July 6, 2009, 1:45 am EDT -- Dartmouth-Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Lebanon, NH
I clutched the attending physician's note in one hand and held up my massively oversized pants with the other as we exited the emergency room. I got the feeling that if my/Logan's folks hadn't taken pictures of the metamorphosis, I wouldn't have even gotten that. Regardless, my/Logan's (I really needed to sort out pronouns between my two lives) father was near apopleptic.
"Goddamn Hospitals!" he groused. "Get brought in by ambulance and hours later the doctors say 'There's nothing wrong with you.'"
"Daddy," I said, using every ounce of Hanover and Hanagawa charm I could muster. "Please calm down. Except for the obvious, I am perfectly healthy." I knew my/Logan's father was a soft touch for the "devoted daughter" bit from Logan's memories. Add a touch of the chakra that I currently had in abundance for some reason, shaped into a genjutsu, and I was able to get him calm enough that we wouldn't have to turn right around and bring him to the emergency room. "Besides, there are a lot of idiots who didn't follow basic fireworks safety in there. Burns and missing extremities trump 'weird but healthy.'" Behind us, Mother/Mom was pensive, clutching the digital camera and thinking over what had happened.
We got to the car and I slid into the driver's seat, as Daddy/Dad was looking tired. I didn't expect to get pulled over so the little detail of my face not matching my license shouldn't be a problem. I felt a little giddy as the part of me that was Misty Hanover thrilled that I knew how to drive a car. An uneventful five minute drive later, and we arrived home.
I bundled my/Logan's parents off to bed, claiming I was too keyed up and energetic to go to bed myself. It was even true. Once they'd gone upstairs, I turned to the computers in the living room. They were both running their screen savers, Daddy/Dad's computer with a simulated aurora borealis, the laptop that Logan had been playing Cities on shuffling through random anime and comic book images. I thought for a minute and decided to claim joint ownership between my halves for most things if only to spare myself the strain of differentiating between sets of parents unless I should happen to run into Misty's, unlikely as that was.
I cleaned up the mess the paramedics had made dragging me out of the house, and moved the mouse attached to the laptop. The screen saver closed, revealing the log-in screen for City of Villains. I quickly closed the program and brought up my browser. I had some things to do, because if what happened to me had happened to everyone else playing the game, then there had to be some info put into the Hanagawa/Hanover email drops. And a few tentative posts on the DW Forums.
After discovering they didn't yet exist in this reality, I replaced the Rogue Isles and New Jersey email drops. Both of them were distinct "personae," loosely based on stereotypical email accounts for a Soccer Mom and a Grandmother, respectively. I made sure to put them up on the web for long enough for spammer spiders to get a hold of them, and rerouted some of Daddy's joke emails to them, hopefully adding verisimilitude. I then proceeded to create the coded messages for Valles/Cousin Sachie by creating "unsendable" messages and leaving the system error messages in the inbox. The specific errors would tell anyone with Hanagawa or Hanover training my location and that I needed to be contacted and how to contact me. Intense kunoichi training in this day and age had to include computer operation, after all.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
I clutched the attending physician's note in one hand and held up my massively oversized pants with the other as we exited the emergency room. I got the feeling that if my/Logan's folks hadn't taken pictures of the metamorphosis, I wouldn't have even gotten that. Regardless, my/Logan's (I really needed to sort out pronouns between my two lives) father was near apopleptic.
"Goddamn Hospitals!" he groused. "Get brought in by ambulance and hours later the doctors say 'There's nothing wrong with you.'"
"Daddy," I said, using every ounce of Hanover and Hanagawa charm I could muster. "Please calm down. Except for the obvious, I am perfectly healthy." I knew my/Logan's father was a soft touch for the "devoted daughter" bit from Logan's memories. Add a touch of the chakra that I currently had in abundance for some reason, shaped into a genjutsu, and I was able to get him calm enough that we wouldn't have to turn right around and bring him to the emergency room. "Besides, there are a lot of idiots who didn't follow basic fireworks safety in there. Burns and missing extremities trump 'weird but healthy.'" Behind us, Mother/Mom was pensive, clutching the digital camera and thinking over what had happened.
We got to the car and I slid into the driver's seat, as Daddy/Dad was looking tired. I didn't expect to get pulled over so the little detail of my face not matching my license shouldn't be a problem. I felt a little giddy as the part of me that was Misty Hanover thrilled that I knew how to drive a car. An uneventful five minute drive later, and we arrived home.
I bundled my/Logan's parents off to bed, claiming I was too keyed up and energetic to go to bed myself. It was even true. Once they'd gone upstairs, I turned to the computers in the living room. They were both running their screen savers, Daddy/Dad's computer with a simulated aurora borealis, the laptop that Logan had been playing Cities on shuffling through random anime and comic book images. I thought for a minute and decided to claim joint ownership between my halves for most things if only to spare myself the strain of differentiating between sets of parents unless I should happen to run into Misty's, unlikely as that was.
I cleaned up the mess the paramedics had made dragging me out of the house, and moved the mouse attached to the laptop. The screen saver closed, revealing the log-in screen for City of Villains. I quickly closed the program and brought up my browser. I had some things to do, because if what happened to me had happened to everyone else playing the game, then there had to be some info put into the Hanagawa/Hanover email drops. And a few tentative posts on the DW Forums.
After discovering they didn't yet exist in this reality, I replaced the Rogue Isles and New Jersey email drops. Both of them were distinct "personae," loosely based on stereotypical email accounts for a Soccer Mom and a Grandmother, respectively. I made sure to put them up on the web for long enough for spammer spiders to get a hold of them, and rerouted some of Daddy's joke emails to them, hopefully adding verisimilitude. I then proceeded to create the coded messages for Valles/Cousin Sachie by creating "unsendable" messages and leaving the system error messages in the inbox. The specific errors would tell anyone with Hanagawa or Hanover training my location and that I needed to be contacted and how to contact me. Intense kunoichi training in this day and age had to include computer operation, after all.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll