Sixteen days since the Omnitrix. Silas sat on his bed with his notebook open to a blank page and wrote at the top: IDENTITY PROBLEM.
Two columns. Left: what people could identify if they saw him operating. Face. Locs. Height. Build. Skin. The camo watch in active mode on his wrist.
Right: what he needed them to not identify. All of the above.
'You've already made the decision three times now. You went out, you helped someone, you stopped something. The costume is just saying that out loud.'
He wrote at the bottom: REQUIREMENTS. Full face coverage. Hood over the locs. Black, absorbs light better at night. Moves. Doesn't make noise. That was it. The watch managed itself in hero mode. He didn't need to engineer around it.
....
Saturday morning. Freight yard. Before building anything he wanted to confirm one thing he'd been assuming without actually testing.
He stood in his school uniform. Blazer, shirt, trousers. and set the dial to Infernoid.
'If this destroys the blazer she is going to know something happened and I will have to explain it and that conversation will be worse than anything Intergang could do to me.'
He pressed the dial.
Infernoid stood in the freight yard.
The blazer was intact. Perfectly, entirely intact. Scaled to the seven-foot volcanic form as if it had been tailored for it, which was physically impossible and yet clearly happening.
'The Omnitrix is doing this. It's been doing this since the first transformation.'
He waited for the timer. Reverted. School uniform, undamaged, blazer exactly as his mother had ironed it.
'So the costume doesn't need to survive transformation. The watch handles it. The costume is identity concealment only. That simplifies everything considerably.'
He took out his notebook and wrote: *Omnitrix handles clothing automatically. Costume is IDENTITY CONCEALMENT ONLY.* He underlined it twice. Then he went home and started building.
....
He built it over the following week in the evenings after school, at his desk, with the door closed and his mother occasionally pausing outside and not knocking, which he appreciated.
The base suit was simpler than he'd expected. Black technical athletic material from a sporting goods supplier online. Matte finish. Forty-two dollars.
The mask was harder.
Version one: fogged at the eye lenses within four minutes. Useless.
Version two: the seal at the jaw was wrong. It shifted when he turned his head quickly and the whole thing rotated, which was both a tactical problem and a dignity problem.
Version three: the lens material was too rigid. When he tested it in Infernoid form the face geometry didn't match and the lens cracked. He hadn't expected that. He noted it, replaced the lens material with something flexible.
Version four: fit correctly. Sealed cleanly at the jaw. One-way lenses. He could see out, nobody could see in. When he put it on and looked in the bathroom mirror the face looking back was nobody's face. No skin, no eyes, no locs. Just the mask and the hood above it. And when he transformed, the costume disappeared into the same spatial field as everything else. when he was in a form he looked like the form, nothing else. The suit only existed on Silas. Not on whatever Silas became.
'That's what it needs to look like. Nobody.'
He sewed the hood to the suit's collar so it couldn't be pulled off separately. In hero mode the Omnitrix handled itself. Active mode, faceplate raised, green and ready. He didn't need to engineer around it. The watch knew the difference between a patrol and a Tuesday morning at school.
Done by Thursday evening.
....
He came out of his room on Thursday at 8 PM wearing it.
His mother was at the kitchen table with a medical journal and a cup of tea, the end-of-shift posture she had when she was too tired to go to bed but too awake to stop thinking. She looked up when he came through the doorway.
She looked at the suit. At the mask. At the Omnitrix on his left wrist, faceplate raised and green in active mode. She looked at all of it for a long moment with her professional neutral. the expression that gave nothing away.
Silas stood in the kitchen doorway and let her look.
Eight seconds of silence. Then Denise Foster picked up her tea, took a sip, set it down, and looked back at her journal.
"The green is right," Denise said.
She turned a page.
Silas stood in the doorway for another moment. Pulled the hood up. Went back to his room and sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his hands. his actual hands, brown skin, the Omnitrix glowing its patient green on his wrist. and felt something he didn't have a precise word for. Not pride exactly. Something quieter and more lasting than pride.
'The green is right.'
'Yeah. It is.'
....
He went out Friday night after Hamilton's visit, at 10:30, when his mother's light was off.
Not to do anything. Just to exist in Metropolis in the costume and understand what that felt like.
He took the window to the fire escape to the alley below and stood on the pavement and the city was the same city it always was at 10:30 on a Friday. Music from the bar on the corner. A couple walking past on the far side of the street. A delivery drone threading between the apartment towers. The ordinary Friday night hum.
Nobody looked at him twice. Metropolis was a city that had learned not to look twice at unusual things and he wasn't unusual enough at street level to override that.
'This is what anonymous feels like.'
He walked for forty minutes. The Daily Planet building, the golden globe dark at this hour. Left on Hob's Street, through the edge of the financial district. South toward the Southside, slowing, his eyes doing the sweep he'd been developing. exits, sightlines, anything that didn't fit the street rhythm.
Nothing tonight. He walked through and back out and turned north toward home.
Fire escape. Window. Suit off. 11:19 PM.
He sat at his desk and wrote the route, the time, the conditions, what he'd observed. Then at the bottom of the page, in the small letters:
'Nobody saw Silas Foster tonight. That's the whole point.'
He closed the notebook. Looked at the mask on the corner of his desk, the one-way lenses catching the desk lamp.
Tomorrow night he'd go out with intent.