Unseen

Genre

M/M Erotic Romance

Blurb

When a scientific procedure has unexpected results, Rory tries to make the best of a bad situation and ends up becoming an accidental superhero.

Medical scientist Rory is working in his top secret underground laboratory in Central London when a procedure has unexpected results. Far from curing his patient, a monkey called Arnold, of an unpleasant disease, he manages to turn the animal invisible! In his panic, Rory accidentally gets some of the serum he injected Arnold with into his own bloodstream, rendering himself invisible, too. With disbelief and confusion filling his brain, Rory finds it impossible to think straight, much less to figure out what precisely happened, and what on earth he’s going to do about it. So, after stripping off his clothes—which remain visible and therefore would give him away—he heads out into the London night for a walk to try and clear his head. Soon, a series of events lead him into a situation where he takes heroic action to protect somebody from hurting themselves, or someone else. And, just when Rory thinks things can’t get any weirder, he’s found, completely naked, in the home of the man he helped the previous evening. How can he explain his way out of this?

Word count: 11,766

Excerpt

[spoiler title=’Click for excerpt’ style=’steelblue’ collapse_link=’true’]

Rory carefully placed the empty syringe into a kidney bowl on a wheeled metal table at his side then snapped off his latex gloves and put them next to the bowl. When he turned back to his workstation, though, the monkey he’d just injected had disappeared.

He blinked, as though his eyes were not functioning correctly and that closing and opening them again would do a hard reset. Like doing a restart on his PC when it acted up. Unfortunately, in the case of his eyes, it didn’t help. He tried again, just to be sure. No such luck. The monkey was still not there.

Shaking his head, he looked around the laboratory. It wasn’t very big, and there was nowhere to hide. Not for a creature the size of Arnold, anyway. Even an escaped mouse would be pretty easy to locate. Rory wondered if perhaps he was asleep and dreaming—vivid and bonkers dreams were a constant in his life. A swift pinch of his arm answered that question. Muttering, he rubbed the afflicted area, the cotton of his lab coat soft beneath his fingers.

He frowned, then frowned some more as a thought occurred to him. A thought so unbelievable, so ludicrous that he couldn’t understand why it had even popped into his brain.

Because it’s the only possible explanation.

He shook his head. No, it wasn’t. There was a perfectly rational explanation for Arnold’s sudden disappearance. He wasn’t where he’d left him, but although he was smart, there was no way in hell he could have escaped the lab. It was impossible. Rory reached into his pocket and clasped the hard plastic of his security pass between his fingers and heaved a sigh of relief. The very idea of a monkey—albeit a tame, friendly one—wandering around the City of London didn’t bear thinking about. And neither did the consequences.

Determined to disprove his silly idea, Rory began searching in earnest for Arnold. It took all of five seconds—he wasn’t underneath the workstation, or behind the large storage unit at one end of the long room. All of the cupboards were closed and locked, and the keys still hung securely on a lanyard around Rory’s neck. There was nowhere else the animal could have gone.

Rory scratched his head, the scientist in him still desperate not to resort to believing the thought that was now flashing on and off in his mind in strobe lighting, unwilling to be ignored any longer.

Invisible. You’ve turned Arnold invisible.

No. No way. He was trying to cure a lethal disease, not create some Harry Potter-esque potion for invisibility. But it was a cloak that made them invisible in Harry Potter, wasn’t it, not a potion? He tutted and sighed, then shook his head. I’m losing the fucking plot, here. I need to go home and get some rest. Maybe I’m overdoing it.

There was one small problem, though. Before he could leave, he had to find the damn monkey. Arnold had been injected with some potent drugs, and although Rory wasn’t expecting him to experience any further side effects, he certainly wasn’t going to risk having the creature anywhere near the general public. He was trying to save lives, not put them at risk. Plus, Arnold himself would be in danger out there—he could get hit by a bus or a car. Which would be highly likely, given the drivers of said buses and cars wouldn’t be able to see him.

Oh fuck, this is really happening, isn’t it?

[/spoiler]

Available from:

No longer available

Also available in German, title Unsichtbarer Retter:
Amazon (universal link)

Reviews:

“This is a fun short that may require a certain suspension of belief to truly enjoy… But, if you’re a superhero buff, suspension of belief is the name of the game anyway. Just go with it, because you’ll enjoy yourself.” Diverse Reader