Chapter 2

Jimmy was pretty depressed for being a whole new boy-man. (he was very young looking, but luckily hadn’t been sent to the wrong side of puberty, nor had he lost much mass.) None of his friends recognized him, except for his emergent latency friends. Kissy Kissy ran to the other end of the tank, (and the dentist wouldn’t even recognize his new teeth as teeth, being formed from titanium dioxide and hard enough to produce sparks against iron.)

Tick-Tick threw branches at him, scolding him from the tree top. Jimmy remembered how he had met Tick-Tick. As he was taking a long lunch (they really liked him at work) in the nearby old tree park, a perfectly launched nut had impacted the top of his head. It was also a marvelous specimen of nut, an artwork of nature. Jimmy ignored the smirking squirrel and looked at a tree nearby, thanking it for the gift, praising the nut, and being happy in a way even a squirrel could appreciate.

Tick-Tick was outraged, it was his nut, his treasure. Jimmy spent the next few lunches worshiping the nut at a little altar he made, ignoring Tick-Tick, who eventually got bold enough to steal the nut back from a dozen feet away when Jimmy was ‘not paying attention’. It must have been the day after Jimmy payed a jeweler to buff the nut so it had a radiant shine to it. The Jeweler thought Jimmy was nuts.

The next day there was a lesser nut at the altar, which Jimmy kept, replacing it with a handful of peanuts.

After that, Tick-Tick didn’t throw hard objects at Jimmy anymore. Until now.

Jimmy hadn’t slept since awakening in his new form, and he didn’t have a dwelling anymore, so he walked the nights in a grumpy mood. The hoodlum who accosted him made a poor choice, and it was about now that Jimmy met the entity he dubbed ‘Grandfather One-eye. Not that the creature had only one eye, but that he only ever glanced at Jimmy with one at a time, briefly and with import. The glance told Jimmy the hood was about to shoot him, so he dropped prone just before the revolver discharged, then bounced back up and took the handgun from the unlucky thug who was confused by Jimmy falling forward, most of his victims fell back, and what was his gun doing in Jimmy’s hand?

Jimmy said “Nice piece, five shots, kind of makes it a ladies gun, doesn’t it? Here, if you want it back, you have to go get it.” as he dumped the cartridges out and put the cylinder into the revolver backward, destroying the weapon. He then threw it across the park where it wedged under the light-bar of a parked police car who’s single occupant was just getting out to check on the gunfire. The noise of the car roof deforming under the force of the impact scared the crap out of the cop, especially when he saw what had hit.

“Unit 345 in the park, please send SWAT asap, someone just fired an unloaded revolver at me. No, no one shot at me, they threw a weapon so hard it jammed under the light-bar, and there is no one within fifty yards. Because the cylinder is in the revolver backwards is how I know it is unloaded. Yes, I know that isn’t possible, but it is what it is. Ok, so it doesn’t sound very threatening, but I am not going into that park alone, and I wouldn’t send any of you in there either. How long till SWAT gets here? Ok, fine, I’ll report the car as hit by an object and let Maintenance figure it out. SWAT?”

They found the thug hanging by his shoelaces from a branch, scared breathless, muttering about monsters, and not to ever turn the lights off. Grandfather One-eye must have given him a bit of a look.

Grandfather One-eye had been one of the top ambush predators to ever exist, before he became part of the collective psyche of life. He taught Jimmy how to be so still, one could bump into him twice with out realizing he was there, or more than an object. His glances gave Jimmy perfect timing, and were very helpful.

Jimmy noticed that his skin changed shade as he was exposed to direct sunlight- so, every one’s skin does you might counter. His did it over the course of an hour, from pale to onyx. He found he could control it to keep the shade he wished, and settled for a darker tone he thought kept him from looking more like a child than a man. Suddenly he realized he was getting sleepy, and wondered if he and Ma Wombat had activated hibernation as an option while sorting and making useful all the bits of DNA the rhino-splicers had shredded. Only one way to find out!