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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 132: Takano 125
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 329
Tommy did avail herself of lunch at the snack bar at K-Mart, getting a cheeseburger and fries and splurging on a strawberry milkshake. She also bought another knee-length skirt and coordinated blouse. Most of the women wore mid-calf skirts to work, but she figured that she was perceived as a teenaged girl working as an intern, and she knew from experience that knee-length was the style worn by girls her apparent age in this decade. She wondered if she should get a little black dress for funerals, but it struck her that any funeral she might attend it would be most likely she would go as Truth.
She caught up her laundry, ignoring the odd looks she got wearing shorts and a tee and a pair of gym shoes. By mid-afternoon she had nothing to do.
That was silly, she thought. There was always something to do. Settling on her bed, she took out Lauren’s Bible and found the bookmark where she had left it. Despite having attended Sunday School her entire life, she was surprised at how much she didn’t know. She was working her way through books called epistles, which she gathered meant letters, that someone had written to someone else to tell them something they needed to know. Sometimes she didn’t get it, didn’t understand what the writer was trying to tell, but then, there were also a lot of things in there that she did understand, and as she prayed about it and thought about it she began to understand more. She sometimes wished she could ask Lauren. She wondered whether she could ask Brian, but she didn’t really know whether he would know, and she didn’t want to put him on the spot.
She booted up her tablet. No internet--that was definitely a disadvantage of the past. She realized that she didn’t really have that much to do on the computer without it. That was particularly odd, she realized, since she was involved in efforts to make the first computers a reality in this world, and there wouldn’t be an internet for anyone for quite a while, and not for ordinary people like herself for a long time after that. She understood how businesses used computers to do accounting and management, and universities used them to crunch data and do word processing. What, though, did ordinary people do with computers before there was an internet?
There were computer games. She remembered. There were still computer games after the internet became a reality, but before that you bought them on disks or tapes or cartridges and played them alone on your computer at home.
She wondered whether she could design games that people would be able to play on the first computers available to them. It was probably too soon, she realized. As of yet there were no programming languages; indeed, assembly language hadn’t been invented. But it was a direction to consider. She should mention it at work on Monday.
It struck her that the past was also boring. It became interesting when she encountered crime on the streets during her patrols, but that wasn’t really that often. She wound up going to bed early. She tossed and turned, and finally slept. But late at night she woke, and despite an hour trying she could not get back to sleep. Reasoning that she needed more practice, she got dressed. The separate cabins really were a boon so that not everyone could hear you through the wall like in the newer?--more futuristic? whatever--motels and hotels she had grown up around. Instead of web surfing in the middle of the night, she went out, hoping for some excitement to invigorate a blah day.
Practicing her stealth, she slipped behind her cabin and headed toward Downtown. Reaching some tightly packed two- and three-story commercial buildings, stores of some sort, she studied the side facade. A quick toss and climb got her to a bricked-in window with a sill, and balancing on one foot, she flung her next toss up to the roof’s edge. Climbing up that, she rolled from the rope onto the roof, and almost got herself to her feet without a lurch.
On the flat roof she did some handstands, then checked the distance to the next building. Four foot alley--easy distance, but the next building over had a slanted roof. It should be doable. Resisting the urge to do a showy flip in the air, she kept it simple, training herself, with her rope in hand just in case she needed to toss it.
The leap went well, but when she hit the shingled roof a shingle ripped out from under her foot, and her planned drop turned into a slide down toward the back edge, not the edge she had just jumped over. Scrabbling to get her feet just made things worse, and in a near panic she went over the edge, grabbing for it with both hands. Somehow she had lost the kawanaga. If she could relax enough, she’d be able to sense where it was. But with her legs kicking in the unsupported air, and the back edge of the roof a solid two feet from the wall, with a crumbling grip, she felt fear. Not wanting to, she looked down, and found an open pile of trash wood, many bits of it sticking up in the wider back alley below here. It was only two stories, but she could easily verse out here.
She flung her feet forward, trying to push off enough that she could pull herself up, but the roof’s edge’s mild disintegration under her fingers let it be known that it was not going to put up with that nonsense. Pulling herself up just by pure arm strength it is then. It was much harder than she had thought because the sudden yank had drained much of her strength, but with adrenaline pushing, she began going up. Then her fingers slid, and she dropped back to where she had been, but only one handed.
A sound of taps above, and a whisper of something, and then a hand got her wrist, and guided her other hand to the roof’s edge.
“Hey, little sister, what’s your name?”
“Truth,” Tommy gutted out.
“Oh, swell, that is a sticky wicket then,” the lightly charming female voice spoke easily from just above her, leaning down from a sitting position over the edge. “My name’s Robinette.”
“Robinette?” Tommy gasped.
“Like Robin Hood, except I’m a girl. Steal from the rich, give to the poor. Skim off enough to have a very nice life for myself.”
“Oh. I guess that means you’re going to let me drop then--being a supervillainess and all.”
“Only the fat cats think I am that. Well, and some law and order types. Fisticuff and William Tell Junior. The police. But what do they know?”
Tommy had no reply to that.
Robinette sighed. Then grumping to herself, she began to pull Truth up over the edge. Tommy looked at her. Robinette had a Lincoln green tunic, hood, and cloak, with a domino face mask of black, along with black leggings, and a very athletic figure. At her waist was some sort of gun, much larger than a regular gun, and also green.
“My net gun. I’m not non-violent, but I prefer not to put holes in my benefactors, or their employees.”
“Benefactors?” Truth said getting her feet balanced.
“What you might call my robbery victims if you’re being all judgemental, and sticking to the plain, boring truth.” Robinette pointed a single finger toward a sack, filled with bumpy objects hooked to a chimney that punched up through the slanted roof. Truth wondered what she should do at this point.
“I was on my way back from a visit when I heard you scream.”
Relaxing, Tommy could feel her things back at The Paris, and also what she assumed was her kawanaga below her somewhere in the alley. She thought about the situation.
“I suppose,” she said, “that I should take you into custody; but then, I suppose you should have dropped me off the roof. So I guess neither of us are doing what’s expected tonight. Thanks for the hand. It looked like a rather painful way to go to the next world.”
“Don’t mention it,” Robinette answered. “Seriously, don’t.” Then abruptly the caped gymnast leapt to the other side of the alley, leaving Tommy to figure out a way to get to the ground and recover her dropped grappling hook.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #512: Versers Work. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
