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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 141: Takano 128
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 332
Saturday arrived, and Tommy decided that since she wouldn’t have to buy lunch she could splurge on a cab ride. She packed her Truth gear in her backpack, which she otherwise emptied for the purpose, and gave the cabbie the address Robinette had given her.
Arriving, she thought perhaps there had been a mistake. After all, this did not at all look like the kind of place she expected. It was very upscale, maybe not luxury but expensive townhouses in a good close suburban neighborhood. However, she saw the name of the development and figured if it was the wrong place it wasn’t the cabbie’s fault and there wasn’t any way she could fix it. Still, she hesitated before knocking on the door.
The girl who answered was the right age and build, blond hair and blue eyes which would have been hidden to some degree by the hood and the mask and dark of night. Tommy stammered.
“He-hello. I’m Tomiko Takano. I was invited to lunch?”
“Oh, I’m so glad you came. I’m Roberta Ettinger, call me Robbie. Come on in.”
As she followed her hostess, she said, “Call me Tommy.”
“I hope you like tacos. I wasn’t sure what to make.”
“As long as they’re not too spicy. I don’t have much of a taste for jalapenos.”
“Well, it’s build your own, so you can decide how much of everything you want.”
Entering the kitchen, she saw several bowls and plates with a few corn tortillas, some strips of braised beef, shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, whole kernel corn, two kinds of peppers, salsa, sour cream, and avocado. “Wow, that’s quite a spread. Are we expecting company?”
Roberta had a friendly laugh. “No, I made enough to have leftovers for a few days. I have Tupperware for it all.”
Tommy had heard of tupperware.
“What would you like to drink? Beer? Tequila?”
“Um--water is fine? Or--” she almost said Sprite, but it occurred to her that she wasn’t sure that existed this early. “Soda, something in a lemon-lime?”
Robbie shook her head. “Weird. How old are you, anyway?”
That was complicated. “Well, a bit older than I look, but not that old.”
“What, don’t you know?” Robbie laughed.
“I kind of lost count after sixteen,” she said honestly. “But that was probably about two years ago, maybe?”
“Maybe?”
“It’s kind of complicated. It’s sort of connected to why I have my powers, such as they are. I wasn’t on earth for a while. But what about you? You’re a really impressive acrobat. How did you learn all that?”
Placing a glass of water in front of Tommy and a glass of something else, Tommy guessed beer, at her own place, Robbie sat. “My parents,” she began, “were circus performers. They trained me from when I was old enough to walk to walk a tightrope and do the various tumbling and trapeze tricks and such. I was a big-top performer before I knew there was any other life out there. But I realized when I was about fifteen or so that it was a hard life and not all that profitable, and that circuses were beginning to vanish from the world. You hear about kids running away to join the circus; I ran away from the circus. But there weren’t really a lot of jobs that wanted my skill set, so I wound up doing what I could do.”
By this time she had constructed a taco, and was about to take a bite when she added, “Your turn.”
A bit fazed, she said, “The truth?”
“Why not?”
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I already think that. After all, you dress like Daniel Boone and leap around on rooftops at night looking for trouble. You’re at least as crazy as I am. I’m just wondering why.”
“O.K.,” she said. “You asked for it,” and she began building her own taco as she spoke.
“I was born in a different dimension. It’s a lot like this world, but we don’t have real superheroes, only comic book ones. About fifty years in what would be your future I was given this gadget, a video player--kind of like a television that stores programs in its own internal memory--that had something called scriff inside. My father was an engineer, and I’d grown up with computers and electronics all my life, so I took it apart, got a nasty shock, and woke up in another world. Apparently the scriff makes it so that instead of dying I travel to another universe, and I’ve been to a few now. In the last one I met a woman who was like me in that regard, and she taught me how to defend myself because she said those were skills I was going to need as I bounced from universe to universe. So a few weeks ago I was living in the woods somewhere and got bit by several copperheads, and wound up here. I met someone else, another person like me, who had gotten work as a superhero and gave me a hand getting oriented, and I sort of just fell into the job. Anyway, it gave me some connections to get my day job, which doesn’t quite pay the bills yet, but I’m working on it.”
“This isn’t a joke?”
“Sorry. I’m not that funny,” Tommy kidded.
“So, what’s the day job?”
“Well, having come from the future it was pretty easy to persuade some people that I knew something about computers, so I got a job helping the engineers in an electronics firm find a way forward. It’s technically only an internship, but since I haven’t aged a day since the accident they’ve got me listed as sixteen.”
“Not Blaisdell Industrial, I hope. I heard they were robbed.”
“I was there when Blue Ray tried to rob the place. Actually, I caught him,” Tommy said, trying to sound modest. “But I’m told that the crystals he was trying to steal were stolen by someone else a few days later. Obviously someone wanted them pretty badly for something, but no one knows who.”
“Oh, I can tell you that,” she said. “Doctor Mordenslice--have you heard of him?” Tommy nodded. “He offered me the job, and he was offering a lot of money, but I turned it down. It’s not really my kind of gig.” She paused. “I guess I’m glad I didn’t take it. We would have met under rather different circumstances if I had.”
“Why does he want them?” Tommy asked.
“No idea. He doesn’t generally explain his nefarious schemes to anyone else. So, your life sounds interesting. I mean, I’ve been to Paris and Stockholm and New York and Sydney and lots of other places, but they probably wouldn’t hold a candle to the places you’ve been.”
Tommy shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m not sure they were so exciting when I was there.” Still, they spent the next hour or so chatting about places they had been and things they had done. Tommy was rather surprised that Robbie seemed to accept the tales of her insane life quite readily. But then, most people probably would have found Robbie’s life incredible, too. In a sense, they did have a lot in common. Robbie gave her her phone number, and Tommy explained that she was staying at The Paris, but looking for a place to share with a coworker.
She walked home afterwards. She wasn’t in a hurry.
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 #516: Versers Stymied. 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:
