I woke up with keyboard face. I was slumped over the desk, aching from the awkward andgle and with my limbs sprawled any which way - entirely consistent with an unexpected but nonviolent loss of conciousness. I'd been out long enough that the pattern of control and shift and enter keys was embossed gently into my cheek, but not long enough for my neck and back to start seriously aching and cramping - though the edge of the desk was starting to cut into my breasts something fierce.
At the time, that awareness seemed simply logical rather than something out of place; the alarm bells didn't start ringing until I tried to recall what I'd been doing when I went under, and even then, those instincts were concerned that some outside force had interfered with me when I hadn't felt particularly tired to speak of nor had any other 'natural' reason to lay my head down and ignore the game when the team needed-
And that was when I noticed.
My habit of referring to both Sachie and Nathan in the third person has nothing to do with my feeling seperate from them. In fact, it's a deliberate effort on my part to try to sort out the influence that, from the inside, feel essentially seamless. I have to deduce, conciously, whether an impulse derives from Sachie's trained paranoia or Nathan's idealism, and it's not always easy. Neither of them enjoyed contact with other people very much, nor was either immune to lonliness.
Something very strange had happened, mashing my two prototypes together into one person, though even without checking it was easy to feel in my ease of motion and weight distribution and choice of clothing and a thousand other tiny things that my body was based on only the more capable of the two.
Given their connection to each other, tenuous and unlikely as it was in real terms, the closest thing that I had to a plausible vector for whatever magic or other effect had afflicted me was my computer. Without more information to judge how or why this had happened, it was safest, wisest, to isolate myself from that vector... but I still needed information.
Piece of cake.
I lingered in my (fusty, cramped) basement apartment for exactly long enough to put Nathan's signature on a check for... well. Perhaps I shouldn't say, beyond that it was just short of the amount where a bank would consider it 'out of the ordinary' - where the US government had set its requirement for being informed of 'large' transactions. The payee, of course, was the most innocuous of the several spare IDs that Sachie had had in one of her coat's inside pockets. Unfortunately, the designs of the money in Nathan's wallet - sitting in a pile next to the keyboard with keys and cellular phone - and of several different samples from Sachie's considerable store of ready cash did not match to speak of, meaning that that would be the limit of my immediate starting resources.
Then, in a hurry and reasonably confident that any potential hunters would lack the skills to see through it, I settled into the modest henge that went with that ID - thirty centimeters shorter, somewhat pudgy, forgettable features, black hair - and went to find a bar.
Nathan had never been the sort to frequent that kind of establishment, and even Sachie had never particularly enjoyed them, but most bars in this modern day and age, certainly in the United States, offered one priceless advantage - they had a television, usually tuned to some sports news channel. If this change had only affected me, well and good and I could start trying to find other sources of information; if it were more common, everyone who had been playing City of Heroes or everyone who had been on a computer game of any sort, then the news services would have picked up the story and I could learn a great deal, quietly, simply by watching until they started to repeat themselves.
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
At the time, that awareness seemed simply logical rather than something out of place; the alarm bells didn't start ringing until I tried to recall what I'd been doing when I went under, and even then, those instincts were concerned that some outside force had interfered with me when I hadn't felt particularly tired to speak of nor had any other 'natural' reason to lay my head down and ignore the game when the team needed-
And that was when I noticed.
My habit of referring to both Sachie and Nathan in the third person has nothing to do with my feeling seperate from them. In fact, it's a deliberate effort on my part to try to sort out the influence that, from the inside, feel essentially seamless. I have to deduce, conciously, whether an impulse derives from Sachie's trained paranoia or Nathan's idealism, and it's not always easy. Neither of them enjoyed contact with other people very much, nor was either immune to lonliness.
Something very strange had happened, mashing my two prototypes together into one person, though even without checking it was easy to feel in my ease of motion and weight distribution and choice of clothing and a thousand other tiny things that my body was based on only the more capable of the two.
Given their connection to each other, tenuous and unlikely as it was in real terms, the closest thing that I had to a plausible vector for whatever magic or other effect had afflicted me was my computer. Without more information to judge how or why this had happened, it was safest, wisest, to isolate myself from that vector... but I still needed information.
Piece of cake.
I lingered in my (fusty, cramped) basement apartment for exactly long enough to put Nathan's signature on a check for... well. Perhaps I shouldn't say, beyond that it was just short of the amount where a bank would consider it 'out of the ordinary' - where the US government had set its requirement for being informed of 'large' transactions. The payee, of course, was the most innocuous of the several spare IDs that Sachie had had in one of her coat's inside pockets. Unfortunately, the designs of the money in Nathan's wallet - sitting in a pile next to the keyboard with keys and cellular phone - and of several different samples from Sachie's considerable store of ready cash did not match to speak of, meaning that that would be the limit of my immediate starting resources.
Then, in a hurry and reasonably confident that any potential hunters would lack the skills to see through it, I settled into the modest henge that went with that ID - thirty centimeters shorter, somewhat pudgy, forgettable features, black hair - and went to find a bar.
Nathan had never been the sort to frequent that kind of establishment, and even Sachie had never particularly enjoyed them, but most bars in this modern day and age, certainly in the United States, offered one priceless advantage - they had a television, usually tuned to some sports news channel. If this change had only affected me, well and good and I could start trying to find other sources of information; if it were more common, everyone who had been playing City of Heroes or everyone who had been on a computer game of any sort, then the news services would have picked up the story and I could learn a great deal, quietly, simply by watching until they started to repeat themselves.
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."