The Glass Scientists micro-fanfictions

Seeing is believing

Shit shit shit!

The door knocked again, the person on the other side clearly not buying into his silence, a silence of which he thought he was maintaining quite well, making the room sound perfectly empty. Well, he hoped would make it seem empty as he was in a bit of a pickle and would rather not have someone barging in before he managed to work his way out of the right mess he got himself into.

"Would you mind terribly if you would open the door?" The extent of the pleasantness in the woman's statement was exhausted in the phrasing, her tone coated in a liberal amount of impatience.

"Room's empty, come back later." Mr. Griffin said after a moment, his speaking proving this not to be the case.

"If the room were empty," Ms. Virginia Ito began, humouring him a wee bit, "Then would now not be the opportune time to fetch my belongings?"

"No."

It wasn't as if he was denying her access to the room just for the fun of it. No, he wished that were the case but instead he had made one foolish decision too many and was paying for his enthusiasm.

In a spark of what he had assumed to be a spark of genius, he had chosen to test his serum on himself – and there was a certain man in the society who could speak from experience the dangers of this so he wouldn't make the same mistake as he, if only Griffin had thought to ask – and as a result lost the visibility of his left leg.

Quite the gruesome result too, mind you, because while his experiments on animals simply had them fade away from sight entirely, on a larger subject – himself – it was so much worse. It was not immediate at all, nor was it regular. Rather horrifically, it was his skin to be the first to lose visibility. Just the skin, nothing else.

Have you seen the workings of your leg going about its business before? No? No, Griffin doesn't recommend it.

The sight of his muscles twitching and working was almost enough to cause the Disapparative Biochemist to lose his lunch. Thank heavens that didn't last for all that long. His bone was the last thing to go, having vanished mere moments before the door began to be knocked at.

It felt weird walking about when he couldn't see one of the limbs that were undergoing the task, it really did his head in, you know? He could feel his leg so he knew it wasn't completely gone, but he couldn't see it. Technically he could see this as a partial victory, partial of course due to its effect only taking to one part of his body. A partial success was not a full success and so he was not satisfied, nor was he sure if the appendage would return to its previous state of visibility.

Shit.

At a third knock on the door, he sighed, relenting more so in the hopes that he could get some sort of assistance – or at least a second opinion – on how to rectify the tomfoolery he had so successfully flummoxed.

"Can you help me if I let you in?"

"I'll see what I can do, but later, I do have things to do." she paused, "Things of which you continue to hinder."

"I, uh, don't think you'll see anything later." If he didn't try to make light of the situation it would feel so much worse. This was said as he regarded the now invisible leg of which was, one would assume, protruding from his rolled up trouser leg.

"What do –" Her question died on her lips as she entered the room, thoroughly pleased to be granted access at last, a feeling which quickly melted into shock, "Jack, what the hell did you do?"