The rain changed tone, is what he first thought, strolling down the block toward his home grounds, but then he realized, that wasn't the sound of rain. He spun to see datacards shattering on the pavement, the ones that weren't cushioned by garbage or by passerby. Things regularly fell down here from far above, but this was unusual; a rain of records. He glanced up, shaded lenses guarding against the actinic glare of the lower level streetlights, the ones that never shut themselves off (though they were frequently broken by gangs or vandals, and infrequently repaired).
So he got to witness the whole fall, the woman's manner of deforming the things around her, pulling it all toward her like she was a black hole, dragging at anything to slow herself down. Before she was even down past the lower catwalk, he was springing toward her, shoving past confused transients and gawking pedestrians. He skidded to a stop as she settled, so gently, against a convenient hillock of old newsflimsies and moldering bags of dessicated garbage. He took a moment to gaze at her. There was a fleeting moment of jealousy; she seemed utterly normal, pretty by the standards of topside, gorgeous amongst the likes of those who washed up down on the street. She was something he could never be: able to pass for human. And yet she was just as different from the humans as he was, he knew that with a certainty.
But she was in danger, here. Even if she hadn't drawn witnesses (admittedly, half of whom were hallucinatory through substances or mental illness), a girl like her, unconscious in the street? No, to far too many, that was an invitation of the entirely wrong sort. Plus, she was more like him than she was like them. That was more of a motivator than any sense of altruism.
So he did what he had to do. He squatted and slid his arms under her shoulders and knees, lifting her off the ground. Then he folded her gently over his left shoulder, letting her hang in a fireman's carry as he sprang into action, running down the block, a whirl of flapping gray coat with a flash of her blue dress for color. Some of the witnesses tried to stop him as he raced toward the wall to get past them; he accelerated toward them, then abruptly veered toward the surface of the building, springing up, his shoes catching enough traction that he was able to run up along the side of the wall, over their heads. His momentum ran out quickly, though, and he used the last of his contact to spring away, flipping over to land nimbly on his feet on the far side of the crowd and sprinting into the gloom.
He ran faster than any street-level dweller ought to be able to run, for two blocks, more than a mile, before he slowed and took a corner. This was one of the more dangerous blocks, but nobody messed with him here. He didn't hunt here, either, just defended himself well enough that the locals knew to leave him alone. That's because this was his home base; he didn't want to make too many enemies or draw too much attention around the place he slept. Of course, he wasn't going to take her to his lair, his sanctum sanctorum. Nobody visited there. Still, there were secondary hideouts he used, storage places, and one place he used had a spot for her to recover...
~~~~~
The first thing that filtered into her consciousness as she slowly woke up was the sound. It was odd, scratchy, like a lo-fi MP9 or something. It was also an
unfamiliar song. It was just soft, background music, filling the mostly-quiet space. Somewhere behind it, the sounds of the city were muted, so she was clearly indoors somewhere, but somewhere without active sound dampening.
The light, as she opened her eyes, was cast from the side, but indirectly; she was shaded by something. It was a fairly standard cheap plastifoam mattress that supported her, a frayed but clean blanket separating her from the slick cushion. The light showed cracked and peeling paint on an ancient brick wall, a ceiling that had exposed beams and wiring, and, as she turned her head, piles of something. They were too large for datacards, too thick for newsflimsies; it took a few moments for her mind to recall them from old movies and school: books. She was walled off from the rest of whatever room she was in by a knee-high wall of stacked books.
At one end of the stack was a strange little box, seemingly electric but not electronic. It was open-sided, so she could see the odd, seemingly hand-made guts, wires leading to a simple speaker, more wires leading to a mechanical motor, which turned something on the top. There was some kind of disk on the top, and an armature of some kind resting on it, staying stationary while the disk turned beneath it. That's where the music was coming from. At the other end of the wall, some clothes were piled; an overcoat, it looked like from the dangling sleeve, with a hat on top of it, and propped against the crown of the hat, a face mask like the contamination-paranoid Phoba subculture tended to use. The glass of the eye covers glinted in the light from the other side of the wall.
Speaking of clothing, hers was rumpled, but intact. Nothing had been any more disturbed than she might have expected, and, given that her last conscious memory before waking up had been falling from several hundred feet toward the pavement, her clothes had held up quite well.
Soon the song came to an end, and
the next song began to play.
When she finally peeped over the books, the first thing she would notice would be the light source, a simple battery-powered camping lantern, a ring of LEDs and a frosted plastic tube to scatter the light more evenly, just placed in the middle of the room. The next thing she might be interested in would be the exits; what looked like blanket-covered windows to the end of the room where the coat and hat were, a door in the corner of the opposite wall, and an open archway into a dark space placed in the wall in between.
Sitting casually on the floor in the archway, his back to the frame so he could use the lantern light, was a man. He was reading one of the books, casually turning pages, apparently not noticing her movements, for all he reacted. He was more intimidating for his unexplained presence than for anything in particular about him, although he did seem odd.
He was short, but what she could see of him was powerfully built. He was also hairy, not quite at the level of an actual pelt, but approaching that, hair swathing his light brown skin. The dark, crudely-trimmed hair of his head crowded his face, it seemed, and he was clearly several days worth of unshaven. In semi-profile, viewed partly from the rear as he angled himself to read by the lanternlight, it was particularly noticeable that there was something about his nose and mouth; they protruded a bit, just kind of a swelling, that made him look like a Cro-Magnon or, with all the hair, some kind of animal man, with a muzzle. If only his nose had been more upturned, it might have really sold the illusion.
All he was doing was reading, but he seemed coiled, in a way. As if ready to spring. Whether this was a bad thing or not, that remained to be seen.
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