17/10/1985 - The Wall

Today was officially the first day of my first mission. I was in theory working with other agents but I was told that they wouldn't make themselves known to me or be revealed in any way. I figured that I just needed to settle for concentrating on my role in the bigger plan and not worry about anything else.

It was a peculiar day to wake up to. I'd spent much of the previous night turning myself invisible in my new costume (I'd tried but failed to walk through any walls - it was a bit too scary and I kept bottling out). In a way, I was beginning to feel like a superhero - like I was better than the ordinary people. Becoming invisible was a fiddly process though - I had to put on the camouflage suit, make sure it was done up fully using the strange self-adhesive strips, pull the sleeves over my hands (they somehow morphed themselves around my fingers) and then pull the rear of the collar up and over my head, sealing it fully around my neck. The suit became transparent from the inside when sealed in this fashion, allowing me to see out but nobody to see in. Looking in a mirror I presented just a dark, black shadow, menacing and other-worldly. By squeezing my hands in the correct fashion I vanished altogether - no reflection in the mirror, no anything. It freaked me out the first time so I quickly made myself visible again. I was extremely worried that I might somehow stick in see-through mode and never recover.

The trick to walking through walls was apparently to hang the personal tunneler around my neck when wearing the camouflage suit. The suit had some fancy trickery in it that interfaced with the tunneler and let it know the outline of the object it needed to tunnel - i.e. me. I followed the instructions carefully; I pulled the morphing gloves around my hands; I pulled the collar up around my neck and I ensured the hood was fully sealed. I was now ready to walk through a wall. Trouble was, which one? I didn't want to go waltzing into one of my housemates' rooms, and I didn't want to suddenly appear in the kitchen and cause someone to drop a vat of chilli all over the floor in surprise. Although admittedly i should theoretically be invisible. But still, this was all new to me and it just seemed too risky. No, I definitely needed somewhere more private...

In due course I found myself in the local park. It was a glorious day, warm and balmy and with a very gentle cooling breeze. There was nobody here. There never was. I was at a feature known simply as 'the wall'. I didn't know what it was, I don't think anybody did. It was just a crumbling wall with a partial roof and random bits of steel girder. Presumably at some point it had been a building of some sort, or maybe some kind of bridge, but now it was nothing but a modern-day ruin. It had plenty of graffiti on it and lots of cigarette butts and broken glass and other associated rubbish. It might attract some local hoodlums later on when it grew dark, but for now the area was deserted - the local park-goers choosing to head to the large open green belt the other side of the trees. In the distance I could hear the thumping of a ghetto blaster, probably some punks out to annoy the locals. Here, though, I was very much on my own.

The wall looked formidable. It was high, it was wide, it was very deep - on a different scale to your average house wall. I began to wonder if I'd been a bit over-ambitious choosing this hulking great monolith as my inaugural tunnel. But I chose to go ahead with it. I figured there was no point putting it off forever. I grabbed the tunneler, depressed the glinting red centrepiece and walked towards the wall. As I reached its nearside surface I couldn't help but close my eyes, anticipating the bump of my nose against the crumbling remains of plaster. It didn't come. I opened my eyes but could see nothing but grainy darkness. I rushed forward a couple of steps and emerged blinking in the daylight the other side. There was a slight drop at the other side that I hadn't anticipated and as I stepped out of the wall and the tunneler ceased its work I fell a few centimetres, lost my footing and rolled downhill, coming to rest against a small mound of earth a few metres away. Well, it wasn't a perfect first run, but it wasn't bad. No injuries, no arms left behind in the wall, and a realisation that you had to be very careful where you emerged on the other side. I was pretty pleased really. So pleased that I immediately went back and tried again, this time going the other way through. I emerged on the initial side without incident but found my feet horribly buried into the earth. I figured I must still have been tunneling somehow, so I experimented stepping up through the soil onto the surface. It seemed to work okay - I was standing firmly on the grass, but I still felt the need to prove it to myself by jumping up and down a few times. The tunneler had proven its safety in exemplary fashion - it was full of protective safeguards and overrides making it virtually impossible to get into trouble as long as the suit was worn correctly.

Over the next hour or so I tunneled through the wall over and over, practising activating the tunneler at the last minute, performing run-ups, trying to surprise myself with the wall (didn't really work that) and generally becoming an expert in walking through walls.

Eventually I got bored and left the wall. I remained invisible, found the punks, kicked their ghetto blaster to pieces, ruffled up all their goofy hairstyles and then headed home. It was time to begin my first mission. I packed all my new goodies into a Black Sabbath rucksack and caught a train to Edinburgh.