2103:09:08:18:41:36

  Mom and I were eating dinner on the couch, plate in hand and watching a movie, when her phone suddenly blared the alarm. I almost dropped my spaghetti at the sudden noise while Mom hurriedly sat her plate down on the table in front of us.

  After, she snatched her phone from the table and read the alert. “Shit,” she cursed – a rarity. She picked her plate back up and stood up. “Sorry honey, there’s an emergency and I got called in,” she said from the kitchen, followed shortly by the noisy clattering of utensils hitting the sink. “You can keep watching the movie. I’ve already seen it.”

  I looked over my shoulder toward the kitchen, but she was already running back into the room and past the couch, toward the door. She grabbed and put on her coat and bag, then went to open the door before hesitating. She proceeded to walk backwards instead, toward the back of the couch and stopped right behind me.

  “It’ll be an all-nighter, so don’t wait up, alright?” she asked and, with my mouth still full of spaghetti, I nodded. “Good. Sleep tight and I’ll see you in the morning.” She kissed me on the back of the head before, naturally, mussing my hair. Not wanting to speak with my mouth full, I waved her goodbye, though she didn’t see it.

  The door closed with a bang and I was left alone. I watched the door for a second, waiting for it to open back up, but it seems that this time she hadn’t forgotten anything in a hurry.

  I stopped the movie and went to the kitchen, piling the remaining spaghetti on my mother’s half-filled plate. Not that it was bad – though basic, it tasted nice – but since I didn’t require food to function, it seemed better to donate it to my mother’s plate instead. She would need it if she was going to be busy all night.

  As a professional firefighter dealing with urban search and rescue, it wasn’t the first time my mom had had to deal with an emergency. I was with her for three others during and heard one deep in the night while I was pretending to sleep, so that made them practically common.

  But so far, there’d never been a call where she’d had to spend the entire night dealing with it. I briefly wondered what kind of emergency was required to call her in for the entirety of both evening and night, but wasn’t too curious – it was Saturday, so she’d probably tell me tomorrow.

  What it meant, though, was for the first time I was fully without supervision for an entire night. Which meant it was time to do what I was made to do: heroics.

  I rinsed my plate and utensils and put them in the dishwasher, then ran upstairs. I stuffed my bed with plushies and extra pillows in a there-is-someone-under-there kind of way I’d seen done in movies – just in case she got home early – then went downstairs and opened the backdoor to the garden.

  I then closed it, put on my shoes, grabbed my wallet and keys, and opened it again, stepping outside before locking the door behind me.

  I quickly searched the neighbors’ houses, looking at their windows to see if anyone was watching. It was still bright out, and it wouldn’t do for anyone to see me transform by accident, especially on my first day being a hero.

  When I found I was in the clear, I transformed into the crow I’d managed to copy last week – I’d gotten lucky and one all but walked up to me during a time I’d been out alone in the backyard.

  Tetrachromatic vision replaced the regular trichromatic one, and my hearing sharpened while my sense of smell all but disappeared. I stretched my wings and flapped a few times, feeling how they moved before running and jumping off into the sky. Flapping my wings and catching an updraft, I rose higher and higher until I caught a tailwind and hovered above the city.

  With my route decided and situation stabilized, I took my first proper look at Charm from this high up.

  Charm was a sight to behold. From the high-rise of Aberdeen and southern Bayside, to the mishmash of diverse styles and vivid colors of Little Europe’s neighborhoods, to the sprawl of townhouses, giant apartment blocks, winding suburbs and oversized mansions and villas of eastern Bayside, Riverside, Northside and Greenside; the whole city was a puzzle of a thousand asynchronous pieces that still, somehow, managed to form a coherent whole. Even the minimalist pragmatism of the trainyards, docks and general industry of The Hub and Portside added its own charm, an enormous, functionally-designed mechanical heart of steel, concrete and asphalt to fuel the rest of the city.

  The normally-invisible mandatory shielding that covered it all was barely visible in my crow vision, giving the whole city a shimmering coat of a light pastel purple that varied slightly in intensity and hue from building to building. Combined with the low-hanging sun, the vantage point and the differences brought about by of crow vision, Charm looked unlike I’d ever seen it before.

  Yet it was beyond the superficial sights that I sensed something else in the city. Something deeper, something that felt alive even if it wasn’t visible. It was in the way the trains, trams, ferries, cars and bikes connected all through street and water. In the way people moved across streets and in and out of buildings in planned-for, organized chaos. Even in the way the cats and dogs, birds and rats, planted trees inside cultivated parks and stubborn weeds through cracked concrete added a touch of nature.

  I didn’t know what to call what I was looking at, but I did like seeing it. So, I stayed hovering while going down my mental checklist of what I needed to do today.

  First off, I needed to find another animal to mimic into, something smaller than a crow so I could leave through my window without squeezing my crow-self through its narrow opening. I’d already tried it once and not only was it painful, Mom had heard my squawking and ran into the room to see what was going on. I had to tell her a bird flew into the window to explain the feathers in the room.

  A cat would probably fit through the opening and it seemed like a useful form regardless, but a mouse or a rat would be fine too. Really, anything was fine so long as it was small, could climb its way to the window, and wasn’t an insect.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  After that, I would start looking for a costume. I wasn’t expecting to find something that would become my costume, but I would still need something I could use in the meantime.

  And after that, it was time to become a hero in truth.

  X

  Once I’d had my fill of Charm, I set off to do my work.

  Finding a cat turned out to be easy. All I had needed to do was fly down into an alley, transform back into human form and then find a cat to bribe with scritches to make one come close to me. Only when I transformed into a copy of it did the cat briefly become hostile to me, hissing and arching their back. But when I transformed back it became frightened instead, running away with a series of yowls that sounded suspiciously like a ‘nonono’.

  Either way, I got my cat form, so I went on to the next part of my quest: finding a costume. Luckily, I already found a place where I could find one.

  During one of our days out, Mom and I walked past a costume shop in Northside where they sold outfits of fictional characters, period-specific clothing and costumes of existing masked. While they’d looked cheap at first glance, for now it was more important that I got something than something good.

  Besides, I would likely spend most of my time in mimicry, so it wasn’t as if the quality of my costume mattered all that much. Only after I started making a name for myself would it become something to think about more deeply, and by that point I'd hopefully have found a way to make some money without it being connected to my identity as Samantha Pearsson.

  After making sure I remembered correctly where the shop had been, I took the form of my crow-self once more and flew to the north.

  Because the store itself did have a camera out front, there was one more piece to my plan. Since someone might catch me doing heroics and link that appearance to something that could be bought here, I needed to mimic a person so my civilian identity wouldn’t get linked to me purchasing a costume on the same day a new masked popped up.

  So instead of going into the store right away, I descended in the closest unmonitored alley near the shop I could find before transforming back. I then took out my phone and stepped out of the alley, walked away from the store and pretended to be lost, holding my phone in front of me to as if looking for directions.

  I lingered in the area like that for a while, looking for someone to pass me without another person being near enough to spot me. It took me maybe ten minutes before I found a potential mark: a lone adult man with a briefcase, dressed in some form of grey business attire and walking in a hurry, uncaring of his surroundings.

  Perfect.

  The moment he passed me by I turned to follow, putting my phone away and staring at their back all the while. He was walking fast, my window of opportunity was short and my ability took time to copy something. I needed to copy him before another person showed up and before he passed by the unmonitored alley I’d found. I felt sweat starting to form on my forehead as the window of opportunity narrowed each passing second, when I felt the mental click! of my power latching onto them just in time.

  The moment we passed the alley, I ducked in and, while keeping my eye on his back, transformed into my mark, heart pounding all the while. For such a small job it’d been nerve wracking, but I’d succeeded.

  I’d transformed myself into the unknown man.

  With a victorious jaunt in my step, I began skipping toward the where the alley met the street when I felt an odd sensation come up from the soles of my feet. At first, it felt like a bit like sand, but then it quickly became something wet and slime-y. The longer I stood, the more uncomfortable it felt, to the point it was starting to become painful.

  I looked down and found myself standing in a pieces of finely crushed glass, with a small stream of blood leaking from underneath my foot.

  My bare foot.

  My eyes went up from there and I saw a bare ankle. Further up from that, I saw a bare shin, then a bare knee, a bare thigh and a bare-

  I quickly transformed back into my regular old self, silently cursing my creator. What was the point mimicry being a part of the infiltrator suite if I couldn’t copy people’s clothes? It was enough to make an android lose faith in their maker. At least the wound itself hadn’t transferred over. That would’ve been a bridge too far.

  Still, it meant I would just have to take the risk of getting exposed then. I’d waited long enough to be a hero, and a hero kept going even if things didn’t go as planned, right? Right?

  Well, my Heroic Impulse agreed at least.

  I stepped out of the alley and walked into Evergreen’s Periodically Appropriate Dresses.

  Although the front of it had looked small, the shop’s interior extended far and away into the back, further than the outside had led me to believe. The organization of it was haphazard and the clothes were densely packed together, but they weren’t unorganized. The rows were stacked and divided into two levels, and together held everything one would need to fit together an outfit: shoes, dresses, pants, skirts, belts, straps, as well as every kind of shirt, jacket, hat and mask, both for masked and for things like occupation or themed festivity. They were all further segmented by era of history, genre, occupation, popular franchise and types of masked.

  I immediately set out to look for one that fit me. I avoided the rows of franchise characters and masked, focusing mostly on the one that held the greatest variety: period costumes. But despite the limit, there were too many choices for me to pick from. Every single one would do – so long as it also had a mask I could use – but I found myself hesitating as I pulled piece after piece out of the racks. Why?

  “Can I help you?” A voice suddenly came from behind. I didn’t startle (promise), but I did turn around on a dime. An older, positively elderly-looking man in an eye-assaultingly colorful store uniform had appeared as if out of thin air.

  “Sorry?” I blurted out.

  “I saw you look around for a while without picking anything,” he explained. “And I was wandering if I could offer some help. Are you searching for something in particular?”

  I hesitated for a second, but decided I could use it. “A costume,” I answered sheepishly. “But I’ve no idea which one. Even though anything would do…” I trailed off.

  The man raised his eyebrows, then gave me a gentle smile. “Hmm, a tricky customer. Do you have an idea on color or look? Or thought about a theme or a concept we can work with?”

  I couldn’t just say ‘hero’, that would be too obvious. But there also wasn’t a good theme to go along with mimic or shapeshifting; powers that revolved around a change in appearance didn’t lend itself to an easy physical representation.

  So, I went another route. What kind of costume would help me in my heroics? What would help people realize I was one of the good guys, someone that would help them when they needed me most? What kind of theme would calm people down, make people happy, help create a better world?

  Figures from my own short life flashed through me. Of my mom and of Millie, Saga and Jolie, and all they’d done to help me.

  “Something to make people smile,” I said, then quickly became embarrassed at what I said. Was that the best I could come up with? It was so plain it might as well be nothing.

  The man, however, took it seriously. “Hmm, something to make people smile, huh?” he murmured. Then, with an odd glint to his eyes, he looked at me and snapped his fingers. “You know, I think I’ve got just the thing.”

  He guided me through the store until we reached a rack labeled ‘Late Middle Ages’. From there, he pulled out an outfit in bright red with a white trim, tight pants and sleeves but with puffy bits at the outer thighs and upper arms, a hat with eight floppy protrusions from it, and lastly, a smiling silvery mask.

  “What is this?” I asked as he handed me the outfit. I’d never seen something like it, but there was something about the way it looked that made me smile. “It looks… funny,” I said with a small, confused, but happy smile.

  “It’s a jester’s outfit,” he explained. “Way back when, when the world was a dark, dark place, these costumes were worn by individuals that entertained the courts of kings great and small, trying their best to make them smile just so their often-dark lives were just that little bit brighter.”

  That sounded like something a hero would wear, and I couldn’t recall seeing another masked running around in one of these. And best of all, it even came with its own mask. I had never thought I would find an actually good costume.

  “It’s perfect,” I said, and the man’s lips twitched oddly at my response.

  We went to the counter where he packed it up for and put it into a bag, which he gave to me. But when I went to pay with my phone, hoping the payment wouldn’t be noticed by my mother, he put his hand out and stopped me.

  “Don’t worry about paying. Just seeing someone like you try and make the world a better place is payment enough,” he said, a sense of pride clear in his voice.

  A warm feeling coursed through me and I put my phone away. “Thank you,” I said. Who knew I’d encounter such a kind person when looking for a costume?

  I went to the exit, but just as the automatic doors opened and I had one foot outside, he called out to me. “And don’t worry; you’re not the first masked I’ve had the pleasure of helping. I’ll wipe the footage before the day’s out.”

  I froze for a second, then, with a quick glance back, yelped, “Thank you,” and all but ran from the store.