.

"Hey!" Jamie shouted in surprise, even as I belatedly dived back into the wheelchair so I could keep up without showing myself.

Karen paid no heed to her protests, instead heading off in a brisk walk that took her down the street. She chattered constantly, not seeming to care about Jamie's reticence. She talked about her school, referencing names and events we had absolutely no knowledge of, yet seemed to be sources of great amusement for herself. She talked about her family, mostly about an older sister who was the bestest in the world and apparently let her get away with anything. There were curiously few mentions of her own parents.

The constant stream of words eventually formed a comfortable background noise, keeping just enough of our attention to distract the both of us from our misery over Jamie's abandonment. The guilt that her hospital fees had apparently driven her parents into a state where her father was unable to continue his restaurant. The renewed reminder that she had no other people in this world aside from myself, who probably didn't count.

When our pace finally slowed and Karen pulled Jamie to a stop, we found ourselves in front of an aged but well-kept house in a relatively nice neighborhood. Despite the late hour Karen had no problems with marching up to the front door and banging on it loudly.

"Hey, Sunny!" she shouted through the door. "I brought some guests over! How's the gruel for tonight?!"

I saw a light flicker to life through the door's windows and the sound of a lock being disengaged. As the door opened, a tall woman stood in the threshold, slapping a towel against her hands as she gave a level stare at the shorter girl. "Karen," she chided. "Another one?"

The voice of the woman—Sunny—also seemed remarkably familiar to me, annoyingly so. I felt Jamie's attention slide towards me for a moment before she began her own appraising look, although Sunny was backlit from the lights inside the house and we couldn't make out her features.

"Yep!" I could somehow hear Karen's ubiquitous grin as she answered the woman. "Found her in front of the bakery where the 'White River' Restaurant used to be. Seemed like she hadn't been there in at least a year, didn't even know it closed!" She turned a pitying gaze back towards Jamie, ignoring how the wheelchair-bound girl bristled at the look.

Sunny sighed and moved out of the way, allowing Karen to skip inside. "Please, feel free to enjoy our hospitality if you wish. Despite what my younger sister may have told you, it is your own choice to partake or not, at your own discretion."

That particular way of speaking, almost excessively formal... without any prompting I propelled the wheelchair forward where I could get inside and get a closer look at Sunny. Jamie bit back a surprised yelp as she pantomimed working the wheel rims in order to keep up appearances.

"Um." Jamie spoke timidly, as if not sure how to take in this strange development. "Thank you for having us—me," she said, crossing the threshold and spinning around to face our host. I felt a shiver of shock run through her body, matching the one that ran through mine as we were able to see the face of our host.

"It is no problem at all," an unmasked Flurry assured her.

ooo

a/n—this chapter marks the end of the Transparency arc, although i'm thinking of tossing in an interlude here... i'm just trying to figure out what character i might want to use. also i'm taking summer classes so updates will most likely be slowing down from this point.

i got some more reviews, yay! and some constructive feedback, double yay! let's see how well i can address any of these... (apologies in advance for the relatively long author's notes)

i like that people seem to be favorably comparing this to worm, at least in the sense that it doesn't seem like the entire universe is out to get our protagonists. i generally do not like grim-dark-type stories, yet for some reason i was still able to tolerate and even enjoy Worm. i still dno why, especially after reading everything that has happened. shrug?

does wildbow review my work? no. when i wrote 'Looking Glass' i did send my first draft to him for a quick run through (some changes were made, for example: looking glass used to be set in california's bay area before it was pointed out the Protectorate would never allow some of the things Glass does, such as his school), but as he pointed out in a few chapter comments, any time he spends reading is time he is not spending writing. i am personally willing to put up with my own story being so far afield of canon if it means more actual Worm.

things like powers and the setting not meshing with canon. mostly intentional and yet not. the idea of a cross-universe-counterpart thing has been bouncing in my head for several years, but i find i have more trouble creating a setting than i do a character idea, so i was never able to think of a proper way to apply it. worm's superpowers and in-setting parallel universes just seemed to jump at me, even if it still wasn't a perfect fit.

street superhero dynamic. while i still made some effort to make it recognizeably Worm, by placing the setting across the pond i'd hoped to give a different sort of dynamic to the cape scene—hence the sort of bounty hunter-esque behavior of Glass and his team— even if it may not be what wildbow intended for the the UK (although india's and china's cape scenes are vastly different than anything i could have imagined as well, who knows, maybe he'll reference my method? *crosses fingers*) one of the other things that was implied in wildbow's feedback was the relative lack of major cape organisations in the UK, with the Suits and the King's Men being some of the notable exceptions

James/Jamie don't seem... quite right in the head. this is true.

James is a boring protagonist. this... is also true. unfortunately it's also unintentional. as a reviewer pointed out, by trying to copy the format of Worm, i made the POV in the first person, except stream of thought-narration does not seem to be one of my stronger points. by forcing a relatively normal narration onto a point-of-view, the result is that James comes out a bit... flat. this leaves me with a conundrum of trying to revise what i've written already, change it in future updates, or find a way to handwave/explain it away. as to the part where he seems completely defined by his relationship with Jamie... yes? hm... i wonder if i can do something with that...

use (or lack of) local British slang and colloquialisms. hoo boy, this is where i wrote myself into a corner. as i mentioned above, i had originally planned to set this in america, but in my attempt to justify the 'changes' i had made to the setting i moved it over to the UK. as per previous author's notes, i am not british. this creates something of a problem, while i can watch my spelling and replace certain words with their british counterparts, i don't know the proper use of common phrases and slang.

(i have a tendency to ninja-edit previous writings if i've noticed significant errors within the first few weeks; if anyone paid attention to Looking Glass you might have noticed me trying to write 'wristwatch' as 'kettle', failing miserably and simply changing it back to the more common name)

unfortunately i don't use a beta and most of my british knowledge comes from listening to a british gamer friend on skype who may or may not be speaking properly since we usually play together in the dead of the night for her. my londonese is lacking. i apologize. apologise. gdi.

timeline in relation to Worm. Worm seems to be set NextSundayAD or ThePresentDay (trope those. ruin your life. go ahead, i'll wait) to that end i played around with my own timeline a bit to work things out.

James and Jamie were born in late 1991; their mutual accident/trigger event happened in 1999, prior to Leviathan's attack on Kyushu; Looking Glass takes place around 2006-2007 (undecided, not important); the Endbringer at Eyjafjallajökull refers to the Icelandic volcanic eruptions early 2010 that brought air traffic in Europe to a near-standstill for several months (i figured to blame it on Behemoth, shrug?); current setting is Spring 2011 (specific time in relation to Worm i'll put at the end of the story, but needless to say James and Jamie will not be running into any Undersiders... i think.)

the Smurf is the only telepath? (refers to a side line 1.04) in Worm's Agitation 3.11, during the bank robbery where Tt is explaining her powers to Gg. take it with a grain of salt since it is Tt engaging in some mindscrew, but the fact that Gg seems to follow suggests that it is true, or at least that it's the widely disseminated theory