Heroes LIVE [IC | Superhero | OPEN]

[Communist Xomaniax]

Kong "Martial Law" Paing
Chronze Gala, San Francisco
San Francisco, California
February 7, 2020

"Does a man want a drink, he says."

Kong grinned from ear to ear, excited at the man's reaction to the offer. He gladly let his new compatriot take his hand, not bothering to resist as he was dragged through the crowd towards the bar. He practically guffawed when the man pulled his gun out and pointed it at the bartender, barely keeping to an even keel when the man tried out his terrible pickup lines. But when the man ordered a bottle of the cheap stuff, Kong knew he meant it. That much was certain. The bartender might as well as flooded herself from his new friend's words. Kong didn't quite understand it. Of course he found it funny, if it was a gun in his face, he probably wouldn't die. But some normal type, whose body might as well be meat sack for all the damage it could take? Kong just couldn't wrap his head around it.

He took the bottle of cheap gin the barkeep put down, pouring himself a tall glass and drinking it all in one gulp. The fire warmed his belly and made everything seem just a little rosier, made the weight on Kong's shoulders seem a little lighter. He finished off a second glass a moment later, determined to not let his powers burn off the booze faster than he could get sloshed. He poured his counterpart a drink and practically forced the thing to the man's lips, eager not to be the only one indulging. He thought about sharing his stash with the man and patted his pocket affectionately. The stuff in there was hot, practically burning a hole in his pocket. Just the thought of taking the party to the bathroom made him sweat a little in anticipation. No, he thought, bad idea. This was the first friendly interaction all week and it didn't even cost him, better to not scare the man off too soon. He'd let things play out a little longer before he made the offer.

"Bartender, this man is my friend and he's had a lot on his plate this week. He needs to celebrate," Kong explained, swishing around the half empty gin bottle, "and this just isn't doing it. Give us, uh. . . ." he trailed off, exaggeratedly counting on his fingers.

"A bottle of coconut rum and a bottle of whatever top shelf whiskey you've got back there. You don't gotta pour them or nothing though, there'll be more after that." He finished his order and clapped his compatriot on the back.

"What's your name, friend?" He asked, stifling a giggle.

"Mind if I join you both for a drink? Because this is not strong enough."

Kong swiveled on his bar stool to face the newcomer, looking from his feet up and really drinking in the stranger's appearance. He was taller than Kong but twice as skinny, with a mop of black hair and skin that said he rarely saw the sunlight. The man, or rather the boy since if anyone looked the part of the heroic youth it was this one, wore a suit like any other you'd see at a men's clothing emporium, like something you'd wear to court. In a way it made Kong jealous, if only slightly. He'd been told to wear his goddamn speed suit, hot as the damn thing was. But this guy? Here he comes in casual-fucking-Friday. Or maybe he's wearing a costume under the suit. That made Kong nearly slap himself. Fucking obviously. In a way he felt bad for the guy, he must be practically cooking in that thing.

"Sure man, feel free." He responded, taking the gin and passing it to the newcomer.

"Feel real free." He said, finishing off a mouthful of rum before he kicked out a seat for his new pal.

[Lunas Legion]

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Arabian Nights

Not everyone gets a good place as a superhero. Some end up in the relatively sleepy US Midwest, some, on a team in Portugal or New Zealand with no hope of advancement, some just can’t take the pressure and retire or burn out. But for some, that destiny is worse than simply not making it big, but having to live in the shadow of others...

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Sayf ‘Infar’ al-Yatimi
February 12th, 2020

There were places in the world where being a hero wasn’t simply a choice someone could choose. It wasn’t a sense of obligation to do so, like there was in places like America, where you could simply not use your powers and live your life as if they never existed, but where being a hero simply was not an option. In North Korea, metahumans were either executed or taken in by the state, raised and indoctrinated to always be subservient to the state and juche, its superhuman protectors. In China, the hero industry was formed from vast training camps, training up generations of heroes to be icons and celebrities, and if the rumours were to be believed, those who didn’t do quite so well became villains, the Chinese government controlling both sides in a carefully-managed nationwide theater.

For Sayf al-Yatimi, her life had been somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. The UAE, like its larger neighbour, Saudi Arabia, had state-run superhero programs run officially to train future superheroes who, like the North Koreans, took in children with powers but unlike the North Koreans, they provided large financial incentives and insisted it was for their own safety. In reality it was to control metahumans, and in a region as unstable as the Middle East, that was necessary. No one wanted terrorists to find someone who could level buildings with a thought or obliterate a military base by themselves. Then they were trained, but it was almost entirely for the media, given how rarely a villainous metahuman was able to survive for long.

Powers couldn’t save you from airstrikes or special forces raids in the dead of night.

And so it was with an almost visible eagerness that Sayf sat in the back of the C-130, largely empty but for her and her teammates in the Dubai Desert Eagles on one of the very rare occasions they were actually going to see action. Omar sat across from her; he was their team leader, wearing a green version of the loose, belt-tied costume-uniform they all wore. Her own was red, Ishtar, who sat next to Omar, had a blue one, while Ismail and Tahir had white and yellow respectively. PR insisted they had a ‘unified look’ as a team; she thought it just made them look like knockoffs of the Power Rangers.

“Drop in ten.” The pilot’s speaker-distorted voice announced.

They’d all been trained to parachute and to use parachutes, partially because entry by parachute looked amazing for the cameras, partially because it meant they could do missions like this when they came up. When an airstrike might not work because the target was too dug in, when you couldn’t send in special forces because they were too obvious to mobilise in strength for a paradrop, helicopters were too vulnerable to whatever surface to air weaponry the target might have…

But a high-altitude C-130, flying a supply route to Yemen as normal? No, shooting that would be sure to bring the type of attention their target didn’t want to attract, not knowing his location was compromised. There was a degree of subtlety required to get past whatever old Soviet systems and self-built weapons he might have lying in the sands, automated by custom metahuman modifications.

“Just to make sure everyone knows who we’re dealing with.” Omar started, but Sayf didn’t look at him, staring down at her glove-covered hands resting in her lap. Omar had that pretty boy look about him, an easy charismatic smile, a strong power… He was the team’s media darling and they were supposed to just go along with it according to PR, play their supporting roles.

Sayf thought he’d let it all go to his head.

Omar continued. “He calls himself Iram, and has a camouflaged base called Iram of the Pillars after himself in our part of the Empty Quarter. He’s been a menace for years, producing bombs for terror groups across the Middle East, but we’ve only just gotten a concrete location on his hideout which is where we’re going in. It’s by an oasis regularly used by Bedouin tribes, so its believed they’re his main route for delivery of weaponry from him and components to him. He’s a bomb-maker, but we believe he has a secondary power of some form that allowed him to hide his base’s construction from us or he had help building it.”

And he insisted on doing things like this, acting like he was their leader when he wasn’t. It was all she could do to keep her face impassive, let the irritation sit in her stomach. Wasn’t like any of the others cared, no one liked Ishtar really given the obelisk-sized stick she seemed to have up her ass most of the time, Ismail and Tahir seemed to be fine being Omar’s flunkies.

“Just him then?” Tahir spoke up from next to her, his voice grating on her ears.

“He’ll have tribesmen with him most likely.” Omar said. “There’s a small camp there currently, but we’ll have caught them by surprise. Five metahumans versus an unprepared enemy, this will be easy-” He tapped the small, black dot of a camera on his left shoulder. “And good footage for the cameras.”

They weren’t stupid enough to live-stream the attack, but they’d broadcast it on a half-hour delay to give the illusion it was live and to allow the editors to make sure nothing they didn’t want being shown was being shown.

“Drop in five.” The pilot announced.

“Get ready.” Omar said, standing up, the others and Sayf doing likewise as they each gave their parachutes one final pre-drop check as they made their way down the aircraft, boots clinking against the steel floor in the mostly silent plane before they stopped in front of the rear ramp.

“Lowering ramp, drop in three.” The pilot announced, the whining of motors and the roaring of the wind and the engines filling the air.

“Plan?” Ishtar shouted out, Omar turning to face towards her.

“Drop near the fires.” Omar shouted back. “Look for a hatch, something going down. Deal with the tribesmen first.”

“Drop in two.”

Time seemed to speed up for Sayf as she stared out into the darkness, only the faintest flickering lights far below them the sign of their targets.

“Drop, drop, drop.”

The call came out, and Sayf flung herself forwards into the darkness.

She couldn’t see anything as she let herself go into freefall for a few seconds, listening to the fading roar of the plane’s engines before pulling her parachute’s chord. She heard it whistle out behind her, winced slightly at the jolt it sent through her body as it unfurled, slowing her descent.

If nothing else, the view was absolutely spectacular as she descended. The great black canvas of the Empty Quarter, featureless and stretching off to the horizon where it met the star-speckled night. She couldn’t see any of the others, as colourful as their costumes were in the spotlight out here with nothing but starlight to see by it was all but impossible to make any of the others out.

That… Was probably going to be a problem. They had radios, but no compasses, and no points of reference in the darkness save for the tiny points of light below, the fires of the camp.

Minutes passed as she descended alone, the lights of the camp growing larger and larger as the ground drew nearer until she hit the sand with a soft thud, ditching her parachute as she landed.

“Infar, landed.” She said, voice barely above a whisper as she slowly moved up the dune she’d landed on, sand shifting precariously beneath her as she climbed up it until she reached the top.

“Saeqia, landed. Where the fuck are you, Infar?”

That was Ishtar. Of course she’d been the first to land of this bunch of idiots.

“Near the camp, no idea on the direction. You?” Sayf shot back.

A few seconds passed before Ishtar responded “Same.”

“Alahaya, landed.” Omar said. “Everyone converge on the camp wherever you’ve landed.”

“Shouldn’t we group up first?” Sayf asked, rolling her eyes. Omar trying to play leader again.

“No time.” Omar said. “We’ll make do.”

This was going to go badly, Sayf could tell as she levitated herself down the other side of the dune.

“Eaql, landed.” Tahir, only Ismail left to report in.

“Infar, moving in.” Sayf said, moving closer and closer to the camp. Even in the poor light, the dunes provided ideal cover as she moved forwards, feeling the fires of the camp come into her range.

She didn’t turn her radio off, but she did ignore Omar’s protests as she used her power, fire forming out of nowhere, blooming out around her as the sand beneath her melted into a pool of liquid glass.

Showtime.

One moment she was in the empty desert, the next, she was standing in the middle of a smouldering campfire on the edge of the camp which seemed deserted, the dark shapes of tends and the occasional snort of a camel the only sound.

Step one was always the same for her; set something on fire. Here, that was easy enough; she just walked out of the fire she’d teleported into, and started making her way through the camp. Fire whipped out of her body in quick lashes out off of her, eagerly latching onto nearby tents. She heard screaming behind her, but she didn’t care.

Let them panic. That was her tool of choice, so much of the time, the instinctual, primal panic everyone felt when they were on fire, something they were wearing or holding was on fire or, well, there was just an uncontrolled fire. A brief, brilliant burst of blindingly bright light shattered the night, the distant wail of pained screams. Seemed Ishtar had joined the fun.

Sayf didn’t need to look behind her to see the nicely expanding wall of fire behind her, she could feel its every movement, every new piece of wood and cloth it touched as it grew, engulfing people and animals alike to fuel itself. A second flash of lightning was followed by more screams as she stopped, content to stand in the fire all but invisible, one flame among many as she pushed them onwards. No reason not to just sit back and wait.



Minutes passed, lightning cracking down from overhead and the screaming slowly died down into silence, nothing left of the camp bar ash, bone and glass.

“You could’ve left some for me.” Omar growled, stomping through the ash towards where she was standing in the middle of the carnage, Ishtar standing silhouette atop a dune against the backdrop of the moon. “Now what are we going to give to the TV screens?”

“Should’ve been faster.” Sayf said simply, otherwise ignoring him.

“You should’ve listened.” Omar said, looking down at her. He had over a foot on her, but Sayf didn’t seem intimidated in the slightest. “Eaql landed a few minutes out, still nothing from Saqr. Saeqia will maintain overwatch, we’ll find Iram. He’s not getting away.”

“Mhm.” Sayf mumbled noncommittally, but nodded anyways. “You go check by the oasis, I guess I’ll scour the rest of the camp.”

Omar said nothing, turning away from her and storming off towards the oasis as she took off in the other direction. She kicked up ash and sand as she walked, occasionally crossing a river of solid glass where she walked, passing charred corpses.

Someone else might have been horrified by what they’d done, or what they were seeing, but Sayf knew what her power could do under the right circumstances, where she didn’t have to restrain herself, keep her power on a tight leash to prevent mass casualties and even larger amounts of property damage.

Still, she couldn’t see anything unusual in the ash-

Something exploded in the distance.

“Fuck.” Sayf swore, turning back and breaking into a sprint. Omar, being the gloryhound that he was, had probably gone in without her to try and fight Iram solo.

She heard a second explosion as closed in on the oasis, skidding to a halt. There was a corpse lying in the middle of it, blackened and burned, any life around it scorched away by her fires.

What the fuck was Omar doing, and more importantly, where was the way down he’d obviously found? She paced around the oasis, not panicking, not fearful for her teammate. If anything if he died and she killed Iram it would be a bigger win for her, but she had to make it look like she was trying.

PR wouldn’t like their golden boy getting hurt.

Another minute passed, and she made a full circle around the oasis. Nothing. She wasn’t blind, what was she missing here? If someone as brickheaded as Omar could find it, so could she-

A piece of cloth moved, as if twitching, before being thrown aside as Omar emerged, a cocky grin on his face despite the maze of burn and shrapnel marks across his body and his tattered costume.
Of course he’d made sure he got solo the villain, it’d be great for his popularity. And it wasn’t like the producers would show her going all out either, they’d edit it with Ishtar’s attacks, make it look like a team effort. Their other two teammates wouldn’t even have gone on the mission for some made-up reason.

“Got him, snapped his neck.” Omar said gleefully. “Bit of a close one, but I knew I’d be fine.”

Sayf said nothing. He was still an idiot, just a lucky one.

“Anyways, we’ll be getting picked up by heli in half an hour, so let’s sit back and relax?” Omar continued, sitting down on the sand by the oasis.

She replied with more silence, turning away in a foul mood. Omar would be insufferable for months, and with how little action they got, upstaging him would be impossible.

She couldn’t take being a supporting actor much longer. She wasn’t meant for the background. She was meant to be where Omar was, front and center, the focus. She just needed some way to take it...

[Forest State]

The Mission
San Francisco Gala
February 7th, 2020

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“Perfect… You look like a menace in those shots. In a good way,” said the redheaded agent, looking over her Russian client, Yana Vedneyeva, also known as the simpler to pronounce name Ladya. The cameras kept clicking away even after she was done giving her speech about why they would be smart to go for her client over others, capturing both the Russian hero standing with her agent as well as the jewelry that her body was laden with - twin VVS diamond chains, one on either wrist, and a larger chain around her neck which sparkled each time the light of the camera flashes hit. The reputation of Russian heroes wasn’t the same as American ones - not just because of the country’s communist past but because they didn’t necessarily have as big a role as western ones did, with many metahumans choosing to go into mercenary work instead of the superhero game.

But every once and a while, a dazzling star did come out of Russia - and for this set of heroes coming out this year, it was possibly Yana, a photogenic blonde who looked like she could fit into any magazine photoshoot or any video for some news network. She was practically the kind of person that you expected to see on a news clip about a superhero doing something notable somewhere, and her costume reminded everyone of just where she was from, the Russian red white and blue draped over her body in the form of the tight fitting hybrid material that made her outfit up. However, there was no mask to go with it - because it would be a shame to hide her face from the public, which was one of her most notable features.

“Send me any pictures you guys got,” the redhead said to the press as her client turned away, seemingly not feeling like sticking around for much longer despite others asking her questions. She still hadn’t said much… One of the strange things about this sequence of events, considering she was here on a media tour. On one of those, someone was expected to speak. But that wasn’t the case right now. “And make sure to catch us in Chicago tomorrow. We’re gonna show everyone over the next couple of days that a Russian hero can go international too.”

She turned around, following after her client and slapping her on the back as her voice shifted to a completely different tone, a quieter one like she was talking to a friend rather than the louder and more bombastic one she had used with the press - and with the shift of her tone, even her body language shifted as she went through something of a transformation and shifted from a in-your-face agent to a therapist of sorts. “Something up, buddy? You need to talk at these things,” she said, looking up at her taller client.

“I remember why we are here,” Yana said simply, her brow furrowed as she looked down at the agent. “Suppose it can’t be helped. When you’re ready for one thing and you come here getting cameras…” she continued, before stopping when she realized she didn’t quite know the English words that she was looking for. “Switching lanes is hard,” she concluded eventually, taking a few steps away from the redhead.

“Be glad that you have someone like me in your corner. Fact is, you’re not the first hero I’ve worked with that’s awkward in front of the camera,” the redhead said with a smirk on her face, proud of the fact that she had been able to work through the problem - even if she had thought of it as important enough to bring up to Yana after the fact.

“I do appreciate you. Though… I do not see myself as awkward,” Yana continued, approaching a table which had a number of drinks set up on it. “Perhaps I should loosen up…”

“I would say you are-”

“I would say strong and silent.”

“Sure,” the redhead said, grabbing a bottle of whiskey from the table and handing it to her client, before pulling her away, probably towards somewhere that was a bit more away from the attention of the rest of the room and from the media. “But you’re in the motherfuckin’ US of A right now. You think people want to be strong and silent? I guess a few heroes here pulled it off but you already know what they’re into here. Flash, glamor, all that. Know your audience, when you’re in Rome, walk like the Romans do, I could say a bunch of phrases about this.”

“Should we be paying more attention to why we’re here?” Yana said, redirecting the redhead’s statement and drawing a raised eyebrow from her. “I believe that would give us the most publicity anyway - if your estimates are right.”

“When are my estimates wrong?” she retorted quickly, a grin spreading across her face. “Just relax and wait for the right time to come, this isn’t the kind of thing you can just rush, you know.”

Yana said nothing but nodded her head as she took the cap off the bottle, eyes narrowed slightly as they scanned the crowd. Although, she relaxed somewhat and lowered her shoulders - the agent was right in a way. What she was speaking of was something that was out of their hands, at least for now… She could look around, and find hints that might lead her in the right direction, but at the end of the day waiting was still the name of the game right now.

Even if it was indeed tense.

Desert Dogs - Dead Ends, New Starts
South of the Namibia-South Africa Border
February 8th, 2020

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Tali was somewhat incredulous at the moment. Not happy with the man that was standing in front of her, not happy with her employer, and not happy with the situation in general and the fact that she had been interrupted in her solitary walk from the scene of her attack to the next destination further along on the map. She didn’t make any immediate moves, but from her face, it was apparent just how much she didn’t like this… She made no effort to hide this.

Before she said anything, she reached out with her hand and focused her power, targeting Mael directly and hitting out with a mental strike - a stunning blow… Seconds later, he would experience the feeling of tendrils going through his mind. Not in the literal sense, though for the one experiencing it, it was possible to question whether or not there was some more literal aspect to it based on how it felt. It felt real enough. There wasn’t even anything visually there, though, just the feeling as data was relayed back to the one who had extended the tendrils in the first place. The data was, of course, different from normal.

Which just made Tali already hate the newcomer already. Couldn’t even dig through his mind easily because there was… Something strange going on with the information that she was gaining, as if he had been sent just to make things as non convenient as possible. Just her luck. It was really the kind of thing that would happen to her, based on her continuing bad luck which had endured over seemingly her entire life.

Even after a new start, something like this happened.

She ended up shoved together with some partner that she didn’t want, hadn’t asked for, and based on her quick assessment, she doubted she would vibe with that well either.

“Well fuck, they aren’t going to let me have any peace, are they?” she said, standing in a face off and looking him directly in the eye as she halted her search, her arm returning to her side as she examined the man across from her. “Just wanted to be alone and they had to give me a partner like you.”

It was spoken with all the bitterness of someone that didn’t like people in general, and of someone that carried antisocial attitudes as a result of being fucked over and abandoned in one way or another by every important person they’d known. “Came all the way out here to get away from shit,” she continued, her arms outstretched as she gestured to the expanse of rocky desert around them, surrounding the highway from both the left and the right and all in all appearing like a real life postcard landscape. It would have been a nicer place to visit if it wasn’t for the circumstances of them being here. “And they put me with you.”

She lowered her arms, her head dropping low too as she stuffed her hands in her pockets, her eyes narrowed and her posture slouched. “Un-fucking-believeabele.”

[Skaldia]

SNIP

[Forest State]

From Moscow To San Francisco
San Francisco Gala
February 7th, 2020

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Yana may have not been the most social or extroverted person within the ballroom, but the callout from Alex was still enough to get her to spin around and see where it was coming from, her eyes narrowed further now and her face rather serious. Her eyes scanned until she stopped on the place where the statement had come from, pounding her fist against one of her palms as she looked towards the source of this disturbance and called out.

“Hey you, don’t chat shit unless you want to get popped,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of the crowd within the building but not quite shouting - or rather, she said it in an even tone with no exclamation on the end, like she was just saying an obvious fact. She could have said more, but she looked to her agent instead, perhaps for instruction, perhaps because she had something to say to her about this situation.

“Head back to the car, get my Kalash,” Yana said, slapping her agent on the shoulder to try to send her off, but she remained around for now as she fished around underneath her own shirt, coming out with a small weapon of her own, a pistol which she kept tucked low.

“I’ve got heat right here, doesn’t mean I think it would be a good idea to use it… We’re on a press tour right now, can’t have you shooting the place up to get one guy. And not with the fucking Kalash, that’s for sure,” she said in an even tone of her own, taking a slight step forwards towards the disturbance before looking back at Yana. “Doesn’t mean we can’t get into a little bit of a bust up, though.”

“They could be armed, too,” Yana pointed out, causing her agent to stop in her tracks rather than disappearing into the crowd.

“Eh? If you’re feeling nervous, call Damir and ‘nem,” her agent informed her, before slipping off between a couple of people that were none the wiser about the pistol that she was holding low, as she moved in a generally low pattern herself in the way that someone experienced with this kind of thing would - it was somewhat surprising, and Yana herself had hardly seen this side of her, but she knew that she was competent with this stuff. Just didn’t realize she would be so willing to duck and move into danger, using the crowd to mask her movements as she ran fast and low.

She would seemingly disappear completely after she had reached a certain point - someone else popped out of the crowd toting a pistol rather than her, although it appeared to be the same pistol that she had shown up with… The person that had emerged on the other side of the crowd, having shed a jacket to reveal a white tee shirt underneath and to further differentiate herself from the redhead, seemed to be Caucasian of sorts - perhaps from Russia, perhaps from Georgia or some nearby country. Either way, it was a completely different person than the one that had entered the crowd, at least it seemed like that on the surface.

And this woman, after appearing on the other side of the crowd, fired off a single gunshot which caused glass to explode at the bar, one of the glasses on the counter having been hit by it thanks to a precisely fired pistol shot on her part.

“Anything else to say, pindos? Next one won’t miss,” she said, around the same time that Yana raised a phone to her ear and waited for the person on the other end to answer before speaking.

“...Bit of a situation,” she said eventually, before lowering the phone and looking at the scene in front of her. She ran forward, after that, as the gunshot caused the crowd to largely part and people to move away. There were, of course, chaotic shouts and such, but that wasn’t deterring either the one with the pistol, or the Russian superhero that was running to back her up, picking up a chair from one of the empty tables in the process since she didn’t have a weapon on her - couldn’t conceal it with a skintight outfit like the one she was wearing right now.

Some kind of banging apparently came from the back of the building but the source of that wasn’t exactly clear yet… What was happening in the main ballroom area was more important by some margin right now. That was, after all, where the bout of sudden violence was breaking out.

[Communist Xomaniax]

Kong "Martial Law" Paing
Chronze Gala, San Francisco
San Francisco, California
February 7, 2020

Kong had been enjoying the revelries with his new friends, taking great pleasure in the man he'd come to know as "Alex" and his increasingly flamboyant antics. It had taken some time but he finally felt comfortable enough to let his guard down. Maybe now was a good time to let his friend in on the bundle of joy he kept in his pocket, Alex seemed up to party after all. Watching the man clamber up onto the bar like a monkey, whiskey in one hand and a gun in the other like some bad western film, he assumed his friend was about to put on a show for the newest addition to the party. The Russians are a surly bunch, he'd fooled himself into thinking, maybe he's just trying to lighten the mood.

But when Alex launched into his bit, it took every fiber of his being to keep his composure. Had he been any drunker he'd be staring completely agape. That was not what he'd expected. A joke maybe, or perhaps a dance. But to insult the woman's pride and her homeland? Ridiculous! And he looked down at Kong and the other as if to reassure them that, don't worry, we're all in this together. The thought gave him the faintest stirring of rage, though he did his best to quash it. Whatever the Russians did in retaliation, he didn't need to be picking fights with his side in the meantime. My side. He thought, cursing himself. He wasn't involved in this, yet. No need to make it any worse. But when the Russian woman, Yana he'd heard her called, screamed back about "getting popped", Kong knew it would soon be getting a lot worse.

A gunshot, fired by some other woman in Yana's entourage, signaled that things had perhaps crossed a threshold they weren't meant to. By luck he'd been staring at the bottle when it happened, watched his glass of gin on the rocks explode into a cloud of shards and sticky liquid that coated his racing suit. The surprise of it made Kong blanch, though he didn't quite jump out of his seat. He swiveled madly to look up at Alex, then to his second newfound friend, to Yana and finally to the woman who'd fired the shot. He felt his heart threaten to pound his breastbone to dust, felt his hands clam up and start to tremble. He hadn't been expecting trouble at all and the suddenness of it shot his anxiety through the roof. That made him feel a deep shame, made him see himself as a coward if only for a moment.

In an instant Kong was out of his seat at the bar, leaping up and landing gracefully on his feet. He strode across the room quickly, powerful leg muscles hard at work ferrying him up close to the armed woman. He didn't rocket up into her face, that would signal aggression and would kick things off that were best left unkicked. Kong knew these types, he'd seen plenty of gangsters in Thailand and Myanmar before that. They even dressed similar to these Russians. Well, most of them. They were mad, their cheeks burning hot at not only the surprise of the call out, but the sheer rudeness of it all. But maybe they weren't the dumb, pasty animals they looked like to Kong. Maybe a bunch of roided out tracksuit monkeys could be reasoned with. At the very least he felt like it was his duty to try. He walked the last few paces at a human speed, until he was nearly toe to toe. Leaning forward, nearly pressing shoulders, he tried to talk their way out.

"Hey, forgive my stupid friend." Kong began, gesturing vaguely behind him. "He's American, you know the type. Fat-headed American with one too many drinks in him, seen too many cowboy movies and now he thinks he's John Wayne." Kong smiled sweetly for the woman, trying to communicate his friendly intent.

"Look, I know it's gonna be hard to wrap your head around, but he didn't mean no offense. Just got a little too loose and shot his mouth off." He gestured again towards the bar, this time focused on where the bullet had struck.

"You made your point already, he shouldn't have stepped on your toes. It was wrong for him to call your Yana out of her name like that. But can you maybe find it in your hearts to forgive my poor retarded buddy back there? I promise, I'll have a talk with him and this won't happen again." Kong did his best to play the good cop, the anxiety of it making him feel like he was going into cardiac arrest. He steeled himself as best as he could, letting his smile droop and hardening his features into a neutral expression.

"You got your guys, I'm sure you're all a little squirrely from the trip over here, I get it, that's valid." He explained. "We got our guys too." He gestured towards the crowd, his hand stopping for a moment as it passed over one American hero or the other. "Your guys have guns, our guys have guns. Look, my buddy here is another dumb-as-shit cowboy cocksucker in a long line of them, I bet you've dealt with them before. Can you communicate to your guys that we don't need a shootout in the OK Corral over all this? Look at all the civilians in this room, they don't need to get hurt because somebody shot their mouth off." Kong finished his spiel and looked the woman in the eyes. He just hoped it'd be enough to get them all out of there in one piece.

[Forest State]

Black Friday
San Francisco Gala
February 7th, 2020

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Fact of the matter was, the situation was already a bit too far advanced to just back down. How could one back down when the guns had already been drawn and the cameras were rolling? Plenty of people had already seen what had happened. The fight at this point was already underway and after it had started, it wasn’t so simple to just put an end to it. Because there was a lot at stake in this case - backroom deals, important bets within the Monarch Casino, and of course, national pride and personal pride… Losing face was a certain for both sides in this case but it was a matter of where. If they fought, the American heroes would likely lose face in Russia while the Russian entourage would lose face in America, but if they backed down… They would lose face everywhere.

And so the only thing the black-haired woman with the gun did was keep moving forward as she looked at Kong, not discouraged by his words about backing down. In fact, it only gave further time for whatever was happening in the back of the building to progress, shouts coming from that direction as four men burst into the building, all of them masked up and clad in black at this point - apparently Russian, with a couple of track shirts but a couple of tee shirts revealing tattooed and muscled arms. Seemed to be Yana’s entourage, who she had just called on the phone, and the most notable thing about the group was that all of them were armed with decent caliber weapons - a couple AK-74s, an AK-74U, and a Draco, all of them able to put a metahuman down with the shots placed right.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Shots began firing off, the bright muzzle flashes cutting through the dimly lit environment of the ballroom as the men advanced and the people in their path moved for cover, shouts breaking out in the crowd - even some of the TV cameras were abandoned, left to run and record footage while no one was on the other side of the screen. There were, of course, Infinity staff on hand, but they weren’t exactly able to do anything compared to a well composed and professional threat like this. They weren’t there to handle a fight - if something happened, it was presumably the heroes that were responsible for security. And in this case, they were being faced with an attack on themselves.

Because there was more at stake here than trash talk, even if the side of the heroes wasn’t aware of that. A 20,000 chip bet in the Monarch Casino that Yana would dominate the popularity polling for her age - something that wouldn’t happen if she was caught getting disrespected on TV and didn’t respond. On the other hand, the fight that was happening right now was sure to make her lose support in the United States, but at this point losing support in either place was a given. It was just a matter of where and how much. She was, of course, in San Francisco out of all the places she could be on this tour exactly because of higher affairs which were out of her pay grade. Because of other events that were set to happen because of one of those bets, that she would be able to capitalize on and gain publicity from.

Supposedly, a major disturbance was set to happen… And she had a lot of polling points on the line if she could help put a stop to it. At the same time, however, it seemed unlikely she would gain anything regardless now - if that disturbance even happened thanks to the fact that there was already a gunfight and it didn’t involve any of the expected sides. The fight escalated quickly as the room descended into thaos, most of the staff for the event just hiding under tables and the like rather than trying to do anything.

The bar where Kong had tried to make peace was the sight of the first casualty of the battle, as Alexander took multiple shots from the black-haired woman’s pistol before taking an AK-74 round to the head, one that was 7.62 caliber, to finish the job… Even durable metahumans could go down to basic bullets if the circumstances were right, and getting caught lacking at a table like this due to picking a fight and greatly misjudging the odds was one of those circumstances. The agent had, after all, gotten the first shot off and put a bullet into Alex’s chest by the time he was able to move his own pistol up towards a position to fire, ultimately doing nothing as his arm spasmed from the gunshots and the pistol went flying out of his hand.

It was a quick and sudden death for someone who wasn’t supposed to die, someone from the quickest rising hero team in the nation, but it was also the due of someone that didn’t respect the codes of this world - someone that had too little restraint to avoid going after someone that wasn’t an easy target, someone that couldn’t just be pushed around and would hit back harder than what had been said. Because in a rough world where metahumans were often on top compared to the common man, and where heroes who struck at criminals with lethal force were celebrated, words were indeed enough to begin a shootout.

The world may have seemed soft at the seams for some of these young heroes, like it was all about traveling around and taking down easy to handle criminals while snapping pictures after the act, or meeting with fans and press… Sometimes, it was forgotten just why heroes were both respected and feared - because it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone could do, and because it was dangerous. Sometimes the fights were easy and a hero could coast by because of their powers, but other times they were like this, with a life over in an instant.

It was a call for all of them to come down to earth rather than flying too close to the sun. The life wasn’t a joke, and those who treated it as such were in for a bad time.

The shooters kept firing although they weren’t spraying randomly - while it was certainly dangerous to be a civilian, they weren’t aiming to hit them but rather the specific target that had started things, and anyone else that was going for a weapon and attempting to fight back against the sudden onslaught against the Infinity side.

In the case of Luan, he would be reaching for a gun when the shooter with the Draco fired a number of shots into his chest, all of them connecting before the black haired woman, who was on her feet and was no longer near the bar, rather dipping and diving through the crowd as it screamed, popped up somewhere nearby and gripped her pistol twice with two hands, firing off a pair of shots and hitting with deadly aim.

She was definitely more than just an agent but what she actually was still remained unclear as the gunshots hit Luan in the head and finished off the metahuman who had been speaking to Olympia, the pistol quickly being withdrawn towards the agent’s chest after she could see that the kill was confirmed… Or at least she thought it was. She moved quickly across the crowd of people that still somewhat inhabited the ballroom floor - people tended to freeze up in the middle of trouble like this, even if most of them were getting low - and popped out closer to Luan, firing into his head again to make sure the metahuman was down.

The gunshots seemed to stop… For now. The target was down, and someone else who had tried to fight was down, but if anyone else went for a weapon or joined in the battle… They would likely be targeted by any of the four gunmen, the agent, or Yana herself - who right now was standing not far from the bar, the chair ready to be swung overhead. She lowered it into a defensive stance with this, however, as she slid towards the peripheries of the room to avoid getting into a fight she wasn’t prepared for.

The room would fall more silent than it had been moments earlier with gunshots and the like, with the main sound now being that of the Russian chatter which filled the air, between the different gunmen that were still brandishing their weapons and swinging them around to face different members of the Infinity party, looking to see which ones were going to be threats.

It was a bloody enough day between the news about Severina and the sudden attack that had been sparked by Alexander’s disrespect, and it seemed all hell had broken loose.

[Lunas Legion]

Black Friday
San Francisco Gala
February 7th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Lunas Legion

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Olympia was no stranger to sudden, unexpected fights. She’d long since learned that survival was about doing the right things in the right order, simple prioritisation.

She was already moving when she heard the crack of the gunshot, diving backwards, her shield invisibly flicking on as she smashed into the drinks table her and Luan had been near, rolling over the top and sending glasses and bottles crashing to the floor as she dropped down, kicking it over.

Step one, cover. She briefly brushed over herself with her hands, heart racing as she checked for wounds; nothing. She let out a relieved sigh.

Step one, cover.

She grabbed her handgun from its holster, gripping it tightly with both hands, crouching behind her cover as she felt the mental switch that was her shield click back, signalling it was ready. Step two, weaponry. That just left step three, enemy. Figuring out who was dangerous, who needed to die.

Cautiously, she poked her head out from behind the table, surveying the scene. There were bodies, but who died wasn’t important. What mattered was who was alive and armed. The ranks of the armed included the agent who had run up and shot Luan in the head again after putting a couple bullets into him - the one in the white tee shirt and toting a pistol, the one who had also fired the first shot of this little skirmish after Alex had tried baiting her ally into a fight… Who she was exactly wasn’t clear, but she’d shown that she could shoot something as small as a glass or a spot on the side of Luan’s head, so it was worth paying attention to where she was in the room.

She hadn’t quite moved from the spot where she was still standing after shooting Luan for the third time, blood running around her sneakers as a result of the attack, and she quickly reloaded her pistol as her eyes scanned the area looking for more hostiles - they passed over the area Olympia was, but she wasn’t primarily looking for her but rather anything that could be considered a threat. She took a few steps forward… Her eyes snapped back to where they had been going when tracking Olympia, though her head was still on a swivel as she went with the safer assumption that every person here was a threat in some way.

If every person was a threat, after all, it was harder for them to surprise you.

Okay. Olympia breathed out deeply, embracing the sense of urgency and panic like an old friend rather than trying to fight it down as she slid back behind her table. She hadn’t seen whatever had happened, didn’t know what had happened, but the distinct lack of further gunfire seemed… Encouraging. But she stayed where she was regardless, crouched down behind her table; only an idiot drew attention to themselves in a firefight, and moving right now would do that.

“Guns on the floor,” the agent said in a Caucasian accent, her pistol leveled in the general area of where Olympia was - holding it with one hand rather than two, choosing the added speed of being able to swing the thing around and aim on the target rather than having the bonus in accuracy that would come from clutching it properly with both hands and bracing herself before shooting. No, right now, she needed to be mobile… Of course, she wasn’t speaking to her own people, but rather anyone with Infinity that was thinking of shooting back.

There was some chance that this was simply a trap designed to get them to lower their weapons so they couldn’t fight back against some further attack, but on the other hand, they had clearly burst in with a target - unlike the shooters spraying randomly at the previous fight, these ones had targeted one person… And anyone else they’d went for had been assuming a hostile posture, reaching for a weapon, or both. So possibly, putting down the guns wasn’t a bad option.

But choosing wrong in this case could have potentially fatal consequences.

Olympia breathed, still coiled up. She could drop the gun, come out, but then there was nothing to stop them just shooting her. Except she still had her power, and she was fairly sure she could cover the distance from where she was to where the voice had come from without dying… And it wasn’t like a table would stop bullets anyways.

Slowly, almost nervously, she reached over the side of the table, gun pointed upwards, before she dropped it to the ground, letting it clatter to the floor. She activated her shield in anticipation of any incoming bullets, just in case she had to do her worst case scenario option.

The agent didn’t shoot when the gun fell to the floor… Rather, she ran over, her pattern of movement like that of a trained soldier as she kept her head low and kept both hands on her gun to be able to fire it again if anything went south, running until she ended up right next to Olympia, the gun leveled at her… There was still a certain danger, but if she wanted her dead, she could have done it already.

“Up. I don’t know what else you have on you,” she said simply enough, as the rest of the Russians crept forward tentatively, doing a similar search. But rather than searching anyone physically, their guns were sweeping across the room, their line of sights ensuring that if someone pulled a weapon in any direction, it wouldn’t take long for shots to be returned.

It was at about the same time that Yana jumped onto one of the tables, the chair still in her hand in case she needed it. She didn’t say all that much, really, even when she was directly in front of the camera… Just wasn’t her style of hero even though her management and her rich benefactor would have preferred things that way. She did, however, deem the situation worthy of speaking right now. “Do not let any more of your countrymen die, Amerikantsy!” she shouted out from her position, gripping the chair in one hand and reaching up to take a bottle in the other before smashing it against the edge of the table and then standing straight, liquid spilling out of the bottle as she held the broken edge up as a weapon against anyone that wanted to have a run at her up here.

“And I thought improvised weapons were my schtick.” Olympia mumbled, raising her hands over the table as she stood up slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves as she stood up. She wasn’t stupid, if they wanted her dead she’d be very dead by this point in time. Her power might stop a few bullets, but it couldn’t stop as many as they could shoot at her.

“Everything in your pockets,” the agent said simply, bringing the gun a little bit closer to make her point. Not really close enough to be too threatening but close enough to prove that she was serious and that she wasn’t going to tolerate messing around…

While in the background, Yana’s sight shifted across the room as she implored the Americans to give up their fight now rather than going for weapons. “This is no joke, Infinity,” she said - her voice could actually be quite booming and deep when she used it, the intimidation factor added to by her accent, which was considerably thick and noticeable. “You can shoot… We can shoot faster. Choose your lives over your pride.”

“Just a phone.” Olympia said, slowly moving her hands down, turning out one of her pockets and slowly doing the same with the other, feeling the weight of her phone shift around until it slipped out into her hand, slowly moving her hand to show the battered and scratched screen off to the agent.

The other woman looked her over before nodding in silence and turning around quickly to pick up the gun that had been dropped, backing away as she held both of them, wielding one in each hand as she kept one aimed at Olympia and kept the other pointed low, and she started off to join the others in the Russian group that was participating in the standoff… Leaving Olympia to do whatever she felt was best as she focused on everyone else, the perceived threat from Olympia having been eliminated in her mind.

Olympia said nothing, just standing there slightly confused, trying to figure out what the flying fuck had just happened in the preceding two minutes and not really sure what she should do now. This wasn’t a situation she’d been in before, funnily enough, so she started slowly making her way towards the door to leave, keeping an eye on the Russians just in case they changed their minds. If in doubt, leaving was almost always the best option.

[Forest State]

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ROMAN TRAGEDY
“MONEY TEAM”

While Generation NEXT has had its ups and downs over the past couple of weeks as it fights for its spot to be taken seriously as a major team, their rivals from AuTech and Team Wave have only proven to be a rival that won’t go away… One that, so far, has had more reason to celebrate after early successes.

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Team Wave
Team Wave House, Paradise, Nevada
February 7th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Lunas Legion

Theme

Luxury wasn’t hard to come by in the world of superheroes - it was quite the dangerous job and it tended to be rewarded accordingly, with the biggest names having the same kinds of houses that big name celebrities did as well as all the watches, chains, and foreign cars that also came with that kind of lifestyle. But one had to admit that Team Wave, based fittingly in Vegas, went above and beyond. Multiple flat screen TVs sat on the wall in the living room, around the back there was a pool that rivaled the Olympics for size as well as style in the surrounding area where palm trees and exotic flowers grew, and the garage was filled with cars that were distinctively fine in quality.

The main room, of course, was one of the centerpieces of the place - aside from the screens there were plenty of other things to take note of ranging from the modern art statues in some spots scattered around the room to the occasional gold plating on the walls, bursts of the rare metal as well as other valuable materials adding color to certain spots in the otherwise white environment as a large light hung overhead, the outside of it adorned in similarly valuable materials… Maybe emeralds, although the light itself was more modern art than it was the classical chandelier that was associated with wealth and old money. Because Wave was anything but old money - being a team for fourth gens that was made to counter the more strict Team Infinity’s efforts in this area, they didn’t have any trouble embracing the tastes of their new generation base, the clean white and the contrasting colors of metals and bright colors making for a rainbow of style for anyone that stepped into the living room and took a look around.

The Team Wave house is considered one of the best in the country.

This place was also where the team was currently gathered, a number of HBO cameras sitting around the room also, some of them manned and some of them left to record autonomously, to get their uncensored reactions as the news played on both of the large TV flat screens, showing a feed of what was happening with their rivals from Generation NEXT at the moment - it seemed the Infinity branded team was considerably less lucky through their first weeks, as while Wave had avoided trouble and had only bagged criminals in their opening days and week, NEXT had been attacked once by villains and been attacked a second time by… Russians? But it appeared it was their own fault, one of their members having hilariously baited the other side into an attack not thinking that it would come.

There was a mistake to be had, it seemed, in underestimating the willingness of the Russians to fight - not every country was like the United States, where looking good for the camera might come before something like basic respect. Respect, however, had seemingly been shown to the Infinity team not with words from some parent or wise adult or even through gained experience, but in a sudden lesson that mainly involved bullets and quick death. It would have maybe been tragic if the American team hadn’t been asking for it so badly, which made the entire incident the kind of thing that one might find in a karmic justice compilation video.

Sure, NEXT had higher ratings for now and would likely continue to have them after this latest episode was out… But how much of that would simply be from people tuning in to watch them crash and burn spectacularly in the fight with the Russians that they had started before getting their ass kicked? That remained to be seen, and it was surely a question that was running through the minds of the members of Team Wave who were gathered to check the news out for themselves here in this luxurious living room in Nevada, where they had remained so far rather than traveling from LA to San Francisco like NEXT had managed.

“Does anyone-“ Elis started, throwing a piece of popcorn from the forcefield-bowl floating beside her from where she was sprawled over a couch, pausing to eat it before continuing. “Know why we even think of the trash fire as a rival?” She continued, flicking another piece of popcorn into her mouth, It was top quality entertainment after all, it deserved to be treated as such.

“Apparently they’re better funded,” said Erin Gallo, although it was clear that it was a joke to her as her eyes traveled the TV screen and she tried to avoid laughing too much and too overtly. Although, she couldn’t hold it in completely, because every word she said had a stifled laugh behind it.

“They say they have…” Allie started, her arms folded as a chuckle escaped her own lips, before she rolled her eyes to help drive the point home that she thought it was ridiculous. “Better talent,” she finished, saying the words in a way that made it very clear she considered it a completely farcical statement.

“Talent for fucking shit up and not in the good way.” Elis snorted in derision, throwing another bit of popcorn into her mouth. “We don’t even need to do anything, like, we can just film our reactions to their fuckups and we’re golden.”

“Ain’t even scared talking about them right here on TV. What are they going to do? Try to jump us like they tried starting a fight with the Russians?” Allie said with a chuckle, reaching to her waist to pull out a Glock pistol as well as lighting a small fire in one of her hands. “Bitch, please… I’ll have someone slumped like that Alex kid or show one of ‘em what heat actually means if they get asshurt and try something. I actually hope we don’t run into them, don’t feel like messing up my clothes when they decide to randomly attack us.”

“If the Russians even leave any of them alive.” Elis let out a dark laugh. “Like, they can say it’s self-defence, NEXT started it.”

“Starting to think that there is no Substance M or whatever this thing is that gives people powers if you take it,” said Britt, speaking up for once even though she wasn’t usually the type to trash talk. “It’s just something that pussies came up with to explain why things like this happen against regular people with no powers…”

“You might be onto something,” Erin remarked, before turning around as Britton’s father, Jon Audley, entered the room and entered the shot of the camera. Of course, when Audley showed up around the team, he often had something to say, which was many times a positive for them.

“You know, since the Wave is crushing the opposition right now,” Audley said, chuckling to himself at the low hanging pun that he’d just made before continuing. “I think it’s time you guys had a bit of a reward ahead of time! New bonus, everyone, what do you think of that!?”

The CEO opened up the bag that was in his hand, tossing bundles of cash towards each of the members of the team - apparently, something like five thousand per bundle if one stopped and took the time to count it all. It wasn’t cheap, at least not for a random bonus that they were getting on this Friday evening as a reward for their margin of success against their rivals. It was kind of funny, how they had found success in everything except for the ratings - that’d come soon enough, if NEXT stopped getting into the kind of high profile situations that made everyone tune in regardless of quality.

“Ow…” Elis winced, rubbing the side of her head as she grabbed the bundle of cash that had hit her, picking it up and leafing through it, somewhere in between confused and awed and generally not sure what to make of it. Having cash flung randomly at her wasn’t something she was used to.

The others seemed decently used to it, however - some of them anyway. Allie wasn’t one to miss on cash being thrown her way and caught it reflexively, while Erin jumped up on the couch to snag a misguided throw from the CEO, and Andrew Saint Pierre caught it without any problem… The only reason Audley was here wasn’t to throw cash, however, there was something else. Something rather important.

“And since NEXT is going to be on their own trip to Japan soon enough to head to the Spring Crucible, one of the biggest training events and biggest events in general for Infinity teams, we have our own trip planned. Thought since we were doing so well, you guys would like to find out about it now,” said Audley. “In fact… We’re not headed that far from there. We’re headed to China, sponsored for the trip by the Taitan Group and attending the more eastern version of the same event, with teams from both China and Russia. Might be a bit of a shock compared to what we’re used to here but you know what they say… A billion people are there. Make sure that all of ‘em are your audience. What do you say, team? Middle Kingdom or bust?”

“Shit...” Was Elis’ reflexive reaction, the word oddly phrased with her accent, making it hard to pin down exactly what kind of reaction it really was. China was a hard market for heroes to get into from outside; a billion people to be metahumans and an audience alike. Getting in and staying for foreign teams was… Hard.

“It’ll be a hell of a challenge at least.” Elis finally settled on, an easy, cocky grin coming to her face as she tried to balance her stack of cash on a forcefield.

“But when’s China ever seen someone like us?” Erin asked as a counter to Elis stating that it was a challenge. Sure it was… But they also had certain advantages. “They’ve just got government teams, corporate teams, that kind of thing. Yeah, they have the Tencent Golden Dragons and everyone’s seen them… But how many people over there have seen a bunch of young guns with their own personality and all the flair we’ve got on this team? We’ll introduce ‘em to it before the other side does.”

Champagne like we won a championship…

“I figure someone must’ve tried it, but they probably fucked it up.” Elis said, still grinning. “Just like NEXT. We just gotta do it right.”

“I think this invite deserves some kind of celebration,” said Britton, grinning for once despite her usually somewhat reserved nature, and running to the table to pick up a champagne bottle before she shook it somewhat and pointed it at Elis, popping the cap off and letting the liquid spray out at the other hero - the hero that she’d had an awkward relationship with, refusing to even speak to her for three days after their initial meeting thanks to the circumstances that, admittedly, had been caused by Britton and her… Desperation was perhaps the right word. Whatever it was, it had clouded her decision making back then - and probably still did to a degree.

Elis yelped as the champagne sprayed out at her, stepping backwards and tripping back onto the chair she’d been lounging on earlier. Grumbling something in Bulgarian to herself, Elis stood back up, soaked in champagne, and dumped her forcefield-bowl of popcorn onto Britton’s head. Not much of a revenge, but it was something. It didn’t deter the blonde for that long, however, as Britton simply ran up on her and decided that she was going to get the last laugh, wrapping her arms around her teammate to take her down to the ground in a clean tackle, champagne spilling in the process during the sudden roughhousing as the bottle flew out of Britton’s hand - appropriately chaotic for such a celebration. Elis went down, wincing as she hit the ground, not having expected Britton to tackle her to the ground and letting out a defeated sigh. At least this team was more fun than her last one was and, well, more like a team.

The moment afterwards would be somewhat more awkward as Britton found herself in a new position, having gotten her teammate to the ground but remaining there now on top of her, breathing in and out deeply to catch her breath from the sudden burst of exertion she had put on running around the room to get the champagne and then spraying it on Elis before tackling her… It was awkward being close enough to someone to feel their breath and yet that was the spot they were both in right now, only about an inch or so away from each other and their bodies pressed into each other with one of Britton’s hands on one of Elis’ wrists.

“You can get off me now Britt.” Elis said dryly, not moving from where she was on the ground. She wasn’t the kind of person who really found things awkward, not even something like this. It didn’t seem like her counterpart felt like that however, as Britt froze up somewhat.

“Ahaha,” she chuckled under her breath softly, before she slowly pushed herself up and off, looking away and flicking her hair forwards so it came down over her face rather than exposing her to Elis seeing her like this. She stood up straight to her full height, the day when they had met at first playing back through her head - the same day that had resulted in her not speaking to Elis for three days due to hurt feelings.

“Thanks.” Elis said simply as she moved to stand up, looking away from Britt and not really sure what to say or do now, instead staying silent.

The awkwardness seemed to be broken up by the fact that Allie had popped another bottle of champagne however, jumping on the table as she sprayed it in the direction of the cameras towards the edge of the room, a smirk on her face as she did so - probably a highlight that would make it to the next episode of Team Wave’s own show… Which was a contender to beat Generation NEXT out in the ratings once things evened out a bit.

Sure, NEXT had luck on the draw between the two.

But when more time had passed, and the world saw both teams for what they were, could they really keep it over the upstarts that were gunning for their spot and doing a damn good job in their own role as heroes?

[Durmatagno]

Fae "Daoine" Drachoit
Chronze Gala
San Francisco, California
February 7, 2020

Fae wasn't sure what happened, one moment she was getting ready to take a sip of her drink, and talk to her teammate, the next there was a series of gunshots, blood splattering on her face as the man next to her dropped, and a crash as her drink dropped to the floor, she spun quickly, reaching for her Glock 20 with high speed. Then guns were pointed at her, she didn't want to die here, so she did the only logical thing, and raised her hands in surrender. Following instructions, she let herself get disarmed of both her gun and her knife, and as a gesture to ensure no further problems, she also dropped the seed bag from her belt. From there she moved to leave, her weapons could be replaced easily, and she didn't even bother bringing her phone. She kept her hands where they could be seen, and didn't even bother to use her powers. Plenty of things she could use, but at this point, all she'd cause was more bloodshed. It was time to just head outside, and deal with what happened later.

She new this would be a media fiasco, for everyone involved. The dead and wounded, the shooters, and everyone else here. It looked bad for everyone, but things could be worse. She'd seen worse situations, never caught in them like this, but she had caused some. She had fond memories of one time she'd tricked an encampment in Mexico into killing each other, and finished off the wounded. This was the first time she'd been in such dire straits herself, even the attack in LA where she'd been wounded hadn't been anywhere near this bad, till a fiasco, but not one that had threatened her as much. She'd survive she always did, but she couldn't say the same for the bodies still bleeding on the floor. Once she was outside, she turned her head to the sky. Couldn't see much in a big city like this, but it still helped focus her mind, things had and could be worse, but apparently she had to keep a closer eye on her teammates to, they could get her killed even when they weren't supposed to be fighting.

[Forest State]

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UNIT 851
“WANDERERS”

Unit 851 prepares for future assignments, the team gathers for a breakfast and discussion of plans. This, of course, makes for some interesting conversation and brings out some hidden similarities within the team members.

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Rosalie Morrigan
Unit 851 Firebase, Chelyabinsk, Russia
February 11th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Durmatagno

Rosalie’s eyes flicked open and she stared groggily up at the ceiling. An unfamiliar one, a new base, a new project, and new people around her. Still, waking up in a bed was somewhat unusual for her given her tendency to fall asleep at her workbench. Stretching, she climbed out of bed and threw on the clothes she had set aside for herself, tossing her pajama shirt and pants onto the bed for use again later that night. Putting on her arm was the last step of her morning routine, before she, still yawning, headed downstairs to join the others for breakfast. She had work to do, but breakfast was important, and she should at least speak with this group outside of work on occasion, after all she wasn’t quite sure how long they’d keep her around. No one kept her around for more than a few months at a time.

The scene downstairs was slightly chaotic with much of the team gathered in some way or another in the room that had been converted to a makeshift dining room of sorts, a table sitting in the middle of it along with chairs, as well as some other chairs which were placed slightly adjacent to it. Breakfast hadn’t exactly been served yet… But it was being worked on one room over, in the similarly haphazard and makeshift kitchen where someone - the one that was called Punk, probably, one of the androids - was working on that. While on the other hand, Melanie was already at the head of the table across from where Rosalie had entered the room, glancing up at her while chatting with Sparrow, who was sitting on the edge of it and glanced over her shoulder upon Rosalie’s entry.

Rosalie quite disliked mornings, if she was honest she’d rather sleep till noon and not go to bed till four or five in the morning, but her work didn’t always allow for that. Right now she wanted coffee, but it didn’t appear to be done yet, or at least, there wasn’t any for her yet. So for now she just took a seat to wait, so far she’d only spoken to Melanie and Sparrow, but she knew there were two, maybe three others. She wasn’t sure on the exact number, she’d spent time drafting the solutions for the overheating problem instead of memorizing that specific piece of information. She looked at the two in the room after finishing another big yawn.

“Morning.”

“Was wondering if you were ever going to get up,” Melanie said, stretching - her casual nature showing even now as she decided against wearing too much, apparently just having on a long tee shirt which stretched to cover the upper part of her legs… Though that wasn’t to say she wasn’t in position to show quite a lot depending on how she sit. She didn’t seem like the type that was bothered much by it, however. While on the other hand, Sparrow’s look was more rugged, already wearing her jacket like she was ready to head out at a moment’s notice and deal with whatever the group needed done - she said nothing for now but offered a wave with the back of her hand, sliding from the edge of the table.

“I was up late getting the drafts for cost and time estimation on the overheating problem done. Plus I don’t like mornings, and they’ve rarely liked me.”

Rosalie offered a wave back to Sparrow. Rosalie herself had winter jeans, and a t-shirt on. If she had to head outside, there was a jacket slung over her arm, which she moved to the back of her chair, and a glove in her pocket. She didn’t really need two, only one arm could get frostbite after all. She wouldn’t question Melanie’s choice of dress, one of her only friends in school would have walked around in a microskirt and crop top 24/7 if she could have gotten away with it. She looked at her phone and frowned, wondering why her alarm, backup alarm, and third alarm didn’t wake her. They were set, it was the right timezone, and she had the AM PM correct. Must have just slept through them.

“Well, either my phone was muted, or I slept through my alarm. That...hasn’t happened in awhile, usually only after a few days with no sleep.”

“You did good work on that I assume?” Melanie asked, raising an eyebrow as she reached for something on the table, her usual e-cigarette that she could be spotted with half the time. “I have to admit, you got onto this… Impressively quick, since you’re just coming here and all.”

“Yeah, well for the most part it was just upscaling things I’ve already done, or at least modeled out in the past, with some tweaks. Besidess, I enjoy my work, otherwise I’d probably have gone into silicon valley like my parents, and hated myself sitting behind a desk.”

“I suppose that’s respectable… Can’t say much about anyone else’s career after getting kicked out of MIT,” Melanie said with a slight shrug, smirking as she thought back to the memories. “And a few other places at that. I’m more well traveled than you probably would think, you know. I’ve… Got more smarts than I look like.”

“I was at MIT for awhile, it’s where I started working on an arm that wouldn’t be fried within a month or two of me getting it. Nearly bankrupted myself, and then I got kicked out when I….melted a professor's car, and nearly overloaded the electrical system in the building I was in. Then a Japanese company flew me over to Hokkaido to help them with a project, then some Russians in Volgograd, then Nanjing, Hong Kong, and I’ve kept bouncing around. Never got my degree.”

“Been around some of the top places in Europe, and MIT obviously, but the whole college thing didn’t work because… Not everyone is ready for things to move forward, you know. AI scares people, they try to limit it - for understandable reasons. But I’m not always a reasonable person. I’ve gotta keep pushing it, asking the wrong questions, stepping over the line…” said Melanie, taking a drag from her e-cigarette before continuing. “And the establishment doesn’t like that. So I said fuck ‘em. Went into security instead, as a specialist in this kind of thing, ended up coming out of it with a business of my own… Which you can see right now.”

“Well it got me a job, so there’s that. No one’s really kept me around for more than a month or two, so I’ve started packing light.”

Rosalie didn’t really have a...verbally expressed opinion on the AI limits vs advancement issue. Part of that was because the last time she’d been in Japan she’d had a short thing with a Japanese AI working security on her assignment. Didn’t last long, was more physical than anything else, but Rosalie had learned to shoot from her, and practiced in some of her free time. Seemed a useful skill considering the kind of companies that wanted her expertise, Melanie being a case in point.

“I’ve been in… Various places since moving into security. Few trips into the Middle East, a lot of stuff in the Caucasus, some more low key stuff in Europe with guarding certain people of locations or whatever. The early days showed me a lot of things I still use today. These days, I find myself pushing the limits more and more and watching the others follow,” Melanie shrugged, as Punk came from the kitchen, starting to place down the plates with food as a couple of the others started to show up - the inspectors Wyatt and Lyev. “The designs I told you to reference when working on your assignment are mine, you know. Distributing the processing power through different lanes with only some of them being active at one time? Was my big idea. Ended up creating maybe the fiercest android I’ve ever known.”

“Wait wait wait, are...are you telling me that no one was using multi core processing or distributed processing with androids? That...just...okay, I need coffee before I fathom how bad things must be with the limiters for that to only just be a recent thing.”

Rosalie got up and made herself a cup, not waiting for it to be brought to her, she tended to do things for herself regardless of the situation. She had a fair amount of sugar and milk in it when she sat back down and started drinking it. Her hair was still standing on end a bit from the shock of the perceived idiocy, her control wavering enough to make her hair stand on end like normal static would. It slowly smoothed out as she started drinking, whether or not it was from processing the information or simply waking up more remained to be seen.

“It’s not exactly like regular computing,” admitted Melanie. “The main processor is part of the… Neural simulation. It’s highly detailed, highly complex… Similar to the human brain. There’s a reason it’s not so easy to just back up the mind of an android, after all. At least not a realistic one. Now imagine plugging extra connections into your brain. You see where… Challenges may come in with that? In the case of the design I told you to look at, the brain design itself is altered for the extra connections.”

“You don’t want me to start imagining that, I’ll have draft designs by the end of the day, and lose track of my main work. I’ll see which of my drafted solutions will have the easiest time integrating with the alterations needed for the connection tonight. Got some unpacking to do, and maintenance on my arm after I’m done eating. Sadly I have not yet figured out a way to never need to maintain the thing.”

Rosalie’s arm wasn’t visibly cybernetic unless she opened up some of the covering or disconnected it. She preferred it that way, drew less stares, and not the good kind of staring. It didn’t help that anyone that knew cybernetics could tell it wasn’t standard, and that drew different kind of attention. Rosalie looked down at her food and took a good sized bite, she wasn’t a slow eater, but neither was she a messy one.

“You might as well meet the others while you’re here. Wyatt, Lyev, and Punk. Of course, the first two are inspectors, the ones giving orders to androids… Last one is a member of the actual field team. Currently the only one like that we have right now. Punk is working with Wyatt as a partner, while Lyev’s partner… Well, that’s what you and me are working on, actually,” Melanie said, pointing out a few faces around the table.

Rosalie looked at each face in turn, and burned the name into her mind alongside the face. She didn’t know how much she’d be interacting with them, but at the very least she’d be able to remember them. She nodded and took another bite of her food. Her right arm moved a little fast without the snubnose in it, she had put on one of her backup arms so she could maintain her main one after breakfast, though now she thought she might need a shower to. Thing was waterproof, so she usually showered with her arm on, though not always.

“Alright, got the names and faces. I can probably give you the best draft by lunch based on the alterations I need to consider, but I’ll give you all four workable ones. Number five would be too fragile for any field work, so I’ve scrapped it.”

“We have a fair amount of funds this time to spend on things like this… Bigger jobs and all that. So we’ll see,” nodded Melanie, satisfied with the plan that Rosalie had laid out - so far, at least, they were somewhat ahead of schedule. It was just a matter of whether or not the plans would work, or if they would hold their progress up with some kind of new problem that was inherent to whatever new design was used. Experimental technology was promising but also… Could be frustrating.

Rosalie nodded as she finished her food. She didn’t tend to stick around and be overly social when she had work to do, not until after she was too tired to continue working anyway. She stood up and grabbed her jacket, stopping to grab her coffee, finishing it off before grabbing her dishes and taking them to the kitchen. She passed back through the main room.

“Gonna go take a shower and get that maintenance work done, then I’ll update my drafts and have them to you after lunch.”

She gave everyone a wave before turning, and stepping into the same hallway she’d used to get to the room. She would, however, be followed by one person from the table who she hadn’t said much yet.

From the voice, it seemed distinctly like Sparrow. “Where ya going that has you rushin’ off like that?” Sparrow asked, practically ignoring the fact that Rosalie had just said it as she moved swiftly after her, heading up the stairs with her while walking just behind, so she would definitely be heard.

“To..take a shower and see about fixing my other arm a little.”

Rosalie said after a moment of confusion, turning to Sparrow. She wasn’t really in much of a rush for this, she wanted to get to solving an engineering problem, they were quite entertaining for her.

“Just wonderin’ something, were you thinkin’ of becoming an inspector or something? When you’re done with this project they got you working on?” Sparrow continued, stopping once Rosalie had turned to face her, one hand against the wall and one eyebrow raised.

The question caught Rosalie off guard, so she hesitated with her answer, though she was going to be honest.

“I...not really? Haven’t really planned ahead at all, just been bouncing from project to project as people hire and fire me. It’s certainly not off the table, just never really had a reason or chance to go looking for it I suppose.”

Rosalie didn’t tend to think ahead except for her next engineering problem. She could fight sure, but she’d never done more than punch or shock someone, never shot at someone. It wasn’t something she had directly considered, but she wasn’t against the idea. Her life was a lonely one, bouncing from place to place, having no friends, nothing permanent to rely on.

“It’d be a lot less lonely, that’s for damn sure.”

“W-Was just askin’ because I don’t… Have anyone that’s my partner or anything,” Sparrow said after a brief pause, her voice even although she stuttered slightly with saying it. Seemed the androids having different partners was a pretty big deal considering both of the other human field operatives had partners - only reason Melanie didn’t was presumably that she was strictly an engineer as well as the one who handled the business side of their operation.

“Must be nearly as lonely as bouncing from place to place.”

Rosalie said after a moment. The stutter didn’t catch her off guard, it was more what Sparrow was saying. Rosalie chose her words carefully as she was...quite bad with people most of the time, and that included androids. Rosalie tilted her head, multi-colored eyes studying Sparrow for a moment as she wanted to find the next words to say.

“No one likes being totally alone.”

“It’s not… Totally. But I still kinda feel like… It’s somethin’ everyone else has, so it doesn’t really feel great, y’know?” Sparrow said, speaking a bit more calmly after the reply, still leaning against the wall, her eyes on Rosalie.

“Not entirely, but then I haven’t had anyone stick around for more than a few months for....three almost four years now. Maybe I just got used to being alone, but I do remember how nice it feels to have someone that wants you around.”

“Oh,” Sparrow said simply. “So you’re… Gonna be gone from here in a little, when you’re done with this stuff you’re working on?”

“That’s up to Melanie I think, honestly...getting kind of tired of being bounced around. Everything I own fits in like a box, a bag, and a suitcase.”

“If you end up staying around here, will ya be my partner or something?” asked Sparrow, taking a leap of faith - but if Rosalie wasn’t going to be here that long anyway, it wasn’t like it hurt to ask. So regardless of if it had a chance of changing Rosalie’s opinion of her, she threw the question out there anyway.

“I...sure, I’d have to talk to Melanie about joining more permanently, but sure. I can be your partner.”

It took Rosalie nearly a full literal minute to answer. She knew what it felt like to be alone and feel unwanted. It was a shitty feeling, and not one she’d wish on her worst enemy. She gave Sparrow a legitimate, warm smile alongside her answer. They’d be an odd pairing given their differences just from what Rosalie already knew, but it didn't seem a bad idea to her.

The answer seemed to take the usually outgoing android by surprise, causing her to pause for some moments before actually giving a reply, but it wasn’t that long before she was herself once again and gave a thumbs up sign. “Well uhh… That’s a little unexpected. But pretty cool. Guess I’ll have to talk to Mel ‘bout that, and uhh, make your case for you,” she said with something of a grin spreading on her face. “I’ll get to that soon, if you want? Er… I’ll just do it.”

An interesting proposition - Melanie was of course the one that handled hiring, and if there was anyone that was going to make a decision on keeping someone in the team long term, it was going to be her. But she hadn’t said anything about the length Rosalie would be here. She was simply being paid for the couple of jobs she had been assigned. But on the other hand… For once, the chance of staying for longer hadn’t been ruled out.

And that meant that underneath the jobs Rosalie had already been assigned, there was a further opportunity. One that someone already with this group was now willing to advocate for.

[Lunas Legion]

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ROMAN TRAGEDY
“METAMORPHOSIS”

The games of the Monarch Casino have continued since the events of February… But between the main players at the table are others, who hold no seat but wield influence regardless - superheroes employed by the Casino’s members, mercenaries taking their jobs, and others who serve to benefit greatly from the behind the scenes games. Business agent and shapeshifter Feng Tsai, better known under the name Linzey Pennington, is one of those peripheral players in the game - and her STRPWR agency has proven to make a difference in the game through its management of certain figures such as Russian hero and Vasya Andreev’s prized prospect, Yana ‘Ladya’ Vedneyeva. Roughly a month after ending up on the back foot thanks to the events of the Chronze Gala, however, Pennington has landed in Dubai to make a big deal which will increase her own position and that of STRPWR… Through picking up a highly rated prospect that so far, has been looked over by much of the world and left for the harsh circumstances of carving out a career in the deserts of Dubai.

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Jumeirah, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
March 6th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Lunas Legion

In the world of heroes, things were rarely simple - it only would have taken a simple outcome in this case to get the desired result when the interests of Russian oligarch Vasya Andreev and Brazilian Senator Xande Pereyra had clashed at the Chronze Gala in San Francisco in February, with both of them having bets at stake in the long running game of the Monarch Casino… Bets not just on money, but on influence and status within the table. Bets to stay close to the others in the rankings to avoid having to take further risks down the line. Really, neither bet had been too complex.

Andreev predicted that his own Russian hero, ‘Ladya’ Vedneyeva, would outperform Infinity’s heroes of the same age and under after Generation NEXT had shown itself to be off to a rough start. Pereyra, on the other hand, predicted that NEXT would have trouble again, this time from regular humans using the new power drug that was fabled in the streets and had been seen in a couple of instances so far, Substance M - and in this case, the trouble had been planned entirely by Pereyra himself with the intention of winning the bet and dealing a blow to the Americans… Something that would likely benefit teams that Pereyra himself, and other figures in Brazil, had high stakes in. Some members of government, after all, held stake in some of the most notable teams in the South American powerhouse - the second largest type of ownership, of course, was corporate.

When Yana Vedneyeva had shown up at the same gala that Pereyra had intended to cause trouble at, it wasn’t hard for someone with the right info to tell just what was happening. The intent had been for her to stop whatever trouble Pereyra’s men intended to start, which would boost her own popularity in the west - helping Andreev win his bet while denying Pereyra his own, as Pereyra hadn’t just implied an attack would happen but implied that NEXT wouldn’t be able to handle it… And somehow, despite this battle being clearly set out, both sides had lost.

There had been a fight alright, but one chaotic variable had changed things. It hadn’t been a fight between the Russian and the Brazilian infiltrators that had shown up on Pereyra’s orders - though they didn’t know their employer, they were simply members of the criminal underworld who had received a payment in BitCoin along with precise instructions about what to do and where to go to pick up their equipment, including the fake key cards they used for their entry into the gala. In the end, however, those thugs had done nothing. The real battle had been between Infinity and Yana’s entourage, all because one member of Infinity had went off the deep end and picked a fight with little context and little reason, giving Yana no option but to call her boys.

Because according to the laws of the streets, the law that many heroes from the rougher parts of the world than the metropolitan United States operated under, one couldn’t just expect disrespect without retaliation - and the remarks from Alexander hadn’t just been disrespect, but practically an invitation to fight, as if the drunk metahuman had painted a giant red target onto his chest. And because of that one drunken moment which the hero had paid for using his life, along with one other member of Generation NEXT who had been gunned down while looking for a fight in the chaotic aftermath, there were suddenly two very angry members of the Casino who had both lost their bets - Yana’s clash with the American heroes drastically lowered her ratings in the United States and Pereyra’s men hadn’t had a chance to cause trouble of their own before the place was being evacuated.

Some had even said that the incident would cause a new split between the United States and Russia, though meetings in Vancouver between the Bureau of Metahuman Activity and the International Metahuman Directorate seemed to result in a covert agreement that nothing was going to happen - most of the blame had been shifted onto the one who started the conflict, but that didn’t mean the Russians were exactly in the market for justice considering they’d gotten that the moment Alexander had been riddled with bullets from four shooters in retaliation for his provocations. Thus, despite the incident being talked about on the news and social media and Yana losing ratings in America, nothing was ultimately going to happen about it.

The current center of intrigue for Linzey Pennington.

That didn’t mean there weren’t consequences at another level.

Staring out the window of her hotel near the water in Dubai, one of the highest rated ones she could find of course, Feng Tsai contemplated the situation she was in - no one wanted to have someone from the Casino after them, or even looking at them negatively. The Casino was one of the groups that ran the world. They bet on outcomes of world events as a game, and the only people powerful enough to do something like that were… Far beyond what the average person could handle. Feng wasn’t the average person, but she still questioned whether she would be able to get out of this intact. Because much of the blame had fallen on her shoulders, even if an Infinity hero giving in to insanity for a moment wasn’t something that was in her hands.

It had practically been an Act of God, but it had thrown her off from her mission too. Because Feng wasn’t a player in the game in the same sense as the others at the table. She was involved at a different level, a mercenary and a business agent who had worked with multiple names around that table in the past, making agreements rather than permanent deals. Her allegiance shifted with her needs and what was available, her company was independent and owned by her rather than some benefactor, even if they did take money from them at some points. One might not think a business agent was relevant to a game about world events, a game that had politicians and top executives and superheroes playing in it. But through her STRPWR agency, - pronounced starpower - she had found herself in the position of working with Andreev to manage his prize fighter, Krasnaya Zvezda superhero Yana ‘Ladya’ Vedneyeva.

All she had needed to do was get through the press tour and wait for the polling numbers to come in, likely enjoying an added boost from a victory that should have come against Pereyra’s men at the Gala, where Yana would’ve fought alongside Generation NEXT despite flexing on them earlier in the event, hopefully increasing her fans in the west. Instead, her and her entourage had been responsible for two bodies… Even if they hadn’t had a choice. It was either lose face at home or lose face overseas, and the former wasn’t an option. Feng had taken the first shots of the battle, but she had only done it because there was no other option and if someone had to shoot, it was better her than Ladya. At least, there was no image circulating the internet now of Yana coming back into the building with an AK in her hands.

Stiil, things didn’t fare great for STRPWR at this point, or its CEO and head agent. Obviously, Andreev wasn’t happy with his famous hero taking a PR hit from this and losing out on 20 thousand chips, which was a rather big deal when it happened over something like this. Feng hadn’t caused it, but she would sure take some of the blame for it thanks to the fact that she was Yana’s manager who had been right there with her. As if there was some way she could have stopped it… Yana knew the laws of the streets just as well as Feng did. There was no way she would have allowed Feng to just stop her from fighting. If she hadn’t rushed in, her crew still would have.

The reason why she was in Dubai right now wasn't for the view overlooking the highway and the lush green spots which could be found around the city - although that was one benefit. The reason she was in Dubai was to help right the problems. More accurately, it was to prove she was still worth something. Even if she hadn’t been able to do the impossible and prevent what had happened from happening. She’d snatch a hell of a signing for STRPWR and then she’d shift the cards to punish Infinity also. It had been one of their heroes to get her into this precarious position, after all, and she didn’t intend to just let that go.

It was a gamble of course, it required putting a lot of capital down up front and she wasn’t sure that some of her former sponsors at the table at the Monarch Casino would be willing to just give her more anytime soon - but there was a chance to make back far more than she was investing here if she played this the right way. And more importantly, if the prospect she was looking at panned out… Stepping away from the window, she activated her power and her face began to shift, her hair also changing face as well as her body, which gained some inches as she stepped into a more regal frame, red hair now draped over her shoulders where her black hair had once been, her eyes having also changed from their rather generic brown.

She was no longer the one behind the mask, Feng Tsai, but someone different entirely - Linzey Pennington, super-agent and CEO of the STRPWR agency, which would soon gain its newest member if she moved quickly and aggressively here… As soon as she had landed at Dubai International, she had been sure to call one of her contacts and get the number of someone she could speak to within the Dubai Desert Eagles. Now, she was about to use that number. Picking up her phone, she quickly called it as she started going through the process of changing into something more agentlike, not caring for the fact that she was multitasking.

“This is Linzey Pennington of STRPWR Limited…” she said as she shed her leather jacket for something more formal. “I’d like to inquire about buying out one of your team members’ contracts immediately…”

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Sayf wasn’t someone who got out that much from her team’s compound. Either they went out all together or not at all, and she’d rather not at all when it came to spending any length of time with the rest of her team.

Which meant she spent most of her time in her room where she didn’t have to deal with them, since she could only tolerate for a certain time before the urge to set fire to the entire complex to get their sticks out of their collective asses.

She heard the sound of a knock on her door and rolled over on her bed, pulling her headphones off and sitting up. “Come in.” She called out unenthusiastically, quickly running a hand through her unruly mop of hair to make herself a tiny bit more presentable ; it was rare the team had any good news for their resident problem member.

The door opened, a uniformed member of her team’s support staff stepping inside but not moving further into the room. “You’re being bought out, start packing.” He declared bluntly, Sayf sitting there frozen in surprise.

“Throwing me out so quickly?” Sayf asked, hopping off of her bed and moving to grab her case from under her bed, but the staff member had already vanished, the door shut.

She wasn’t really sure what she’d expected from them other than that, but she set to packing regardless. Wasn’t like the support staff had ever been particularly helpful either, so she’d assume she had like an hour to get out.

At least she didn’t have any goodbyes to say.

So it was that around half an hour later with a weight off of her shoulders, Sayf practically strolled out the front gates, not exactly having been told anything at all other than ‘get the hell out’ but in more polite terms. They hadn’t even told her who had her contract now, unhelpful bastards. Still, she figured someone would be by to collect her or she’d get a call or something. There was no obvious sign of someone on the street waiting for her, however, strangely enough… But as she did move to the front gate, she’d notice a red and blue Ford GT, the kind that someone might expect from a racing team, accelerating from the other side of the street and quickly moving over to the curb of where she was standing, coming to a quick halt with the help of the powerful braking.

Dubai is no stranger to expensive cars.

One of the tinted windows was rolled down, and she would soon see a redheaded woman inside looking her over before speaking. “Sayf…? Yeah, that’s you. The name’s Linzey Pennington. CEO of STRPWR Limited, the company that owns your contract right now. The Desert Eagles transferred the rights after I had the buyout fee paid. You’re going to want to get in… There’s a fair amount of things to talk about.”

“More like literally everything.” Sayf said, moving to drop her suitcase into the boot before climbing into the passenger side, shutting the door before continuing. “Team all but threw me out.”

Linzey accelerated once Sayf was inside, pulling away from the curb and heading en route to get on the highway. “Yeah, well, amateur management doesn’t know what to do with talent and contracts and such. Be glad that you’re not going to have your career wasted by that. I’d say I’m doing it out of the goodness of my heart but I have my own motives, too. However, those motives will prove to further your own success also - you have a certain role in fulfilling a vendetta of mine,” she said, as if she already expected Sayf to know these things, not even looking over at her as she kept one hand on the wheel and navigated traffic.

“Who’s burning to death then, literally or figuratively?” Sayf asked, taking it in stride. She wasn’t naive enough to believe she’d have had her contract bought out and not have something thrown at her.

“Infinity and in particular their Generation NEXT team have put me in a rather compromising position,” Linzey said with a fire in her voice. “I have my plans for getting back for that… But sometimes, doing things outside of the public view is for the better. I’m offering to put you in connection with some very powerful people - more powerful people than you’ve ever met before, that would make the royal family here in the UAE seem like small timers in comparison. And to put your career somewhere it hasn’t been before… You’ll have to cooperate, of course. Dealing with powerful people is a double edged sword, and with a larger spotlight, comes larger requirements. Or rather, more important ones.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you bought me out of there-“ Sayf point with her thumb back the way they’d come. “If you asked me to burn down the Burj Khalifa I’d probably do it. You put me in with this type of people, for someone you’ve never met and have probably only ever seen the censored parts of my appearances…” Sayf let out a whistle. “You have a hell of a lot of confidence in me. Guess I’ll just have to do my best not to disappoint.”

“Call it having an eye for these kinds of things,” Linzey said nonchalantly as she turned onto the highway, picking up speed as she stepped on the gas pedal of the GT. “And having access to some of the national intelligence of the People’s Republic of China as well as Egypt. Trading information can get you a hell of a long way, especially if the other side thinks they can get something out of giving you the info. But that’s a story for another day - it goes to establish the level of my connections, hopefully. As for the future, making a million dollars is better than having five minutes of fame causing trouble… If you want to truly get back at someone, you don’t just destroy them. At least not yet, no. You humiliate them. Which is what I’m aiming to do to NEXT as we speak.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Sayf asked, leaning back in her seat. “I’m one metahuman from a team that paints itself as far bigger than it is, not sure how much help I’m going to be in humiliating one of the biggest up and coming metahuman squads around.”

“It’s a game of chess… You’re one piece in this mess,” Linzey assured, glancing over at Sayf. “You don’t have to understand everything at this point and if I told you all the details at once you wouldn’t remember it all in the first place. Just know that if you follow the instructions… You’ll do fine. And for your team, well… One of the first orders of business is getting you somewhere far bigger, and I already have some plans and preliminary calls made about that.”

“Any hints on where you’re throwing me?” Sayf asked. “Not that it really makes much of a difference given, well, you literally own me in a way.” She had the UAE and a contract signed on her behalf by the state to itself to thank for that.

“Vegas,” Linzey stated simply. “You’re most likely on the way to Team Wave and all the bright lights that come with it. Again, don’t question the decision. You forget that I’ve decided this after spending damn near most of February looking through Chinese intelligence documents to find the best option here. I know what I’m doing… Whether you believe in yourself or not.”

“As long as it isn’t here, I’m not complaining.” Sayf shrugged nonchalantly. “I’d prefer not to be freezing somewhere but you could’ve sent me to Australia and I wouldn’t have batted an eye.” Anywhere was probably going to be better than a government team like the Dubai Golden Eagles.

“Don’t be so nonchalant about it. Have some enthusiasm… Your face is going to end up on HBO thanks to the show they have running out there. Vegas is a decent place to live, too. Was there not that long ago, and living with Wave is just going to make it better for you,” said Linzey. “But if you want to act like it’s just another place, I can move on to another prospect and have you sent to Heilongjiang.”

“Just a bit difficult to get enthusiastic when you’ve spent your whole life on one team you’ve always hated, you know?” Sayf said, turning to look out the window. “I will say that Vegas is going to be one fucking hell of a contrast to Dubai, just similar enough but this place…” Sayf shook her head. “It’s just so damn boring.”

“You’re finally getting a chance to be free…” Linzey muttered, heading in the direction of the airport now. “That in and of itself is enough of a reason to have enthusiasm. It’s not every day that someone comes to break you out of a cage, giving you an offer to be yourself. I’m aware of what the reports say - about the side of you that’s been censored. I’m giving you a chance to change that fact. Act like it.”

“Yeah, normally I’m not all this oddly mopey.” Sayf said, rubbing her cheek. “Probably just still registering all this. Anyways, not all that familiar with Wave, but if they’re based in Vegas and they’re about as fun as my old team was, what are they even doing in Vegas? You can probably give me a rundown on the flight but given how much you seem to know about me, I’m pretty sure you’d pick a team that can keep up.”

“They’re owned by tech company AuTech… And by the owner directly. Some of the best facilities you can imagine even if the team is brand new, and they have their own show on HBO to counter Infinity’s efforts. Youth is one of their specialties - Team Wave is all fourth generation, which you fit into. They’re trying to put together the best team in that age group and they’re doing a damn good job so far,” Linzey explained quickly, not going into details. “But as a team run by a billionaire and a tech company owner at that, they know how to have some fun still. Different from Infinity in that regard, and different from the teams around here.”

“Different is the understatement of the decade.” Sayf laughed. “Any bit of freedom is more than we got, we were five people treated as one collective. It’s soul-sucking.”

“You’re going from that to the kind of team that parties every day before heading out for hero shit at night, while having one of the largest pools in the neighborhood and hitting the clubs to do coke off of strippers. Guess you could say they’ve still got youthful energy while a lot of these other teams don’t. And well, being around Vegas is part of the team style it seems,” Linzey remarked. “Make of it what you will,” she added as they were approaching the airport. “Just know what you’re walking into. I expect some thanks for setting you up here and not just shipping you off to China or somewhere like that…”

“I did say I’d burn something down if you asked, but I get the feeling me committing mass arson on request isn’t the type of thanks you’re looking for.” Sayf chuckled. “But you’ve set me up with what seems to be a pretty sweet deal so thanks are probably in order.”

“I believe you’re right about my intentions,” said Linzey, stopping to head through the airport gates, quickly getting through and starting towards the private terminal where their transportation was actually located. She wasn’t just here by herself, but rather, on a tour with one of her clients, though the date for the visit to Dubai had been delayed greatly thanks to the events in San Francisco that had seen Yana return to Russia and put off most activities - and so there were multiple planes all here in STRPWR’s name, one of them Linzey’s own private jet and the other one a much larger Antonov that was painted in the Russian colors and seemed to be used for other things such as transporting vehicles.

She stopped at a VIP parking lot, stepping out of the car and reaching into a pocket for a pair of shades, putting them on before starting to walk away towards the terminal. “Come on. As much as I’d like to ask for ‘thanks’ right now, this car is pretty tiny and we should be on the move. You have a flight to Shanghai, where the rest of the team is for certain events right now.”

Isn’t flying private a goal of every hero?

“Plus flights are long and boring.” Sayf nodded safely as she got out, retrieving her suitcase before following after Linzey at a brisk pace to catch up with her.

It didn’t take them long to get processed through the airport - these things tended to happen a lot quicker for celebrities compared to the general population that had to deal with lines, overbearing security officers, and delays - and they were soon moving to the tarmac where the Antonov was resting. Although, that wasn’t the plane they were taking, but rather the smaller A330, which was painted in a blue and white STRPWR livery but was still distinctly private… Rather than carrying hundreds of people, this plane was designed for the luxury of a smaller group, and once Linzey had reached it, she began to ascend up the steps before entering, waving Sayf inside. “My other client will be here in about an hour or so. For now, feel free to get a feel for things.”

“Thanks, I’ll find a place to set myself and my stuff down, maybe have a nap or something.” Sayf said, moving into the plane after Linzey. “Your other client know I’m going to be here or, don’t want to get blasted in the face or something by accident.”

“She’s been made aware. There’s a specific reason why Dubai is one of the cities she’s touring in, after all,” Linzey stated plainly, before giving Sayf a look, probably because she had said something about having a nap. “And I have better ideas than napping,” she said, walking further down the main aisle, passing a number of spacious seats which each had their own television screen and desk before stopping when she had reached a doorway at the end of the aisle, looking back in the direction of Sayf.

“Reflex military thing, we got taught to sleep whenever was possible cuz we didn’t know when we’d have the next session of whatever ‘training’ they were throwing us.” Sayf said, moving down the aisle to join Linzey. “It’s kinda the default for if I have nothing else to do, but if you have better ideas I don’t mind.”

Linzey pushed her way through the doorway, revealing a decent sized bedroom that looked like any of the ones that someone might find in a good hotel, the furnishings in the room perhaps even better despite the small nature of the room as one that was part of an airplane. She simply stepped inside, and sat down, stretching. “Like I said… I’m doing a hell of a lot for you. Only fair if you do a little bit for me, too,” she stated.

“I’d just be repeating stuff I’ve already said at this point.” Sayf said simply, leaving her case by the door and sitting down on the bed.

And Linzey didn’t waste time… She was a rather direct person in both her words and her actions, and Sayf would find that out first hand when she grabbed her by the collar, pulling her suddenly into her, and chuckling ever so slightly. “You know, not many grab my interest like this,” she stated, speaking almost directly into Sayf’s ear. “Let’s see if your game’s as good as your looks…”

---

Everything hurt. That wasn’t exactly unusual in Sayf’s experience, it was a rare day after training when everything didn’t hurt, but that didn’t make it any less uncomfortable. It just meant she knew how to deal with it as she rolled off the bed, staggering at an unsteady walk around the room, a hand on the wall to keep herself upright to the bathroom.

She didn’t bother getting a glass, just turning on the taps and shoving her mouth into the water, gulping it down eagerly for a few moments before turning the tap off, just leaning over the sink, breathing deeply. Linzey, on the other hand, hadn’t bothered getting up for a bit, only moving to find Sayf when she didn’t immediately return from the sink.

“We still have things to do today, you know,” she said nonchalantly, as if what had just transpired between the two of them wasn’t a big deal… Well, it wasn’t in every sense. But it had meant something in the sense that it showed the kind of give and take relationship they now had - even if Linzey was giving a disproportionate amount just because of her position. “It’s not going to be that long before we’re in Shanghai,” she continued, leaning in the doorway and drumming her fingers against the frame. “Your new outfit… I already have prepared in one of my bags.”

“I’d ask how you got my measurements but I think I can guess the answer.” Sayf said, turning away from the sink. “As long as it doesn’t make me look like a power-ranger knock-off it’s better than the last one.” She added, brushing past Linzey as she walked back into the bedroom. “Might as well make sure it fits.”

“It’s more of a dancer type of costume… You know how Wave is. Well, you haven’t seen the show yet, I guess, but you need to know that this team is extravagant. No censorship on stuff like this unlike Dubai. The others have their own unique looks, so you’ve got to stand out. And it’s nice to look at,” Linzey stated, keeping her eyes on Sayf the entire time - that was another way she was more direct than most people. She made no attempt to avoid showing where her interests were, or who they were with.

“Well I guess I’m getting a UAE travel ban then, they can’t let one of their go off and do something completely different.” Sayf laughed. “Go get it, I’m not going to go look through everything you brought for it.”

Linzey moved to go through her bags, coming up with the outfit, which wasn’t made from all that much… It didn’t leave a ton to the imagination, and therefore simply had a top and a bottom and some accessories, rather than anything expansive or elaborate like some heroes had. Sometimes, however, simple things were all that were needed - it still looked impressive enough in pictures and more impressive in person, which meant it filled the intended role even if there wasn’t something like armor plating or some kind of high tech composite material. “Come and get it,” Linzey said, holding the outfit up but keeping it out of Sayf’s arm length by a little bit.

“Not much of it, is there?” Sayf commented as she looked it over, stepping closer to take the costume in her hands. It would be like night and day compared to her previous costume, even if she wasn’t entirely sold on it quite yet.

“No… And you’ll have to come a bit closer for that,” said the taller Linzey, pulling her arm back and the outfit with it, and extending it to full length to make it harder for Sayf to just grab the costume. She could have a sense of playfulness when she felt like it, though admittedly her tone was usually more serious than this.

“Do you know how it’ll work with the whole me setting myself on fire thing?” Sayf asked, stepping closer so she was standing all but touching Linzey, again moving to take her new costume. Linzey, in response, held the costume directly overhead - but conceded it and allowed her to grab it, a slight smirk on her face.

“Should be fireproof… Or so said the ones that designed it. There’s been a couple weeks of testing. I have the foresight to start these things ahead of time, before the media is paying much attention,” Linzey stated.

“Probably a good idea, last thing I need is discovering my power sets my costume on fire so I need it replaced every mission.” Sayf said, taking her costume and briefly feeling the material in her hands before starting to pull the various parts on.

“Far more eye-catching than my last one for sure, if a bit on the cold side, not that that’s a problem.” Sayf said, looking down over her costume. “Loose, but I get the feeling it’s meant to be like that.”

“Nothing with this is a coincidence. At this level, a lot of work goes into practically every area of things… From the costumes to the team tactics to the way the media presents things. Remember it. Everything you’re seeing was designed by multiple people who are more knowledgeable in this kind of thing than I am, though I gave them my input on the direction to take with it,” Linzey said, looking Sayf up and down. “I’d say you look good in it, too. Good enough that it makes me do this.”

Shortly after she had concluded speaking, she pushed Sayf to send her tumbling to the bed, quickly falling on almost the same spot as she threw herself to the bed after her, each of her hands pinning one of Sayf’s wrists and a devious smirk on her face, the smirk of someone that was fully confident in themselves and didn’t look back because of their actions at all - that trait of Linzey’s seemed to show in multiple ways, at least in this setting right here, where she was almost completely isolated with her new hero with no outside interference to worry about. No reputations or anything like that… Just her and someone she had quickly found herself drawn to.

“Kind of a shame you’re going to end up taking it off so soon,” she said with a chuckle, shifting her position as she indicated another round of passions before they landed… Sure, there was a risk they would run late. But did that really matter all that much for the rich and valuable? What would the team or the reporters do if Sayf was late, fire her? One wouldn’t and the other wouldn’t complain - and therefore, they were about free to do what they wanted.

“Already?” Sayf let out a small laugh. “And here I thought you’d be tired by now.” Fortunately learning how to hold herself up under the limelight despite whatever else had happened was something she’d had drilled into her.

And so, the time leading up to their landing at Shanghai Pudong would be filled with another burst of rapid, tiring activity as Linzey found herself getting closer to her newest client than she would have liked to admit - of course, she was close to all of her clients in a way, managing their careers and putting in just as much work for each one of them, regardless of whether they were just coming up or a veteran who was bringing in big money. However, with things like this she tended to have better self control… That wasn’t to say she didn’t have an appetite, but she was better most of the time at keeping it for the proper time. At not letting it delay things and such, like what was happening now possibly.

She wasn’t quite sure what made Sayf different - nor was she sure how she felt about this development.

Eventually, the bedroom was briefly rocked by the thud of the plane coming down cleanly on the runway, even the soft landing still able to be felt through the rooms of the place. Which was a call to bring both of them back down to Earth, Linzey in particular. “Alright, I guess you are going to have to get off me now…” Linzey said, looking up at her… New partner as she caught her breath and took in the fact that they had landed and were currently taxiing to the private terminal.

“I guess.” Sayf said, once again rolling off of the bed and making her way to the bathroom, although this time to properly fix her appearance as well as grabbing another drink of water. “I’ll be ready in like a minute.” She said from the bathroom, water running down her face.

Linzey, on the other hand, said nothing as she quickly cleaned herself up the best she could and moved to the dresser within the room to find new clothes, throwing on a rather basic outfit consisting of black denim jeans and a sweatshirt, albeit an expensive one that was a bit more high class than the average one that someone might see on the street. She looked in the mirror, fixing her hair somewhat for only one or two minutes - essentially only giving it marginal attention - before taking a step to the door of the bedroom… But only after she had hidden a pistol on herself. Just in case. “I’m going to be near the main door whenever you’re ready.”

“Just about done.” Sayf said as she stepped out back into the plane’s aisle, finishing pulling her costume on and briefly looking it over, making sure everything was how it was supposed to be. First impressions were always important, and she was going to give off the best one she could manage.

“Right, then,” said Linzey, taking that as her sign to push open the door of the jet, stepping out into the jetway where they were about to walk into what would likely be a large amount of press… They did have one other member of their group with them after all, that was rather well known. “Yana!” Linzey called out, gesturing forwards. “We’re leaving now.”

And so the costumed Russian hero who had stayed in the main body of the aircraft rather than the bedroom stood up, following the other pair out as they stepped foot into Shanghai. “Might get mobbed by the press since they know we’re coming and the plane is rather obviously the one that they’re looking for, with the markings and all, but don’t worry too much about it,” Linzey continued without breaking her stride while walking. “As soon as you realize they have no power and the furthest they can go is to be pushy… You feel a lot better about dealing with them.”

“Just more used to… Friendly press lines.” Sayf said as she stepped out of the aircraft, referring to that most of the press in the UAE was either state owned or censored and wouldn’t dream of painting a hero team in a bad light.

The press in Shanghai was different, however, more along the lines of what one expected from a big city like New York or LA than somewhere like the UAE, and as soon as they stepped off the jetway there were indeed reporters and camera people and others waiting for them - probably all completely clueless about the fact that the heroes they were waiting for had been slightly delayed not because of any technical difficulties or some other legitimate excuse but because of what had transpired in the bedroom. Still, they didn’t exactly care about the delay, but there were still plenty of people trying to get in their questions and video clips as the party moved through the terminal.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Linzey said informatively. “If you don’t have anything to say that will help yourself… Say nothing at all.”

“We were never meant to say anything that wasn’t scripted when we went abroad.” Sayf said quietly, looking over the throng of reporters with a well-hidden nervousness, everything about her looking relaxed. She figured silence was the best option here no matter the question. The trend was of course repeated by Linzey and Yana who didn’t have anything to say themselves, though most of the questions weren’t directed towards Linzey but towards Sayf or the Russian hero next to her, the one who had made headlines last month on an international trip for all the wrong reasons.

Still, despite the press chaos, they were able to get through the terminal, at which point Linzey led the pair through the front gates and to the outside. “Our ride should be showing up shortly,” Linzey stated, standing by the curb and taking a look at the Pudong surroundings while she waited, before a dark BMW came down the avenue in front of them and slowed down upon reaching them. “Ah, that would be it,” she said, advancing forward and opening the door, getting in first and then allowing Yana and Sayf to get in after her.

The car pulled off and sped up as soon as the doors were all shut. It was headed, of course, for the same downtown hotel where Team Wave would be staying and where Yana would also be staying, thanks to the fact that Linzey was also there - it was easier on the manager to be able to access both of her clients from the same building. For Yana, of course, it was nothing, but for Sayf… It was a rather big deal. Because this car wasn’t just heading for a hotel - rather, it was headed right towards the place where her next chapter would finally start.

[Communist Xomaniax]

Kong "Martial Law" Paing
Chronze Gala, San Francisco
San Francisco, USA
February 7, 2020

Turns out, Kong's words hadn't been enough. He scarcely had time to look at Alexander before a gunshot deafened his ears and a grisly starburst erupted from his new friend's chest. He watched the gun fall from his hand like falling through water, watched his corpse crumble and fall as he was riddled with bullets. He felt his mettle tested when he watched his new friend's face explode inwards from the rifles. More gunshots erupted and Kong glimpsed another hero fall.

“Do not let any more of your countrymen die, Amerikantsy!”

His eyes darted to the Russian whore, Yana, who'd jumped up onto a chair to deliver her insipid little line. All the hate in Kong's heart boiled over hearing that wriggling piece of shit speak, her words making his brain pound in his skull. She was a long distance away but at that moment Kong felt like he could simply reach over and touch her. He could feel his fingertips dragging down her face, practically feel the warm jelly in her eyes mashed underneath her fingernails. Hear her anguished wails as he tore into her flesh. Taste the penny taste of her meat as he dined on her carotid artery.

For a moment Kong lost himself in ecstatic titillation over the sweet suffering he'd inflict on Yana. His manhood burned for the wickedness he felt compelled to bring upon her. That cunt. That fucking worm. He clenched his teeth hard enough to crack, balled his fists until his nails dug into his palms. But he did nothing. Kong knew the shame he felt right then would never leave him. He would carry the shame of cowardice, the shame of inaction, for the rest of his life. His eyes stung at the realization, his face burned.

At a loss, Kong's instincts kicked in. He shot away from the bar, charging off in a mad sprint for the far wall. He ignored the rest of the world, letting it disappear in a shower of glass as he exploded through a window. His mind raced over those past few seconds over and over again, totally ignoring the maze of gashes opened up across his face and forearms. A splinter sliced his eye cleanly in half, filling his vision with darkness. Still he saw a storm of bullets end the life of the first friendly face he'd seen since he joined the team. Still he saw Yana's ogre visage. Eye or no, he continued to see the carnage.

He took off like a rocket the minute his feet his the earth, muscles straining against themselves to carry him. Everything became a blur as he ran, the world melting away into a picture he could understand. His hand shot into his pocket and grabbed his stash, protected against his profuse sweating only by a plastic bag. In one go a flood of white powder shot up into him. Kong seemed to only pick up speed, the city melting by. Where was he?

His hands seemed to find purchase on a drain pipe of their own volition. He blinked and he was halfway up a brick wall, again and he was leaping from a rooftop. More of the good stuff found its way in his system. His blood felt like it was on fire, his veins like they were ready to burst. He blacked out again, finding himself in a dugout under an underpass. A fist struck one of those Russian thugs in their ham-head, passing through like how a cannonball might through a soft melon. A forward palm cleaved cleanly through another's chestbone, splitting the heart in two. His foot rose into the groin of a third in a powerful kick, crumpling him to the ground.

He stared down a smug faced Yana and roared like a madman, launching himself into a headbutt that folded the woman in two. Her screams fell on deaf ears as he reverted to his purest animal self, a mass of pounding limbs and gnashing teeth. Gleefully he squeezed her neck with all his might, totally engrossed in the pleasures he felt from dismantling her. It was only when she was viscera, totally unrecognizable from human, that the delusion of his horrific "victory" began to fade. He was alone again, his fingers broken and the flesh ground off his knuckles and knees. His eyes darted around his environment, stopping only for a second here or there on the spiderweb cracks he'd formed all over the structure during his episode. Biting down in his fingers, he pulled them out and set the bones the best he could. Time passed and he let his healing factor do its work.

Kong reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone, dialing the only number he'd memorized. It was late at night, at first he expected it to go to voicemail. But on the third ring it clicked through and an old man spoke.

"Hello?" The old man asked.

"Hey Khan, it's me. Check the news. I've had one hell of a night. . ."

[Forest State]

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Generation NEXT - ACT II: Tokyo Hustle
“Starting From The Bottom”

After an up and down start to Team Infinity’s Generation NEXT show, the team is headed to Japan for a very important event, the Spring Crucible - while there, the team is also introduced to a new challenge which offers benefits at the individual level.

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Northeastern Tokyo Infinity Hall, Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

The first month for Generation NEXT as a team and as a TV show had been… Many different things. Interesting, intense, rough, and full of ups and downs were all placed to start when it came to summing up what the show was and how it had done so far. All of those terms could also be applied somewhat evenly to the team, which had experienced a wide range of both the good and the bad after its establishment and its initial episodes on TV. They’d smashed through the top ratings at first and the show had seemed on pace for something special, but that wasn’t to say there weren't challenges - while the fight in the first episode proved the team’s worth in a way and caused many people to tune in thanks to hearing about it on the news, the one in the second episode was very different… That one shouldn’t have started in the first place, as it had been initiated by a hero rather than any villains, and had been against other heroes.

The fact that it had happened against the Russians, a traditional rival, helped reduce the amount of outrage over the incident… But it did expose NEXT as maybe not being as skilled as they seemed from the first fight, even with the people that didn’t care all that much about their fight with the Russians. It seemed everyone was ether condemning them after it happened, after the footage showed how Alexander had initiated the series of events, or withholding condemnation but pointing out that the team had been decisively defeated when the provocation and baiting turned into a surprise battle between the two camps, one that the Russians were ready for and the NEXT team was caught lacking in.

They’d hit similar ratings numbers to the first episode, but it remained to be seen if those numbers were just because people wanted to tune in and watch the heroes get taken down a notch in the widely reported on incident. People did like to keep their eye on chaotic situations like this after all, but things like that couldn’t be expected consistently - and ratings would drop if the public wasn’t confident enough in the team to keep watching. Who wanted to tune in to follow a hero team that failed at well, being heroes?

The time between the fateful Chronze Gala and the month of March had mostly been spent building up the team image by handling smaller tasks successfully - stopping small time criminals, disaster relief, and training with other heroes. Nothing too big, but nothing that was too much of a risk either. They hadn’t been to any flashy public events, but they had bagged a fair amount of smaller time criminals and even one or two legitimate villains operating at the lower level.

---

Internet reactions to the first month of Generation NEXT ranged from forgiving to not-so-much

---

They did have a chance to redeem themselves, however, and if they were smart they would think about just how they were going to use it - it wouldn’t be fighting against villains, but against other heroes… In a more controlled way this time, of course. This wasn’t another chance for a spontaneous hero versus hero fight like the one that had happened at the Gala, but a chance to attend one of the top events that was held every year by Team Infinity - the Spring Crucible. They had two of these events every year, one of them in the spring and one of them in the fall, and many of their top names would descend on one location and would even be joined by select heroes from elsewhere… The televised events changed based on the year, sometimes they involved things like team exercises and other times they were focused on more individual efforts of skill.

Either way, there were a lot of eyes on it regardless and there was a chance for NEXT to make up some of what they had lost with the gala incident in terms of public faith as well as support in them. The public hadn’t exactly turned on them after all - they just had their doubts about them based on what they had seen so far, which was a team that hadn’t been able to stay out of early trouble and hadn’t been the same since.

While the Crucible was happening outside of Tokyo, however, there were still plenty of things to do within the city. Food, shopping, entertainment, all of that. Most of them hadn’t been to Japan before, and the culture shock of being in a alien place like this as well as the fact that they were in a megacity would mean there was quite a lot to check out when it came to exploring the place. All of it would make for footage that their audience would tune in for.

Their arrival in Tokyo wasn’t as big a deal as their arrival originally in LA, but after the long flight from Dallas to Tokyo, they would likely all be happy to spend at least a week without having to fly anymore - and their arrival had still been worth watching, with a massive Boeing 747 carrying the team in after the second leg of their flight, LA to Tokyo, was completed. The starting point of Dallas, it seemed, had been too far away for them to take the trip in one go, although none of them were exactly fans of the stopover… It just increased the overall time spent on the ground, ensuring everyone would be all the more ready to be done with flying once they were at their destination.

With that being said, the jetlag and the long flight was one of the reasons the staff had been sure to feed the team a large dinner upon their arrival in Tokyo, where they were staying in the suburbs at a complex that was already owned by Team Infinity - Tokyo was, after all, one of the locations that hosted the most foreign events for the organization. Having some of their own infrastructure only made sense. The food served had been a combination of the local dishes and more of the American style foods that the cast would already be used to, either because they had grown up in the States or simply because it was what they’d been eating up until this point with the team… There had been no trips abroad until this point, after all.

But the food wasn’t the most interesting part of it all.

The most interesting part was how the Infinity Chairman himself, who was of course here because of the large event going on, had told them all to eat dinner together this time because there was a special announcement that was being made afterwards. Eating together wasn’t usually a requirement, though it happened at times, and this request from Capone marked something different coming. Despite slight speculation from some members about what the announcement was, there was no real hint or further information than what Capone had said…

So there was plenty of curiosity to go around once the dinner had wrapped up. However, they didn’t have to wait long to find out what was up, as Capone reentered the room with someone else at his side.

“I’m sure you’ve all been wondering exactly what I alerted you all about earlier. I can tell you a bit more details now,” Capone started, looking over the team before they could depart from the table in the notably gigantic dining room. “The fact of the matter is, our results haven’t been the best so far. That’s not to say that everything has been bad… But the team picked up some doubt during the second episode and hasn’t regained faith since. We’ve had a suicide, a couple of deaths, and we’ve done things that are average since then, even after we decided the show must go on. Average isn’t good enough. So, to help the team get back to where it needs to be, extra help will be joining you. Today I can introduce the man that I trust to serve as manager of this team, Otto Faeber.”

The man that was wearing a dark polo shirt that contrasted with his blonde hair offered a wave to the table, looking over them with eyes that were seemingly filled with anticipation - the look of someone that thought they had all the potential in the world and they just needed the right leadership to move forward. It seemed both the management and Otto himself believed that. “Otto here isn’t a superhero himself but, or even a metahuman, but he’s worked with several of our other heroes in the past and helped to get them more popular with the new generation. Your generation. He’s the type of guy that will make you… IG famous, as you kids would say.”

“I wish it was just Instagram but there’s a lot more to managing a celebrity career. Fortunately, that’s my specialty,” Otto stated, clasping his hands together as he finally began to speak. “As your manager, I’m not here to boss you around or to micromanage your career but to help you grow it… Organically. Generally, my job is just to send you in the right direction and offer advice. You don’t have to accept any of this advice, but I’m sure that you would like to bounce back from past incidents and not let the now famous gala define who you are as heroes. If this is your goal, I can help with it. Me and the producers of the show have agreed that a little challenge here in Tokyo will help with that.”

Chuckling slightly at the curious looks from the team, Otto continued. “The one who makes the most viral video in the next two days will receive a twenty thousand dollar bonus. It doesn’t matter what kind of video this is. It can be showing your powers off in some kind of combat, it can be something funny, something about exploring the city we’re in right now, or whatever else - but whoever manages to rack up the most views on social media… Will win the bonus. I’m aware that not all of you are socially savvy. Hopefully, this gives you a bit of an incentive to finally get out there and try. Now, if there’s any questions, I’m here to answer them… If not, this challenge starts immediately.”

[Wysten]

Joan, unlike the others, had been to Japan a couple of times to visit her oddly young Uncle. Though the vast expanse that was Tokyo was a jump from the usual small town she visited it was still a welcome sight nonetheless. She had joined with NEXT a week after the incident at the Gala. Sitting at the table she almost choked on her food at Otto's announcement, "Pardon me um Mr.Otto but what if your powers don't exactly garner much public attention? I am not exactly going to start going around town as if I'm Jesus and cur-" Joan stopped herself when the idea popped in her head. If she could start healing the poor and downtrodden she could possibly cause a stir and have some popularity with the Christians. Standing up she quietly started out of the dinner hall heading towards her room. Busting in Joan combed through her clothes and started to find the most plainclothes she could find.

[Lunas Legion]

Olympia Galatias
Northeastern Tokyo Infinity Hall, Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

Olympia said nothing, just sitting where she was. Her powers weren’t the flashiest out there by several miles, hell, it was theoretically possible for someone without powers but with a sufficient level of stubbornness to get to the same level as she was. Equally, she’d seen enough viral videos and knew enough about what she remembered from the blitz of an education she’d gotten to have a vague idea of what she could do.

Keep it short, sharp, spectacular and, not that she really wanted to, be stupid.

Going out there and punching a reporter in the face on camera would go viral for sure, but it also felt like cheating and not really in the spirit of things. They weren’t supposed to make things even worse, but she was the resident slightly edgy vigilante. Maybe she’d get a GoPro, do a live patrol vlog or something.She’d just give it a bit of thought for once rather than charging in headfirst. Why did being a hero have to be so much more complicated than just being a vigilante?

[Forest State]

The Viral Challenge
Northeastern Tokyo Infinity Hall, Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

Powers, of course, weren’t the most important thing in all of this. It did help to have flashy powers, yes. Someone that could make themselves disappear or set someone alight or pick a car up over their head and throw it was probably going to have an easier time making a viral video than someone that couldn’t do any of those things. But that wasn’t to say that brains didn’t matter in this too - it was one thing to do something that was cool looking. It was another thing entirely to do something that had thought behind it and might keep someone thinking about it after the few seconds that they watched the video, or might make them replay it a bunch of times.

That, perhaps, was what Otto wanted the team to learn by giving all of them this challenge and not just picking the ones with the most appealing powers or physical appearances and telling them that.

Being able to use smarts rather than relying entirely on what fate had given them was a rather big deal in this industry, where at the highest levels, those who assumed that just their high level powers were enough were often outplayed by those with more subtle abilities who were forced to put some thought into how to use them. It could happen in the social arena in less serious situations like this - or it could happen in the middle of a fight, with deadly consequences. There was a reason there were commonly lists of heroes who had shown the greatest potential but hadn’t lived up to it… And the Infinity management had an incentive to keep the members of this team from turning out like that.

“If your powers don’t overtly warrant attention, you have to be smart about how you use them. You can use your powers in this challenge, but the most important thing is your personality and your presence on the camera,” Otto said, but Joan was already headed out by the time he answered her question - and so, he posed it as a general statement towards the others who were still in the dining room.

“You have access to all of one of the largest cities in the world,” he added, glancing to Joan leaving the room and then looking back to the others. “If you can’t figure out something interesting to record there, you probably aren’t going to go viral no matter what.”

[Durmatagno]

ACT II: Tokyo Hustle - The Viral Challenge
Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020
Featuring - Zoroșiia Valentina "Zora" Lăzărescu (Red Star) & Fae Drachoit (Daione)
Collaborative post between Durmatagno and Khasinkonia

After sitting out the second episode, Zora was more eager to participate than she had expected. After all, even if it was ultimately for an alien system that she didn’t trust, she was on someone else’s payroll to explore what was apparently a “megacity,” which, to her, sounded incredible. All the flashing lights she’d seen in pictures were even then overwhelming, but there was definitely fun to be had exploring.

Although the incentive given to explore and film was no doubt a solid sum, there was a key issue for Zora. A simple, practical one. She’d learned the basics of social media, and even had accounts on Instagram and Snapchat, but she was far from media savvy. When she started following the Team NEXT publicity account, she gained followers like never before, but her following still paled in comparison to those of many others on her team. Somewhere, she’d heard the term for her “fandom” was “to have a cult following.” Having a cult sounded weird, and she really didn’t want to have a cult, but if a cult was what was necessary to succeed.

In any case, access to Google was well and good—indeed, she had gotten fairly good at using it—but there was no real guide other than practical experience and luck for social media success. Luckily, she knew at least one person who could hopefully help with this. And by good fortune and a bit of quick shuffling when they’d all come in, Zora had gotten a seat next to her. Hopefully she’d be willing to help.

Zora leaned a bit towards Fae, and asked her question.

“Sorry, but can I go with you?” she enquired, “I am not so good to using social media.”

“I’m not really either, didn’t have much need for it in...Montana.”

Fae chose her final words carefully, it was public record that she’d worked for the SAP, but beyond that nothing else. All her missions were considered classified, and she wasn’t about to get hit with breaches of confidentiality. Still, she at least knew how to use these things, Zora seemed to struggle with even that. Fae shrugged and continued.

“I didn’t really have any idea what I was going to do other than maybe go out shopping, and record myself with any fans that show up. No harm in you tagging along and doing the same.”

Zora nodded, and replied, “Maybe two heroes can bring more attention. I am interested to see this city.”

“Well then, soon as we’re free we can check things out.”

“Thank you.”

Fae nodded and settled in, listening to the rest of what was said. The last month had been...slow to her, but she was used to field work or absolutely nothing, so it was a nice change of pace. Far more relaxed than she was used to in fact, even given the extreme circumstances surrounding their downtime. Things could be far worse, Fae just needed to remind herself of that and she would be fine.

[Forest State]

The Viral Challenge
Northeastern Tokyo Infinity Hall, Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

Viral videos were something that Amalia was familiar with. Not that she had done anything truly viral but she had managed to get herself trending within the vigilante scene in California… Okay, so maybe that wasn’t viral. She had managed to trend in a nice subculture in one state, but hadn’t really gotten attention from the wider metahuman community until she had made it onto this show somehow - which wasn’t because of anything she had done in the past but because of the skillset she had and the fact that Infinity was banking on potential for the future. The case for everyone around here, really.

With that being said, however, social media was one of those reasons why they believed she would be a future top hero and had decided to include her on the reality show for, well, future top heroes. Even if she had only made a splash in a small part of the endless void that comprised the internet these days, she had done it with certain things that could work at a higher level if used correctly, and one of the main things was her personality and presence on camera.

She had been not just a vigilante hero, but something of an internet personality with a local following, plenty of people speculating about what her identity actually was at the time but not getting the answer correct. Now that she could show her real face on camera… She did have a lot more options for getting attention online and making a viral video as they had been challenged to do. It was easy to take for granted being able to use one’s real identity rather than having to hide it, but as a vigilante, she had realized just how many places she had ended up not using her identity and having to keep certain things a secret to avoid being found out.

It was a weight lifted off her shoulders, but at the moment, she didn’t know exactly what she was going to do. Because while she could record a video for social media in no time - it was something she did daily, actually - this one was supposed to be viral. Not just popular, but more viral than anything the others were putting out right now. Considering she didn’t have the flashiest set of powers and didn’t have pre existing connections to the hero business like some of the others did, or any sponsors for that matter, it wasn’t the easiest thing to ask.

She’d be damned if she didn’t give it her best shot, though.

“What are you thinking for this viral video thing?” she asked as she followed after Olympia, sticking close to the person that had proven to be her best friend through all of this - and who wasn’t as good at social media as she was, unfortunately. She knew that fact clearly from both of their vigilante days.

If they put both of their minds together, though, they had a chance to come up with something. “I mean, I know it’s not your thing,” Amalia added with a slight sigh, wishing she had some better advice at the moment. “But the two of us know each other more than most of the others do, maybe we can play off of each other for this or somethin’, I dunno.”

“Could always appeal to the shipping crowd if you’re desperate,” said Amalia, placing a hand on the back of Olympia’s neck somewhat jokingly, rubbing it in a massaging manner.

[Lunas Legion]

Olympia Galatias
Northeastern Tokyo Infinity Hall, Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

“My first thought was that I head out, find the most smug-looking asshole of a reporter, and punch him right in the face out of nowhere.” Olympia admitted, slowing her pace slightly to walk alongside Amalia. “Then I remembered we’re supposed to be doing something good for the team and that kinda goes against the spirit of all this, even if it’d go viral.” She wasn’t a complete meathead, despite that being what her power and her reputation as probably the team’s most violent member encouraged.

“And are you sure we want to pander to... Them?” Olympia said, relaxing slightly from her usual tense posture as Amalia rubbed at the back of her neck. She’d seen more things that she didn’t want to see or shouldn’t have existed in her brief time with Generation NEXT than she had her entire vigilante career. “I mean if we come up with literally nothing else I guess we can, but I figured we could run off, do some vigilante-type stuff just like old times but we record and commentate and shit. It’s not the best idea but fuck knows you’re the social media one of the pair of us.” It wasn’t like the general public really got to see hero work up close and personal often. “Grab some GoPros and mics or something.”

[Forest State]

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RISING SUN CHAPTER I
“BUTTERFLY EFFECT”

The seemingly mundane Japanese city of Cherizumi is rarely home to headline news and events worth following, but the lives of the students at Cherizumi University are no less frantic than that of young adults anywhere else… And when some notable events do begin to appear, being in the right place at the right time can bring major consequences.

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Cherizumi, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
March 10th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Lunas Legion

In a world where superpowers were often in the news and where new advancements were seemingly made every year in the top fields of technology and science, there were still normal people - not the ones that were easy to find in the headlines and not the stars of the world that were followed by millions, but the ones that allowed the heart of the planet to beat and the stars out there to continue doing their thing. Heroes needed someone to save and aside from that someone had to do the more mundane work…

The superhero was viewed as one of the most important types of people in society, but they still interacted with plenty of others each day… The tailors and armorers who managed their finely tuned outfits and equipment, the drive through workers that did the lesser appreciated task of helping to feed them and the general public at large, and the people in a crowd that recorded fights between metahumans and caused them to go viral. All of these people played into an ecosystem, even if the top was the only spot that received much attention.

The city of Cherizumi, not often brought up by foreigners and located on the peripherals of the Greater Tokyo Area, was a city filled with mundane people like that… Now, that wasn’t to say that the city was unimportant. There was a lot of wealth concentrated here. It was the Decatur to Georgia's Atlanta, the Beverly Hills to California’s Los Angeles.

Tokyo was the city everyone knew, but Cherizumi was where some of that Tokyo money went when the upper class executives of the city wanted to escape from the hustle of the city and head somewhere where things happened at a bit of a less chaotic pace. It was still a city, and still had a busy downtown, but it was nothing like the urban jungle of Tokyo… And there were real suburbs here, rather than urban area stacked upon urban area stacked upon urban area. The view of the mountains in the distance wasn’t bad, either.

The people here still went through the same things everyone else did… People worked to move up in their jobs, they married, raised families, or whatever else. But you wouldn’t see this place on the news internationally like you would Tokyo, which was less than an hour away on a good day - the train, of course, was the most consistent way to get there without delays due to the urban congestion. They didn’t exactly have a superhero presence because the heroes from Tokyo could handle it, and they didn’t have a lot else in the way of strange events either, like many big cities did… Well, there was one exception to that. The power plant that had been shut down, seemingly ages ago by now.

Perhaps that was the reason the students of Cherizumi University, otherwise known in short form as Cherdai, dreamed of being something more - doing something more. They hadn’t yet settled into the routine of everyday life that some of the adults had… They didn’t have kids yet, they didn’t have steady jobs to attend, and they had much less tying them down in general - except for expectations. Here in a business management class that was just ending, they had plenty of expectations from multiple sources, themselves and their families among the chief sources.

It was hard to tell how many of them would hold onto the feelings they had and how many of them would end up in Tokyo working at Nikkei 225 companies in some time and experiencing the same thing that their parents did… Working for a sum of money that looked good on paper but didn’t exactly leave much time for the other things. This generation, of course, was less content with that route. But what could they actually do? The fact that they were in a business management class right now may as well have been an admission that they couldn’t change the world… A moment of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.’

“That’s going to be it for today,” said the professor at the front of the room, as the students in the room began standing up, stretching, and gathering their things up. “Remember that classes are at the same time tomorrow, I hope to see none of you here late this time…”

Amaya stood up slowly, gently starting to sort everything back into her bag as she prepared, the blonde girl, Masae, sitting beside her doing the same but in a much more hectic fashion, simply cramming everything in compared to Amaya’s far neater packing. Masae picked up her bag, looking impatiently at Amaya as she waited for her to finish, other members of their class already leaving as Amaya finally finished.

“You always take forever.” Masae complained, rolling her eyes at Amaya who just smiled back, following her best friend out of the lecture theatre into the corridors of the university building.

“I can’t stand things not being done properly.” Amaya said, walking alongside Masae. “It also means that I can fit everything.” She added, patting her smaller bag. Masae just rolled her eyes again.

They weren’t the only ones getting up as the class ended - there was also Hanako Ehara, their classmate from poorer stature, something of an outcast around these parts but smart enough to have gotten into the school with financial aid regardless. And that said at least something about her, because most of the students that were here had paid their way in… It took brains to get in with help, and yet, despite her cheap clothes and her simple style in comparison to the two more stereotypically popular girls, Hanako was here… Keeping her eyes on them for now for whatever reason but not doing or saying anything for now, instead just looking away as she put her things in her backpack and closed it up, throwing the strap over her shoulder before she started towards the doorway.

Fact of the matter was, as much as she wanted to, and despite being smart enough to be here, Hanako wasn’t all that great socially and wasn’t all that great at approaching those like Amaya and Masae. She had thought about what she wanted to say for a month… Now that she had decided to finally go ahead with it, she was finding it harder than she expected to even make her approach, let alone talk.

Amaya and Masae hasn’t noticed, Masae distracted by the sound of her own voice, regaling Amaya with her plans for the weekend as Amaya nodded along politely, but not seeming particularly interested.

“So, anyways, you’re coming, right?” Masae asked, turning to look towards Amaya who hadn’t been paying much attention and hadn’t actually realised what she was being asked if she was coming to.

“Oh, yes.” Amaya nodded, politeness triumphing over the embarrassment of admitting she hadn’t been listening.

“Great, I’ll pick you up, we both know you need to get out more.” Masae grinned, ruffling Amaya’s hair who gave her an annoyed look, making Masae stop. “Can’t be fun with just you and your draconian mother.”

“Mhm.” Ayama said uncertainty as they stepped out of the building.

Hanako, however, was not far behind… Which wasn’t to say she had summoned up some courage, but regardless of the fact that she was scared of this situation, she was going to try her hand anyway at delivering the message she’d thought out over the past month. She hadn’t intended to think about such things for a month, but each day she kept telling herself she would say it the next day, until time had piled up enough to get to this point.

She knew deep down that it was now or never. She couldn’t keep telling herself she would say something and not do it.

“…Excuse me,” she said when she felt she was close enough to be heard… At the very least, regardless of how this went, the bright side was that she wouldn’t have to endure another month of mentally debating whether to speak or not.

Amaya stopped, turning around gracefully. “Oh, hello, Hanako.” Amaya said as Masae realised her shorter friend wasn’t walking beside her anymore, taking a few steps backwards to rejoin her friend.

Neither of them really knew Hanako, well, they knew of her in the sense that most of their class knew the rest, but they didn’t really know her as a person.

“Can I help you?” Amaya continued, Masae standing slightly behind her, watching.

Because they didn’t know who she was outside of class, they also wouldn’t know about her struggles approaching or about the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure of her plan in the first place - nor would they know about the cumulative hours she had spent over the past month worrying about it and talking herself in and out of it… However, her shot had come, and she knew she had to take it even if she couldn’t expect the two girls to be sympathetic to her for these reasons which they weren’t even aware of.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go out tonight for ramen or something,” Hanako blurted out… Before letting out an internal sigh and knowing she could have delivered the sentence better. To them, she was sure, she most likely sounded like someone who had been forced to read the line at gunpoint.

Amaya blinked, silence reigning for a brief few seconds before she gave a small nod. Masae had been telling her to go out and do more, and it wasn’t like there was anything she could think of that would prevent her from doing so. “I’d love to.” She said, as polite as ever as she fished in her bag for her phone. “I’ll give you my number, call… Half an hour in advance?”

Masae just looked confused for a few seconds, as if something had mentally exploded, before she turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?” She said as she started walking away, more confused than anything.

“Yes.” Amaya said, waving after Masae as she offered her phone to Hanako.

“Uh…” Hanako muttered. Not because she wanted to, but because she was awkward in these situations and she didn’t exactly expect to get Amaya’s number and she was hardly sure what to do in this spot… Until her brain snapped her back to reality and she blinked, taking the phone and adding herself as a contact. Which… Wasn’t what Amaya had asked, but at the moment, she wasn’t capable of precision. “Here,” she muttered, handing it back, before she realized her mistake and flushed slightly. “But uhhh… I gave you my number… So you can call when you’re ready or something.”

“That’s fine.” Amaya said, smiling slightly. “I’ll call around six, most likely earlier since it might take you a while to find where I live. I’ll have to tell you that when I call you. Unless there’s anything else, I’ll see you later?” Amaya asked, not turning to head home just yet. That would be just rude, and unlike Masae who had to worry about parking tickets, she didn’t since she preferred to walk.

“I… Yeah,” Hanako said after a brief pause, managing to sound coherent at least even if she hadn’t been able to string a sentence together like she had hoped. She knew to get out now before she managed to make a fool of herself, and she ended up turning and walking, almost running, away only moments after that. The entire time, wondering just how she had managed to survive the encounter and even get what she was looking for.

Maybe… Things weren’t so bad after all.

---

Amaya wasn’t someone who felt the need to call people often. She was normally the one being called, but there were exceptions like this as she knelt on the floor in her house’s main room, phone in hand and dialed Hanako’s number in. She held her phone up to her ear, letting the dial-tone ring as she waited for Hanako to pick up.

The voice on the other end of the line was shaky but it was still present, and it only took a couple of rings for Hanako to actually pick up - of course it had only taken a couple rings… After spending this much time waiting for ths, she wasn’t going to mess up by not answering her phone. “Hello?”

“Just letting you know I’m ready.” Amaya said simply. “You’ll want to leave the line open so I can give you directions, it can be a proper maze if you don’t live here.”

“Er, I shouldn’t have too much trouble… I’m just taking the train from the university station to Yenoji,” Hanako said, her mental map of the part of town that Amaya lived in coming to the forefront of her mind again… Most students around here lived at the university itself, but the ones who had enough money to throw around lived in Yenoji, either renting or because they had been rich enough to live in that side of town in the first place.

Hanako supposed Amaya fell into the latter group of people.

“But I’m headed out right now regardless,” she added, stepping through the doorway of her dorm room and starting towards the elevator to head down and make the walk to the station. Despite being someone that worked on cars in her free time, for both enjoyment and profit, Hanako didn’t have one herself… Money was too tight for that, in her case.

“Okay, I’ll see you soon, and call if you get lost.” Amaya said, standing up slowly. “Shouldn’t take more than half an hour on a slow day so I’ll call if you take longer than that. Bye.” She finished as she hung up, placing her phone back into her bag. Now she just had to wait.

As the call ended, Hanako stepped out into the open air and started in the direction of the metro station, her hands in her pockets as she walked, staring up at the sky - wasn’t quite dark yet, though she knew that once it was, there wouldn’t be a sight of stars. Too many buildings around here for that. She kept going until she had passed through the suburban surroundings of the university - perhaps more urban than most Japanese schools, but not right in the middle of the city - and arrived at the train station that was only minutes from her apartment block.

The train was there a couple of minutes later, and soon enough, she was off to the downtown to north Cherizumi part of town that made up Yenoji… The place where pretty much everyone around here would have liked to live despite only a select number being able to actually afford it. She’d never even considered it herself. It just wasn’t one of the options on her plate, which was why it felt almost strange to her that she was heading to pick up someone from one of the big houses that were worth millions of dollars and could be found in droves on the north end of the town.

Hanako spent the train ride thinking about it - about Amaya and going out to dinner, about the neighborhood, about how she wasn’t a fit and knew she’d never end up living somewhere like that… Before the train stopped once again and the voice speaking over the sound system told her that it was her stop. “Now stopping at… Yenoji North Station.”

Her stop. She stood, striding through the double doorway as the doors slid out of her view, and once again she was on her feet walking. Not too far from Amaya’s house but not too far away, either. The path took her through boutique shops and the large houses where Tokyo businessmen and their families settled when they needed to get away from the lifestyle of living around so many people… And life was indeed slower around here, the streets still active but not congested in the same way as the big city to the west. The same thing applied to the sidewalks, and as Hanako kept going, she noticed there weren’t a ton of others out here right now.

She was glad. She knew she fit in like a fish out of water - seeing too many others around here observing her every move would only make her realize it more than she already did.

As she walked, she did a double take as she spotted a particular person she didn’t want to run into - police officer Umeko Tamura… No, not police officer. Security guard. She worked with Shirudo Security, the private company that was contracted around these parts by the neighborhood to make sure that ruffians like her stayed out, and she’d had a couple run ins before with the intimidating officer… In fact, she considered her to be more intimidating than the actual officers, which at least didn’t blatantly discriminate against her for not having enough money to live here.

“Shit…” she muttered under her breath, pulling her hood up and over her head to try to keep her identity covered up, stopping and doubling back when she saw that specific guard patrolling the streets. She wasn’t quite sure if she had been spotted, but she abandoned her current route, tracing her steps back across the street and ducking into the electronics store that was right in front of her.

Her sudden entrance didn’t exactly make her look great - her clothes were distinctly cheaper than what most people around her wore, and more importantly, she didn’t carry herself like she lived in this part of town. She didn’t carry herself like someone from Cherizumi at all, really. Lacked a number of things, the standard confidence and self assuredness among them.

She was somewhat surprised to see someone she already knew there - Naoko Himura, film student and former wannabe journalist who had changed her tune because according to her, the news was all fake… Said she wanted to report on things herself, but Hanako was surprised to see her here. “You work here?” she blurted out after bursting through the doorway, and seeing that Naoko was in a loose uniform rather than

“Part time, dude… You look like shit, ya know,” Naoko said in reply, calmly looking her over while chuckling at her current state. “Or should I say you look like you just had a heart attack?”

“Was headed to someone’s house and I saw that security guard, Tamura… And remembered that the last time she saw me around here she threatened to get her baton out if she sees me again. Assumed I was going to rob someone or something-”

“There’s a back door if you head through the doorway behind me, and keep going straight,” Naoko said before she could finish. “Should probably get a move on, if she’s after you…”

Hanako just raised an eyebrow as she started to take a step forward but stopped herself. “Really? You’re going to help me just like that?” she asked curiously, surprised Naoko would even help an outcast like her get away from a security company that could at times be quite aggressive.

“Yeah, yeah, just gimme a favor or something later,” Naoko replied before waving her on… “And of course I’m helping you. The bitch works for those Shirudo Security people that make everything worse around here… Heh… SS…” she muttered, laughing slightly at her own joke before slapping Hanako on the back, her own eccentric nature apparent from the conversation. “Anyway, fuck feds. Glad I can be useful.”

Hanako kept moving, heading through the back door like Naoko had told her about, and following the instructions to keep going until she reached the other door at the end of the hallway. Opening it up, she was outside again, and she oriented herself for a moment before taking out her phone and glancing down at the map, turning to head in the direction of Amaya’s house again now that she had avoided the guard who was certainly headed for the electronics store in search of her.

She made it past the spot where Tamura had been, and looking at the route, she knew she wasn’t that far from the destination right now. The houses were getting more and more expensive as she made her way into the inner part of Yenoji… But there was one thing that wasn’t right.

These rich parts of town tended to be quieter places than the rest of the city. People didn’t live as tightly together, and there wasn’t as much traffic on the road. But as she moved closer to the destination, she could hear noise, and it didn’t sound like a good thing either… Voices shouting? It sounded like there were a decent amount of people and they didn’t sound happy.

Hanako picked up her pace, knowing that whatever it was, it wasn’t normal for this part of town. As she picked up speed, coming closer revealed what she was looking for - the source of the noise, a group of people heading for the same street that she was. She watched the back of the group as they turned and looked up to check the street sign… Yep, they were definitely turning onto the one that she needed to get to. Despite having no idea what was going on, she followed, and in the process she was able to get a better look as she examined their clothes from a safer distance, seeing a common pattern in them.

They seemed to be involved in some kind of protest and she wouldn’t put it past them to be with the Japanese Red Army or some similar organization based on the red that she kept seeing when she looked from person to person. They didn’t seem that old, either. Not much older than her, but obviously, in very different circumstances… She was here to visit someone, they were here to… Make trouble.

As Hanako crept behind them and kept an eye on them while they didn’t know she was there, they stopped in front of one house in specific.

It was when the mental connection was made in her mind - Amaya’s family, the Kakodura clan, wasn’t popular with everybody. Sure, they employed a fair amount of people and they hadn’t done anything too bad, but there were other things that had impacted their standing with certain sections of the public… Their ownership of Bluesky Energy, however, and its subsequent moves in the experimental energy field which had resulted in the power plant outside of Cherizumi and the community around it being shut down due to the potential dangers, had caused some to say that they were worse than the ones who advocated for atomic energy.

And Hanako wasn’t sure how much truth there was in it. Supposedly, because of this family’s research into ‘red energy’ and using it to power the world, an entire suburb of Cherizumi of about 50,000 inhabitants had been turned into an exclusion zone. There was a reason they had a bad reputation… But that wasn’t what she knew Amaya for. Panicking slightly after seeing the crowd outside of her house, and knowing she couldn’t sit around and do nothing, she reached for her phone and dialed Amaya’s number, taking a deep breath while she waited for an answer.

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“Oh, hello Hanako.” Amaya answered almost immediately, having picked up her phone from where it had been resting on her lap as she waited. “Is something wrong? Did you get lost or something else?”

“I’m outside of your house right now, but… Just look out the window. There’s a mob of angry people out there right now,” Hanako replied urgently, edging ever closer to the group from behind but not moving close enough that they would detect her… Yet.

“Looking out the window at an angry mob sounds like a bad idea, Hanako.” Amaya chided gently as she stood up, holding the phone away from her ear as she made her way through the otherwise silent house, slippers slapping softly against the floor.

“Ah, I can hear them.” Amaya said, her voice just as serene and calm as ever, risking a glance out of a front window. “Well, I suppose I should probably call the police and inform mother.” Amaya continued, turning around to head back through her house, headed towards her mother’s office. Her father was away very frequently, and had his own flat in Tokyo where he lived, not that Amaya saw him much.

“Do keep an eye on them please if it’s not too dangerous, Hanako?” She asked. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

“You should sound more panicked than you are,” said Hanako, taking a deep breath and trying to keep her own voice calm as she looked at the crowd. “I do have my eyes on them and they’re not going to wait around forever for the police to get here, I think… They look like they’re ready to start trouble and I see bats and stones in the crowd… At least a dozen of them, don’t know where from…” she continued, reading off a general description. Then again, Amaya would know that for herself. She had looked, after all.

“Panic won’t accomplish anything, Hanako.” Amaya said, pulling open the sliding door that led into her mother, Shinju’s, office. It was hard to tell them apart at times, Amaya looking like a younger, less tired and weary version of her mother.

“We have a mob outside.” Amaya said, with the same tone someone else might use if it was raining.

“We’ll head out the back then.” Shinju said, getting her own phone out and starting to dial the police with one hand while slowly pulling an ornamental wakizashi out of its sheath-stand on the wall.

“We’re, um, going to head out the back Hanako.” Amaya said, the faintest hint of nervousness creeping into her voice. They had a decent garden, but it was walled and Amaya doubted either of them could climb over it.

“I’ll head the same direction,” Hanako said, backing away before the group out front could get sight of her, walking around the large grounds of the house at a pace that was nearly running - no, she practically was running at this point… Unsure about what she would find on the other side. She had the feeling this wasn’t going to be as easy as just slipping out through a back door and waiting for the police to show up. Especially when the police department here was more equipped for arresting teenagers for graffiti and the like rather than dealing with serious problems like the one that was happening now… Big things like mobs tended to happen in Tokyo, not here.

“Police are on the way here.” Shinju said, mirroring Amaya’s own calm as they made their way down the gravelled path in their back garden, winding between trees and bushes. “But they’ll take at least half an hour to have enough to disperse the mob.”

Amaya said nothing, just making her way further back into the garden. “We’re going to try and climb over the back wall Hanako, but, um, we might not be able to.” Amaya said, looking back nervously at her family’s house. “Police are half an hour away according to mother so they won’t be here any time soon.”

“Alright- Shit…” Hanako said, cutting her own sentence off as she realized something. Seemed there was another group coming from this location as a white van came to a screeching halt not far from the curb on the other side of the road from her, more people in red and black jumping out, with face masks and bandanas and the like visible in the crowd. Apparently, they were planning for trouble just as Hanako had assumed, since they were going out of their way to hide their faces… Letting out a growl of frustration, Hanako quickly relayed the situation back to Amaya. “You might want to rethink that, another ten or so people just hopped out of a van in front of me and they’re headed this way… Spotted me, too.”

“Just be safe, we’ll find another way out.” Amaya said, giving a worried look towards Shinju.

“Different direction then.” Shinju said, turning to head towards the left side of the garden instead. “Who are you talking to?” She asked, turning down another path.

“A friend from university, we were going to get dinner somewhere. She saw the mob on the way here.” Amaya said before turning her attention back to her phone.

“We’re going to try going over the left wall.” Amaya said into her phone. “You okay, Hanako?”

“They have their eyes on me which I don’t think is a good thing…” Hanako said through gritted teeth, frozen in place for the moment… She did have one thing that she could potentially do, but she wasn’t exactly sure if she wanted to go to those lengths yet, and so she remained where she was, frozen for now by the back wall and with only her pocket knife on her to help her in this situation… Only a couple seconds before a pair of people tossed Molotov cocktails over the wall, showing the fact that they were serious about this and not just messing around. This issue of the power plant and its ownership was a bigger deal apparently than she had assumed.

“Just look after yourself, we should be fine.” Amaya said, her and Shinju coming to a stop by the left wall. It was fairly high, maybe seven feet, the sides covered in smooth white paint as Shinju crouched.

“I’ll put you up, you pull me up.” Shinju said, holding out her hands which Amaya stepped onto, Shinju’s face creasing under the weight as she slowly moved her hands up so Amaya could scramble onto the wall so she was sitting atop it. She held down a hand, into which Shinju pressed the wakizashi, Amaya tucking it under her shoulder before reaching down with both hands to grab Shinju, visibly straining as she held her mother up, panting desperately until Shinju finally got a hand around the top of the wall, hauling herself up and panting audibly as they looked down the drop on the other side into the street.

The street, however, wasn’t exactly a safe place at the moment. They still weren’t that far from the mob - the mob that Hanako was facing down with right now and deciding what to do. “You know, they have a van, you’re not going to last for very long out there if they spot you…” she muttered into the phone, looking up at the threat in front of her one more time and sighing. “I’m… Going to try something I haven’t done before… Not in a situation like this.”

The fact of the matter was, most people didn’t take Hanako Ehara for being a metahuman. And it was easy to understand why. The idea was perhaps shocking that someone could hold great power and still not be able to talk to people, or be an outcast - but that was the very position she found herself in so much. So the vast majority of the time, she just didn’t bring it up. They probably wouldn’t have believed her if she had brought it up at Cherizumi University anyway…

But that didn’t change the truth, which was that she did indeed have a power.

She wasn’t the most trained in using it but she had enough raw strength to get by in this instance, and she could thank fate that she didn’t have a mundane power like some people she had heard of. No, hers was distinctly useful in this situation.

Extending her hand without saying anything, she put her focus on the van… And it was only a second or so later that darkness leapt from her palm in beam form, firing rapidly towards the van before making impact with the side as raw energy, burning right through and making a distinct noise as it punched through the metal outer layer, eventually passing through the fuel tank as she moved her hand to the side… There was an ignition, and a fireball, and the van was consumed seconds later. Lifted off the ground a bit by the force of the blast, even, knocking a couple of people over. Even standing by the wall, she’d felt her hair get blown back by the force of it, and she wasn’t that close.

It was safe to say she had panicked the crowd. Screaming, running, and looking for cover suddenly became commonplace. The same people that had been walking up on her with bad intentions before were now running for their lives, terrified of what they had accidentally angered with their actions… Maybe it would be a lesson against not thinking things through, for them. Or about not underestimating anyone.

“They… Might be gone,” Hanako said into the phone, breathing deeply as she looked down at her hand, a slight layer of smoke drifting off her palm and reflecting the heat of the energy blast she had just fired.

“You’re okay, aren’t you?” Amaya asked, looking towards Shinju and then back towards where the smoke was clearing and she could hear the sounds of screaming and trampling footsteps. Shinju jumped off the wall first, wincing as she landed before she helped Amaya down, clutching onto her phone as she handed Shinju the wakizashi back. “We’re, um, on the street to the left of the house, your right.”

Hanako said nothing for a moment before she started on her way, deciding that it would be better to get away from the immediate scene sooner rather than later… All the while while she processed what had just happened. “I… Stopped them using my power…”

“Oh.” Was all Amaya said, not entirely sure what to say to that. Metahumans and powers were something that had only ever been in the background of her life, something distant on the TV, not front and center like this. “I. Um. Okay.” Was all she managed to say as she looked at Shinju who was more alert, watching the street just in case there were any stragglers. For once in her life she had no idea how to react, and that scared her more than anything.

Hanging up on the phone, Hanako was now able to see Amaya for real, and she finished running over to her, panting as she looked over her shoulder and confirmed that no one was following them… But as the smoke plume rose up and was visible from even where they were standing there, it looked like the other side had largely realized they were in bigger trouble than they had imagined and were bailing on their original goal. “Ummm… I know, it’s crazy,” Hanako said, offering at least some explanation to what she just did. “But if I said I had powers back at the university, it’s not like anyone would even really believe me, you know…”

“I know.” Amaya said simply, smiling. “I’m just happy you’re okay. We should probably talk more inside though and…. Figure out what we’ll tell the police. I don’t think you want to be revealed as a metahuman somehow.”

Shinju said nothing, looking over Hanako with an evaluating gaze before she turned away, starting to walk back slowly around to the front, gears churning in her mind. Hanako followed, nodding… “I don’t want to be under surveillance or something,” she agreed, and… This was kind of what she had been scared of. But with only a pocket knife to protect herself with, she wasn’t sure what else she could have done in the situation that she ended up in. The mob had brought Molotov cocktails and clubs, after all. She had just done what she needed to keep herself safe.

“What happened is you were here to pick my daughter up, you spotted the mob and ran back to the house to tell me and as we attempted to escape an unknown metahuman intervened and then we retired back inside to await the police.” Shinju said firmly, Amaya following closely behind her. “None of us saw what happened beyond the explosion and the smoke, and the police should be more concerned that a hundred plus mob was able to form and almost burn a house down and murder the occupants in Yenoji. I know the two of you were meant to go out, but after that incident I’m afraid you’ll just have to settle for my cooking.”

“Guess I can’t complain about that,” Hanako said awkwardly, not entirely sure what she thought about talking with her classmate’s mother like this, but she did the best to not sound like she couldn’t talk… Even if she was nervous in this situation for a number of reasons. Shinju was, after all, someone important. And it wasn’t often that Hanako spoke to someone who was both important and related to the girl she was supposed to take out for dinner on this night. Though, that plan hadn’t lasted beyond contact.

“My daughter might disagree.” Shinju said with an amused tone as she led the two younger girls around to the front of the house, Amaya not saying anything in response. She didn’t feel the little poke deserved the dignity of one. They entered the small lobby, Shinju and Amaya changing from their now dirtied slippers to clean ones before they moved into the house proper.

“I’ll let you handle your guest, if you don’t mind. I have a meal to cook.” Shinju said, departing to go cook dinner and leaving Amaya and Hanako in the lobby.

“Um…” muttered Hanako, pausing as Shinju left, and lowering her head. Sure, she had been the one to push for this, but now that she was alone with Amaya, she didn’t quite know what to do or say. “Sorry for sticking around and bothering you even after all this, I guess…” she said eventually. “I know you probably only said yes to go out with me to be polite, too…”

“Hanako, you do not get to apologise after scaring off a mob that would have burned down my family home with me and my mother inside and beaten us to death if we’d gotten out. If anything, we both owe you thanks.” Amaya said firmly, reaching out to take Hanuko’s wrist and pulling gently on it as she turned to head into the house. “Come on, I’ll take you through to the living room and get us something to drink if you have any preferences.”

“I uhh… Whatever you have is fine,” Hanako nodded, panicking slightly when Amaya took her wrist but otherwise going with it, following after her even after her heart rate picked up… Wondering how much her classmate actually knew about the reason she was panicking slightly right now or why she had even asked her out to dinner in the first place.

“Tea it is then, I know I need a little bit of normalcy in my life after the past few minutes.” Amaya said as she entered the living room. “Sit wherever you want, I’ll return with tea in a few minutes.” She said, turning and leaving Hanako alone in the room.

Amaya returned a few minutes later, carrying a pair of steaming cups on a wooden tray that she delicately set down on a table in the center of the room before kneeling down by it, taking one of the cups of tea in both hands. “There.” She said, seemingly content as she blew gently on her tea. “Calm, at last.”

Hanako didn’t say anything immediately but she did nod in thanks as she took a cup in her own hand, her head downcast. “Doesn’t even feel like I should be around somewhere like here, really… I’m a little bit out of my depth,” she said, speaking of the surroundings and the fact that it was far richer than anything she’d ever had before.

“And it would be the exact same for me if I went anywhere else but reversed.” Amaya said, watching the steam rise off her tea and blowing on it to cool it down. “I was worried how mother would react, but saving our lives seems to have given her a rather good impression of you. She… Might not have had one otherwise since she can be quite overprotective of the family.” Amaya admitted, gently poking at her tea with her lips. Still too hot.

“I wouldn’t have had a good impression of me either, to be fair. I mean, I’m kind of a loser… Just a fact, really,” Hanako said with a shrug, sipping at the tea. “Sure, I managed to get into Cherdai… But at the end of the day I’m still just some girl that hardly has anything and works on cars in her spare time because of not having anything else worthwhile out there.”

“I wouldn’t call anyone who saved my life worthless, Hanako.” Amaya said, sipping gently at her tea to savour the taste. “You have a power, Hanuko. That you’re still here and you saved my life by being there makes you more important to me than any superhero in Tokyo. You’re not just some loser.”

“If you say so,” Hanako shrugged, unsure of what to think of the words Amaya had just told her. “I’m sure my family would disagree or whatever because I don’t really want to get the job they want me to get, and all that… I’m just in the same class as you after being told a thousand times it’s what I need to do.”

“Mother would understand that better than I, I think.” Amaya said, a distant look in her eyes. “She never talks about her family, and I’ve never seen any pictures of them.”

Amaya paused, sipping at her tea. “To move onto a less… Depressing topic, I’m curious as to what your power is. I didn’t get to see it, but if you don’t want to talk about it that’s fine.”

“I don’t know… It’s this weird darkness beam thing. I’ve hardly used it… Can’t really show you right here and now because it would cut the table in half if I did,” Hanako said with a nonchalant shrug. “Which is also why I haven’t practiced with it a ton. Kind of hard when you don’t want to wreck the surroundings… If I wanted to show you, I’d have to go somewhere outside the city.”

“Would the garden be too small, even for a little demonstration?” Amaya asked. “Just… Point it away from anything solid maybe and point it at the ground?”

“Well… I don’t have great control of it. But if you really want to see it, I can try and do it without hitting anything,” said Hanako… Making a concession she wouldn’t normally make for someone. She hadn’t told a single person at university about her power so far, since coming here.

“If you don’t have that great control then I’ll take you outside the city tomorrow.” Amaya shook her head slightly. “Mother may insist you stay over in case they come back today, and I can drive you out in the morning before class either way.”

It seemed to draw some nervousness out of Hanako again even after she had started calming down somewhat. “I don’t really know about that, might be a bit too awkward for me…” she said. Practically a flat out admission of certain things on her part, but she felt it was fair to not hold that back. She was right in that it would be, well, very awkward after all.

“Ah.” Amaya said, nodding slightly in understanding. “Well, you can always ask if you change your mind. I would like to see your power at some point.” She fell silent, sipping at her tea. “Or if you have some other way of getting out there, we can do that instead.”

“I guess I can stay if you think it’s a good idea…” Hanako admitted after a long pause… Looking like she was going to say something else but falling silent, deciding that she had said enough for now.

“We don’t know if they’ll come back or not.” Amaya said simply. “You might have scared them off but they might come back in a few hours to try and finish the job, having you here would make both myself and mother feel a lot safer.”

“And how am I going to feel staying over at my crush’s house?” Hanako blurted out without thinking too much about what she was saying before she said it, a slightly distraught look on her face as she posed the question that had been hanging in the air… But before just now, neither of them had brought it up verbally.

Amaya said nothing, just sipping at her tea in silence, thinking. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Hanako.” Amaya said softly. “I’m saying I’d feel safer if you were around. If it’s too hard for you, that’s alright. I was only asking, not telling you to.”

“I don’t know,” Hanako said eventually, looking away, letting out a deep sigh she had been holding in for a little bit. “Maybe I should just go… Probably fucked things up enough already by just saying what I said just now. Me and my stupid mouth, you know…”

“You can’t leave, you haven’t finished your tea and you also promised me dinner.” Amaya said, almost jokingly as she set her own empty teacup back on the tray. “Not everyone can be as composed as me and that’s perfectly alright. We don’t have to talk if it would just make it worse for you.”

“I didn’t think that dinner was even much of a thing anymore after the mob thing happened,” admitted Hanako, still not raising her head as she gritted her teeth slightly, trying to avoid the awkwardness but finding it… Hard. “But I mean… I can’t even look at you and talk to you and you’re telling me to stay over here… How am I supposed to manage that?”

“With difficulty.” Amaya said, smiling slightly. “But you can look at me, it’s not like I’m blinding. It’s just a matter of strength, Hanako, and taking things one small step at a time. You’ll never get anywhere if you keep telling yourself you can’t. You managed to ask me to dinner with you, didn’t you, and look where you are now.”

“I should go… I’m not as strong as you think I am,” said Hanako, setting the tea down and standing up, taking a quick step in the door’s direction before she stopped herself, breathing deeply before clarifying her statements a bit further. “And if you don’t want to talk to me again or something, I get it… If you’re worried about the group from earlier, I don’t think you need me here, either… You can probably just tell the police to keep a car outside… Or something.”

“Hanako, sit down.” Amaya said, her voice firmer than before as she let out a small sigh. “I know you are as strong as I think you are. You saved my life, Hanako, when you didn’t have to, so I know you can be strong if you choose to be. If anyone is going to leave this room it will be me, so you can calm yourself if that might help, it’s the very least I can do.”

“I don’t want to sit down,” Hanako replied, tears welling slightly in her eyes from the fact that someone was going to end up upset no matter what happened here… She knew she couldn’t stay, knew that she wasn’t prepared enough for it or ready enough for it, but also knew that she couldn’t go without disappointing the one she had asked out in the first place… And the problem on her hands caused her to freeze up where she was, her hands moving to her face instinctively to cover it. “How can you say that when you don’t fucking know me? And when you don’t… Know what it’s like being this out of place. Just let me go back to where I belong…”

“If that’s what you really want, then…” Amaya stood up gracefully as she spoke. “At the very least let me show you out. You have my number if you ever want to talk, and I do want to see your power at some point.” She continued as she moved to stand in the doorway. “And… If you ever feel up to dinner, the yes is still a yes, just call and give me a time and a day, okay?”

“A-Alright,” Hanako managed to say, holding herself together for that long at least… Before she was through the doorway quickly, not sticking around for any longer than she had to, feeling like she would simply embarrass herself more than she had already if she was staying for longer than this. She took off as soon as she was out of the house, moving quickly through the streets in the direction that she had come as the sun went down in the distance… Usually a sight that was worth stopping to admire around here. Today, however, was a different story. There wasn’t anything worth celebrating in her opinion.

She’d built up to something all school year - which in her opinion was pathetic enough, since the only reason she’d taken as long as she did was her own lack of courage - and as soon as she had reached what she’d thought of as a goal of hers, she had found a way to fuck it up. Typical for her, really, at least according to her own memory. She didn’t look up on the train ride back to the University, her face written with anger not directed at anyone else but directed at herself for the incident. There were many ways she could have handled it…

But at the end of the day, when the pressure was on, she hadn’t been able to handle it.

As she arrived back at her apartment, she made a point of slamming the door shut behind her. She wasn’t sure if she would be in class for the next day, either… She needed a bit of time to think this over.

[Lunas Legion]

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RISING SUN CHAPTER II
“RECONCILIATION”

Following a rough encounter, two students at Cherizumi University finally speak to each other again and come to terms…

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Cherizumi, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
March 14th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Lunas Legion

It had been an… Oddly few normal days for Amaya since the mob incident. Quiet, even by her own standards of quiet. She’d given the same story that Shinju had said to to cover for Hanako to the police and otherwise kept the incident as quiet as it could be kept, partially for Hanako’s sake, partially to avoid all the publicity around it. It wasn’t likely to happen again, at least according to the police, but Amaya wasn’t sure she believed them.

Still, it was far better than a repeat incident, even if she was still slightly on edge about the whole thing. She still had her classes to keep her distracted thankfully, and she’d hurled herself into them to stop her thinking about the incident or everything that had happened after. She was back at the university again, this time without Masae as she’d, predictably, forgotten to do something, she’d been vague about the what. Probably important work that she’d done a while ago. But otherwise, it was back to normal for her as she made her way through the corridors of the campus building. Maybe Hanako would be in today she… Hadn’t seen her since everything that had happened. It all kept replaying in her mind over and over again, everything she could have done differently.

She hadn’t been in her previous class, but she had a lot of time to spare until her next class of the day but not quite enough to make it worth going back home. She had enough time to look for her and she did need to apologise, she just wasn’t sure where to start looking.

Hanako, however, wasn’t somewhere complicated per say after spending a couple of days not really talking to anyone, locked away in her room for much of the time as she missed class and otherwise shut everything out - from school to the limited part time work she did… She hadn’t gone into her room intending to do that but as she left the scene back on that night before and returned to it, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to get back up and do anything else, either… This was the first day since then that she was back at the university, and she was at one of the locations that just seemed commonplace for someone that was looking within themselves and introspecting… The rooftop of one of the main buildings, where there was a view of the university campus and many of the more urban grounds around it that were somewhat further out.

Minutes passed as Amaya slowly made her way up through the building, more of a methodical search of everywhere than looking specifically for somewhere Hanako might have been, not that she had any idea where that might possibly have been, until she encountered one of her other classmates who’d seen her heading up to the roof. She turned away with a nod and a polite “Thanks,” as she meandered her way back through the corridors and stairwells, pace quicker than it had been as she emerged onto the rooftop.

“I was wondering where you were, Hanako.” Amaya said softly, standing in the doorway and looking at the back of the girl, not moving any closer and standing where she was. “I… I wanted to apologise.”

“I’m the one that fucked up,” Hanako said simply, scratching her head in slight confusion as she remained where she was, thinking back to the night before where she had managed to mess up despite getting what she supposedly wanted. “Don’t know why you’re the one apologizing for it… For me being too weak to hang around or whatever.”

“It was my house. I… Put too much on you too quickly, in somewhere you were already uncomfortable and after doing something you didn’t want to have to do.” Amaya shook her head. “I think you said something about me not knowing who you were and you were right. It isn’t weakness to be overwhelmed by something you’re not used to, Hanako. It just means you need to get used to it in smaller amounts first.”

“You keep telling me a lot of different things and not all of them are true,” Hanako said flatly, her hands still stuffed in her pockets while she stood miserably not far from the edge, her sight focused on the scenery beyond… On the buildings popping out above the trees, and the rail bridges and highway overpasses which were visible among the green. The blend of nature and urbanization here was likely one of the reasons a lot of people preferred it to the more pure urban jungle of Tokyo. “You’re probably going to tell me you would even care if I jumped off this building too… Like I’m an actual person to you or something and not just someone that you know because I happened to do one thing with a power that I can hardly use.”

“I’m not as flawless as I seem to be, so, yes, I have probably told you some things that are not true.” Amaya said, taking a step forwards. “And… I would care, just like I would care if it was Masae or Shinju standing where you are, Hanako. I’m probably making a mess of all this, aren’t I? For the both of us.” She wasn’t sure what to say really, this… Wasn’t something she’d ever had to deal with.

“You just care this much about someone you don’t even know?” Hanako questioned, perhaps doubting how genuine she was, perhaps feeling like she was only getting this treatment out of pity. “Like I said… I only did one thing… Not like you cared the same back before all this happened and the only thing you knew me for was being some fucking loser in the same class as you.”

“Maybe I’m just a genuinely nice person.” Amaya said, placing her hands by her sides. “You were a classmate, maybe not a particularly social one and a bit on the rougher side of things, but I didn’t think you were a ‘fucking loser’ as you put it. Why would I have thought that when I didn’t even know you except from class?”

“If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,” Hanako shrugged slightly, frowning. “Look, you don’t have to soften it… I know what I am. I’m probably the most aware of it of anyone. Doesn’t mean I need someone telling me I’m just exaggerating or whatever… It’s just another fact like the sky being blue and water being wet.”

“I think I’m simply unused to someone… Claiming it like you do.” Amaya said. “It’s not something you expect someone to say they are with the vehemence that you do. But if you’re going to insist you are, I don’t think I can change your mind. I… Didn’t expect you to be perfectly fine with it.”

“It is what it is… I’m just not the type of person to lie about it,” sighed Hanako, turning around finally, her head lowered. “Maybe you’re from a softer background but I’m not… I face things head on, not call it something else when reality shows me what it really is.”

“Maybe.” Amaya admitted. “I prefer to do my best to avoid being harsh when it is being needlessly so out of fear I might offend people. It takes a perverse sort of courage to admit one’s faults and to face up to them rather than simply denying them like people tend to.”

“I guess…” Hanako admitted herself, taking a long pause before she looked up, posing a question of her own. “So… Since you’re so insistent on how you know what I am, did you even have a reason to come all the way up here and find me?”

“I was coming to apologise about… Well, almost everything about the other day.” Amaya said softly. “Although we talked about it a little earlier, I assumed too much about you. I… Shouldn’t have pressured you into something like I did without actually really knowing much about you.” Amaya coughed, looking down at the floor. “So, um, I was going to ask if… Well… If I could get to know you better first before, um, doing anything else like that. If you’re fine with it.”

“You’re even interested in doing that?” Hanako asked with a raised eyebrow, probably not confident in the honesty of the person she was speaking to… Or considering her overly naive and social to an extent, considering how she was approaching someone that had already avoided her for days and rejected previous moves.

“I wouldn’t have brought it up if I wasn’t.” Amaya said, nodding. “Yes, last time was a… Bit of a disaster. But I do still, um, want to see that power of yours at some point and if mother actually let you inside the house you’re doing something right, and I trust her opinion of people far more than even my own.”

“Fine…” Hanako said eventually, gritting her teeth and apparently not happy about the statement but deciding that it was worth enough to go with regardless. She was still frustrated however, and it showed on her face as she looked down once more, one of her fists clenching ever so slightly at her side. “Just tell me when you want to do something then…”

“I was, um, going to let you do that. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable again or something.” Amaya said. “Plus I’ve already said I don’t really know you so I wouldn’t know what you’d want to do, but we can probably meet somewhere outside the city, you can show me your power… Maybe we can go have a look at the bits near the exclusion zone, even if we own the land I’ve never actually seen it and after the mob… I’m curious as to why so many people are so angry about it.”

“I guess,” Hanako stated with a shrug, going along with it for now even if she wasn’t convinced about the reasons behind why they were even talking about this. Still… It was a better alternative than jumping she supposed, and so she said yes to it, folding her arms. “I’ll talk to you soon about that… Need to get ready for a little bit.”

“That’s fine.” Amaya said, nodding slightly. “I’ve never really done anything like this before so but I’ll see you then.” She stepped out of the way of the doorway, looking out over the scenery. She’d never been up to the roof before, she’d never had a reason to come up here or even known she could. It was a nice view though.

“Right, then…” Hanako said, keeping her hands in her pockets as she turned and waited for Amaya to move, slowly walking after her in the same direction and roughly following her path back down the stairwell. That would be where their paths diverged, however, as Hanako started back towards her apartment as soon as she was back at the ground level, a number of new things on her mind as she pondered how the day had went and how once again, she had a reason to give things another chance…

Hopefully, her experiences would be better this time.

[Durmatagno]

Fae "Daoine" Drachoit
Somewhere in Tokyo
Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

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Fae moved through the crowded streets of Tokyo looking for something, anything to spark her interest. She had her phone with her, of course, for a possible video, but for now it was just her browsing stores, seeing what caught her eye. It wasn't exactly like she blended in, Fae was part of NEXT, she was fairly tall by the normal standards of women, and now she was in Japan. Not to mention the horns extending form her head, and the crimson eyes that peered at everything around her. Many people avoided her, some stopped to talk to her, when they did she posed for pictures, some she posted, some they posted. She didn't particularly enjoy this, but at the same time it was fan outreach, and looked good for her. Fae crossed the street with a throng of people and moved on. While her walking had it's purpose, slowly making her way to the Shinjuku Garden Greenhouse, she was taking her time, and this time she stopped in front of a little book store.

Pushing her way inside, she looked around and smiled at the rows of books, some of it manga of course, but books nonetheless. She'd spend a little time browsing in here. She gave the clerk she could see a small wave before moving into the stacks. The hustle and bustle of the massive city was muted in here, things were calm. Of course a few people followed her in, watching her in the stacks, or otherwise checking out what she was doing. She chose a few smaller books, she was still learning Japanese, and took them to the front. Paying for them before heading back out onto the streets. Now she needed to head down to the subway to get to her destination, thankfully Japan was renowned for the efficiency and speed of it's subway systems. She wouldn't have to wait long, but there was always some waiting time down on the platform. So she passed the time posing for pictures, even uploading a few short videos of her showing tricks with plants. A man with a bouquet of flowers found them becoming bigger, and more vibrant. Nothing to win the contest, but it brought about smiles, and clapping. She even grew flowers of her own for some of the cuter girls on the station, she'd put together a compilation of the smiling, blushing, giggling girls receiving a variety of flowers that Fae had grown later. Nothing that would win the contest, but again, they were good, and brought her some more publicity without problems.

[Forest State]

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RISING SUN CHAPTER III
“BLUE SKY”

Kohemori is a suburb of Cherizumi which formerly was home to 50,000 people… But has now been quarantined following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami thanks to damages sustained to an experimental power plant running there on proprietary technology. As the exclusion zone is maintained around the site to this day, one student at Cherizumi University investigates the reasons and the truth.

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Cherizumi, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
March 15th, 2020
Collaborative post between Forest State and Durmatagno

Koharu scratched her chin as she stared at the screen in front of her. If she was being honest with herself she highly preferred the hands on, mechanical stuff over theory and design. Unfortunately that was part of her assignment at the moment, and so into reading and research she went. She’d found a nice spot where there wasn’t much glare on her laptop. A few of her class partners had been here earlier, but they’d already packed up to move on. She wasn’t supposed to pick up Shiroi for another two hours, so that gave her time to study, and maybe some time to work on the next part she was machining for her car. Honestly she preferred a bike, but she didn’t have one at the moment, and she wanted to rely on funds outside her own as little as possible. Give herself some responsibility and experience with managing tight budgets was how she had justified it, in reality she just didn’t much like having to rely on other people. She didn’t even like the burdens she put on Shiroi, but her sister was very obstinate about sticking around to help her, so eventually Koharu had given in.

She wasn’t alone for much longer, however, and at this place it seemed like there was always something going on or someone saying something - in this case it was the latter, as a blue haired classmate… No, fellow student from another major, made her approach and could practically be seen coming from a long distance away thanks to her distinctive eyes and generally uncommon body language and mannerisms - Naoko Himura, film major and perhaps the most well known ‘truth seeker’ around the campus. But what she wanted from someone in a completely unrelated field, engineering… Remained to be seen.

Koharu looked up from the page she was reading at the sound of someone approaching. Naoko was somewhat...infamous for her theories. Koharu didn’t think she’d ever talked to the girl herself, but then again Koharu had some trouble with names. Of course, Naoko was pretty memorable, so Koharu settled on having not talked to her before. Straightening in her seat, Koharu was abnormally tall even by Western standards, here in Japan she was practically a living giant. It was why she usually hunched, made her stand out slightly less, though her own crimson eyes didn’t help her case much.

“Can I...help you?”

The resident conspiracy theorist of Cherizumi University.

“Well, yes…” Naoko said - she was tall herself, of course, one of the people around here that could compete with Koharu in terms of height. “You’re an engineering major or something like that, right? So surely… You know how to put together an um… A steam turbine. You know how that works, right?”

“Mechanical major, civil minor, steam turbines are fairly variable, depending on size and purpose, though most are used in generators. So yes, I know how it works. Whatcha need?”

Some of Koharu’s mannerisms were from the lengthy time she spent in the states, so even when conversing in Japanese she was more relaxed than most people in Japan would be. Not all of course, everyone was different, but in general Japanese tended to be a much more strict and formal language than English, and Koharu had picked up mannerisms from it. Steam turbines were on paper rather simple, the design hadn’t changed a ton since it had been invented, materials, efficiency, size, and so forth had, but at it’s core it was just steam creating a rotary motion which was then transformed into motion or electricity.

“What size we talking, and what’s the purpose?”

“I’m talking big…” Naoko said, gesturing for effect, and pausing for a moment. “Supposedly to fill up batteries. But… I’ve looked at pictures and shit and I’m not sure this is it, if you know what I mean. Compared it to regular ones, that is… You know, if I just show you a picture, will you be able to tell me if what I’m talkin’ about is actually a turbine or if it’s something else?”

“Depends on the detail in the picture but I can give it a go.”

Koharu responded with a nod. Generally she felt it was easier to just indulge this now instead of being accused of being apart of whatever theory she was working on now. Besides, it distracted her from tedious work, and it wasn’t as if the conversation was droll or unpleasant.

The blue haired girl responded by taking out her phone, swiping to a picture which seemed to have been taken in… A dimly lit area, the only light coming from the flash seemingly as Naoko had tried to photograph something far larger than herself. She had indeed taken a picture of something that seemed like a generator, from what could be made out, but she swiped to the side to show a second picture where another part of it was illuminated, with some more unfamiliar aspects of the structure showing. Apparently, some kind of spires or radio equipment protruding from the structure and pointing upwards? It was hard to see in the darkness of the photo, but it looked like there was some kind of upwards facing superstructure built around the turbine itself which culminated in one specific red and white spire jutting above the rest of it towards the top, portrayed in a third photograph which Naoko swiped to.

“Those spires are...quite odd. I’m not sure what they’re for, don’t look like a radio or cell tower, definitely not a lightning rod. Could be weird cosmetics, but those are...exceedingly rare on something like a turbine, which few people that would care about cosmetics would ever see. It’s a large turbine though, would produce a fair amount of power running through it, seems like it’d be more for a power plant than batteries. Though if it’s on it’s own it could be for a lot of batteries, most plants use many large turbines.”

Koharu scratched her chin again as she leaned in for a better look at the spires when they showed up. They were part of the turbine itself it looked like, which was far from conventional. She had no clue what those would be used for, but their design alone reminded her of lightning rods designed to attract lighting. Most places used them to protect buildings, but some channeled that power into the grid in a more controlled manner, taking advantage of the large current to reduce operating costs.

“They look like they’re supposed to attract energy, but why they would be on a steam turbine is beyond me without more details.”

“I took the pictures inside the exclusion zone in Kohemori,” Naoko stated calmly… She was referring, of course, to the city which had formerly had 50,000 inhabitants but had been closed off following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami due to damage to the power facility there and supposed continuing threats around the area… But the strange thing in all of it was that the plant that the city had been built up around wasn’t nuclear in nature, and was rather run by the Tokyo based Bluesky Energy corporation - the owners of which resided largely in Cherizumi and the surrounding area - using experimental proprietary technologies. It wasn’t nuclear power and it wasn’t any other existing green energy either, or one of the more traditional ones such as gas or coal… Rather, the corporation took advantage of something that they called a new discovery that could revolutionize a number of things…

Supposedly, this discovery was called ‘red energy,’ and it was said to already exist invisibly, as a field that couldn’t be seen but impacted things in multiple ways regardless. They said that it was one of the missing pieces in understanding quantum theory and just how everything in the universe worked, and that it was related to the dark energy that supposedly made up so many things… And that it helped bind this reality to, well, this reality. What it actually was still remained to be seen, but apparently, such an energy was quite powerful if captured - a process that was supposedly like catching lightning in a bottle, but that Bluesky had figured out with the opening of the Kohemori Energy Plant on the peripherals of Cherizumi and only a train’s ride away from Tokyo. But ever since the plant had been damaged… There was apparently some unseen danger left because of it, which wasn’t talked about by the authorities but warranted the town which had sprung up because of the plant to be closed off and for an exclusion zone to be enforced by soldiers. It had definitely been one of the strangest moments of the last decade even if the lingering effects still showed… Hadn’t been long ago that the family of the creator of the technology had been attacked by a mob of environmentalists and associates of the Japanese Red Army.

“Let’s face it, don’t you think it’s strange that 50,000 or so people had to leave the area because of a power plant breaking? There’s nothing radioactive around there,” Naoko continued, leaning in to look Koharu in the eye. “So I had to check it out myself, of course. And then I realized I don’t even know what I’m lookin’ at and that I needed to ask someone smart like you if I’m even looking at a generator or somethin’ more… Evil,” she continued. “You think it’s a weapon of some kind and that’s why they closed the place off?”

Koharu continued to stare at Naoko for a moment before sighing and rubbing her temples. She didn’t give an answer right away though as she considered what she did know about the power plant. After a moment, she gave a even response.

“I doubt it’s a weapon, few weapons worth using are so immobile as to be attached directly to a turbine. It’s almost certainly a generator of some kind given that it is a turbine, but whether it’s purely a generator is something else entirely. The area was quarantined because they just don’t know what the effects could be. It’s like...NASA blew up many of the first returning craft from the moon on the off chance there was some bacteria there. For awhile, no one knew exactly what kind of radiation did what, and panicked anytime even benign radiation was mentioned. I can’t say they’re not hiding something, after all every government and corporation on the face of the planet does shady shit, but what I can say is that a quarantine when dealing with something so unknown isn’t strange in of itself. That being said, there’s certainly plenty they’re not telling us, and likely much of it is the reason for the exclusion zone beyond shaky ‘we just don’t know what it’ll do’.”

“Sure, but it’s been years at this point and I dunno why they would waste the JSDF’s money having them guard some site that nothing happens at just because something might happen,” shrugged Naoko, skeptical as she usually was on these types of things. “I managed to get in through the forests but I found out pretty soon that I wasn’t even in the clear once I was past the border, they have people going through in Humvees along the major roads and actively checking stuff out, too. And I saw a helicopter or two, also. Place has been locked down since 2011 and they’re still doing all this right now, in 2020? ‘Cause something might happen there?”

“Look, I can only speculate on what the military is still doing and looking for. All I can tell you for sure is that the turbine is the right size and basic construction from what I could see to something in a power plant. I can tell that an intentional weapon that needs a construction like that to be usable would never leave the design phase, it’s too static and immobile when we have plenty of other weapons to choose from. They’re up to something, yeah I’ll give you that, but there’s too many variables and unknowns to make even a basic guess. With what I have here it could be anything from something as ridiculous sounding as Lovecraftian monsters to something as mundane as random searches to maintain the zone.”

Raising an eyebrow, Naoko backed up slightly and stood straight. “Right, rule out the weapon theory, I didn’t get weapon vibes when I was there either… You want to go there with me or something? I spent a couple days there on the last trip but I had to dodge the patrols and stuff, I only ended up on the plant floor. I’m sure there might be more info… If we went to the control center or something. It’s a fuckin’ big place, lot more secrets inside those rooms I imagine,” she said, treating it like a casual idea… Though whenever she went on these trips, she was certainly well prepared.

“I’ll admit I’m curious as to what the hell is going on, but is it really a good idea to go poking around in there with so many armed patrols?”

Koharu had a lot to worry about if something happened to her, be it jail, disappearing, or death. She’d worry her sister sick, worry her mother, worry her father, and much more besides. That and she quite enjoyed being able to you know...be free. Still, the turbine alone was drawing her curiosity, she specialized, or more accurately, was mostly just interested in vehicles, but it presented it’s own challenge both as a mechanic and an engineer.

“The turbine alone gives me a lot to think about, but…”

Koharu’s split feelings on the matter were evident in her voice. She worried what might happen, but her curiosity was piqued, and the only way to satisfy it was to actually go in there.

“You’ll have me with you. I’m prepared for this kind of stuff and besides… It’s always a fun time having me around,” Naoko shrugged nonchalantly, sticking her tongue out teasingly and gesturing with her thumb and index finger around it briefly, a slight smirk settling on her face as she paced back and forth, stopping and turning to face Koharu fully after a moment. “What do I gotta do to get you to say yeah?”

“Just...worried about my family is all, gotta sister to look after, and family I don’t particularly want to worry about me. I may have my problems with them, but they are still family.”

Koharu was caught off guard by Naoko’s gesture and comment. Her hesitation wasn’t from lack of interest in figuring out what was going on, but her concern for her family, especially her sister. Shiroi was a pre-med student, but she didn’t hold down a job to pay for what she could the way Koharu did, she was focused purely on her studies and helping keep Koharu’s worst tendencies from becoming problematic, namely her work drive.

“It’s not that I’m not curious, it’s that I have family to look after, y’know?”

“Sure, sure…” Naoko said, picking her pacing back up at a slower rate. “You should take my number and follow me on Squeakr at least,” she added, referring to the newer social network that… Many people of their generation were moving to rather than the more mainstream ones. “And I can tell you about it if I’m doing anything interesting… Gotta report back on what I see at least, if you’re not going yourself.”

Koharu drummed her fingers on the table, deep in thought. Her unease about this all wouldn’t be dispersed so easily but...her curiosity also drove her. After a moment she sighed and closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose and pulling out her phone.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but...if you promise to get me back home for my sister, I’ll...go in with you next time I have a few days off from work.”

She unlocked her phone and offered it to Naoko so she could add her number. This all felt insane to Koharu, but she wasn't the type to stick to sanity. If much of her family only knew the kind of parties she went to…

“I picked up a Chinese knockoff shotgun off the radar in Tokyo, if anything goes wrong I’ve got us covered,” Naoko said with a smile as she added her number and handed the phone back to Koharu. “And there’s a fuckton of forests around there, anyway. Shit hits the fan, worst case scenario we can just run into the forest and run away. The 12 gauge should be enough if we run into any… Anomalies or some shit.”

“Alright…”

Koharu still seemed skeptical, but it’s not like she could have brought her pistol from California. Japan was rather strict with it’s gun laws, and Koharu didn’t care enough to circumvent them. She did have a good sized knife she could bring, but a knife in a gunfight was...there was a reason for the idiom after all. She shut her laptop and sighed.

“Just make sure you use slugs, shot wont do shit against anything with a half decent hide or armor if the situation arises.”

“Not my first rodeo,” chuckled Naoko, head cocked to the side as she examined Koharu. “I’ll tell you what, things get bad and I’ll distract whatever’s happening since I’m the one with the gun and the one that’s been around here before and you can just focus on running. I’ll be fine. Got in and out without any problems on the first try, after all.”

“Alright, probably need to remind me, I don’t get my schedule for next week till tomorrow so, I might forget. Was planning on going out for some drinks tonight after I dropped my sister at home. You’re welcome to come with me if you want.”

“I don’t mind,” nodded Naoko, smiling slightly. “I don’t have a date or something tonight,” she added. “So you’re asking me out?”

Koharu wasn’t sure she’d call it a date, but now Naoko wanted her to label it. That...caught Koharu off guard. After a moment she just nodded, a little sheepishly from the surprise, but her voice was still even. Seemed she wasn't used to this sort of thing, which to be fair she wasn’t. Most of her hookups had been quick fun after or during a party, she didn’t really ask people out out much.

“Yeah, suppose you could say that…”

“Like I said, I don’t mind,” Naoko said, reaching to pat Koharu on the head, perhaps somewhat amused by the fact that she had been slightly startled or maybe unsettled a little by her forward nature and her willingness to act like it was a date. “And hey… No need to be nervous about it.”

“Just...not the response I was expecting is all, not really a ‘date’ person most of the time.”

Koharu was now unsure about this exceedingly strange person in front of her. After all, who pats a near total stranger on the head like that out of nowhere. Still, she’d already offered to take her out and she’d accepted. Strangeness aside she was at least cute, and seemed smart enough even if she was a conspiracy chaser, not deal breakers they just made Koharu more wary. Plus she hadn’t been on a date in a few years, just casual hookups knowing she was going to Japan to study. Plus the constant back and forth between mother and father being in separate countries wasn’t conducive to dating. That had all changed now though.

“I’ll make it a fun time… Whether you decide on a second date or not,” said Naoko, leaning to place her face right next to Koharu’s ear to speak just about directly into it, before leaning about an inch or so further… Once again showing her social strangeness as she bit her earlobe ever so slightly, before she pulled back with her hands on Koharu’s shoulder still, close enough that Koharu would be able to see the details of her strange eyes and the heavy eyeshadow surrounding them.

“I-”

Koharu stopped to clear her throat, this was all kinds of odd. It was rare that people were this forward with her, she was the one that was usually forward. She gave Naoko a smile though, despite the nervousness she was still looking forward to seeing how things went.

“-never said I wasn’t interested. Just not used to the dating thing is all, being shipped back and forth between distant countries made it hard.”

Course, that didn’t change that she was the one that asked Naoko out. Technically she had just wanted to hang and get some drinks, but now she had to make it a proper date, and she knew just the bar. Higher class place, but it was worth the expense if she was going to show Naoko a good time.

“I mean… If you don’t want to take that jump, there’s no pressure… Doesn’t mean we can’t hang out,” Naoko said, repeating her gesture from earlier, but making it rather more noticeable this time. “I’m down for a lot, you know. You should really check out my Squeakr page,” she added.

“Gotta give it a shot sometime, might as well be now.”

Koharu raised an eyebrow at the second gesture, and just smiled knowingly at it. She wasn’t sure how much Naoko was after or how interested she actually was, but she was going to give it at least a first try, see where it went.

“Besides, I know a good bar, shame to drink alone.”

“You’ve got my number… Gimme a call when you want to head there,” Naoko said, seemingly having reached a resolution in her mind about what they’d do, standing straight once again and starting to pace away but turning first to face Koharu again. “I’m sure it will be… Quite the interesting time for you.”

[Sraelyn]

Giovanni "Fumus" Salazar
Tokyo, Japan
March 6th, 2020

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“We'll be arriving shortly at Infinity Hall.”

Finally. The words of the limo driver felt somewhat distant, and not only because of the dark glass that separated him from Giovanni. The unending hours of flight and had taken a toll on him, even if the cute stewardess and the ample amounts of champagne and scotch had made it a bit more manageable. The older brunette woman sitting in front on him thanked the driver and offered a million dollar smile, while he did nothing but slouch on the leather seat and stare out the tinted window to the city outside. He’d never been to Tokyo before, let alone Japan, and cruising through its streets felt entirely different from the massive sprawl that was Metropolitan Tokyo when gazed upon from the plane.

“Don’t loose focus now Gio,” the woman snapped her fingers to grab his attention, “the next few weeks will be decisive for your success on NEXT. You’ll be starting as the new member on the roster and need to make a strong first impression if you wish to establish yourself amongst them.” He looked at her as she spoke. The perfect posture, immaculate hair and expensive dress all helping maintain the aura of a bona fide star she carried around.

“Well, it’s not my fault that La Guardia made it such a fucking pain in the ass to transfer out of there. I gave them a good three-year run, they surely could have offered something better if they didn’t want me to jump ship instead.” Giovanni turned to the window once more. “Sure, they have a few heavy hitters with potential, but they’re also already down three members. In what? Two months? If they keep dropping at that rate, I won’t be the new kid for too long.”

“More of a reason for you to worry then. Even if the whole fiasco at the Chronze Gala did tarnish them, it also functioned to cull their weakest links. Don’t expect the rest off them to follow suit.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I’ll try to keep that in mind."

“I’m always right, I’m your mother"

“Here we go.” He rolled his eyes, knowing full well that he could not go against the headstrong Contessa when she was set on something, instead opting to change the subject. “Anyways, how long are you going to stay over in Japan?”

“Not long unfortunately, just enough to see you off and take care of some business. After that I’m heading back to Italy, Salvatore will be waiting for me at Rome in a few days.”

“Oh, I’m sure the minister is eagerly waiting to see how you express your gratitude to him this time.” No longer the words had come out of his mouth, her hand flew across the distance that separated them, slapping his cheek not too hard.

“Don’t be a smartass with me.” Her hand now pointing at him in am accusatory manner. “All I do is for the both of us, even if you don’t appreciate it.” She slowly moved back to a more relaxed position. “I can take back everything I’ve bought for you and let you live on your own money if you’d prefer.”

“I cant say I do. Thank you Mr. Minister and your ample generosity.” Still, the prospect of never seeing the old man’s face brought him some joy. Giovanni suspected he would not be in the picture for much longer, not many tended to be.

“Now, now, let’s get back on track.” She cleared her throat with a gentle cough. “From now on you’ll be under a much bigger spotlight than what you were back home. That means, being more careful of what you say on social media, control your partying, less of those Instagram whores you seem to like so much, and for the love of God, don’t repeat what happened in Milan.”

“Mamma, would you please stop worrying. Something like that will not happen again, I promise.”

“So you say.”

Finally arriving at their destination, Giovanni sat upright, combing his hair and tidying up his shirt before taking a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his designer suit. Soft hands pressed gently against both sides of his face, while a pair of hazel eyes looked deep into his for a few seconds. A long hug followed, the silence only interrupted by a whisper as the embrace ended.

“Make me proud Gio.”

“Have I ever not?” The door of the limo opened, bringing in flashes from the cameras outside and the voices of those holding them. They had managed to avoid people at the airport but his luck was now over. Their presence here was no doubt, partly his mother’s doing, she preferred having control over when the reporters would appear to prepare accordingly.

“Giovanni, is it true that your departure from your previous team was on unfriendly terms?”
“What did you think about what happened on the last episode of the show?”
“Mr. Salazar, what can you say about your mother’s activities in the past?”
“How do you feel about being a new member on Generation NEXT?”

The wave of reporters ganged up on him while blocking the way, all eager to ask questions he had no real interest in answering. Taking a deep breath, he offered the well practiced smile he often did while dealing with the media, before grabbing the nearest microphone, consciously trying to keep both his irritation and accent at bay.

“Me leaving La Guardia was in excellent terms, I will miss my teammates and friends over there greatly, and any delay was caused by a bit of bureaucracy and paperwork, nothing else. However, I’m really excited to join the great team of young heroes of Generation NEXT. I can see myself getting on great with the rest in no time, and wait impatiently for what may come in the future. Please keep on watching the show as I’m sure there’s going to be great things down the road.”

The microphone on his hand was beginning to smoke, quickly corroding beneath his fingers until it was no longer functional. He was done with this charade.

“Now if you’d excuse me, I’ve got a team to meet.” Pressing forward, his lower half began dissipating into a cloud of thick, dark smoke. His half incorporeal body moving upwards, above the crowd, purposely making it harder for them to see and breathe. Fuck them. Landing on the other side, the gaseous mass reformed itself below him, as he entered Infinity Hall. Now it was time to meet the competition.