AnotherArchetype
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133. Cowl
🕑 Added 2025-04-04 20:19:17 +0000 UTCIt was morning by the time I left the classroom and ventured back out to the mansion proper.
Has so much time really passed? I thought to myself.
As ugly and vandalised as the interior of the mansion was, the way the morning light shone through the fractured window panes at the end of the hallway caused me to stop and appreciate the warm glow.
Further along the hall steam continued to eke from beneath Azad’s bedroom door. I heightened my hearing and heard him breathing and the sound of what I could only guess was musculature, blood, bones, and other organs changing under Azad’s use of the power. I thought back to how Xandra had created a skin-cocoon for herself in order to change her wounded body into a tougher, rubbery one.
She hadn’t come out looking much different beyond a smoother complexion and slightly larger eyes. It was my hope Azad wouldn’t step out of his bedroom looking too different either.
I had stepped out of the classroom with a goal in mind, and since Azad was still busy, I decided to head downstairs. I didn’t, however, do this the normal way.
I moved to the nearest wall and stuck my sinew-gloved hands against it. In a single flowing movement I climbed up onto the wall, the adhesive qualities of the suit causing me to stick in place.
I crawled along the walls, the whole of the hallway tilting sideways.
Crawling along the wall worked fine, though somewhat awkward in terms of maintaining a crawling posture.
Move faster, I thought.
I remembered back to how the fox-frog-monster had taken over my body at the textile factory, and how it had leapt its way along the corridor on all fours, using its powerful claws and grip to stop itself from falling to the ground.
I didn’t weigh nearly as much, and the adhesive quality of the sinew-suit was more than capable of keeping me fixed to the wall. On top of that, it felt effortless to move along the wall where any normal human being would have greatly struggled to hold themselves in place even with something to hold onto; the musculature of the sinew-suit took all of the effort away from my real body beneath the suit. My real body which could simply move and remain mostly relaxed, not having to commit to the same level of effort.
Conserving physical effort and willpower, I thought, acknowledging something I had written inside one of the workbooks.
I bounded forward, moving down the flight of stairs, going from wall-to-ceiling-to-wall on my way down. The more distance I cleared, the more I was aware I was hardly pushing the sinew-suit to its limits.
When I reached the ground floor I changed up how I approached traversing the walls. I pushed away, standing upright, though still horizontal to the ground.
Will my body collapse under my own weight? I wondered, Will the adhesion at the soles of my sinew’d feet not be strong enough?
The adhesion, and the overall strength of the suit, allowed me to walk completely horizontal along the ground floor hallway wall. I had to arc my head a little since there wasn’t as much room width-ways along the hallway, so I walked up and onto the ceiling, so that I was walking completely upside-down.
The sinew-suit made it seem effortless, and that’s how it felt, but I knew just how many things had to work in tandem for the suit to pull this feat off.
For one, the sinew-suit all over had to be in perfect unison with the intent of how I wished to move my body. The electrical brain signals of my mind telling my body, and then by extension the suit, what to do, was done as if a step ahead of my intent to move my limbs.
Then the suit, by some means worked out between the sinews, the musculature, my own body and brain, and the power, made sure that the suit created tension and release where needed. How else could the suit allow me to casually stroll along the ceiling?
I felt some blood rush to my head, but even this issue was relayed so that it was more a sensation that indicated to me that I was upside down, than something I would need to be worried about.
Could I stand upside-down like this for hours? Even indefinitely? I wondered.
My instinct told me that, yes. Yes, I could.
I stepped over the upper doorway frame and into the kitchen. It was strange seeing everything upside-down, but also kind of fun. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I was thirsty. I let myself drop from the ceiling, spun round in the air, and then landed on my feet.
Then I casually approached the blue basket and took one of the bottles of water. It tasted so good to my parched throat. I drank the entire bottle’s contents and set the empty bottle aside.
I spotted a bag of crisps in the blue basket and helped myself to it, enjoying the taste of the prawn-cocktail-flavoured crisps more than needing the food itself to satiate my hunger.
Whilst I ate the crisps I heightened my hearing enough to give me an idea of what was going on around the mansion. As loud as everything was outside, there was a docile quiet to everything which caught my attention; the birds, the insects, the grass and leaves, and further off a car driving down the road. I debated with myself for a moment whether I should do a quick patrol of the mansion to scout for trouble.
Yes, I thought, but you’ll also have to do the other thing.
The other thing was something I had considered during my strategising during the night. It would become an integral part of The Archetype Project.
To move forward with patrolling the mansion grounds the way I intended, I needed a mirror.
I found a mirror, cracked in places but mostly intact, above the sink in a large bathroom on the ground floor.
The bathroom stunk, and had been used to the point the toilet had been clogged and left to fester.
There wasn’t much I intended to do about that for the time being, so I just did my best to ignore the stench whilst I took a large quarter-chunk of the mirror from the wall and took it with me into the kitchen; I’d also made sure to slam the bathroom door shut for good measure because, boy, was it gross.
Standing in the kitchen, by the sink, looking into the large quarter-piece of mirror, I had time to look at my reflection.
My eyes were different. They didn’t have the shell-shocked look I had before when I first arrived at Donald and Sienna’s farm. But a different, more focused, look in my eyes.
I looked older. Maybe by a year or two. Maybe it was the stress that had done that. My face wasn’t quite so round and chubby in the cheeks anymore. My brow, which had always been good at scowling, had become even better at doing so.
Mum will still recognise this face, I thought to myself, taking some small relief from that.
The problem was, so would Robert Hoffman, and the Pied Pipers. I had already been stupid enough to trust that normal people wouldn’t have lost their minds to fear of mice in society. I had learned my lesson the hard way back at the Putsley Bay petrol station that trying to ignore the obstacles the Peepers had put in place wasn’t going to work.
I had considered ageing up my face so I wouldn’t have to present a Piper Pass to the clerk working behind the petrol station counter. But I hadn’t considered the option for very long because the idea of changing my face to look older was the stuff of nightmares. If I had gained one thing from my experience at the Wedder Gorge facility, and being on the run with Xandra, it was learning just how easy it was for the power to start taking control at the slightest use.
It was clear enough identity and the power were linked. And that scared the crap out of me, and had been a reason why I hadn’t tried every possible use of the power I could think of. Down in the underground complex deep below the Wedder Gorge facility, I had allowed myself to become a hypocrite, to take on were-fox features in order to boost my screaming ability. With Sophie and Walter’s help, I had successfully rendered the Peepers helpless.
But that single use of the power had become a splinter in my mind. Shortly after I saw the baby fox beneath Donald and Sienna’s dinner table, at first believing it to be real. Then, later, at the petrol station, I had seen that puppet frog which had told me to jump. The power had been working, consistently, relentlessly, auditioning parts of the itself to influence my thinking and actions.
I had used the power to increase my jumping ability at the puppet frog’s say-so. And I had increased the slight elastin-elasticity of my body because I had tried so hard to keep up with Xandra.
All of these things had helped us survive. To stay ahead of the Peepers. That is, until they had us cornered at the World War Two bunker.
Then, pushed to the brink mentally and physically, the beast had taken me over. The beast that had been building inside me the entire time came to the fore.
After all that I was finally back to myself, for the most part. And the sinew-suit, a leftover from changing back to myself from the beast I had become, was something new, something unexpected.
During my night of strategising, I considered never using the sinew-suit again. But then, I realised, there was something different about it.
The suit was over my body.
I wasn’t the suit.
Right then and there to prove it to myself, knowing I wasn’t going to be disturbed by Xandra or Azad, I ran a finger down the middle of the sinew-suit and took it off.
It peeled off me with a slightly sticky sound, but otherwise came off without a hitch. In no time at all I was stark naked in the kitchen holding the suit in front of me.
I’m not the suit, I thought again, I made it, and that’s the crucial difference.
I put the suit back on as easily as I had taken it off.
It covered every inch of my body from the neck down. That wasn’t going to be enough.
I need to keep my identity hidden from now on, I thought, reminding myself of one of the core elements of The Archetype Project I had decided on during the night.
I knew all of the reasons why I had to do so, and kept them front of mind. Soon, if things progressed as intended, I would explain to Xandra and Azad all the reasons why protecting our identities was going to be crucial for success moving forward.
Staring at my face again, I willed the power to increase the sinew-suit threads to reach over the entirety of my face.
In seconds, like fast-growing, pink-coloured blades of grass, the layers of sinew covered all over my face. I could see through the sinew at the eye sections, though in the mirror it looked as if the eye-sockets were covered. I could breathe just as easily as if my mouth weren’t covered.
My fluffy brown hair was also swallowed up and contained beneath the sinew-suit as if it weren’t there at all.
A somewhat frightening, sinew-masked face stared back at me in the mirror.
I didn’t exactly like what I saw, but that didn’t matter. It was a compromise I was willing to make on behalf of moving ahead with The Archetype Project and protecting my true identity moving forward.
But I wasn’t finished. During the night, when I had finished strategising as best I could, I had turned my attention to sketching out my alter-ego suit design.
After dozens of sketches I had decided on the look which seemed the most efficient, and in line with what I knew I could achieve at my current ability to use the power.
Bit by bit, I tapped into the power, willing it to form a second skull-like ‘cowl’. In the mirror I saw the bone emerge out of the sinew, as if the sinew itself were receding, revealing an island of white bone beneath its pink shores.
Within seconds a scowling, even more menacing face stared back at me in the mirror. The upper half of my sinew-masked face looked as if the skull were exposed. In the holes of the skull-cowl eye-sockets the pink of the sinew-mask over my eyes could be seen.
I had intentionally made the skull-cowl have a very similar scowl to my own.
The figure facing me in the mirror was an entity no person in their right mind would want to mess with. No potential Sub-Divisioner threat, nor a Pied Peeper officer.
Nobody who didn’t already know would think, ‘Yep, that’s Burgess O’Bannon beneath that cowl’.
It’s a lie, I thought, turning my head this way and that to examine the shape of the skull-cowl atop the sinew-mask. The ear-sections of the skull-cowl were shaped so as to leave the sections of sinew-covered ears exposed, to prevent any potential hearing-loss.
Lastly, as yet another compromise, I willed the power to increase my overall height and build, though kept lean and muscled, to the point I was about six feet tall.
My height of five foot seven was a part of who I was. Who Burgess O’Bannon was. And it was one more giveaway to those malicious forces waiting out there in the world to figure out who it really was beneath the cowl. So, whilst wearing the cowl, my height had to change too.
With my identity hidden beneath the suit and cowl, I moved to the kitchen backdoor.
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.
Each of my footsteps was heavier thanks to my larger body.
Noticing this, I willed the suit to dampen the sound of the footfalls as best it could. I took several steps backwards, and didn’t make even the slightest sound with the exception of a creak from the wooden floorboard which was only heard by me because my hearing was heightened to the nth degree.
Finally, grinning, I gripped the door handle, hesitated for just a moment, then stepped outside to start my patrol of the mansion grounds.
