Beep

Beep

Beep

It was dark, Elms extremities felt cold. He felt a new but familiar tingling at the back of his mind, Elm also felt a dull pain all over his body. Well except for his left leg. He couldn't feel that at all.

Shooting awake in a panic, Elms numb hands slapped uselessly against the thick white blankets covering his legs. Taking a few breaths he realized he did feel a lump of some-kind under the blanket where his leg should be. So he calmed himself, prepared for the worst then lifted the blanket. To his relief, he saw a polymer cast and his still living toes poking out a big hole at the end. He could even wiggle his toes a tiny bit, though he still couldn't feel any of it. Just some targeted anesthetics, he reasoned.

Taking a relieved breath as he leaned back, Elm settled into the clean and comfy sheets of the bed he was in. He took some time taking in his surroundings. He was in a sterile white room with the whole ceiling making up a bright unnatural feeling light, making the few accommodations in the room seem as though they didn't have shadows. A couple empty chairs obviously meant for visitors sat in the corner next to a plain white door. There were a couple cabinets to his left with obvious locks on the handles. Finally, to his right was a small end table where he could see plastic tub with his cloths, washed and folded. On top of that pile, sat his phone, slightly dinged on the cheap black protective case, but still mostly intact.

Elm reached over and grabbed the phone, his numb fingers fumbling to get a grip on the smooth plastic. Hopefully just a side effect of whatever drug was keeping him from feeling all the pain he should be. Eventually managing to snag the device Elm looked it over more thoroughly. The small, out of fashion phone was an impulse buy after the ancient phone his father had given him upon leaving for Paradise had been mocked by other kids at school one to many times. Unfortunately the lady who sold him the phone neglected to tell him that this phone was still a couple years out of date, so it never really served its intended social purpose. The ability to connect to the web was definitely a perk though. Pressing the on button Elm happily found it did still work, though it looked like the screen was slightly cracked in the top left corner. Checking his messages he found to his surprise that he did indeed have one. He tapped the screen hopeful, only to be disappointed when he found wasn't a message from his father. It was just the school letting him know he would be given a week off for recovery. It also contained a list of assignments he would need done.

Sighing Elm looked away from his phone and up to the ceiling light. "A whole week..." he thought, before checking the date and time on his phone again. "Well 5 days at least" he amended, noticing that he had been unconscious for around a day and a half. It was 11:31 at night so most of the Hospital staff were probably gone. What would be left would mostly be AI nurses and cleaning staff. Fumbling along the side of his bed he found a cord that he pulled until small button attached to one end was freed of his sheets, he grabbed the device and pressed the button. A minute or so later a robotic nurse opened the door and entered the room, it was a crude approximation of a female nurse, with mat gray, obviously plastic skin and too big eyes.

"Hello patient Elmore Analcime, welcome to Bishops General Hospital, I am N02351, how may I be of assistance?" Spoke the robot nurse in a smooth but mechanical female voice, tilting head its head with reprogrammed cuteness.

"Umm, ah... What happened?"

"Hold on, bringing up patient, Elmore Analcime's file... yesterday at 6:35 Elmore Analcime, was involved in a violent incident, at 7:00 Elmore Analcime, was recovered and given first aid. Initial diagnosis, minor lacerations, internal hemorrhaging, heavy head injury, broken leg. At 8:45 Dr. Amin Toumen began surgery on Elmore Analcime's head injury, found no broken bones, Elmore Analcime, was given anesthetics and placed in an artificial coma. Was this answer adequate? "

Elm looked blankly at the robot, "Uhh, yeah... but what happened at the bank?"

"Patient, Elmore Analcime, requesting access to case file 009984231, Access deigned." The corners of the nurse bots lips moved up in the facsimile of a smile as its wheels slowly started reversing it out of the room.

"Ah wait!" Elm called in a bit of a panic, causing the nurse bot to stop its retreat. "Umm, could I get some food?" it nodded at Elm

"Affirmative, request for 'food' recognized, it will be delivered posthaste. Is that all, patient Elmore Analcime?" Staring once more at Elm.

"Yeah, I think that's all." The nurse bot then left the room, its electric engine werring as it sped down the hallway quickly being cut off as the rooms door closed.

Elm gave a tired sigh as he reached behind him self to prop up his pillow so it would support his back better as he sat up. Now he had one more thing that had been bothering him since he woke up, an odd feeling at the back of his mind. As the bot had been prattling on about his injures, a memory had resurfaced it's self, during the attack on the bank. He remembered that odd nothingness that came before he could suddenly sense every bone in his body, and, most importantly, the bones in another body. As Elm focused in on that feeling at the back of his mind, like a connection to a numbed third hand. After a confusing flash, he suddenly found his surroundings changed, instead of being in a well lit hospital room, he was now staring at a blue colored sheet of metal that seemed to be only a foot away from his face.

Surprised by the sudden change in perspective, Elm shot up on reflex.

Fomp

The thin blue metal absorbed Elms high speed head bump letting out a hollow sound as it sent him reeling back. A dull sense of almost pain flashed through his head as it bounced a couple times against the much harder surface below it. Bringing his hand up to his face in reaction to the odd sensation, he stopped when he noticed the odd blue hand that was very much not his own. He realized then, as he looked at the skeletal hand, that the odd blue color of everything in the room was emanating from the spaces between the bones were on a human there would've been joints. Flexing his new appendage, he could see the bony digits moving and rotating smoothly like a normal flesh and blood hand, smoother if anything.

Glancing past his hand to what he assumes is steel sheet metal, he can see a blurry reflection of a skeleton looking back at him through the matte finish on the sheet metal. Looking closer at the skull he can see a bright blue flickering light coming from where the eye sockets should be. A sense of worry then overtakes Elm as he realizes he doesn't know how to return to his real body. 'Umm return?' He tries speaking, but no sound comes out as his jawbones clack together. Trying instead to just focus on the word he starts repeating 'return' in his head for around a minute, in different variations, before giving up and just laying back to think of a better idea.

As he loses focus he starts to feel a tingling at the back of his flesh-less skull, just above where bone meets metal. As Elm concentrates in on that spot, the feeling becomes more clear, almost like a single hair being pulled lightly. He can feel a thread of some sort stretching away from his skeletal body. He mentally prods at this sensation, eliciting a rush of feeling as his mind seems to break through a thin flim like barrier, and is zipped along the line through the steel wall, into a corridor that he's not given time to process as his perspective accelerates through the wall on the other side, then through countless other rooms and corridors that all blend together in a jarring sequence of light and dark. All ending when his eyes shoot open back in his room at the hospital.

Blinking away the black spots Elm waited for his flipping stomach and the spinning ceiling to calm down, Elm glanced around the now much too bright room. No large changes. Elm smiles, "Cool!"

Sinking back into his pillow and closing his eyes tight. Giddy to test the limits of whatever his new gift is, he quickly focused back in on that tingling sensation, quickly finding the pulled hair feeling. He pushed his mind against it until feeling something give way and his perspective starts to shift, first showing a quick glimpse of the room he was in, then the hallway past it, before devolving into an incomprehensible garble of light and dark. Finally, finding himself back in the blue lit metal box. Looking down at his bony hands he clasped one before giving a boney fist pump, 'FUCK YEAH!'

After several more transfers back and forth, Elm found the task slightly quicker and a little less disorienting. However, on the 9th switch back to the skeleton, just as he was feeling for the connection back to his own body, he noticed something else. Eight other, very weak connections seeming to be coming from all around the box he was in. Tentatively he reached for one of these connections, like he had for the one between this body and his own. This however seemed to take much more effort, it was almost as if a thick wall was keeping him from forcing himself down the line. Somewhat confused Elm started from scratch, instead just trying to feel out the connection, this bore much more fruit, as upon further inspection, the line seemed to open up, not changing Elms perspective but instead, flooding his mind with information. Information that coalesced into a detailed memory of a skeleton, not the same skeleton as the one he was inhabiting though. He could tell by the shape of the skull and hip bones that this body was female, the small micro cracks in the finger bones told him they worked with their hands, damage to the left ankle suggest they, at some point, broke it. Though it showed signs of healing. Most noticeably, and what the brain dump seem to be implying was most important. The scrapes along the third rib cage on the left side and the vertebrae immediately opposite it, Mean this woman died being impaled, likely through the heart.

The absolute Flood of information came so unexpectedly and with such force that as Elm was trying to process all this new information, he found himself involuntarily switching back to his own body in the bright hospital room. Before he could fully adjust to all the sensory overload, a loud mechanical voice pulls him partially out of his daze.

"Patient, Elmore Analcime, food has been delivered. Do you require further assistance?"

Not yet able to focus on the world around him, and with the beginning of a massive headache tickling at the edge of his brain, Elm answered with the most eloquent response he could.

"Uhhhhhhh."

"Response not recognized, returning to normal duty, patient, Elmore Analcime, enjoy your meal." Elm watched in a slowly dissipating daze as the

6 armed cleaning bot, a slightly fancier model then those who cleaned the school between classes, drove a hasty retreat past the door to his room and down the hallway before he could even think about giving of a proper response.

Almost a minute later, he finally realized he should have just said thank you. The headache now in full force, and a long ignored hunger spiking at the smell of food, he decided to at least get rid of one of those pains. So, he dug into his meal. It was eggs with the taste and texture of something that was once powder, bacon that was almost certainly was just poorly disguised tofu, and finally some individually packaged butter flavored toast with a box of apple juice. The whole meal had a distinct, just heated in the microwave feel, complete with random cold spots, but Elms ravenous stomach convinced him not to complain.

The much-needed meal was gone much too quickly, and Elm leaned back into his pillow, pushing the table away, so he could sink back into the welcoming sheets. The mostly hot meal seemed to have staved off his approaching headache, and the accumulated fatigue of all that intense focus made him decide to postpone further experiments until tomorrow.

"Hehe I'm going to be a super hero."

Elm drifted off to sleep, dreaming of caped justice and Derick getting decked by a skeletal fist.