Part Eleven: Alice Through the Looking Glass, Part One
Ack
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Adventures in the MirrorVerse
Part Eleven: Alice Through the Looking Glass, Part One
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Brockton Bay, Earth Bet
I paused, mid brush-stroke. Mom had always encouraged me to take care of my hair; a little darker than hers, it was just as curly. In her memory, I tried to brush it out at least once a day; truth be told, if I let it go longer than that, it did its best to become an impenetrable tangle of knots. If nothing else today, I was going to do that; the concussion I had suffered yesterday at Bakuda's hands didn't leave me much else to do. Fortunately, the pills were keeping the headache to a dull murmur.
But it wasn't my hair or the concussion that was the problem right now. I was more concerned with the fact that my image had just vanished from the mirror in front of me. One moment there, the next … not.
Squinting through my glasses, I moved my head from side to side. No, it wasn't a trick of the light. There really was no me in the mirror.
Oh shit. What if I'm hallucinating? That could only mean bad things. A brain bleed, or worse. Pressure on the … what was it called, video centre? Visual something or other? Whatever it was, maybe I had brain damage that the CT scan had missed. And now I was seeing … well, not seeing things. Literally not seeing something. That is, me.
I wondered momentarily if this was going to be permanent. A very specific hallucination causing me to block any image of myself out of my mind. This is gonna make putting on makeup very difficult. I paused. Maybe it's my glasses?
Reaching up, I pulled my glasses off. The mirror got a little blurry, but I didn't see a blurry me in there. Okay, there goes that idea. Putting them back on, I reached forward. Final test. See if the mirror's still there. Intellectually, I knew it was. It had to be. It was a part of my dresser, which was free-standing against the wall. I could see my room behind it, which would be impossible to fake, given that the dresser was against the outside wall of the house, and so the room would have to be projecting several yards out into empty air.
But concussion plus pain meds makes it easier to do things that you know are illogical. So I reached out to touch the mirror.
Only it wasn't there.
I paused, half-standing, my arm halfway up to the elbow inside my damn mirror. I waved my hand around, feeling no resistance. It was there. I could see it clearly. It was also sticking through a hole that shouldn't exist, into a mirror-imaged room that shouldn't exist.
I didn't freak out, mainly because my brain wasn't hitting on all cylinders. Slowly, I pulled my arm out of the impossible hole in the wall and moved around to look down the narrow gap behind the dresser and the mirror. If I squinted, I could see the back of the mirror and I could also see the wall. They both existed.
Without even asking myself what the fuck am I doing? I reached around, feeling my hand go through the mirror once more as if it had simply ceased to be. Standing next to the dresser, I could see that the back of the mirror and the wall were undisturbed, despite the fact that I had my arm elbow-deep in the damn mirror.
Pulling my arm out again, I went to the window and leaned out. The sunlight stung my eyes a little, but I was able to ascertain that no, nobody had bolted an extra bedroom to the outside of the house overnight. There was a wall there, with no holes at all. Nothing that I could stick my arm through. Nothing that made any sense at all.
I went back and sat on the bed. Okay. My mirror is now a window into a mirror-image of my room. That's kind of weird. But I'm pretty sure there's weirder shit out there.
With a thought, I called up a dozen bugs and sent them through the mirror. They passed through perfectly fine, so I spread them out to explore the mirror-house. While they were doing this, I lay back on the bed; I may have dozed for a few moments.
When I woke up, the mirror was still a window. The bugs were spread out through the mirror-house; I gathered from their sensory impressions that all the rooms in my house were the same in that house, only mirror-imaged. To go to the bathroom from my room, I'd have to turn left instead of right, that sort of thing. Outside the house was … well, outside. I guided a beetle to fly up to the mirror-house window and inside. Nothing flew in my window. But when I told it to go to the mirror, there it was.
And then I caught my breath. Because sitting on the sofa in the mirror-living room, reading what was probably a mirrored newspaper, was … Dad.
Not my Dad, but a mirror version of him.
Wow, holy fuck.
I reached out to the bugs in my living room, and … there was Dad. My real Dad. He was watching TV; I couldn't make out what was on. And at the same time, I was using my bugs to watch another Dad, in a different world, do something subtly different.
This is so damn weird.
At this point, I should have stopped. Taken stock. At the very least, told Dad what was going on. Shown him the mirror. Maybe I should even have called in Lisa and Brian and shown them the mirror. Shit, I should have called up the PRT and told them about it. After all, the huge song and dance about the Earth Aleph portal that Professor Haywire had created had never really gone away. And that one was tiny. This one, I could literally climb through.
I blame the meds and the concussion. Because there was literally no other excuse for the next thought that popped into my head.
Hey, why don't I go through and find out what it's like on the other side?
There were probably hundreds of good reasons.
I couldn't think of a one.
Dad looked up when I got to the bottom of the stairs. "Taylor, are you all right?"
"Sure," I told him. "I was just going to get a snack, then have a shower and get some more sleep. Is that okay?" Translation: I don't want to be disturbed for the next few hours.
"Of course it is," he assured me, jumping up from the couch. "You know, you could use the bed down here and watch TV."
I made a face. "The sofa bed is kind of lumpy. I'm happy in my own bed."
"Whatever's fine with you." He led the way into the kitchen. "What would you like for a snack?"
"Um, a sandwich?"
He pointed at a chair. "Sit down, I'll make it for you."
Guilt started to jab at me as I obeyed. He was so anxious to please, so willing to do whatever I needed. Maybe I should tell him.
Opening my mouth, I almost did. The filter between my brain and my mouth was that thin. But then I found myself running through the conversation that would follow.
Uh, Dad, I found a portal to another world in my bedroom mirror. I'm gonna explore it.
Taylor, that's not a good idea. What if it's hostile?
Oh, I can defend myself, Dad. I've got bug powers.
You've got what now?
No matter how I tried to play it, the conversation went downhill fast after that. And if I didn't tell him about my powers, he'd stop me from going, even if it was my world. I'd discovered it, after all. It was my right to be the first to explore it.
And of course, if I told him about the powers, that opened another huge can of Endbringer-sized worms. He'd know about me being a supervillain and he'd probably figure out that Lisa and Brian were villains as well. I'd ruin everything for everyone.
So it was better to not say anything to anyone. Yeah. That was much safer.
By the time I finished my shower – I hadn't been lying about that part – my headache was starting to come back, along with the first stirrings of common sense. Not very strong stirrings, given the fact that I was still concussed, but stirrings all the same. I squashed both headache and common sense ruthlessly with a painkiller pill, washed down with a glass of water that I'd brought upstairs with my sandwich.
Firmly closing my bedroom door, I changed into what I thought was sensible alternate-universe-exploring clothing. In the event, this was T-shirt, jeans and a hoodie. I stuffed a pepper spray tube into my pocket and made sure that the knife that I had used to de-toe Bakuda – carefully cleaned, thank you very much – was secure in its sheath in the small of my back, under my hoodie. I wasn't being totally clueless, after all. As an afterthought, I stuck my phone in my pocket as well. I didn't think I'd get coverage in the mirror-world, but if nothing else, I could get some photos.
After that, I had to decide how to climb into the alternate universe that I had discovered. Absently, I wondered if they'd call it Earth Taylor, or maybe Earth Rolyat, given that it seemed to be a mirror-world. Then I wondered why I was even wondering about that.
Climbing through was not the easiest thing in the world, even after I had cleared the stuff on my dresser to each side, and done the same with the stuff on mirror-Taylor's dresser as well. It felt really weird, reaching into a whole different world to move stuff around, but if I was going to be climbing through, I didn't want to break any of her stuff. Who knew, we might end up being besties. After all, who better to be my friend than someone who already knew me as well as I did?
The dresser didn't like it when I climbed up on to it; it rocked rather alarmingly and I thought it was going to fall. So I climbed off again.
But the rocking gave me an idea. The mirror was on a swivel; a little experimentation showed me that although the mirror-portal was fixed to mirror-Taylor's dresser mirror, I could move mine without affecting hers. So I lifted it off the swivel and put it face-up on the floor. Then, before I could talk myself out of it, I got down on to the floor and lowered myself through.
It felt really weird going through; as soon as any part of me passed over the threshold, it was dragged to one side – the 'down' side – and I ended up clambering down off of her dresser. Looking back through the mirror, I had a good view of my bedroom ceiling, and where the pain was peeling. Then I wondered why I was looking back at my own bedroom, when I had a whole new world to explore, right here and now.
I looked around at mirror-Taylor's bedroom; unmade bed, clothes on the floor, smell of cigarette smoke … ew. The other me smoked? Ew. I wasn't so sure if I was going to like her. I moved sideways, and my foot hit something that clinked. Glancing down, I saw what was obviously an alcohol bottle. It had hit another one. Oh great, mirror-me drinks too.
Fighting down a profound sense of disappointment – I had crossed into another universe to find out that this world's version of me had two habits that I had nothing but distaste for – I looked at the posters on the walls. At least she had those. But in place of the Protectorate poster that held pride of place opposite my bed – it was an older one, missing Triumph – there was one that I thought at first was lettered in Russian. The backwards N was what confused me. Then I saw a backwards G, and frowned. I didn't think the Russians had that in their alphabet.
And then, of course, I realised what was going on. I'm in a mirror-universe, duh. The writing's all going to be mirror-imaged. I concentrated on the lettering, reading it from right to left, mentally reversing them. N … O … N … A … G … O … N. Nonagon. Huh. A nine-sided figure. Cute name. Then I looked at the people actually portrayed in the poster and recoiled so hard that I sat down on the bed.
I knew those people. Everyone in America who hadn't been living under a rock for the last twenty years knew them. But there was no way in hell that they should be on a poster.
Standing up again, I stepped forward, peering at the poster. Wait a minute …
The Siberian was easily recognisable, despite the fact that she wore a one-piece costume. Beside her, Jack Slash was posing proudly, holding a knife aloft. Flanking them … that was Mannequin, although his armour was designed a little oddly. And that there was Bonesaw, minus the blood-caked apron. Crawler was missing, though Shatterbird was there. Some capes I didn't know were filling in the gaps, but it was definitely them. Definitely the Slaughterhouse Nine.
Here they're called … Nonagon? And people are putting posters out about them? Okay, that's really kind of weird.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay in this bedroom for much longer. A lot of the excitement of being in a whole new universe was starting to drain away. All the writing was reversed and I was having to concentrate to read any of it. Plus, the smell of stale cigarette smoke and, I was pretty sure, alcohol wasn't doing my headache any favours. I took a few photographs anyway, just because I could, then tucked the phone away again.
Carefully pulling the bedroom door open, I peered out into the corridor. My bugs still had mirror-Dad down in the living room, reading the paper. I wasn't really sure that I wanted to meet him, even if he thought I was his real daughter. Maybe I can sneak out past him. Duck down the front hall into the kitchen and out the back door.
Or maybe I should just brazen it out. Walk down the stairs like I belong here.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I had decided to try the second idea. My footsteps thudded on the steps as I trotted downstairs. At the bottom of the steps, all I had to do was turn right, not left, so that I would be heading along the front hall, toward the back door.
At the bottom of the steps, habit took over and I turned left. Into the living room. Right in front of mirror-Dad.
Crap.
If I stopped, then he'd notice me more. I kept going.
"Taylor." His voice was more grating than my Dad's. More raspy.
"Yeah?" I made my voice as non-committal as I could and kept on going.
"Thought you went out."
"Came back," I replied in a well, duh sort of voice, not looking around. "Got changed."
I was almost to the doorway into the kitchen. Behind me, he put the paper down; my bugs picked it up and I also heard the rustle. "Come here a moment."
Reluctantly, I stopped and turned. Mirror-Taylor smokes and drinks. She's rebellious. "Can it wait? Got places to be."
Rolling up the paper and tapping it on his knee, he pointed at the spot on the floor in front of him. When he spoke, I heard a tone that Dad had never used in front of me. "Here. Now."
I walked over and stood in front of him; he looked up at me. "You look kinda different. You feeling okay? You were pretty loopy after Shebang's laughter grenade got you yesterday."
Shebang? Laughter grenade? What the hell?
"I, uh, yeah, I'm fine," I told him. I knew what he was seeing; faces are not totally symmetrical, and to swap the features from side to side often produces strange effects. To him, it seemed as though I was unwell.
"Okay then," he grunted, then picked up the remote and turned on the TV, attention dropping away from me as though I had never walked into the room.
Greatly daring, I picked up the discarded paper and strolled into the kitchen. The door handle turned easily and I stepped out of the house.
I wasn't quite sure where to go after I left the house. I needed to get out of there, in case mirror-Dad noticed anything else weird about me, such as being left-handed (to him) or not knowing something simple. But I didn't know where to go; at first, I thought it would be cool to go meet up with this world's version of the Undersiders. If mirror-me was there, we could hang out. Though if she started smoking and drinking in front of me, I didn't know how I was going to react.
Eventually, I headed for the Boardwalk. I made quite a few wrong turns, because I still wasn't totally used to being in the mirror-world. Left was right and right was left, duh. That meant that if north and south were the same as always, then east and west had been swapped, so I had to go that way instead of this way to get to the Boardwalk, instead of toward Captain's Hill.
In the end, I followed the street signs, though I thought that people might think I was slow, spending a few moments puzzling out what they meant instead of reading them at a glance. But I got there eventually and flopped down on to a bench seat.
I needed to think about what mirror-Dad had said. He'd mentioned someone called 'Shebang' and a laughter grenade. I recalled encountering Bakuda and her pain bomb. Could they be one and the same, on two different worlds? A laughter grenade didn't seem nearly as nasty as a pain bomb, but I supposed that if you laughed hard enough it would incapacitate you.
But … a laughter grenade sounded almost … friendly. It was something that a hero would use, unless it made you laugh so hard you hurt yourself. Though mirror-Dad hadn't seemed to be overly concerned. Then again, he hadn't seemed to be overly interested in connecting to me at all. Did he even care about mirror-me?
With a mental effort, I put that aside for the moment and addressed another problem. I hadn't really noticed it up until now, given all the other things on my mind, but I couldn't feel any bugs around me. The dozen or so bugs I'd sent into the house before exploring myself had been left back there; between the house and the Boardwalk, I hadn't once felt the distinctive signal of a bug 'reporting in'.
This was kind of frightening and disorienting, like waking up one day and finding out that one of your arms was missing. It was perhaps more so than when I'd gotten my powers. After all, I was used to them now. Being able to control bugs was all kinds of amazing.
If I didn't have the power to control bugs here, exploring this world would be a whole lot less fun, and a lot more unsafe, than I had imagined. On the other hand, I told myself hopefully, maybe it's just a factor of being mirror-imaged. Maybe they're just on another frequency, or whatever it is. Maybe I can tap into it.
And maybe I couldn't. I had to face the fact that I was quite possibly without powers in this world. My sudden impulse to go exploring without backup and without telling anyone where I had gone was starting to look less and less sensible by the minute. A buzzing grew in my ears.
"Hey, are you all right?"
I looked up, startled. A man stood opposite me, peering at me carefully, with a woman at his side. They weren't anyone I knew, or thought I knew; just a couple, in their mid twenties or so. Panic closed my throat; could they tell that I was from another world?
"I wouldn't have asked but you look like you're in pain or something." His voice betrayed nothing but concern.
I realised that I'd been sitting hunched over, my hands clenched into fists at the sides of my head. I straightened up, relaxed my hands. "No, no, I'm good. I was just … thinking about something."
"Oh, that's good then." He smiled uncertainly. "Don't think too hard. You might hurt yourself." A chuckle told me that this was supposed to be a joke.
"Yeah." With an effort, I returned the chuckle. "Thanks."
They moved off then; a few yards on, the woman glanced back at me. I gave her a smile and a brief wave; reassured, she went on with the man. Leaning back against the bench, I found myself relaxing, a genuine smile starting to creep across my features. Well, at least random strangers here can be nice.
The buzzing was back. To distract myself from it, I opened the paper and tried to read it. It was, of course, printed in reverse, so after a few moments I turned to the front page, all the way to the right. Concentrating as well as I could, I began to read the headlines and then work my way through the articles. People came strolling past, but if they found anything weird about a teenager reading the paper at the Boardwalk, nobody said anything.
DRUG STASH DESTROYED BY TEEN HEROES, said one article header. Huh, so this world has the Wards as well. Cool. MAYOR'S NIECE MISSING, stated another. That one got my attention, so I started to puzzle my way through the article.
I found it easier and easier as I went along, despite the buzzing in my ears; toward the end, I was reading almost as fast as I could normally. But I had to go back and re-read it, because it came across as weird.
Apparently, this version of Brockton Bay also had a man called Roy Christner as Mayor. That much I could understand. Whether our Mayor Christner also had a niece called Dinah Alcott, I couldn't be sure. From the article, she had gone missing on the fourteenth; that was the day that I had robbed the Brockton Bay Central Bank with the Undersiders.
But what I couldn't get over was the tone of the article. Christner was quoted as being 'very angry' and 'offering a large reward' to retrieve his wayward niece. However, the reporter who wrote the article seemed to be not very worried about the twelve year old's well-being. It seems more likely that she's gone to stay at a friend's house, the article read. After all, who would abduct a child? Really?
I had to stop and think about that. Now that I was reminded, there had been an Amber Alert in the paper, pushing our bank job off the front page. In this world, there seemed to be about the same level of interest as in a lost dog.
Are people so callous here? I wondered. Do they care so little? After all, my experience with mirror-Dad hadn't given me a high level of confidence regarding his home life with mirror-me.
The buzzing ramped up in intensity, making my head begin to throb. I gasped, clenching my eyes shut as I clasped my hands over my temples. I forgot all the other problems I had as I tried to ride out the pain.
"Hey, are you all right? Is she all right?"
"I don't know. She looks like she's in pain."
"Hey, kid. You all right there?"
"Do you need a doctor?"
The babble of voices surrounded me, startling me with its suddenness. I unclenched my eyes and looked around at the circle of faces that had appeared out of seemingly nowhere. Men and women, young and old. One little girl solemnly offered her ice-cream. An older man held out a bottle of water.
Abruptly, as if turned off by a switch, the headache was gone, as was the buzzing in my ears. I struggled to sit upright once more. Carefully, I waved away the ice-cream, but I accepted the bottle. Slowly, I sipped, letting the water trickle down my throat.
"Thanks, I'm fine now," I told them. "Honestly, I'm all right. Thank you."
The man who had offered water frowned slightly. "You looked as though you were really in pain there, kid. Do you want me to drive you to a doctor? I know a good one."
Capping the bottle and handing it back, I shook my head. As sincere as he sounded, I didn't really think that I wanted to get into a car alone with a strange man. "No, I'll be fine, thanks. I'm feeling much better now." I looked around at the crowd. "Really, I'll be all right. Thanks."
Nodding to me, they began to move off. I paused, looking at my would-be benefactor. "Though … well, I hate to ask …"
"Yeah?" It was downright weird, the way he seemed to perk up at the chance to help me.
"Um, I don't have bus fare to get home, and …"
"Say no more," he declared, pulling his wallet out and withdrawing a banknote from it. "This should get you home, as well as a sandwich or something if you get hungry on the way." Looking at it, I finally realised that it was a twenty.
"I, uh, thanks, but -" I began to protest at the denomination of the note, but then I saw others around him, pulling their own wallets out. One by one, each of them produced banknotes and handed them to him; I saw ones and twos, mainly. By the time they finished, he must have been reimbursed half again as much for what he'd given me. " … uh, never mind. Thanks a lot. I mean it."
He nodded firmly to me as he tucked the ones and twos away. "Think nothing of it. Have a nice day, kid."
"You too," I responded. Turning away, I headed off down the Boardwalk, looking for a bus stop. Okay, that was weird. He was generous to me; they were generous to him. Nobody was out any large amount. But it was all … natural. Weird, weird world.
I had travelled a hundred yards before something else occurred to me; I could feel bugs in my vicinity. Slowly, yard by yard, my awareness of the local bug life was pushing its way outward once more. My power was back. That's what the buzzing must have been. My power finding the new frequency.
I wonder if I have to go through that again when I go back home. That'll be no fun at all.
Finally, I found a bus stop. Carefully, I began to read the schedule times. I needed to find the bus to the north ferry dock; if the local version of the Undersiders made their base in the same place as in my world, I could walk there in twenty minutes.
Boy, are they gonna be surprised to see me.
End of Part Eleven
Part Eleven: Alice Through the Looking Glass, Part One
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Brockton Bay, Earth Bet
I paused, mid brush-stroke. Mom had always encouraged me to take care of my hair; a little darker than hers, it was just as curly. In her memory, I tried to brush it out at least once a day; truth be told, if I let it go longer than that, it did its best to become an impenetrable tangle of knots. If nothing else today, I was going to do that; the concussion I had suffered yesterday at Bakuda's hands didn't leave me much else to do. Fortunately, the pills were keeping the headache to a dull murmur.
But it wasn't my hair or the concussion that was the problem right now. I was more concerned with the fact that my image had just vanished from the mirror in front of me. One moment there, the next … not.
Squinting through my glasses, I moved my head from side to side. No, it wasn't a trick of the light. There really was no me in the mirror.
Oh shit. What if I'm hallucinating? That could only mean bad things. A brain bleed, or worse. Pressure on the … what was it called, video centre? Visual something or other? Whatever it was, maybe I had brain damage that the CT scan had missed. And now I was seeing … well, not seeing things. Literally not seeing something. That is, me.
I wondered momentarily if this was going to be permanent. A very specific hallucination causing me to block any image of myself out of my mind. This is gonna make putting on makeup very difficult. I paused. Maybe it's my glasses?
Reaching up, I pulled my glasses off. The mirror got a little blurry, but I didn't see a blurry me in there. Okay, there goes that idea. Putting them back on, I reached forward. Final test. See if the mirror's still there. Intellectually, I knew it was. It had to be. It was a part of my dresser, which was free-standing against the wall. I could see my room behind it, which would be impossible to fake, given that the dresser was against the outside wall of the house, and so the room would have to be projecting several yards out into empty air.
But concussion plus pain meds makes it easier to do things that you know are illogical. So I reached out to touch the mirror.
Only it wasn't there.
I paused, half-standing, my arm halfway up to the elbow inside my damn mirror. I waved my hand around, feeling no resistance. It was there. I could see it clearly. It was also sticking through a hole that shouldn't exist, into a mirror-imaged room that shouldn't exist.
I didn't freak out, mainly because my brain wasn't hitting on all cylinders. Slowly, I pulled my arm out of the impossible hole in the wall and moved around to look down the narrow gap behind the dresser and the mirror. If I squinted, I could see the back of the mirror and I could also see the wall. They both existed.
Without even asking myself what the fuck am I doing? I reached around, feeling my hand go through the mirror once more as if it had simply ceased to be. Standing next to the dresser, I could see that the back of the mirror and the wall were undisturbed, despite the fact that I had my arm elbow-deep in the damn mirror.
Pulling my arm out again, I went to the window and leaned out. The sunlight stung my eyes a little, but I was able to ascertain that no, nobody had bolted an extra bedroom to the outside of the house overnight. There was a wall there, with no holes at all. Nothing that I could stick my arm through. Nothing that made any sense at all.
I went back and sat on the bed. Okay. My mirror is now a window into a mirror-image of my room. That's kind of weird. But I'm pretty sure there's weirder shit out there.
With a thought, I called up a dozen bugs and sent them through the mirror. They passed through perfectly fine, so I spread them out to explore the mirror-house. While they were doing this, I lay back on the bed; I may have dozed for a few moments.
When I woke up, the mirror was still a window. The bugs were spread out through the mirror-house; I gathered from their sensory impressions that all the rooms in my house were the same in that house, only mirror-imaged. To go to the bathroom from my room, I'd have to turn left instead of right, that sort of thing. Outside the house was … well, outside. I guided a beetle to fly up to the mirror-house window and inside. Nothing flew in my window. But when I told it to go to the mirror, there it was.
And then I caught my breath. Because sitting on the sofa in the mirror-living room, reading what was probably a mirrored newspaper, was … Dad.
Not my Dad, but a mirror version of him.
Wow, holy fuck.
I reached out to the bugs in my living room, and … there was Dad. My real Dad. He was watching TV; I couldn't make out what was on. And at the same time, I was using my bugs to watch another Dad, in a different world, do something subtly different.
This is so damn weird.
At this point, I should have stopped. Taken stock. At the very least, told Dad what was going on. Shown him the mirror. Maybe I should even have called in Lisa and Brian and shown them the mirror. Shit, I should have called up the PRT and told them about it. After all, the huge song and dance about the Earth Aleph portal that Professor Haywire had created had never really gone away. And that one was tiny. This one, I could literally climb through.
I blame the meds and the concussion. Because there was literally no other excuse for the next thought that popped into my head.
Hey, why don't I go through and find out what it's like on the other side?
There were probably hundreds of good reasons.
I couldn't think of a one.
<><>
Dad looked up when I got to the bottom of the stairs. "Taylor, are you all right?"
"Sure," I told him. "I was just going to get a snack, then have a shower and get some more sleep. Is that okay?" Translation: I don't want to be disturbed for the next few hours.
"Of course it is," he assured me, jumping up from the couch. "You know, you could use the bed down here and watch TV."
I made a face. "The sofa bed is kind of lumpy. I'm happy in my own bed."
"Whatever's fine with you." He led the way into the kitchen. "What would you like for a snack?"
"Um, a sandwich?"
He pointed at a chair. "Sit down, I'll make it for you."
Guilt started to jab at me as I obeyed. He was so anxious to please, so willing to do whatever I needed. Maybe I should tell him.
Opening my mouth, I almost did. The filter between my brain and my mouth was that thin. But then I found myself running through the conversation that would follow.
Uh, Dad, I found a portal to another world in my bedroom mirror. I'm gonna explore it.
Taylor, that's not a good idea. What if it's hostile?
Oh, I can defend myself, Dad. I've got bug powers.
You've got what now?
No matter how I tried to play it, the conversation went downhill fast after that. And if I didn't tell him about my powers, he'd stop me from going, even if it was my world. I'd discovered it, after all. It was my right to be the first to explore it.
And of course, if I told him about the powers, that opened another huge can of Endbringer-sized worms. He'd know about me being a supervillain and he'd probably figure out that Lisa and Brian were villains as well. I'd ruin everything for everyone.
So it was better to not say anything to anyone. Yeah. That was much safer.
<><>
By the time I finished my shower – I hadn't been lying about that part – my headache was starting to come back, along with the first stirrings of common sense. Not very strong stirrings, given the fact that I was still concussed, but stirrings all the same. I squashed both headache and common sense ruthlessly with a painkiller pill, washed down with a glass of water that I'd brought upstairs with my sandwich.
Firmly closing my bedroom door, I changed into what I thought was sensible alternate-universe-exploring clothing. In the event, this was T-shirt, jeans and a hoodie. I stuffed a pepper spray tube into my pocket and made sure that the knife that I had used to de-toe Bakuda – carefully cleaned, thank you very much – was secure in its sheath in the small of my back, under my hoodie. I wasn't being totally clueless, after all. As an afterthought, I stuck my phone in my pocket as well. I didn't think I'd get coverage in the mirror-world, but if nothing else, I could get some photos.
After that, I had to decide how to climb into the alternate universe that I had discovered. Absently, I wondered if they'd call it Earth Taylor, or maybe Earth Rolyat, given that it seemed to be a mirror-world. Then I wondered why I was even wondering about that.
Climbing through was not the easiest thing in the world, even after I had cleared the stuff on my dresser to each side, and done the same with the stuff on mirror-Taylor's dresser as well. It felt really weird, reaching into a whole different world to move stuff around, but if I was going to be climbing through, I didn't want to break any of her stuff. Who knew, we might end up being besties. After all, who better to be my friend than someone who already knew me as well as I did?
The dresser didn't like it when I climbed up on to it; it rocked rather alarmingly and I thought it was going to fall. So I climbed off again.
But the rocking gave me an idea. The mirror was on a swivel; a little experimentation showed me that although the mirror-portal was fixed to mirror-Taylor's dresser mirror, I could move mine without affecting hers. So I lifted it off the swivel and put it face-up on the floor. Then, before I could talk myself out of it, I got down on to the floor and lowered myself through.
It felt really weird going through; as soon as any part of me passed over the threshold, it was dragged to one side – the 'down' side – and I ended up clambering down off of her dresser. Looking back through the mirror, I had a good view of my bedroom ceiling, and where the pain was peeling. Then I wondered why I was looking back at my own bedroom, when I had a whole new world to explore, right here and now.
I looked around at mirror-Taylor's bedroom; unmade bed, clothes on the floor, smell of cigarette smoke … ew. The other me smoked? Ew. I wasn't so sure if I was going to like her. I moved sideways, and my foot hit something that clinked. Glancing down, I saw what was obviously an alcohol bottle. It had hit another one. Oh great, mirror-me drinks too.
Fighting down a profound sense of disappointment – I had crossed into another universe to find out that this world's version of me had two habits that I had nothing but distaste for – I looked at the posters on the walls. At least she had those. But in place of the Protectorate poster that held pride of place opposite my bed – it was an older one, missing Triumph – there was one that I thought at first was lettered in Russian. The backwards N was what confused me. Then I saw a backwards G, and frowned. I didn't think the Russians had that in their alphabet.
And then, of course, I realised what was going on. I'm in a mirror-universe, duh. The writing's all going to be mirror-imaged. I concentrated on the lettering, reading it from right to left, mentally reversing them. N … O … N … A … G … O … N. Nonagon. Huh. A nine-sided figure. Cute name. Then I looked at the people actually portrayed in the poster and recoiled so hard that I sat down on the bed.
I knew those people. Everyone in America who hadn't been living under a rock for the last twenty years knew them. But there was no way in hell that they should be on a poster.
Standing up again, I stepped forward, peering at the poster. Wait a minute …
The Siberian was easily recognisable, despite the fact that she wore a one-piece costume. Beside her, Jack Slash was posing proudly, holding a knife aloft. Flanking them … that was Mannequin, although his armour was designed a little oddly. And that there was Bonesaw, minus the blood-caked apron. Crawler was missing, though Shatterbird was there. Some capes I didn't know were filling in the gaps, but it was definitely them. Definitely the Slaughterhouse Nine.
Here they're called … Nonagon? And people are putting posters out about them? Okay, that's really kind of weird.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay in this bedroom for much longer. A lot of the excitement of being in a whole new universe was starting to drain away. All the writing was reversed and I was having to concentrate to read any of it. Plus, the smell of stale cigarette smoke and, I was pretty sure, alcohol wasn't doing my headache any favours. I took a few photographs anyway, just because I could, then tucked the phone away again.
Carefully pulling the bedroom door open, I peered out into the corridor. My bugs still had mirror-Dad down in the living room, reading the paper. I wasn't really sure that I wanted to meet him, even if he thought I was his real daughter. Maybe I can sneak out past him. Duck down the front hall into the kitchen and out the back door.
Or maybe I should just brazen it out. Walk down the stairs like I belong here.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I had decided to try the second idea. My footsteps thudded on the steps as I trotted downstairs. At the bottom of the steps, all I had to do was turn right, not left, so that I would be heading along the front hall, toward the back door.
At the bottom of the steps, habit took over and I turned left. Into the living room. Right in front of mirror-Dad.
Crap.
If I stopped, then he'd notice me more. I kept going.
"Taylor." His voice was more grating than my Dad's. More raspy.
"Yeah?" I made my voice as non-committal as I could and kept on going.
"Thought you went out."
"Came back," I replied in a well, duh sort of voice, not looking around. "Got changed."
I was almost to the doorway into the kitchen. Behind me, he put the paper down; my bugs picked it up and I also heard the rustle. "Come here a moment."
Reluctantly, I stopped and turned. Mirror-Taylor smokes and drinks. She's rebellious. "Can it wait? Got places to be."
Rolling up the paper and tapping it on his knee, he pointed at the spot on the floor in front of him. When he spoke, I heard a tone that Dad had never used in front of me. "Here. Now."
I walked over and stood in front of him; he looked up at me. "You look kinda different. You feeling okay? You were pretty loopy after Shebang's laughter grenade got you yesterday."
Shebang? Laughter grenade? What the hell?
"I, uh, yeah, I'm fine," I told him. I knew what he was seeing; faces are not totally symmetrical, and to swap the features from side to side often produces strange effects. To him, it seemed as though I was unwell.
"Okay then," he grunted, then picked up the remote and turned on the TV, attention dropping away from me as though I had never walked into the room.
Greatly daring, I picked up the discarded paper and strolled into the kitchen. The door handle turned easily and I stepped out of the house.
<><>
I wasn't quite sure where to go after I left the house. I needed to get out of there, in case mirror-Dad noticed anything else weird about me, such as being left-handed (to him) or not knowing something simple. But I didn't know where to go; at first, I thought it would be cool to go meet up with this world's version of the Undersiders. If mirror-me was there, we could hang out. Though if she started smoking and drinking in front of me, I didn't know how I was going to react.
Eventually, I headed for the Boardwalk. I made quite a few wrong turns, because I still wasn't totally used to being in the mirror-world. Left was right and right was left, duh. That meant that if north and south were the same as always, then east and west had been swapped, so I had to go that way instead of this way to get to the Boardwalk, instead of toward Captain's Hill.
In the end, I followed the street signs, though I thought that people might think I was slow, spending a few moments puzzling out what they meant instead of reading them at a glance. But I got there eventually and flopped down on to a bench seat.
I needed to think about what mirror-Dad had said. He'd mentioned someone called 'Shebang' and a laughter grenade. I recalled encountering Bakuda and her pain bomb. Could they be one and the same, on two different worlds? A laughter grenade didn't seem nearly as nasty as a pain bomb, but I supposed that if you laughed hard enough it would incapacitate you.
But … a laughter grenade sounded almost … friendly. It was something that a hero would use, unless it made you laugh so hard you hurt yourself. Though mirror-Dad hadn't seemed to be overly concerned. Then again, he hadn't seemed to be overly interested in connecting to me at all. Did he even care about mirror-me?
<><>
With a mental effort, I put that aside for the moment and addressed another problem. I hadn't really noticed it up until now, given all the other things on my mind, but I couldn't feel any bugs around me. The dozen or so bugs I'd sent into the house before exploring myself had been left back there; between the house and the Boardwalk, I hadn't once felt the distinctive signal of a bug 'reporting in'.
This was kind of frightening and disorienting, like waking up one day and finding out that one of your arms was missing. It was perhaps more so than when I'd gotten my powers. After all, I was used to them now. Being able to control bugs was all kinds of amazing.
If I didn't have the power to control bugs here, exploring this world would be a whole lot less fun, and a lot more unsafe, than I had imagined. On the other hand, I told myself hopefully, maybe it's just a factor of being mirror-imaged. Maybe they're just on another frequency, or whatever it is. Maybe I can tap into it.
And maybe I couldn't. I had to face the fact that I was quite possibly without powers in this world. My sudden impulse to go exploring without backup and without telling anyone where I had gone was starting to look less and less sensible by the minute. A buzzing grew in my ears.
"Hey, are you all right?"
I looked up, startled. A man stood opposite me, peering at me carefully, with a woman at his side. They weren't anyone I knew, or thought I knew; just a couple, in their mid twenties or so. Panic closed my throat; could they tell that I was from another world?
"I wouldn't have asked but you look like you're in pain or something." His voice betrayed nothing but concern.
I realised that I'd been sitting hunched over, my hands clenched into fists at the sides of my head. I straightened up, relaxed my hands. "No, no, I'm good. I was just … thinking about something."
"Oh, that's good then." He smiled uncertainly. "Don't think too hard. You might hurt yourself." A chuckle told me that this was supposed to be a joke.
"Yeah." With an effort, I returned the chuckle. "Thanks."
They moved off then; a few yards on, the woman glanced back at me. I gave her a smile and a brief wave; reassured, she went on with the man. Leaning back against the bench, I found myself relaxing, a genuine smile starting to creep across my features. Well, at least random strangers here can be nice.
The buzzing was back. To distract myself from it, I opened the paper and tried to read it. It was, of course, printed in reverse, so after a few moments I turned to the front page, all the way to the right. Concentrating as well as I could, I began to read the headlines and then work my way through the articles. People came strolling past, but if they found anything weird about a teenager reading the paper at the Boardwalk, nobody said anything.
DRUG STASH DESTROYED BY TEEN HEROES, said one article header. Huh, so this world has the Wards as well. Cool. MAYOR'S NIECE MISSING, stated another. That one got my attention, so I started to puzzle my way through the article.
I found it easier and easier as I went along, despite the buzzing in my ears; toward the end, I was reading almost as fast as I could normally. But I had to go back and re-read it, because it came across as weird.
Apparently, this version of Brockton Bay also had a man called Roy Christner as Mayor. That much I could understand. Whether our Mayor Christner also had a niece called Dinah Alcott, I couldn't be sure. From the article, she had gone missing on the fourteenth; that was the day that I had robbed the Brockton Bay Central Bank with the Undersiders.
But what I couldn't get over was the tone of the article. Christner was quoted as being 'very angry' and 'offering a large reward' to retrieve his wayward niece. However, the reporter who wrote the article seemed to be not very worried about the twelve year old's well-being. It seems more likely that she's gone to stay at a friend's house, the article read. After all, who would abduct a child? Really?
I had to stop and think about that. Now that I was reminded, there had been an Amber Alert in the paper, pushing our bank job off the front page. In this world, there seemed to be about the same level of interest as in a lost dog.
Are people so callous here? I wondered. Do they care so little? After all, my experience with mirror-Dad hadn't given me a high level of confidence regarding his home life with mirror-me.
The buzzing ramped up in intensity, making my head begin to throb. I gasped, clenching my eyes shut as I clasped my hands over my temples. I forgot all the other problems I had as I tried to ride out the pain.
"Hey, are you all right? Is she all right?"
"I don't know. She looks like she's in pain."
"Hey, kid. You all right there?"
"Do you need a doctor?"
The babble of voices surrounded me, startling me with its suddenness. I unclenched my eyes and looked around at the circle of faces that had appeared out of seemingly nowhere. Men and women, young and old. One little girl solemnly offered her ice-cream. An older man held out a bottle of water.
Abruptly, as if turned off by a switch, the headache was gone, as was the buzzing in my ears. I struggled to sit upright once more. Carefully, I waved away the ice-cream, but I accepted the bottle. Slowly, I sipped, letting the water trickle down my throat.
"Thanks, I'm fine now," I told them. "Honestly, I'm all right. Thank you."
The man who had offered water frowned slightly. "You looked as though you were really in pain there, kid. Do you want me to drive you to a doctor? I know a good one."
Capping the bottle and handing it back, I shook my head. As sincere as he sounded, I didn't really think that I wanted to get into a car alone with a strange man. "No, I'll be fine, thanks. I'm feeling much better now." I looked around at the crowd. "Really, I'll be all right. Thanks."
Nodding to me, they began to move off. I paused, looking at my would-be benefactor. "Though … well, I hate to ask …"
"Yeah?" It was downright weird, the way he seemed to perk up at the chance to help me.
"Um, I don't have bus fare to get home, and …"
"Say no more," he declared, pulling his wallet out and withdrawing a banknote from it. "This should get you home, as well as a sandwich or something if you get hungry on the way." Looking at it, I finally realised that it was a twenty.
"I, uh, thanks, but -" I began to protest at the denomination of the note, but then I saw others around him, pulling their own wallets out. One by one, each of them produced banknotes and handed them to him; I saw ones and twos, mainly. By the time they finished, he must have been reimbursed half again as much for what he'd given me. " … uh, never mind. Thanks a lot. I mean it."
He nodded firmly to me as he tucked the ones and twos away. "Think nothing of it. Have a nice day, kid."
"You too," I responded. Turning away, I headed off down the Boardwalk, looking for a bus stop. Okay, that was weird. He was generous to me; they were generous to him. Nobody was out any large amount. But it was all … natural. Weird, weird world.
I had travelled a hundred yards before something else occurred to me; I could feel bugs in my vicinity. Slowly, yard by yard, my awareness of the local bug life was pushing its way outward once more. My power was back. That's what the buzzing must have been. My power finding the new frequency.
I wonder if I have to go through that again when I go back home. That'll be no fun at all.
Finally, I found a bus stop. Carefully, I began to read the schedule times. I needed to find the bus to the north ferry dock; if the local version of the Undersiders made their base in the same place as in my world, I could walk there in twenty minutes.
Boy, are they gonna be surprised to see me.
End of Part Eleven
