Work Text:
“Thanks for coming,” Ellen said to Elliot. She was driving; he was riding in the back seat.
“I’ve been wanting to help out with one of your investigations for a while,” Elliot said. “It sounds like fun.”
“Yeah, and I hope your vision spells will help out with this case. But weren’t you going to record a review show episode with Susan tonight?” Ellen asked, glancing at her brother in the rear-view mirror.
“Oh, yeah, but I got Justin to fill in for me. He and Susan will do a bang-up job.”
“Actually, it was Susan who told referred this client to me and Nanase. One of her neighbors –” Ellen broke off as they pulled up in front of Nanase’s house, pulling out her phone to tell Nanase they were there, but Nanase must have been watching the window, as she came out before Ellen could even click on her contacts.
“The game is afoot!” Ellen exclaimed, backing out of the driveway as soon as Nanase had her seatbelt on.
“You were saying something about Susan’s neighbor?” Elliot reminded her.
“Oh, yeah. She says weird stuff’s been happening around her house. Like food disappearing from her plate when she wasn’t looking, or finding the towel in the guest bathroom wet when she hasn’t had any guests. The police looked around but didn’t find anything, and weird stuff’s still happening.”
“Hmmm,” Elliot said, putting his hand to his chin and looking thoughtful.
“Anyway, since Susan knows this woman, I asked her to meet us there,” Nanase said.
“What?” Elliot asked. “Who’s going to do the review show with Justin?”
Nanase shrugged. “She said she’d take care of it.”
CATALINA: Hi, I’m Catalina, filling in for Susan.
JUSTIN: And I’m Justin, filling in for Elliot.
CATALINA and JUSTIN (out of sync): And this is the review show.
JUSTIN: Oof, that could have gone better. You want to do another take?
CATALINA: Maybe after we’re done if we have time. I’ve got a date with my girlfriend after this.
JUSTIN: Fair. Well… We just watched Recognition, a 2002 movie starring Jason D. Poit (mmmmmm) as Matthew Haythorne and Azaria Wilton-Paget as Stephanie Pelletier.
CATALINA: And we’re gonna spoil the heck out of this thing. – Can I say ‘heck’?
JUSTIN: I don’t see why not.
JUSTIN: So we start with a kind of prologue before the credits, where a couple of little kids have just defeated the Dark Lord of this fantasy world and their sorceress mentor is about to send them home.
CATALINA: And they beg to stay a while longer, but she says their families will miss them if they’re gone much longer. And she casts a spell and they’re gone, and then we see them in their bedrooms at home, and it’s obvious they don’t live anywhere near each other – the boy looks out the window at a bunch of snow covering a city street in New York, and the girl lives in a shack in the Louisiana bayou.
JUSTIN: Then after a credits montage where we see various milestones of the kids growing up, which emphasizes that the boy’s family is pretty well off and the girl’s family can barely afford to patch their clothes, we cut to a literary agency where Jason D. Poit’s character is an intern. He’s balancing eight cups of coffee for all the agents in the office and of course that doesn’t go well.
CATALINA: Kasploosh! Jason and this agent that didn’t look where he was going are completely covered in coffee!
A few minutes later, they pulled up into the driveway of a house catercorner from Susan’s. Elliot noticed Justin’s car in the driveway of Susan’s house, and another one he didn’t recognize, with a lesbian flag bumper sticker. He had a moment of anxiety about the review show, but shrugged and turned his attention toward the house Nanase was ringing the doorbell of. It was about the same size as Susan’s, i.e., enormous, especially for one woman living here alone. There weren’t any other cars in the driveway, but he could see the outlines of a vehicle of some sort through the garage windows.
A few moments later, a middle-aged white woman with short blonde hair opened the door. “You must be Nanase and Ellen,” she said. “Susan’s told me about you. And you are?”
“I’m Elliot, Ellen’s brother.”
“He has some skills that might come in handy with this case,” Nanase said.
“Then you’ve already got an idea about what’s going on?”
“Sort of, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions until we’ve heard everything.”
“All right, come on in.”
They found Susan in the living room, with a cup of coffee in front of her on the coffee table. She waved hello to them. “I was just telling Susan about the strange things that have been going on,” the woman said.
“Would you mind telling us again from the beginning?” Nanase said.
“Of course. Would any of you like something to drink?”
When the woman went to the kitchen to get Elliot and Ellen’s soda and Nanase’s tea, Elliot whispered to Ellen, “What’s her name?”
“Lisa Grant,” Ellen whispered back.
Ms. Grant returned with their drinks and sat down, then started, "Well, the first strange thing I noticed was about two weeks ago. I’d cooked dinner for myself after work, just something basic – I think a couple of fried eggs on toast. I’d plated it and sat down in front of the TV, and then my older son called to talk about our plans for Christmas, and when I hung up, I realized one of the eggs and one of the slices of toast were gone. I didn’t remember eating them and there weren’t any crumbs or crust or yolk residue on the plate. I thought I must be going senile, thinking I’d cooked two when I’d only cooked one.
“But then a few days later, I checked the towels and things in the second and third story hall bathrooms, the ones my sons will use when they’re home, to make sure they were ready for them. And I found that one of the towels on the rack was damp. I never use that bathroom, I always use the master bath adjoining my bedroom or the half-bath over there when I’m downstairs.” She gestured at a door in a corner of the living room. "And then I pulled aside the curtain and saw water droplets in the tub, like the tub or shower had been used recently.
“That was when I called the police. They searched all over the house and couldn’t find any other signs of a break-in or intruder. But more things like that have been happening: food disappearing off my plate when I’m distracted, or leftovers going missing from the refrigerator. I found a Tupperware bowl I’d used for leftover chicken soup in the dishwasher when I unloaded it, but I definitely didn’t finish off the chicken soup and put the bowl in the dishwasher.”
“Have any valuables gone missing?”
“Not many,” she said. “And it’s odd; if it were a normal burglar, I’d expect them to take the most valuable lightweight things. There was an old laptop; I’ve been meaning to erase its hard drive and take it to the electronics recycler. I noticed it was missing a couple of days after the police came and went, although it could have been gone longer than that, but the newer laptop that I use regularly wasn’t touched. A few books off my shelves, none of them rare or antique, and a whole box of books I was planning to donate to a thrift store. And a set of sheets and a matching blanket have gone missing – not antique or anything, but they have some sentimental value, since they were a wedding present from my aunt, who passed a couple of years after I got married. There might be other things I haven’t noticed, but after I noticed those I kind of did an informal inventory and didn’t notice anything else out of place or missing.”
“Does anyone else have a key to your house?” Nanase asked.
“Well, my sons do. I changed the locks after my ex and I divorced, so they should be the only ones.”
“How many sons do you have? How old are they?” Ellen asked.
“Two, both adults – Brandon is twenty-two, he just graduated from the University of Chicago and got a job at a radio station in Springfield. Tyler is twenty-four; he’s in law school at the University of Michigan. They had a younger brother, but…” She shook her head and looked grim. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think it’s relevant.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Nanase said, and Ellen murmured something similar. Elliot felt helpless and tongue-tied, and he supposed Susan did too, as she didn’t say anything either.
After a few moments of silence, Ellen asked, “Where else have you noticed stuff out of place or missing?”
“Mostly the living room, kitchen and the second-floor hall bathroom, like I said… let’s see. I keep cold-weather gear on a coat rack by the garage door, and a few days ago I was looking for my baby blue coat to put on, and it wasn’t there. I made do with another coat that didn’t match my pant suit as well, but the coat was there on the hat rack again when I got home. And just last night I popped a bowl of popcorn to eat while I was watching a movie, and when I paused the movie to go to the restroom, most of it was gone when I got back.”
“Has anything in your bedroom been missing or out of place?”
Ms. Grant shook her head. “No, not that I’ve noticed. And I’ve been checking, believe me.”
“Do you mind if we take a look around?” Nanase asked. “We won’t disturb anything, of course.”
“Go right ahead,” Ms. Grant said. “Do you want me to give you a tour?”
“Actually, we need someone to keep an eye on the front door,” Nanase suggested. “If there’s someone hiding in your house and eating your food, they might try to sneak out once we start looking around thoroughly. Is there a place where you can see both the back door and garage door at once?”
“From parts of the kitchen, yes.”
“First, though,” Ellen said, “could you show us the Tupperware dish you were talking about? Have you used it since then?”
“No.”
“Elliot, could you stay here and watch the front door until Ms. Grant’s done showing us the bowl?”
“Sure,” he said. He figured Ellen was using a spell she’d gotten recently to see the recent history of an object she touched. She and Nanase had both gotten several investigative spells in recent months, probably due to their ongoing mystery-solving activities, but that was the coolest. Unless she or Nanase had gotten others he didn’t know about; he hadn’t stayed in as close touch with them this past semester as he wanted, having disjoint class schedules from either of them even though they were at the same university.
A couple of minutes later, Ms. Grant came back from the kitchen and said, “They want you in the kitchen.”
“Elliot,” Nanase said when he arrived, “start using your vision spells, alternating between them every thirty seconds or so, if you haven’t already.”
“It’s an invisible person, isn’t it?” Susan said.
“Looks that way,” Nanase said.
“What did you find out when you touched that bowl?” Elliot asked.
Ellen shook her head. “Hardly anything. I got a vague impression of the bowl being eaten out of and then rinsed and put in the dishwasher, but I couldn’t get a look at the person who did it.”
“Immortals can turn invisible, and I can’t see them with either of my vision spells,” Elliot said.
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the stuff Ms. Grant told us about would be against immortal law,” Susan said. “Even now.”
“The person could be in the room with us, listening in,” Ellen said.
“Yeah. Let’s not discuss this out loud any more,” Nanase said. She took a pocket-sized notebook from her purse, tore out several pages, and handed them out along with stubby pencils. “Pass notes if you think of something or notice something, and try not to let anyone read over your shoulder.”
They looked around the kitchen; Nanase and Ellen opened cabinets and the refrigerator and glanced inside. Elliot wasn’t sure what kind of clues they were looking for. He looked at everything with the ocular enhancement spell he’d gotten back in February and again with his newer infrared vision spell. Then Nanase wrote out a note and showed it to the others: “One should stay here and watch the back door and garage door while others search house.”
Susan wrote, “You think they’ll open the door to leave? What about a window?”
Ellen wrote, “Cheerleadra aerial surveylance surveillance ftw!”
Elliot wrote, “Won’t you need my vision spells?”
“We’ve got wands for them,” Ellen scribbled. Tedd had learned both of Elliot’s vision spells at different points, and Elliot guessed he’d made wands for Ellen and Nanase’s meddling business.
So all of them left the living room except Susan. Ellen and Nanase headed upstairs, while Elliot said to Ms. Grant, “Left something in the car, be back in a bit.”
Once outside, he used a small wand with Nanase’s “How many people are watching?” spell that Tedd had made for him. Two people, not good enough. He walked around the corner of the house, beside the gate to the back yard, and tried again: nobody.
Moments later, Cheerleadra was circling above the house, looking down so she could see all the entrances every few seconds, with her infrared vision active.
CATALINA: …So anyway, after he figures out that the Stephanie Pelletier who wrote this novel has to be the girl who helped him save Torcaria from the Dark Lord, he emails her and tells her who he is and says he wants to meet up. And she doesn’t answer right away, and he gets nervous.
JUSTIN: Then we cut to a restaurant in New Orleans where she’s waiting tables, and show how exhausted she is. She goes home and we see how crappy her apartment is and how many roommates she’s got, and the roommate who was supposed to do the dishes hasn’t. She’s about to call her and chew her out about it, but her phone battery dies as soon as her roommate picks up. Nothing’s going right for her.
CATALINA: Meanwhile Matthew asks his boss for a few days of vacation starting immediately, and his boss turns him down. We see him looking at Stephanie’s manuscript again on his computer, deep in thought, and then he gets up and walks out. And that’s where everything goes to heck.
Ellen and Nanase held hands and kept their free hands on the banisters of the stairs as the ascended to the second storey, so no one could slip past them. “Seems like the layout is basically the same as Susan’s house, except mirror-reversed,” Nanase remarked.
"Huh, yeah, you’re right. So there should be a master bedroom with an attached bathroom down that way, two slightly smaller bedrooms the other way, and three bedrooms on the third floor.
“Plus a bathroom with a linen closet on each floor.”
They looked into all the bedrooms, repeatedly using the vision-spell wands Tedd had made for them and their own investigative spells. The master bedroom was obviously the only one in regular use, not especially untidy, but with a few things out of order and the bed having been slept in since it was made. Two of the others were evidently her living sons’ bedrooms; Ellen guessed they hadn’t changed the wall decorations since they were in high school, though they’d probably taken a bunch of their personal possessions with them to college and beyond. Another was clearly a craft room, with a couple of tables with craft projects spread out on them and a few shelves full of plastic bins of supplies, and there was a guest bedroom with no personal touches or belongings.
When they came to the bathrooms, Ellen tried her psychometry on the towels, faucets, and toilet handle. The towels were a bust, but the faucets and toilet handle in the second-floor bathroom gave the same vague results – someone had used them recently, but she couldn’t get a clear image of them.
“Definitely someone invisible,” Nanase wrote.
Ellen wrote a longer note, trying to keep it telegraphically brief and still comprehensible. “If so, I’d see water falling over invis. outline of person. But just vague sense someone used it within last day, but nobody important.”
“Say we’re going downstairs but check the bedrooms again, separately,” Nanase wrote back.
“I guess that’s it for the upstairs,” Ellen said. “You want to head downstairs again?”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Nanase said. They started toward the stairs at a normal pace – then Nanase dashed past the head of the stairs and into the master bedroom, while Ellen turned up the stairs to the third story and quickly went over the craft room, guest room, and one of the sons’ bedrooms with both vision spells. She met Nanase again on the second story as she emerged from the other son’s bedroom.
“Probably downstairs,” Ellen wrote. “Or already left.”
“Or vision spells don’t work on them,” Nanase wrote. Then her eyes got wide. “How many rooms did we search?” she added.
Ellen counted: master bedroom, two boys’ rooms, guest bedroom and the craft room. “Five,” she wrote. “Hey! Should be six!”
“Let’s get Susan, she knows layout better,” Nanase scribbled.
They went downstairs and showed the piece of paper they’d written their last few messages on to Susan. She wrote, “Somebody else’s problem field.”
“What?” Ellen wrote, as Nanase nodded.
Susan added: “They aren’t transparent to light. Their magic makes you ignore them even if you can see them. And it’s affecting one of the rooms upstairs, too.”
“Help us figure out where the missing room should be,” Nanase wrote. “You know the layout better.”
They went upstairs again.
CATALINA: So then Matthew walks into the restaurant where Stephanie is waiting tables and tells her he was the other kid in Torcaria with her when they were little, and she tells her boss he’s a crazy stalker, and her boss has him thrown out.
JUSTIN: And then this miserable pile of very poor choices hangs out near the restaurant waiting for her to get off, and she’s about to walk to the bus stop when she spots him and asks one of the male waiters to help her scare him off.
CATALINA: Jackass. – Can I say ‘jackass’?
JUSTIN: I don’t see why not. And to be fair, he told her the truth. It’s not his fault she forgot that stuff really happened and thought she’d dreamed it all.
CATALINA: Yeah, but he didn’t have to be so stalkery about it.
JUSTIN: Fair. So anyway, he goes back to his motel room and writes her a letter, saying more about what he remembers from their adventures when they were kids and how he recognized her from the novel she sent to the agency he worked at.
CATALINA: She reads about half a paragraph before throwing it out and and talking to her landlord about this stalker, asking him to warn her neighbors about him.
When they got upstairs, Nanse and Susan stood side by side on the second-floor landing with their hands almost touching and their free hands on the banister. Susan looked up and down the hall and counted the doors. There was the door to the master bedroom at the near end, and the shared bathroom at far end. Then there should be a door on either side of the hall… but there was none on the right.
She texted Elliot, or rather Cheerleadra, “How many windows do you see on the second story on the west side of the house?”
She was getting impatient when the reply came, “Which is the west side?”
She resisted the urge to facepalm and texted back, “The side facing the back yard.”
A few moments later, Cheerleadra texted back: “3.”
Susan showed the text message history to Ellen and Nanase, then switched to a notes app and typed “Should be 4.”
Nanase scribbled, “So how are we going to find the door to the hidden room?”
Susan wrote, “Should be right across from that one,” and pointed to a door with a Moperville North pennant on the door.
Susan went to the door on the left and stood square in the middle of it. Then she turned around, closed her eyes, and walked forward a couple of steps with her hand held out where a doorknob should be.
Her hand ran up against the wall. Or a door, she reminded herself. She groped blindly for the doorknob and – there. She had a grip on it, but something was telling her it wasn’t important and she could let go of it and go do something else.
In response, she said, “Use the ocular enhancement spell and look at my hands.” She decided not to open her eyes yet; she felt like she couldn’t trust them just now.
“Huh. There’s a label, but I can’t read it – it’s like in a dream where you can’t read text.”
“I can, sometimes, but it usually doesn’t make sense,” Susan said. “There’s a round thing in my hand, I can feel it, and a minute ago I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but it’s taking all my concentration not to let go and ignore it. What should I do?”
“Um… try pulling on it?”
Susan did. “It won’t budge.”
“Pushing…? Turning it?”
There was a click. Suddenly Susan remembered she’d been looking for a doorknob, and how doorknobs worked; she pulled on the knob, and at Nanase’s gasp and a yelp from someone in front of her, opened her eyes.
She saw a short teen girl lying in bed, maybe fifteen at most, with long blonde hair, a book apparently just fallen from her hand as she scrambled to get up. The girl had a panicked expression on her face for a moment before Susan lost track of her.
“Block the door!” Nanase said, and Susan squeezed in beside her in the doorway, holding onto the jamb on her side. Ellen quickly joined them, standing behind them and grabbing onto the jamb as well.
“Just texted Cheerleadra,” Ellen said.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” Susan said. “We just want to know what’s going on.”
The room was sparsely furnished and decorated, but there was a double bed that had been slept in, a chest of drawers, a shelf less than a quarter filled with books, another shelf holding food that didn’t need refrigerating, and a swivel chair with some feminine clothes draped over the back. On the bed there were several books, a spiral-bound notebook, and a laptop with several pride stickers on the lid. There were several large rectangular areas of the wall where the paint was less faded, and a few tack-holes, as if several posters had been taken down not terribly long ago and nothing yet put in their place.
All the furniture was painted navy blue, but the bedsheets and blanket were pastel floral-patterned.
Susan was starting to put together a picture, and she didn’t like it one bit.
“We know you’re in there,” Nanase said, “and we’re not moving away from the door until you turn visible and talk with us.”
“I think I can guess what happened,” Susan said. “You told your mother you were transgender, or she found out, and she kicked you out. Either before that or later, you found you had magic that would let you give yourself a feminine body, and then this other spell that let you make people ignore you. And then you moved back in here, to the room where your mom had thrown out all your stuff. Maybe because it’s getting cold and the shelters are crowded.”
Suddenly she noticed the girl again, standing a few feet away. “Who are you people?”
“I’m your neighbor Susan Pompoms; if I’m guessing right about who you are, we’ve met once or twice. These are my friends Nanase and Ellen.”
“And Cheerleadra’s outside,” Ellen said. “Would you mind opening the window to let her in?”
The girl was trembling now. “Are you gonna turn me over to the cops?”
“No,” Nanase said. “We’ll get you the help you need.”
“Send me to a homeless shelter, you mean?”
“We’ll figure out something better than that,” Nanase said. “Between us, we’ve got resources and contacts with people who have more.”
“Can we sit down and talk?” Susan said.
The girl hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. I don’t have much furniture. Like you said, Mom got rid of most of my stuff. I don’t know how you figured that out, but…” She sat down on the edge of the bed, gesturing toward the other end of the bed.
Ellen said in a low voice, “I’ll stall her,” and disappeared down the hall. A moment later they heard her talking with Ms. Grant.
“Pull the door closed,” the girl said. “Don’t want Mom interrupting us.”
“Um, the doorway doesn’t seem to have a door?” Nanase said. “There’s something weird about the space where it should be, though…”
“Ugh, I’ll do it,” the girl said, getting up and going over to close it. By the time she returned to the bed, Susan had opened the window to let Cheerleadra in.
When everyone had sat down, except for Cheerleadra, who was hovering cross-legged at the level of the bed, Susan said, “Can I ask your name?”
“Tatiana,” the girl said defiantly. Then she deflated a little, and said, “But I haven’t been able to change it officially yet. I think I’m gonna change my last name to something other than Grant when I do, but I haven’t decided what yet.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Nanase asked.
JUSTIN: So after her roommate’s convinced her to hear him out –
CATALINA: Which the movie wants us to believe is good, but in real life she’d be giving terrible advice. Don’t compromise with stalkers, people.
JUSTIN: Yeah. In real life stalkers are not actually long-lost childhood best friends, no matter what they tell you. Well, she agrees to meet him in a public place with her roommates nearby and watching out for her. And he shows up at the mall food court, looking a little more put-together than when he was fresh off the bus from New York after quitting his internship.
CATALINA: Idiot.
JUSTIN: No argument there.
“Well, it’s basically like you said,” Tatiana said, nodding at Susan. "Back in October last year I was feeling really dysphoric one day, cause of some stuff that happened at school that doesn’t matter anymore… anyway, I was hanging out in my room and rereading a story about a trans girl that got a new body from a fairy in exchange for her deadname, and I was wishing that was me, and then suddenly, poof! I’m all girl! Well, you know, technically I was already, but now it was obvious so everybody could see it.
"So I was ecstatic, and I kind of wanted to tell everybody and throw it in Mom’s face, but after a few minutes I started worrying about whether I could prove who I was, and then I worried about being kicked out, and suddenly I changed back. And then I changed back and forth several times to make sure I could, and I felt all tuckered out and dozed off.
“So anyway, for the next few months I turned into my girl shape whenever I could get some privacy, but I figured I’d have to wait until I was eighteen to live as a girl full-time because I’d already told Mom I was trans and she told me it was just a phase and I’d get over it.”
Nanase winced sympathetically. “I got that from my mom, too,” she said. “Not about being trans, but about liking girls.”
“And then in January, I found this book lying on my desk?” Tatiana rummaged around in the small piled of books on one side of the bed, and came up with a book titled The Snooping Scarabs of Summer. “Weird, huh? But it had spells in it, just two, the change into a girl spell and another one that let me hide something so nobody but me could notice it. I used it back then to hide my box of girl clothes and makeup, and now I’m using it to hide my whole room.”
Nanase nodded. “I think I can guess who gave it to you, but it’s a long story we don’t need to get into. She anonymously helped out a number of trans people last year and early this year; we’ve know of at least three. Four, counting you.”
“Well. Things were pretty okay for a few months, and then everything went to hell. Mom was going to some charity gala thing, and she wanted me to go and wear a suit and tie and make friends with the other rich kids, but I pretended I was sick, and then I transformed and put on my nightie and watched a movie on the big TV downstairs. Only Mom came home early, she got food poisoning, and she caught me. And she was so mad.” Tatiana looked down at her lap. “Anyway, long story short, she kicked me out, I slept in the park that night, and the next day I started walking to Chicago, cause I figured they’d have more services for homeless people there. I was in and out of shelters for a while. When the weather was good, it was nicer to sleep somewhere else, where it wasn’t so crowded; I could use my spell to hide my bedroll so nobody could mess with me or my stuff when I was asleep. But then after I got this spell to make myself invisible, or technically I guess to make people ignore me, I figured I could move back in here and make Mom support me like she was supposed to. Stop using up a homeless shelter spot that somebody else without magic needed more.”
Cheerleadra had been growing angrier and angrier the longer the story went on. Finally she said, “We’re not going to tell Ms. Grant anything about this, right?”
“We don’t work for TERFs,” Nanase confirmed. “What kind of cover story do you want us to use instead, Tatiana?”
“Cover story?”
“To explain why food’s been disappearing, why she found a wet towel in the guest bathroom, things like that,” Susan said. “We’re not going to tell her about you, obviously. Unless you want to confront her with us for moral support.”
“Wouldn’t do any good.”
“So we need to tell her something,” Nanase said. “Our reputation – I mean mine and Ellen’s. My girlfriend’s the one who went to stall your mom when she came upstairs after she heard the noise. We’ve got a reputation as supernatural detectives to uphold.”
“Ohh… I know!” Tatiana grinned maniacally. “Tell her I died a couple of weeks ago, probably froze to death or got murdered, and I’ve been haunting her.”
“That would be satisfying,” Nanase said, after a moment’s thought, “but if we tell our government contact that we’ve met a homeless trans girl who needs help getting a new ID for her new face, he’s gonna want to do a background check; he’ll probably talk to your mom and he might give away the fact that you’re not dead.”
“What kind of government contact?” Tatiana asked warily.
“Our friend’s dad works for the magical department of the FBI,” Nanase started to explain, but Tatiana shook her head.
“ACAB. Don’t tell him anything, please.”
“He’s decent, personally,” Cheerleadra said, “but you’re probably right not to want the FBI to know about you. Obviously we wouldn’t tell him anything except that you got a gender spell and you need new ID because of that, but however discreetly he tries to help you it’ll leave a paper trail for other FBI agents to follow up on you and see if you’ve gotten any other spells, and they might be able to figure out you’ve got invisibility. And we know of at least one case where the FBI strong-armed someone with a powerful spying spell into working for them.”
“So how are we going to get her new ID?” Nanase asked.
“I don’t need ID, I can just keep living off the grid,” Tatiana said.
“That’s probably true,” Susan said, “but doesn’t it get lonely?”
Tatiana shrugged. “I’ve got friends online. And it’s not like I had any friends in school before I got kicked out.”
No one said anything more for a few moments. Then Susan said, “Are you doing anything to keep educating yourself? Watching course videos online, things like that?”
“Not exactly courses, but I’ve been reading a lot of Wikipedia articles and watching a lot of history videos.”
“Follow up the sources on the Wikipedia articles,” Susan suggested. “Not all of them are going to be online, or at the public library, but nothing’s stopping you from walking into the library at Moperville U to read academic books.”
“What about other subjects?” Nanase asked. “Have you studied any math?”
Tatiana grimaced. “Why would I need anything more than algebra?”
“What do you want to do once you’re old enough to stop hiding?”
“Help other homeless people,” she said.
“Do you think you might end up administering a homeless shelter or similar charity?”
“Nah, I’d want to do something where I’m helping people directly. Let somebody else do the fundraising and bookkeeping and stuff. And even if I did become a manager, I’m not gonna need advanced math, like I would if I were a scientist or something.”
“There’s nothing stopping you from going to high school,” Susan said. “Or university. Just walk in invisibly and audit lectures. You won’t get the same benefit as you get from having the teacher give you feedback on your work, or being able to ask questions about things you don’t understand, but it’s better than nothing.”
“If I can’t ask questions and stuff, how’s it better than just watching videos online?”
Susan thought about that, but before she could come up with an answer, Nanase said, “What about languages? Are you fluent in Spanish?”
“No… I had one semester of it before Mom kicked me out.”
“That’s something you would find useful in that line of work. There’s over a million Spanish speakers in the metro area; I don’t know how many of them are homeless and don’t also speak English, but you’d probably know better than me.”
“Um… yeah, I probably should get better at it.”
“And learning a language is something you really need personal interaction for, talking in Spanish with your teacher and other students at first and then with native speakers once you get better at it.”
“I’ll figure out a way to study it online.”
Nanase and Susan looked at each other. “Well, if you’re serious about studying on your own, you can take a GED exam after you turn eighteen,” Nanase said. “But it won’t look as good to colleges as a diploma from a good high school.”
“And you’ll probably need a degree to get a decent job with a homeless charity,” Susan said. “Even if you don’t want to be an administrator.”
Tatiana looked sullen. “I don’t have to get a job with a charity to help homeless people. I can do it already with the spells I’ve got.”
“You mean by stealing from the rich and giving to the homeless?” Cheerleadra asked.
“Fifth amendment, baby,” Tatiana said.
“Far be it from me to discourage direct action against billionaires and corporations,” Susan said, “but that kind of thing could draw the attention of the magical FBI. Best case scenario is that they press-gang you into working for them.”
“Best case is she doesn’t get caught, but yeah, that would be second-best,” Cheerleadra said. “Worse things could happen. We only know about one rich guy who had magic of his own, and he’s dead, but there are probably other people who got rich using magic as well as exploiting their employees. Who knows whether some of them, or people on their payroll, could see through your invisibility?”
“This is beside the point,” Nanase said. “If you’re serious about educating yourself with all the resources we’ve talked about, I guess you can live off the grid until you’re eighteen, or until magic is common knowledge so you can just walk into the courthouse or DMV and show them your gender spell to prove you’re the same person. The way things have been going, that could happen pretty soon.”
“Just stay in touch with us,” Susan said. “Let’s exchange email addresses. Keep me posted about how your self-education is going, and whether you need help with anything, and I’ll let you know if we come up with another way to get you a new ID without going through the FBI.”
“And in that case,” Cheerleadra said with a vicious grin, “there’s no reason not to use Tatiana’s cover story.”
CATALINA: And then, whoosh, they’re in Torcaria again, because of course they are.
JUSTIN: Only question was when and how.
CATALINA: The interior sets in Torcaria look cool, lots of neat architecture and furniture and stuff, but the exteriors are CGI, and CGI from back then hasn’t aged well.
JUSTIN: Still a lot better than stuff from the nineties, though. I thought the forest scenes looked good.
CATALINA: Until the ogres show up and the fight scene starts. Anyway, they’re both panicking, Stephanie more than Matthew, because she’s forgotten this was real – but on the other hand she’s in better shape than he is because of waitressing, walking back and forth carrying heavy trays all day, while he hasn’t done anything physical in years.
JUSTIN: On the other hand he remembers how to use magic better than she does. And I feel like being an intern probably keeps you on your feet more than other office jobs, like with all the people who outrank you sending you for coffee over and over like we saw in the opening scenes?
CATALINA: Could be, yeah.
“What happened?” Ms. Grant asked anxiously when Nanase, Susan, Elliot and Ellen (who had waited in the hall upstairs after calming Ms. Grant down) came back downstairs. “Have you figured out what’s going on?”
“You’re being haunted, I’m afraid,” Nanase said. “By the ghost of your daughter.”
“W-what? I don’t have a daughter –”
“Your youngest child, who you kicked out when you found out she was transgender. She lived on the streets of Chicago for almost a year, but froze to death just a couple of weeks ago, around the time you first started to notice weird things happening.”
Ms. Grant went pale and clutched her hand to her chest. “H-how do you know –?”
“We’ve had a chat with her ghost. Trade secret. Anyway, we don’t work for TERFs, so have a nice day.” Nanase headed toward the front door and the others followed her.
“Wait! What can I – how do I get rid of the ghost?”
“You could try to atone by giving lots of money to transgender charities,” Elliot suggested. “And volunteer at the homeless shelters in Chicago where she stayed sometimes in cold weather. Maybe that would help? And apologize to your daughter, or should I say ‘grovel’. Out loud, in every room of the house, to make sure she hears you.”
“Good night,” Nanase said, and they left.
‐—-
JUSTIN: So what did you think of the movie overall?
CATALINA: Azaria Wilton-Paget is easy on the eyes, especially after she gets into her warrior woman outfit. And the adventure stuff in the last half is fun, except for the tacked-on het romance.
JUSTIN: Yeah, the leads didn’t have much chemistry.
CATALINA: If any!
JUSTIN: I’ll admit that Jason D. Poit had plenty of chemistry with Leeann Young in American Cake, so I don’t think that’s just gay bias.
CATALINA: And the stalker plot in the first half is really kind of gross if you think about it for two seconds. Really the movie should have ended after she told him to leave her alone the first time.
JUSTIN: What did I like about it? Well, the adventure stuff after they arrive in Torcaria, like Catalina said, and the workplace comedy at the beginning. Jason D. Poit and Kelly Dewhurst have good comedic timing. The problem is when they tried to make the stalking funny too.
CATALINA: I liked the byplay between Stephanie and the other wait staff when they’re helping her get rid of him. And the supporting characters in Torcaria are fun, despite the bad CGI on the nonhuman characters.
JUSTIN: Overall I’d say it might be fine to have on in the background while you’re doing laundry or something, but don’t make it a centerpiece of a movie night with your friends.
CATALINA: Yeah, that sounds about right. Um, how are we supposed to sign off?
JUSTIN: Hang on, let me bring up one of Susan and Elliot’s videos…