The late afternoon sun cast long, distorted shadows across the sun-baked weeds of the Alberta Street lot.
As the perimeter tape fluttered in the warm summer breeze, Nick stood near the rear bumper of a marked patrol cruiser, his arms crossed, watching the forensic technicians work the scene.
Even though America in this era had not yet reached the height of modern social reform movements, and the suspect lying dead in the dirt was an unkempt white male, Nick was painfully aware of the volatile nature of police-involved shootings.
In modern law enforcement, an officer standing completely unharmed while a suspect lay dead was always a lightning rod for scrutiny.
There was never any guarantee that a grieving relative wouldn’t step forward to claim that Joshua Coffey was a “good son, a loving father, and a gentle neighbor who—despite his minor struggles with substance abuse and an unregistered firearm—had a heart of gold,” before slapped the department and the officer with a multi-million-dollar wrongful death lawsuit.
Having lived in this world for twenty years since his transmigration, Nick knew its baseline logic intimately.
On the surface, this society operated under standard real-world rules; there were no public legends of true werewolves, kobolds, or mythic beasts walking the streets of Portland.
Yet, what he had just witnessed defied every law of biology he had been taught.
His gaze shifted away from the news anchorwoman—a woman in her late thirties with impeccably styled hair and a practiced, empathetic camera persona—and anchored instead on her news cameraman.
The burly man held a heavy Sony shoulder-mount camera mounted on a tripod, calmly rewinding the digital tape deck to check his framing.
Nick’s heart pounded with a subtle, icy rhythm.
Did he capture it?
Logically, if an HD news camera had recorded an ordinary human face exploding into thick grayish fur, bone structure re-hinging into a predatory muzzle, and razor-sharp incisors snapping at an officer, the cameraman would not be casually wiping dust off his lens.
He would be in full-blown hysterics, screaming for an ambulance or calling his network editor in an existential panic.
Before Nick could digest the thought further, the low rumble of approaching engines announced the arrival of the command staff.
Seven or eight emergency vehicles pulled up in rapid succession along Alberta Street.
First came the duty shift Lieutenant, taking immediate operational command of the perimeter.
Seconds later, a sleek dark sedan pulled up, and two men stepped out into the dusty air: Nick’s veteran squad partner, Detective Hank Griffin, and the Commander of the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct—Captain Sean Renard.
The paramedics pronounced Joshua Coffey dead at the scene at 17:14 hours.
Nearby, the crime scene investigation team flagged a rusted .22 caliber revolver resting six feet from the body, its cylinder holding two spent casings and four live rounds.
Captain Renard walked onto the scene with measured, commanding steps.
Tall, sharply dressed in a tailored charcoal suit, and possessing an imposing physical presence, Renard was a man whose cold blue eyes rarely displayed emotion.
He approached the news van first, flanked by two patrol sergeants, and demanded an immediate on-site playback of the cameraman’s raw footage.
Nick watched from thirty paces away as Renard stood behind the small video monitor, watching the violent five-second exchange replay frame by frame.
To Nick’s surprise, the Captain’s usually unyielding, stern expression softened just a fraction.
Renard turned away from the camera rig, walked directly across the yellow police line toward Nick, and extended a heavy, well-manicured hand to clap Nick firmly on the shoulder.
“You did well today, Nick,” Renard said, his deep voice carrying a rare tone of personal approval.
“And you were extraordinarily lucky.”
Nick noted the subtle shift immediately.
Renard had addressed him as Nick, bypassing the formal title of Officer Burkhardt.
While Nick didn’t let the praise go to his head, he offered a respectful, disciplined nod.
“Thank you, Captain.
I just reacted to the threat.”
“You followed department protocol under extreme distress,” Renard replied smoothly.
“Take the rest of the week off.
Administrative leave with pay pending the formal OIS review board.”
Renard turned to Hank Griffin.
“Griffin, drive your partner home.
Escort him off the scene before the larger media outlets set up their broadcast trucks.”
Ten minutes later, Nick sat in the passenger seat of Hank’s unmarked sedan as it cruised west along Killingsworth Street.
Hank was buzzing with an electric, infectious energy, gripping the steering wheel with one hand while gesticulating wildly with the other.
How the hell did you pull that off?” Hank laughed, shaking his head in sheer disbelief.
“I stood right behind Captain Renard while he played the camera footage back in slow motion.
Do you have any idea what you looked like on that screen?”
Nick leaned his head against the headrest, feeling the sudden fatigue of an adrenaline crash settling into his limbs.
“I was just trying not to get shot, Hank.”
“5.5 seconds!” Hank slammed his palm against the steering wheel enthusiastically.
“From the second that scumbag pulled his piece and popped off his first round to the moment you emptied your magazine, it took exactly 5.5 seconds!
Captain Renard played it back at one-quarter speed three times.
In less than six seconds, you executed ten separate tactical maneuvers!”
Hank rattled them off on his fingers: “You deployed the Taser, recognized it failed, executed a low-profile tactical fall to duck two incoming rounds, drew from retention with your off-hand supporting, returned fire, suffered a stovepipe jam when you hit the dirt, cleared the malfunction with a blind slide-rack, and re-engaged until the slide locked back.
It looked like a training video for SWAT!”
Nick frowned slightly, rubbing his temple.
“My gun jammed?”
“Yeah!
When you dropped to the dirt, your wrist went limp on the fourth shot,” Hank explained.
“The brass didn’t eject clean.
But you cleared that stovepipe in less than half a second.
Muscle memory, man.
Pure instinct.”
Nick remained quiet.
He remembered clearing the slide, but in the heat of the moment, he hadn’t processed it as a mistake.
He had only known one absolute truth: if I don’t clear this weapon right now, that creature is going to rip my throat out.
He turned his head to look at Hank, choosing his words with extreme care.
“Hank…
when you watched that video playback…
did you notice anything strange about Coffey’s face?
Right before he pulled the gun?”
Hank paused, shooting Nick a brief, concerned glance before turning his eyes back to the road.
“Nick…
you put two .40-caliber hollow points directly through the upper mass of his torso and head at point-blank range,” Hank said gently, his voice softening into a tone reserved for partners dealing with post-trauma shock.
“A center-mass impact at that distance does terrible things to human tissue.
Don’t obsess over what his face looked like when he went down.”
Hank patted the dashboard.
“Don’t overthink it, brother.
The guy was pure scum.
When forensics popped his trunk, they found three bricks of uncut methamphetamine and two stolen shotguns.
He was a walking death sentence waiting to happen.
You did the city a favor.”
Nick slowly nodded, looking out the passenger window at the passing city scenery.
He didn’t see it, Nick realized with absolute certainty.
The news camera didn’t record it.
Hank didn’t see it.
Renard didn’t see it.
The transformation…
it was completely invisible to everyone else.
Only Nick had seen the monster.
By 8:00 PM, the story was top-of-the-hour news across Oregon.
Sitting in his quiet, neatly organized living room, Nick watched the local TV broadcast.
The third-person footage captured by the news team looked startlingly intense on screen: the dark silhouette of a patrol officer dropping low into the weeds as muzzle flashes strobed through the dusk, followed by the rhythmic pop-pop-pop of returning fire.
Seeing it from an outside perspective reinforced how narrowly he had escaped death.
Even with his Level IIIA concealable body armor, a .22 round to the throat or face would have been fatal.
He raised his right palm, staring at it in the dim light of his living room.
With a subtle focus of his will, a faint shimmer of golden light coalesced in his palm, solidifying into a sleek, metallic card that felt both weightless and impossibly dense: the Cinema Pass.
Nick had transmigrated into this world two decades ago, retaining his memories from his past life.
For years, this mysterious ticket had remained dormant, resisting all forms of kinetic force, heat, and electrical current.
It couldn’t be destroyed, lost, or analyzed by conventional science.
If he threw it into the Willamette River, it would simply dematerialize and reappear in his palm whenever called.
It was only recently, after surviving his second cinematic trial, that he had unlocked his first passive trait: Kinetic Pre-Cognition.
That single skill had heightened his spatial awareness and reflex speeds just enough to allow his body to react before his conscious brain registered the threat of Joshua Coffey’s revolver.
Without it, he would be lying on a steel slab in the county morgue right now.
He stared at the shimmering surface of the ticket, a deep sense of urgency gripping his chest.
I need more trials.
I need a healing ability.
His mind drifted away from the shootout, turning to the person who meant more to him than anyone else in this world: Aunt Marie.
Marie Kessler was his late mother’s sister, the woman who had taken him in, raised him, and provided him with a warm home when he arrived in this world as an orphan.
She had been a quiet, gentle figure who spent her career working as a senior archivist at the Portland Public Library.
However, during Nick’s senior year of college, Aunt Marie had been diagnosed with an aggressive, chronic form of leukemia.
The medical consensus had been grim: expensive target therapies could prolong her life, but the disease was fundamentally incurable by modern science.
When Nick graduated from the police academy three years ago, Aunt Marie made a decision that shocked him.
Despite Nick’s fierce opposition, she purchased an old, heavy-duty Winnebago camper van, packed up her belongings, and announced she was going on a solo, nationwide road trip across North America.
“I’ve spent fifty years surrounded by dusty book stacks, Nick,” she had told him with a serene, unyielding smile on the day she left.
“My job is done.
You are a fine man now.
It’s time for me to see the world before my candle burns out.”
Nick had only agreed under one condition: she had to send him regular updates and promise to return to Portland the moment her health deteriorated beyond her ability to manage it.
Over the past three years, Aunt Marie’s postcards had arrived like clockwork every month—from the red rocks of Sedona, the coastal highways of Maine, to the quiet forests of Montana.
Nick walked over to his desk, picking up the latest postcard, sent from a small town in northern California two weeks ago.
In the accompanying photo, Aunt Marie stood beside her rusted camper, holding a cup of tea against a backdrop of giant redwoods.
Her face was noticeably thinner, her skin pale, and her hair sparse from the harsh side effects of her ongoing daily medications.
Yet, her smile was radiant, her eyes sharp and full of fierce vitality.
Nick stroked the edge of the photograph gently, his eyes darkening with determination.
Modern medicine couldn’t cure leukemia.
But this world—with its secret monsters, hidden bloodline legacies, and the inter-dimensional trials of the Cinema Pass—was no longer bound by ordinary human medicine.
If there was a cure to be found, whether through a rewards chest in his next movie journey or an ancient secret hidden within the supernatural world he had just stumbled into, Nick was determined to find it.
He closed his hand, watching the golden ticket dissolve back into his skin, and looked out into the quiet Portland night.