Chapter 204: An Afternoon in the Real World
The voice came from behind him on the path.
Jake turned.
The person standing there was young — late teens, dressed for weather that had been colder this morning than it was now, a thick scarf pulled up and a baseball cap pulled down in the specific way of someone who had learned that being recognizable in public was a variable worth managing. Despite the coverage, something about the posture was familiar.
"Kira?" he said, after a moment.
The girl's expression shifted immediately — the particular brightness of someone who had hoped to be recognized and had it confirmed. She came off the path and sat down on the lawn beside him without checking whether the grass was damp, with the easy unselfconsciousness of someone who had decided the afternoon was worth a grass stain.
"You remembered," she said.
"You have a distinctive voice," Jake said.
Kira Bennett was nineteen, a performer with a small pop group that had been building its audience through regional shows and online presence for the past two years. Jake had met her on the set of Sandbox Pictures' first film — a brief crossover with a music label project that had put her in three scenes and on screen for approximately four minutes total, which had been enough for her energy to register as distinct from most people he encountered in professional contexts.
"I didn't see you at the premiere," she said, with the directness of someone who had been thinking about this and had decided to raise it.
"I had to be somewhere else," Jake said. "I watched it the same night. Different theater."
She considered this with the expression of someone evaluating whether the explanation was satisfactory. "Director Marcus said you tend to disappear."
"He's not wrong."
She pulled her scarf down now that she'd determined the park was low-density enough to not require the full coverage configuration. The early spring light hit the lawn at the angle that made everything look warmer than it was, and she sat in it with the unconscious ease of someone whose body had decided the afternoon was good.
"You look different," she said, after a moment. The observation had the careful quality of something she'd noticed immediately and had been deciding whether to raise.
"People change," Jake said.
"You're taller," she said.
"A bit."
She frowned slightly — the specific frown of someone whose visual memory was telling them the discrepancy was larger than a bit and who was being too polite to say so directly.
Jake let it go. The height change was the hardest external modification to explain casually, because the most plausible natural explanation — late growth combined with posture improvement and specific training — worked up to about eight centimeters before it started requiring people to suspend disbelief. Fifteen centimeters required a more committed suspension. Most people chose to trust their own uncertainty over their initial impression, which was what made human memory useful for him.
Kira appeared to make the same choice and moved on.
They sat in the sun for a while without particular agenda, the conversation moving at the comfortable pace of two people who had established a baseline familiarity and were adding to it without pressure. She told him about the group's rehearsal schedule, about a choreographer who had joined recently and was pushing them past what their previous training had prepared them for, about a regional show that had gone better than expected and had produced a moment she was still processing — the specific high of a performance that landed, that connected with people in the room in the way you practiced hoping for and rarely achieved cleanly.
Jake listened with the attention he brought to conversations with people who were talking about something they genuinely cared about, which was different from the attention he brought to most conversations and people tended to notice the difference without being able to name it.
The sun was moving and the light was shifting and the early spring afternoon was doing what it did — warming up slowly, the kind of warmth that felt like a decision the weather was making rather than a condition.
Kira reached over and brushed something from his hair — the gesture happening quickly and then stopping, both of them registering the unexpected closeness of it at approximately the same moment.
"You have half the lawn on your head," she said, converting the moment into something practical.
"Occupational hazard of sitting on grass," Jake said.
He stood and dusted himself off. She stood beside him, and the height differential registered in the specific way that height differentials registered when two people were standing closer than they had been when sitting — she was looking up at him with the slight adjustment that required, and he was looking down with the equivalent.
She was nineteen. He was — the question of how old he was had become genuinely complicated over the past year in ways that he didn't try to calculate precisely anymore. His biological age was the super soldier serum's doing, which had optimized the physical architecture toward peak function regardless of calendar years. His experiential age was considerably more difficult to quantify.
The gap was there. It was manageable.
"My group has a concert in the city on Thursday," she said. "Front row seats. Are you interested?"
"Yes," Jake said, without the deliberation that made the answer feel like a calculation. He meant it.
She smiled — not the performance smile that people in her industry developed as professional infrastructure, but the straightforward one underneath it.
The sports car drew attention the way it always did — it was too fast for the street it was on and too well-built to be anything a person owned casually, and the combination produced the specific kind of second-look that Jake had stopped noticing except as ambient data.
He pulled up in front of Kira's building and she was halfway through saying something about Thursday when a voice came from the sidewalk.
"Kira?"
A girl about the same age, carrying a performance bag that suggested she'd come from or was going to rehearsal, had stopped on the sidewalk. The expression on her face was doing several things simultaneously — recognition, surprise, and something underneath both of those that was making the surface expression work harder than it needed to.
Kira's response was perfectly calibrated. The smile, the easy wave, the "See you inside" that closed the car conversation without rushing it. She got out, said goodbye to Jake in a way that managed to be warm without being demonstrative, and walked to the other girl with the comfortable confidence of someone who had decided the situation didn't require any particular management.
Jake watched this in the rearview mirror with the mild professional appreciation of someone who recognized competence in an unfamiliar domain.
He pulled away from the curb and accelerated back toward the main road.
The afternoon had produced two useful things alongside the generally enjoyable quality of it.
The first was the conversation with Kira, which had reminded him that the real world existed as more than a logistics base between dimensional transits — that there were people in it whose company was worth making time for, and that making time for it didn't require a strategic justification.
The second was a thought that had arrived during the lawn conversation and had been sitting in the back of his mind since: the Superman problem.
The dimensional library contained a catalogued entry for the DC Extended Universe — he'd been in the Dark Knight Rises world, had spent time with Bruce Wayne, had the Batman equipment sitting in the Wasteland stronghold. The DCEU was accessible. The question was what could be done with it.
Superman's biology was solar-powered — the yellow sun interaction that drove the Kryptonian cellular enhancement. The power scale was categorically different from anything Jake had accessed through the super soldier serum or the Fraternity training or anything else in the current portfolio. If there was a dimensional world where the merging mechanics applied to something at that capability level, the outcome of the merge would be interesting to think about.
The Red Queen had already flagged the concern he'd identified himself: a character with that kind of inner architecture, merged with his own, would not leave his identity as the primary consciousness. The gap between Clark Kent's fundamental nature and his was too large in the wrong direction.
But the DNA. The genetics. Without a merge — just a blood sample, the same approach he'd taken with David in the Jumper world — the Kryptonian genetic sequence might have applications that didn't require the merge risk. Solar interaction at the cellular level. The energy conversion mechanism.
He filed the thought for the Red Queen to research.
The Sandbox Pictures building came into view and he parked and went up.
The Red Queen's interface was already active when he reached the office — the monitor display showing the status updates she'd been running while he was out.
"The IP negotiation completed while you were in the park," she said. "We have the rights."
Jake sat down. "Terms?"
"Favorable. The property owner accepted creative control provisions that protect the world's internal logic, which is the primary requirement. The financial terms are above our initial offer but within the budgeted range." A pause. "Pre-production can begin immediately."
"Start the casting process," Jake said. "And get Marcus on the phone — he needs to know the project is real and moving."
"Already done," the Red Queen said. "He's waiting for your call."
Jake picked up the phone.
Outside the office window, the city moved through the late afternoon with the unconcerned momentum of a place that had things to do and was doing them, and the early spring light hit the glass buildings at the angle that turned everything orange for about twenty minutes before the sun found the horizon and the color changed.
Jake talked to Marcus about the new film.
The film that would open access to a world with biological energy systems that could solve the genetic integration problem. The film that needed to be made correctly, with the world's internal logic intact, because the world's internal logic was the point.
Marcus was excited in the specific way of someone who had been given a project that mattered and knew it.
Jake listened to him talk and thought about Thursday, and a front row seat, and the particular quality of an afternoon that had been good for reasons that didn't reduce to productivity.
He added it to the accounting.
[Power Stone Goal: 500 = +1 Chapter]
[Review Goal: 10 = +1 Chapter]
If you liked it, feel free to leave a review.
20+chapters ahead on P1treon Soulforger