Although the feeling of utter helplessness had vanished entierly thanks to all the shots the good doctor had stuck on his back, Jack still felt tired and stiff. However, he was certain that was because he had been lying down in a bed for a couple of weeks and had too much to catch up on. He got up and loitered around the hospital for a good spot where he could be on his own as soon as he was capable of it, but the nurses quickly found out he had been sneaking out and tried imposing restrictions on him. Of course, not unlike others of his kind, Jack wasn’t very good at obeying rules, and eventually Dr. Swain had to come forward to warn him that if he tried to work out like Summoners usually did, all of their work would quite easily become undone.

To avoid the inevitable boredom of recuperation, he usually wandered about in the hospital’s garden, looking up to the distant sky other the other patients from afar, and from time to time he offered his help to who couldn’t move by themselves along the halls. Visitors for him were few and far between, and most of the time it amounted to David and his parents, so when two familiar patterns stroke his nose, he believed he was imagining things at first, until a nurse tapped him on the shoulder, telling him he had visitors, and he turned around to find Yana, her boyfriend and Sofia.

“Hi!” Sofia said with a smile from ear to ear, giving Jack a peck on the cheek. When he didn’t reply she looked at him a bit puzzled, but quickly made sense of it. “Oh, you’re like the English, you don’t kiss people.”

“No,” he answered, wondering where she had gotten that kind of idea from.

“No one’s been hurting you, right?”

“I’m better than ever, Sofi. You don’t have to go after anyone.”

“Ok,” she said with a nod, pointing with her head to her girlfriend after. “I told Yana that you were feeling better, and she said she wanted to come too. We came by train from Oxford, I couldn’t really fly them here without being seen.”

“Yeah,” Yana said, cutting Sofia off before she could go on. Then she turned to Jack, arms crossed and a mildly angry, concerned stare. “She told us you knew about what she can do.”

“I do,” he answered.

“Are you going to be less bitchy today?” She asked.

“I’ll try to keep my impersonation of you a bit tamer,” he said, shrugging.

Her date laughed while Yana tapped her foot and turned to him. “Why are you laughing? That wasn’t funny.”

“You’re so cute when you’re mad,” he answered with a smile. She didn’t complain nor smile back – she stared at him while tapping her foot violently on the floor. Ignoring her reactions, he turned to Jack. “Hey, man, I know we started off on the wrong foot, but Yana’s friend is my friend.”

“Thanks,” Jack answered, shaking the hand he had put out for him.

“I would probably go crazy if I had to spend too much time in here, too. For how long have you…?”

“One month next week.”

“Really? What do you have?”

“They say it’s a weird kind of pneumonia, that they couldn’t really fix. Until a new doctor arrived two weeks ago, whatever he’s doing, it’s working.”

“When are you getting out?” Asked Sofia, her eyes glowing from the expectation.

“Pretty soon, according to them… Why?” He asked as she looked down to her feet, a bit letdown with the answer.

“No reason,” she said, shaking her head. “Just wanted to know.”

“We can still do it here, we just need someplace where we won’t be seen,” Yana said. At first, Sofia just stared at her a bit confused, then she opened her mouth as if she had just remembered something.

“Oh, right, we can do that.”

“Do what?”

“While we were on the train, we were thinking about what sort of limitations Sofia has,” the boyfriend said. “She’s a shapeshifter, so is there a rule to what she can turn into or not, and if there is, what are those rules? That sort of thing.”

“Do you know somewhere we can go to give it a try?” Sofia asked.

“Sure, we can go to my room,” Jack answered, signaling them to follow him out of the hospital’s garden and into the patient halls. “They don’t come in without knocking.”

For a while they just followed him, until the boyfriend decided he had enough with the awkward silence.

“So, how did the two of you meet?”

Jack glanced at Yana, and from the look she returned to him he could keep his mouth shut and let her do the work. For a while, at least.

“Remember when I got in a freak accident last year, and was in a coma for a day?”

“Yeah, just before you asked me out for the first time.”

“He was in the same hospital with a broken nose,” she said, pointing at Jack with her head.

Oh, I see. Ok, I’ll play ball.

“Shoved one in him better than he did me.”

“Oh, you got into a fight? What happened?” the boyfriend asked Jack, who merely shrugged back.

“I have slight anger issues. Working on them.”

“Remind me to never piss you off,” he answered. They both laughed it off, but something stirred between them, an unseen rift of what had already been obtained and what was forever out of reach.

“There’re very few things that can make me angry, but when I do… It’s pretty quick.”

“Were you in Portugal for the Cantarian Holiday, too?”

“Yeah, it’s what Christine chose to do. My sister,” Jack barely remembered to utter those last few words as he wasn’t used to even having to refer to a family of his own. Since he had almost never left the Lonergan mansion up until that point, he also never had to pretend he was an integral part of them.

Seeing her cue, Yana leaned on her boyfriend ear with a mischievous smile.

“He’s the middle son of the Lonergan family.”

“Who?” the boyfriend asked in full volume, making her laugh and knock on his shoulder.

“O’Claire!”

“Oh, really?” he turned back to Jack with the newfound amazement that is the signature of every galvanized fan. “I never even knew she had siblings.”

“David and I keep a low profile,” he shrugged back. “He keeps to himself, and I rarely use my name when I’m on my own. The last thing I want to do is drag them into the messes I get myself into.”

Having arrived at his room, he opened the door and let them in before closing it behind them.

“Alright Sofia, what did you try to turn into so far?” The boyfriend asked the young girl that entered the room last. Having kept quiet throughout the rest of the conversation, looking down to the floor in a gaze that all but made it impossible to tell if she was listening in or imagining the answers on her own, Sofia immediately turned to him, pondered for a moment and replied, moving her fingers for each of the forms she recalled.

“The first thing I turned into was Raytsu, back in school, and I flew to Yana’s place with it… Then I asked for a true form and turned into Linvios… Then I turned into a meguio…”

“You’ve only turned into hidan so far?” Asked Jack, crossing in arms.

“I turned into a fox yesterday. I was seeing if I could understand Foxy, but she just looked at me funny and tried to smell my butt,” she answered. “I think that’s it.”

“What are hidan?” Asked the boyfriend.

“Some creatures from a video game she likes,” Yana answered, prompting Sofia to nod along.

“What about other people?” He asked. She looked up to the ceiling as she focused on something on the back on her mind but ended up looking back down and shaking her head.

“No, it doesn’t work.”

“How do you do it?”

“There’s this part of my brain I didn’t know I had until I turned for the first time, where I feel… I can’t really explain it, but I feel relaxed, I think? I think about these things I want to turn into there, and then I turn. I feel very light for a moment and then I feel very different, and I open my eyes, and I’ve changed,” she said, talking very fast and with a big smile, as if the whole was a little embarrassing. “But it’s strange, when I think about you and Yana, I can picture you just fine, but I don’t turn, but when I try to picture Jack…”

“You get flustered because you like what you see?” He said cutting her off. Although he had a smirk, Sofia could tell she had just said something she shouldn’t have.

“No, I… I mean, a little, but…” she said trying to laugh it off.

“Try turning into other animals. And other hidan,” Jack said. Clearing her throat to stop laughing, Sofia focused again, that time turning into countless blue lights that morphed into a much smaller creature, and then solidified to reveal a stripped grey cat. It looked at the three people on the room and meowed before turning into blue lights again, growing in size, and solidifying into a spotted paka that time. As Sofia jumped to bed and sat next to him, lashing her tail and staring at him, Jack had to remind himself that wasn’t Moonlight asking for pets to stop his hand from hovering towards the back of her ears.

“That’s amazing… Such an amazing ability…” The boyfriend said. Yana agreed with him as Sofia changed back into a human and thanked them, her cheeks turning slightly pink.

“What about things you haven’t seen yet?” Asked Yana.

“Like what?”

“… There is an animal from the prehistoric, a dinosaur, who was short and had spines on its back and a club on its tail.”

“An ankylosaurus?” asked the boyfriend. “It wasn’t short.”

“It was compared to all the others,” Yana said.

“No, I can’t picture it,” Sofia said. “I know what you’re talking about, I can imagine it just fine, but it doesn’t work.”

“Then how can we know what you can or can’t turn into? Hidan are imaginary, but dinosaurs were real. Why can you change into something from a video game, but not some ancient reptile?” the boyfriend wondered aloud.

“Maybe there isn’t a rule,” Jack suggested after all of them slipped into silence for a moment. “There are somethings she can turn into and others that she can’t.”

“Maybe you need to like the thing enough to be able to turn into it?” asked Yana.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“But I like the dinosaur, I think it’s cool…”

“Wait, have you seen an ankylosaurus before, Sofia? Like, moving in a movie or in a game?” asked Yana again.

“No, just in pictures.”

A knock on the door silenced them all at once but Jack.

“Yes?”

The door opened and an old nurse curiously peeked in.

“Visit hour is over, Jack. Dr. Swain will be coming down in a few minutes.”

“Oh,” he said, clicking his tongue.

“Get well soon, alright?” said the boyfriend, holding out his hand again to shake.

“Sure,” Jack answered giving it to him, refraining to say another word, lest Yana yell at him for no good reason.

***

A few days later, as he woke up and peeked to the chair at the feet of his bed, Jack was pleased to finally find a new change of clothes. It meant Josh was waiting outside and he was going to get discharged from that barren, boring room.

Shortly after he was up and reaching for the coat to finalize his transformation from patient to free man, when something caught his attention and he stopped, facing the door. Seconds later the door opened, and Dr. Swain entered.

“Good morning, Jack,” he said, closing the door behind him. “I see you’re ready to leave.”

“No strings attached?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Not from me.”

“But from the Unknown,” Dr. Swain remained silent, so Jack continued the train of thought he had mused over the previous days. What he had been told about the Unknown had to have been false – nothing that was just “curious” would use such drastic measures to recover something that did not exist in that universe. They wanted to use him, and Swain was there to make sure that would be possible.

“Sofia isn’t going to tell me anything relevant, even if she has the best intentions.”

“But I am?”

“You’re not her. She’s perfect for what they say they want from her. She’s a shapeshifter, so she can adapt to any situation they throw her in, and she’s not stupid, but she is stupidly naïve, so she’ll do anything they tell her to. I have no reason to trust them, and all I can do is use a scythe, which isn’t even a practical weapon.”

“If using a scythe was your only asset, then the Unknown wouldn’t have come to an expert like me to get you back on your feet,” Dr. Swain raised his arms. “But I genuinely don’t know any more details beyond the information I collected about you in Dunia, and what the Unknown told me about your physical condition.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Staying,” he answered, gesturing to the room around them, “and changing the world. Do you know what they allow themselves to do? Collective brainwashing to enforce peace.”

“You want to reverse it?”

“No, no, nothing to such extremes. Modifying hidan weapons to treat humans the same way they treat hidanna would make for the ideal entertainment feature for them. That’s what I want to do for now. Speaking of, do you have…”

“I only have my own weapon and I need to keep it.”

“Of course, that makes sense,” Swain quickly replied with a nod. “No matter. Director Pavel has gotten me in touch with a university who is very interested in working with me, so we’ll see what we can do. As for you and the Unknown,” he said, looking back to him “you’ll have to wait until you are summoned by them to find out what they want from you. Oh, right, I do need to give you this.”

The physician approached him and gave him a prescription signed by the hospital’s director. “This is a simple supplement with metals found in this world, iron and magnesium, you can find it in any pharmacy. It’s not medan, but they are the closest thing to it I could find. If you take them according to the instructions, you’ll delay the next infusion by two to three months.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Jack said, finally putting on the coat and putting on the folded paper on one of its pockets.

“However,” Swain continued. “If you do go and talk to the Unknown, you won’t have to worry about the lack of medan in this world again.”

“What? How?”

“I wish I could tell you how, but I don’t have a scientific explanation for what they are capable of doing,” he answered with a shrug, turning back to the door. “Let’s just say it’s magic.”

And, telling him a nurse would be there shortly with the discharge papers, he left the room and Jack in his quiet, alarmed thoughts.

---

After a week of sleeping in the Lonergan mansion, Jack had already found a perch. Their larger living room had a wall made of glass, showing both the manege where Christine rode her horses at times, and the woods that surrounded the place, giving them necessary privacy from prying camera lenses. The natural light that poured in illuminated the long, curved sofa that tattily surrounded the white screen that should’ve functioned as a television, but that was almost never turned on. The columns were hidden by intricate grey stone sculptures, twin rocks carved to evoke round, elegant animal shapes whose true identity had been lost along the original artist’s name. Behind the sofa, over a few steps leading to an elevated platform, was a bookshelf encompassing the entire south wall. In order to protect the books, part of the left side of the window was covered in a thick curtain, a bit tasteless but discreet enough that it didn’t bring attention to it. On the bookshelf’s platform there were two bulky dark red armchairs, very comfortable and equipped with their own lamps, where David spent the majority of his free time, seemingly not reading any of the volumes in the family’s library but others he enchanted from elsewhere, mysterious and secret.

Another thing the window had was a tall and wide step for its right half, hiding the stable doors, depending on the angle, covered in pillows and flanked by more pillows on the corner where it merged with the wall. It had likely been an idea of their interior designer to make it another reading spot, closer to the nature that surrounded the mansion, but no one seemed to have appreciated the corner until Jack realized it was perfect for him - not to read but to flush out his thoughts.

Soon after he arrived, Jack had asked the head of the Lonergan family if he could release two of his hidan, the two that most looked like animal pets. Not knowing how aggressive jibwas and pakas could be, he agreed to it without too much friction. Sunshine stayed outdoors, preferring to run around and chase rabbits and journalists out of the woods together with the family’s two Doberman guard dogs, but Moonlight adopted the stance of a house cat as naturally as it would be expected out of a feline. She’d vanish during long periods of time, hiding out and getting accustomed to the new layout. Even after becoming familiar with Team Steel’s base, she’d still loiter about and was ignored by all. Whenever he sat down on the canyon top or, in their new home, at that window in the Lonergan Mansion, she’d eventually trot in and jump on his lap, hardly ever asking for permission. If he didn’t start petting her immediately, she’d meow until he did.

From that little corner, stroking Moonlight’s soft fur, he could hear most of the staff working around the house and used those daily sounds to empty his mind out of his haunted memory. Their private chef preparing the next meal. The stable boy opening and closing the loud tool shed door. The housekeeper making rounds on the bedrooms and bathrooms and tidying them up. Christine pacing in her room because she couldn’t get some picky detail just right. Her clothes, her hair, her songs, her choreographies, everything apparently made her mind bubble more than anybody else’s in the house.

Whenever people actually entered the living room he’d briefly check who it was. Most of the time it was Mary Lonergan, who barely waved at him before fetching whatever she was looking for on one of the chiffoniers that was on the room and leaving. Sometimes it was David, either with a volume of his own to read in the elevated armchairs or coming to remind Jack they still had work to do in order for him to able to understand written English. But, one time, during a typically British rainy afternoon, it was Joshua Lonergan, still in one of the suits he wore to go to work every morning, who looked back at Jack with a soft smile.

“Good evening.”

“Hey.”

“I see our new cat is a creature of old habits,” he said, approaching them. Then, he slowly held out a semi-closed hand in front of Moonlight, who uncurled, yawning quietly, and stared at it.

On one hand, Jack should have stopped him, but on the other, Moonlight didn’t seem agitated at all. She sniffed the knuckles that Joshua presented to her cautiously, but then ducked under them and rubbed her head on his fingers. He opened his hand to stroke her behind her ears and thought aloud.

“What a sweet girl.”

It was the first time Jack had seen Moonlight warm up to anyone so fast. She had almost bitten David when he tried the same thing, staring at him intently before Jack reeled her in and told him it was a bad idea. Christine didn’t listen and was taking antibiotics as a result.

“She’s not usually this friendly,” he admitted.

“Animals tend to like me,” Joshua explained. “I’ve been told my hands are warm, and they enjoy them.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I have warm hands, too.”

“Oh, so you attract them as well?” he asked, and Jack nodded in response.

“I would like to have a word with you, Jack. Why don’t we go outside?”

He hesitated on his automatic petting, wondering which bad case scenario was most likely to happen and, noticing the uncertainty, Joshua raised his hands.

“It’s nothing serious.”

Usually, Jack’s instincts would have told him to refuse and leave. But, in his time under the Lonergan’s roof, from what little he had seen, Joshua seemed trustworthy, and even Moonlight approved of him. Deciding to at least hear what he wanted, he looked back to the huge spotted cat on his lap and clicked his tongue. Moonlight looked at him and meowed in protest.

“Come on,” he insisted, signalling with his head that spoiling time was over. Taking her time, she stretched, clawed at his jeans for good measure and jumped from his lap, allowing him to get up from the window seat and follow Joshua along the mansion’s hallways towards a back door right next to the kitchen.

It opened to the porch that shielded the stables from the eternal british rain. Closer to it, Jack let the sound of the cascading water surround him in its calmness. The three horses the family owned, thanks to Christine’s whims more than anything else, momentarily peeked outside their boxes to see what was just outside but resumed nibbling their hay, as the familiar human and the smaller sort-of-human were of no interest to them.

“Do you like rain?” Joshua asked, noticing the young man could hardly take his eyes away from it.

“It’s different. It’s… strange, seeing it so often.”

“There wasn’t rain where you came from? Was it a desertic region?”

Jack thought about the implications of that adult man knowing more than he should but, as far as David had told him, he only knew he had come from inside a video game console. Of course, just to make sure, Jack also did his own research on “Hidan Battle”, aided by David, and quickly confirmed it had nothing to do with the reality he had left behind.

He hadn’t even emerged from the game console itself – only used it as a reference point.

“Then… how?”

That’s one of the few things I actually know the answer to, and… It’s fucking wild, man.

“Yes, it was,” he answered. “We looked at rain as a sign of deep change.”

“Well, things have changed for you, so I’d say that’s very accurate,” he noted. “You are an orphan, aren’t you?”

For a moment, he didn’t reply, wondering how far he could be truthful with such an assortment of predictable questions. But that first one was harmless.

“Yes.”

“You’ve never met your parents?”

“No.”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

For that one, he chose to shake his head. It was true he didn’t know what happened to them, but only because he had no idea who they even were.

Would they care if they found out?

“And where were you raised? An orphanage?”

“A mercenary team found me,” he answered. It was true, but also a concealed lie. They hadn’t found him until he was ten.

“Mercenaries?” Joshua repeated in a surprised tone.

“Yes. They raised me.”

“I see… Did they train you?”

“They did. That’s why I…” he said, rubbing a scar right by his right shoulder, hidden by his shirt’s sleeve.

“Yes, now I see,” Joshua nodded. “So, they deployed you?”

“No, thankfully they didn’t,” he shook his head. “It was just rough training.”

“Wait, didn’t he tell Yana before, during yesterday’s session, that he was already wounded when Team Steel found him? Why is he saying that he got those scars from training?”

“Jack has a condition known as being a chronic liar.”

“Then, are we going to find out what is actually true?”

“Yes, of course.”

Pfft yeah, right.

Yet another half-truth. They had sent him out, alone, but to be a thief.

“Oh, thank goodness. Someone so young should never see a battlefield. No one should, to be frank,” he added, looking out into the rain again. “In here, no one has for over a thousand years.”

“David told me.”

“That is something you will have to become intimately familiar with,” he warned. “Every child in this world, born into a good family or not, knows about the history of the Code and Cid of the Cantaria.”

“I’ve been trying to find more about it, but… it’s difficult to read.”

“You haven’t been taught how to read?”

“I was, but our language is written differently. Even if it is spoken the same.”

“Oh, I see. What else have you been taught? Mathematics?”

“A little bit of everything, just the basics. Their focus was on fighting.”

“All right…” Joshua stopped for a moment, considering everything he had heard, until he looked back up with a smile. “We will have to find you a tutor, then. Get you up to speed with 9th grade so we can try and enrol you in David’s school in a year or two. Think you’re up to the task?”

“Mr. Lonergan, don’t misunderstand me,” Jack said, looking at him for the first time in that entire conversation. “I am deeply grateful for everything you’re doing for me, giving me such an… amazing place to stay, but… Why are you doing this?”

The dark-haired man gazed out into the rain. “Could be because you’re a very interesting individual. Could be because you need someone like us if you don’t want to get thrown into the system, which would expose you as… an outsider, and have you treated as such. Could be just because I have the resources and decided to do it because I can. Or it could be because I wanted a third child, but things didn’t quite work out that way,” he turned back to Jack, his smile still intact. “Which one do you prefer?”

“I don’t think that would be fair,” he replied, shaking his head.

“However, I do have to impose a rule on you,” he said with a stern tone in his voice, and Jack looked at him again. “You will never call me “Mr. Lonergan” again. If it’s too soon for “dad”, Josh will do just fine.”

“Thank you, Josh,” he nodded after pondering for a little, and deciding it was indeed too soon for “dad”.

“Wait a minute.”

Oh, here we go again.

“But they didn’t do anything to Swain. And we all know now that he’s from another universe.”

“Swain had leverage, and a plan. He was planning on leaving his world for good long before it actually happened, so he was in a position where he could negotiate the terms of his stay here so they would remain favourable to him.”

“And it’s not like he has complete freedom, if you go around the Earlham Insitute there’s armed patrols everywhere, you can be sure that’s not just to protect his research.”

“Meanwhile Jack’s just a kid. Put the army on him and he can’t do anything.”

Someone who understands.