First things first. It may be the weekend, but you want to test out of high school as soon as possible. Every day you ditch in favor of studying for your GED is a day you risk getting caught and forced to go to class. Granted, it's not much of a risk, since the cops don't exactly patrol for high school students, especially at the library, but it's possible! All it would take is someone deciding that hunting down teenage girls is less risky than getting in the middle of a superpowered gang fight.
For practice and fun, you expend a small amount of prana generating the books and practice problems you scanned at the library yesterday. You expect the low-quality, mundane objects to last for… actually long enough that Dad might notice them. You can claim you checked them out from the library. Or maybe just destroy them before he gets a chance to see.
All that aside, the math practice problems continue to be easy, and you're getting faster and faster at solving them with practice. Studying at home is also a lot more relaxing than the quiet background murmur of the library. Also, it lets you avoid changing out of your PJs for the half the day. And HalBear is wonderfully fuzzy for cuddles. Okay, maybe it isn't more productive overall, but you still prefer this to the library for when you don't need internet access. (GED status: 3/30 study points).
Now that you've gotten your urge to be responsible out of the way, it's time to have a little fun. You briefly consider visiting a history museum to try to copy more gear for your power, but decide to put it off for now. You have enough to cover the basics. And on that note, you have enough gear that you don't
really need to train. Probably. You survived one night out even without armor; with the Varia Suit or Armsmaster's power armor, you'll be guaranteed to come home uninjured.
Probably.
Either way, your plan for today is completely serious. You've been able to ignore it up until now by refusing to acknowledge that your new friends are Uber and Leet, but you can't hide from it anymore. They're villains. They had that one show where they beat a prostitute to death.
And they're your only friends right now, and you're going to give them a chance to explain.
You're so lonely.
You call Uber, and he teaches you his address and how to put it into Dragon Maps. Your new smartphone is so amazing, you're starting to regret letting Mom's death keep you from having one for years. Uber's place -- or Leet's, you're not sure, maybe it's both of theirs -- is a small apartment. You were expecting a house, but you suppose that makes sense if their show was really doing so poorly recently. You ring the doorbell and wait, but not very long.
Uber lets you in, displaying a living space that is somehow immaculately clean. This is strange because every available surface and quite a bit of space besides is covered in electronics. There's the giant TV taking up most of a wall with more game consoles than you recognize attached to it. There's the multiple computer towers, each hooked up to multiple monitors. And there's a series of tables surrounding a very comfy chair, covered in all kinds of tools and spare parts. Leet -- Ted, you correct yourself, they're not in costume right now -- sits in the middle, toying with a dissected controller. He looks up briefly, registers your presence, and goes back to ignoring you.
Uber directs you to a seat in front of the massive TV. "What do you want to play?" He asks. "I've got a number of recommendations if you want."
No. Games later. Serious first. This is
important, dammit! You steel yourself, take a deep breath, and force yourself to ask the question that's been eating away at you for the last two days.
"The, um, Uber and Leet. The show. You killed a women. On camera. Beat her to death. I don't know if you're bad people, not anymore, but I don't feel comfortable about that. I promised myself I'd give you a chance to explain. But I don't think I can be friends with a murderer."
"Why is it always the GTA ep?" Leet grumbles from the other side of the room.
Uber, on the other hand, takes the question in stride. "Neither of us have ever killed anyone. If you don't believe me, you can walk now, but it's the truth. Stay, and I'll explain."
You believe Daniel. You
want to believe Daniel. If he says that's what happened, you'll gladly listen to his explanation.
"First, I'm going to explain why you thought I was a murderer. This is not a rhetorical question: If you were to classify Uber and Leet on the spectrum of heroes to villains, how would you describe them?"
"Villains," you answer immediately. As if it's obvious.
"That's what the Protectorate and the PRT would like people to think. But it's inaccurate. We're rogues. Like Parian, the superpowered tailor downtown. We don't fight crime. We don't better ourselves by taking from others. We're just in it for the art, and hopefully for a little profit."
You nod. That makes sense. Except for the part where they force people into their shows. That seems kind of criminal and villainous.
You mention this.
"To me at least, what's important is that there's a few lines we won't cross. Beyond even the unwritten rules almost all capes hold to, I mean. Informed consent before doing any harm. Uninformed consent for anything active. Risk minimization and safety measures for bystanders and actors. Think about how we handled the most recent video: You were asked first, and we made sure you were as safe as possible during the Event."
"That makes sense," you agree, "But what about the apparently-not-murder on camera? On the GTA video."
"Like I said, informed consent. Believe it or not, we hired an actual prostitute for the episode who was into that from the ABB. A major masochist. I took her to just shy of comatose in the video. If you want something to laugh about, that Event was how I discovered that I'm not a sadist. I have no plans to do anything like that again, even for the art."
"Safety measures?" You prompt.
"I spent days ahead of time practicing how to non-fatally seriously injure people and how to quickly and easily check someone's vital condition. In case of overdoing it, Leet made a proper medkit," Uber indicates a
white metal box with a thick red plus hanging on the wall, "That we haven't needed yet. I stuck to limb and body shots to avoid brain damage. We paid her for her services, and even though it wasn't in our agreement, Leet and I were in agreement that we should pay her hospital bill. Panacea cured her a few days later and that was it. She even thanked us for hiring her afterwards."
New Trace: Medkit [Leet/Black Mesa] {NP}:
Medkit: The Impossible Healing Solution: Despite its size, this medkit contains only one thing: a giant syringe, full of a mysterious green liquid. When injected, it recovers up to a quarter of the patient's maximum health. Oddly, touching the kit while injured causes it to permanently disappear, healing you as if you had injected yourself with its contents.
Proper medkit indeed. Even if Uber is lying, this has been a profitable trip already.
"If you didn't kill her," you ask slowly, "Then why did the news reports say you did? Why didn't they report it as hospitalization, later treated by Panacea?"
"We're supposed to be villains, remember?" Uber explains. "The Protectorate and PRT are government agencies, interested in maintaining the perception that they're the good guys and everyone who isn't one of them is a bad guy. Have you heard about Canary?"
You shake your head no. Uber continues his rant.
"Paige Mcabee. Parahuman rogue singer. Accidentally mastered her ex into genital mutilation. Now, I'm not a fan of what she did, but it was very clearly an accident, a case of an idiom being forced into literal interpretation. The government is clearly pushing for her to get the Birdcage, which you can tell by looking at any of the trial footage. They have her in full Hannibal Lecter getup, ostensibly to prevent her from using her powers. As if that isn't a form of persuasion and they couldn't just gag her if that's what they really wanted. Her lawyer's so incompetent they could probably declare a mistrial if it wasn't pointless once she inevitably gets convicted. My point is," Uber forces himself to pause while he calms down, "Government agencies hate rogues as a concept. Toybox? Viewed as rogues too. They don't want people to think about parahumans as anything but a bunch of government employees or violent criminals. We're rogues, but that's not what the government wants you to believe."
"And besides," Leet admits, "It's actually kinda useful when people think we're stone-cold killers. Gets us a lot more respect."
This is really all… something to think about. This is heavy. You're not sure what to think about it for now, except that your new friends probably aren't capital-E Evil. Instead, you opt to distract yourself with video games.
"Let's stick to the Super Nintendo," Uber suggests. "Collection's over here. I recommend Chrono Trigger if you want an RPG today, or Kirby Super Star for an easy action game. A Link to the Past or Super Mario World if you want something a little harder than that -- they're all kind of like Super Metroid. Oh, and speak up if you feel inspired for any future shows."
Video games are fun. Having friends who are not murderers is fun. You didn't realize how stressed you were until afterwards, when it was all gone. You head back home, have dinner with Dad (spaghetti again), then sneak out once you're sure he's asleep. You have no plans to be brought home by the PRT tonight. No, tonight Dad will never know you snuck out.
To be a hero.
Gearing up hardly takes a thought. Armor is mandatory, and of your best options, one gets you mistaken for an established hero, and the other is a Noble Phantasm. It takes almost all the prana you have left to manifest the Varia Suit, and it won't even last the whole night, but it provides both offense and defense, and besides, it's
yours, a fact that manifests both in the feeling of
rightness in wearing it and the slightly cheaper prana cost to recreate it. Sure, it isn't the original, but your power makes a damn close copy.
You could probably Trace one of your weapons, but definitely not the Halberd with how little prana you have left. If there's something your mace spray and stun cannon can't handle, you can deal with it at the time.
You find yourself leaping along the waterfront. You could 'fly' with your space jump, but it's way too hard to observe for crime through all the spinning. Building hopping keeps you out of sight, traveling quickly, and able to quickly scan multiple perpendicular blocks at a time.
And that's when you see him: the man in the dragon mask, surrounded by Chinese thugs. The man who gave you an endless supply of perfectly-real, actual-object-destroying bombs. Grenades, really, since the explosions only have about a foot and a half radius. But still! It's Lung! Again! And this time, he doesn't know you're there. He's undoubtedly on his way to fight
someone, but you don't know who. What should you do?
Today is Sunday, March 27, 2011
There are two independent votes: What game to play (which will probably become the next U&L mission if accepted) and what to do about Lung. Please vote on both separately.
Game:
[ ] Chrono Trigger
[ ] Kirby Super Star
[ ] The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
[ ] Super Mario World
[ ] Some other SNES game
-[ ] Which one?
[ ] Some other console entirely!
-[ ] Console and game?
Lung:
[ ]
Do. Nothing. Maybe the dragon won't notice you and get angry.
[ ] RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!
[ ] You're Samus right now, right? Be the bounty hunter. Collect the bounty. Fight.
-[ ] Battle strategy? If you don't vote on one, it'll start out as 'shoot him in the face until he stops trying to murder you'.
[ ] Scout Lung for later. Follow him, see what he does, but stay out of whatever brawl he gets into.
[ ] Something else? (Write-in)
