"Not being always able to follow others exactly, nor attain to the excellence of those he imitates, a prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent."

-Niccolo Machiavelli

We all want the bigger lawnmower, the hotter wife, the bitchin' new GTO. Plain as that; we want it, and that's all that matters. If we want it enough, if we desire, work and sweat and pain for it, we'll do all we can to have it. However, there exists within every desire the point of no return—the point at which you must "spend money to make money" if you get my meaning. A better way to say it is that if you really want something, there's great labor involved. You've got to give up something to attain something, spend money to make money. There must be substantial sacrifice for any title of power or influence you want: CEO of the company, spiritual guru, it doesn't matter. Something's got to give. And once you have attained your goal, normally you feel empowered because you stuck it out, reached your goal and now you have triumphed. You feel empowered because you worked for it on your own, without somebody handing you anything. You didn't ask for anything in your quest, and so you feel vindicated—you feel…fulfilled because you have succeeded on your own terms. In my experience, I believe I've been handed many things; most of them without my requesting.

My name is Allen O'Neill. I'm 17 years old, ready to graduate, and all that happy crap. For those 17 years, I lived a happy life in the suburbs outside Metropolis. I go to Whitehorse High School—small, out of the way, middle-class by the basest of definitions. And I'd like things to stay that way, despite the fact that my father and mother are both lawyers—that's right. Blood-sucking lawyers.

I love a good argument, and I love digging up dirt on things—stuff that could ruin people—it's my passion. So it may not be surprising to know that during the last three weeks of school, I came dangerously close to getting expelled. In my own mind, I felt no closer to any of the administration than I did with some vegetable in a hospital bed; I felt no reason to form connections with people who were only temporary players in my life. In that spirit, I decided that if I had no connections to them, I might as well make my last days fruitful.

A budding senior "reporter" for the school paper has nothing better to do on an idle Wednesday than probe the fiduciary of the Whitehorse-Metropolitan school district. It was then that I found that the Whitehorse coffers were capital-B bulging over with money. The detective in me, combined with an unflagging sense of right and wrong, planted seeds of doubt almost immediately as to how they got their funding. No school district—private, public, inner-city or charter—from here to Blüdhaven and Gotham (a menial 50 miles away) gets their money through the private sector. Every financial aid going to any kind of school in the tri-city area had to apply to the state for aid. Or even—God forbid—the national government.

So I gave it a few weeks, delved deeper into the matter…and found nothing of great consequence. No illicit money scandals, no secret prostitution rings running out of the girl's locker room—nothing at all. My school had its own ways of funding itself; I found out a month before graduation. How they did it, without state-aid, was quite beyond me.

So much for trying to work in a final scandal before graduating. Looking back, I suppose I did have a knack for wanting to cause a scene, or at the very most, public outcry. Whitehorse, despite the riches, was unassailably dull. Thank God I was getting out when I did. The administration didn't like the fact that I was snooping where I probably should not have been, but a simple majority of the teachers found it quite…amusing that the Valedictorian would do something that could potentially screw him over in the matter of a few days.

So much for trying to dig up dirt on…well, anything.

So, after finding nothing in the way of slanderous material or blackmail against my "beloved" Whitehorse, I spent the weekend waiting for the final weeks of school—and a week later, graduation.

I wasn't excited beyond recognition that I was graduating; it was just another hoop that society required me to jump through. In early celebration of my accomplishments, my parents (bless their twisted little Brady Bunch souls) paid for—out of their own pockets, a trip to Metropolis for me. For a whole week. At first, I smirked at the idea. Metropolis, to middle-class folk like my family and I, was a skip over the Roger Stern Bypass (named after a former mayor-turned-governor from Metropolis). Going to Metropolis itself—a mere 10 miles, after the interchanges and roadside dregs—was more of a field trip than anything else for me. It was no road-trip, no life-changing event. But some part of my conscious wanted to know: why would my parents send me away to the big city for a whole week? Besides the obvious cost effects of shacking up in any of a number of sinfully-expensive hotels, there was college—a pricey investment at best. It took me about three seconds to figure out why they had sent me away, at cost from their own pocketbooks.

They wanted their space. Dad had recently bought a restored gull-wing '61 Mercedes; a sign of his rapidly progressing mid-life crisis. All in all, I surmised Mom and Dad wanted some damned romantic week to themselves.

In any case, the prospect of getting out of an increasingly monotonous cul-de-sac existence for a whole week, even if it was to shack up in a pricey hotel, was too good to pass up.

It didn't take me very long to pack up and head out. My parents filled me with emotional sap before I left, which I took with massive grains of salt.

"Now, you will be careful on the bypass won't you, Allen?" My mother was a chronic worrier.

"Yes, mom. I'll use my flashers and everything," I said impatiently.

"And you'll call when you get there?"

"Yes, Mom. My cellular's all charged up."

My father stepped in. He said quite sternly, "Peggy, let the boy go. He's got places to go, things to see. As do we."

I slung my duffle-bag over my shoulder and cocked my eye. My father continued, slipping his arm around my mother's midsection.

"Now, uh, be careful. Watch the traffic, it's a bear. And Allen?"

"Yeah?"

"Have fun," he said. Then, my father turned around with my mother in tow, waved curtly and shut the door.

I stood there and stared at the door for just a moment, the thought of my parents "doing their thing" quickly left my mind. In between the thoughts of my parents having some hedonistic, sex-filled week without me, I repeatedly told myself in sarcastic mannerisms on the way into town that it was a nice time to be alive.

It took all of twenty minutes to get out of the 'burbs, onto the main roads, and drive across the Roger Stern Bypass. Within ten minutes of entering the city limits, the skyscrapers began to crowd around me like lions over a fallen gazelle. They were waiting to eat me up—waiting to digest the new kid so he doesn't have a chance.

In my stupor, I almost missed the street that my hotel was on. Slamming on the brakes, I was brazen enough to back up in the middle of mid-day traffic to where the street was—Sullivan Street. No cars were coming in either lane, so I found it almost too easy to bypass the law in the Big Apricot. Strange, though, I found, that no cars were on a busy street. On a spring day. At lunch hour.

The hotel my parents had set me up in was…amicable. It was no dingy Econo-Lodge, but rather, a glass-front high-rise. I looked at the bronze logo suspended over the revolving doors to the lobby, and saw two capital-letter L's glinting in the noon sun. I frowned and pushed open the heavy glass door.

The concierge was excited to see a customer; she acted as if she had not seen one in a millennia. Politely welcoming me to what she called the Metropolis Plaza Hotel, she handed me my room key. I pulled the plastic card out of its manila slip-envelope and regarded the number on it: 1940. Perplexed, I looked back at the concierge and decided to make light of my own stupidity. Best to open with a joke.

"Excuse me, Miss."

"Yes?" Her chipper, New York-accented voice was eerily unsettling to me. So was that God-awful fake smile.

"You'll have to excuse poor suburban folk like me; I don't get to come in town much. What does this number mean?"

Brightly, loudly, she replied "that means you're in the nineteenth room on the fortieth floor. We put the room number before the floor, as opposed to most other hotels."

"Oh," I said, as curious about the numbering system as I was surely convinced that she thought I was some brand of super-moron. "Thank you."

She nodded as I picked up my duffle-bag and suitcase and walked towards the gilded elevators. I pressed the button and waited for the doors to open. It was only when they opened that I noticed, etched into the gold veneer, was the same double-L logo as on the outside of the building. I sighed, and waited for the elevator to take me to my room.

Once there, I slid my key into the mechanism, pushed open the heavy ivory door, and looked in at my hotel room. Mine for the week. I smiled at my parents' ingenuity, threw down my bags, ran and jumped on the plush bed. Covering the bed was a deep purple-hued coverlet. Softer than anything I'd ever felt before. The walls were bathed in a deep green hue. The dichotomy between the purple and green was…amusing.

Simple suburban folk like me.

Realizing that I had nothing but time on my hands, I unpacked my bags hastily, and decided to jump in the shower.

After a brief shower, I stepped out, slung a towel around my waist, walked out of the bathroom, and opened the blinds to let in some afternoon light. But the light was obscured. As I pulled on a white Oxford and cargo shorts, I kept looking out the window at the large tower in the distance. It was like a giant black monolith sticking notably out of the puzzle work of urban Metropolis. It was, by all accounts, blocking the setting sun; almost purposefully, I inferred.

I remember it quite well, the LexCorp Tower. My mind flashed back to high school.

From my biology class, we could see Metropolis quite well; the top of the Galaxy Communications building and the LexTower, which rose prominently above the city like a monumental middle finger saluting the entire eastern seaboard.

When my father and I went to Gotham City five years ago for a Knights game, he had taken me downtown to see "the big buildings" as he called them. I remember how awestruck I was to behold the Wayne Tower—the hallmark of the Financial District. We were both immediately struck with how the Gothic structures reached invariably into the sky like gulls escaping a voracious crocodile. The parapets on the buildings reached into the usually-dark sky like stone fingers desirous to escape the drudgery of this world. My trip to Gotham really fueled my interest in architecture. Now, I saw the LexTower stand higher, brighter, and more prominently than the Galaxy building, even the Wayne Tower.

In my intrepid way, I managed to find the number for the Board of Tourism, called them up, and asked if the LexTower had an observation deck—like the Sears Tower or the Chrysler Building. The man on the other end said the Tower did, in fact, have an observation deck. On the 100th floor.

I sighed into the receiver and hung up the phone. I realized parking at the LexTower was going to be extremely difficult, given the hour, so I decided to walk the twenty blocks down to the LexTower; its deco, noir-esque, bronze façade rising above the entire city of Metropolis.

I needed the exercise. No two ways about that. I slipped on my leather sandals and left the room, twirling my car keys around my index finger. Did I need them? No, but call me paranoid.