True Blue #2

Written by Cody Fett

Edited by Cyclone, Bob Regent, and Shinzakura

Hikari awoke the next morning with the alarm, having slept the best she had in years. It was incredible. Yesterday, she felt like she was about to die, but that morning, she felt like she was on top of the world.

She was also still very naked though, but that was easy to fix. All she had to do was put on her clothes, easy as pie. First, came the underwear, then she put on her bra and clasped it behind her back . . . and then she clasped it behind her back. And then she clasped it behind her back! And then she stretched it and clasped it behind her back! . . . And then she walked over to the mirror above her dresser and looked at what that metal thing on her back was that had been slowing her down. Then she screamed.

"Hikari?!" her father's voice yelled from the other side of the house.

"Hey, sis, what's going on in here?" her older sister Kodama asked as she entered the room.

"AAAAAAAH!" Hikari screamed, grasping at the big blue beetle on her back. "Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!"

"Holy frak! What is that thing?!" the 15-year-old Kodama exclaimed as she backed up slightly.

"Hikari, what's wrong?" Horaki Nishitetsu asked just before entering the room to check on his panicking daughter.

"Don't come in!" Hikari screamed while sticking out her arms towards the door. As if by magic, the big blue beetle on her back came alive, and a blue and black metal shot out to cover her entire body, encasing it in an organic-looking suit of armor. Then, as if that wasn't enough to raise the tension in the room, gigantic cannon-things seemed to explode from her arms to point straight at her father and older sister.

"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Calm down!" a voice said.

"Calm down?! How can you tell me to calm down when this is happening?!" Hikari shouted, wildly flailing her arms off to the side and causing the cannon-things to shrink back into the armor that was still covering her.

"Uh, sweetie, who are you talking to?" her father asked her worriedly.

"You two. Who else?" Hikari answered matter-of-factually before trying to rip her own face off, or rather the helmet attached to her face.

"We didn't say anything," Kodama confirmed.

"Yeah, I was the one talking to you," the voice said again; this time, Hikari recognized how distinct it was... and then screamed again.

"AAAAAAAAAAH! There's a voice in my head! There's a voice in my head! AAAAAAAH!" the class rep panicked.

"Did Hikari finally snap?" Nozomi asked precociously as she strolled into the bedroom. "What is she wearing?"

"I'll explain later," Mr. Horaki explained before going over to lay hands on his daughter's shoulders. "Hikari! Calm down! Breathe."

Hikari stopped failing, stood up straight with the helmet's oddly expressive yellow eyes staring at her father, and slowly but surely, her breathing settled down. "Thanks, Dad," she said with a sigh.

"No problem," he told her. "Now, what's your armor telling you?"

"What?" Hikari asked, dumbfounded.

"Oh, my goodness, they can hear me!" the voice said cheerfully.

"Those prongs on your shoulders are blinking and making chirping noises when you claim to hear someone talking. It wasn't that hard to put two and two together," Kodama told her.

"Aw, man! They can't hear me. I've really got to get this translation matrix fixed. Or find a new way to speak. Either/or, really. I tell you though . . ."

"What's it saying?" Nozomi asked somewhat curiously.

"It – she, I'm pretty sure it's a she – is just rambling on and on about communications technology," Hikari explained with an ever more confused look upon her helmet.

The voice was rather indignant. "Hey! I'm not rambling! I'm merely trying to have an intelligent conversation after being stuck in a warehouse for years! Years! Do you have any idea what that's like? The last person who talked to me was Ted Kord, and he couldn't hear me, so all our conversations were really one sided and . . ."

"Wait, who did you say was the last person you talked to?" Hikari interrupted.

"Ted Kord. Why do you ask?" the voice answered.

"The armor says the last person it talked to was Ted Kord. Kodama, didn't you do a report on him recently?" Hikari explained, ignoring the voice's question.

"Yeah. He's the CEO of KORD Incorporated, based out of Chicago over in the States. If that armor talked to him last, then it's probably a KORD Inc. product," Kodama replied, her classic "thinking expression" starting to develop.

"Hold up! I know where this going on. First of all, I'm not a 'KORD Inc. product,' I'm a self-sustaining weapons platform developed by the Ministry of Conquest for the Reach Empire – don't worry, they're almost certainly gone now – who achieved sapience thanks to magic and escaped to Earth so many years ago that I lost all sense of time. Secondly, the only way I can be removed without seriously injuring or killing you is with specialized equipment that I'm almost positive doesn't exist anymore, or by my own free will, and I don't want to be alone again!" the voice interjected.

"I'm going to see Mr. Kord and see if he can get this thing off my back," Hikari informed her family. "Please call the school and tell them . . . I . . . tell them . . . I don't know! Just tell them something convincing!"

"I'll take care of that," Kodama told her as she inadvertently caused a traffic jam at the door trying to get out.

"Don't lie about it!" Hikari yelled at her.

"I can't work under those conditions!" Kodama yelled back.

"You're not really going to give her up, are you, sis?" Nozomi asked her in a sad tone.

"I have to," Hikari told her. "I can't go to school like this, I can't fulfill my duties as class representative like this, I certainly can't go to the bathroom like this."

"You know, this armor can retract back into the scarab. You don't have to walk around like you're ready for battle all the time," the voice informed her in a distant tone.

"But you don't have to do that! You could be a superheroine instead! Like Supergirl! You could help save this city instead of living in fear of the Angels or criminals and walking home covered in rubble!" Nozomi shouted at her. "You could be awesome!"

"Hey, listen to the small child!" the voice suddenly perked up.

"Nozomi, I . . . Dad, talk some sense into her!" Hikari asked her father.

Her father looked pensive, like he was deep in thought over the hardest decision of his life.

"Dad, you can't seriously be considering what she's saying! I can't . . ." suddenly the armor's helmet retracted away, revealing her distraught face and hair before she covered it with her still-armored palms and let loose a frustrated growl.

"Hey! Your face is still there!" Nozomi exclaimed. Hikari just moaned in response.

"Told you," the voice said smugly.

"I don't know, Hikari," her dad finally answered, making Hikari drop her hands from her face. "I don't…I won't pretend that I really want you to do this. It's dangerous work, being a superhero, probably even more for a teenager like yourself than for an adult. And if you really don't want to, then I don't think that you should. But... the world is in dire straits these days. It could use more heroes. So I won't forbid you from becoming a superheroine."

"Don't you dare say that I'll have to decide this for myself," Hikari growled.

"Oh, no, wouldn't dream of it. That's far too cliché," Mr. Horaki said with a laugh. "No, what I was going to say is that we should get a second opinion."

"Oh! I know! We can ask Mr. Kord; he's a superhero," the voice jumped in.

"Mr. Kord's a superhero?!" Hikari exclaimed, quickly being followed by the rest of her family.

"Uh oh, you guys weren't supposed to hear that," the voice realized.

"Oh! Oh! Ask her which superhero he is. I bet he's Aquaman!" Nozomi practically shouted, jumping up and down as she did so.

"No way. I bet he was Batman," Kodama threw in, having come back from calling school. "Also, everyone thinks that you caught a bug yesterday, just so you know."

"I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say he was the Blue Beetle," her dad said humorously.

"Hey, he got it right . . . and you're not supposed to know that either," the voice chimed in.

"So, it looks like everything leads back to Ted Kord, doesn't it?" Hikari asked morosely.

"Hey, buck up, Hikari," her dad told her with a smile.

"Yeah, it could be worse," her sister informed her.

"You get to fly across the ocean, and see America, and do all these really cool flippy tricks, and you don't even have to pay for a plane ticket!" Nozomi declared.

"How am I supposed to fly across the ocean without a plane?" Hikari asked as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

As if on cue, a quiet hiss resonated throughout the room, and Hikari suddenly found herself floating up into the air on blue jets of force coming from her boots and wings spreading from her back. Remarkably, the 13-year-old managed to keep calm about it. She merely got an annoyed look on her face and crossed her arms.

"You know what?" she asked rhetorically. "I'm not even surprised at this point."

An hour later, Hikari found herself rocketing across the sea, fully encased in the armor that, she had to admit, was growing on her.

"So," she asked her traveling companion, "where did you get the name Khaji-Da?"

"It's technically my serial number," the voice replied.

"I'm sure there's an interesting story there," Hikari said curiously.

"Yeah, but that's for another time. You know what's for today?" Khaji asked excitedly.

"What?" the class rep asked worriedly.

"Transorbital flight!" Khaji yelled, a split second before the two of them rocketed up into the sky at a nearly vertical angle, Hikari screaming the whole way.

"Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaji!"

"Oh, come on! We were taking forever down there at sea level. Things go so much faster in the upper atmosphere where the air is thinner," Khaji explained matter-of-factually to the screaming girl. "Now, straighten your limbs out so we fly to America instead of flying off into the aether."

"That can happen?!"

"Theoretically, but it's rare. I'm sure it won't happen to us."

"I'm sure it won't either, because you are going to turn this suit around right this instant!" Hikari demanded.

"Just level out. It'll be easy."

"Easy?!"

"Yeah, just level off, or cut off the thrust and point yourself in the direction you want to go before re-applying the thrust if you're in space. Just relax. You're the one in control."

"And you! You're in control too!"

"Hey, you've got to learn how to do this too if we're going to be stuck to each other."

"How in the world am I supposed to learn any this?! How do the controls even work?! All I'm seeing are a bunch numbers, which are going up very fast, I might add!"

"The suit is embedded into your spine. Just think it!"

"Think what? How do you visualize something like that?!"

The thrusters on the suit abruptly stopped, leaving the two companions to rocket into the upper atmosphere at a slightly slower pace.

"AAAAH! Okay, tuck-in, then straighten out, just like swimming. Now how do I get the thrusters back?"

Said thrusters immediately sprang back to life and caused them to change course at a ninety degree angle headed east.

"How in the world did that work?"

"Magic."

"Magic?!"

"Yeah. Didn't you hear me earlier? I got free will from magic, and I still am magic."

"This is just too weird."

"Hey, for some people this is normal."

"For whom could this possibly be normal?!"

Deep in the semi-secret laboratory of Theodore "Ted" Kord, science was afoot. Today, after years of work, the project that he had been working on for years would finally be complete. It would become a reality, and with it, the world would change forever.

His work was promptly ruined when a blue and black blur smashed through his lab windows and into his equipment before skidding across the floor and into the opposite wall.

"Who's there?" Ted asked the crumpled form on the floor as he reached for his trusty BB gun. In response, the form spewed some incomprehensible and dazed-sounding chirping... and Japanese. "OK then. Do you speak English?"

"Uh," the form grumbled as it tried to right itself. "Hai."

"Um, hello?" Ted replied.

"No, I mean . . ." the form straightened itself out and turned around, revealing itself to be a young girl in a blue and black beetle-themed suit. "Are you Ted Kord?" she asked with an odd accent.

"Yes. I'm Ted Kord, CEO of KORD Inc. Now, who are you?"

"Greetings, Mr. Kord. I'm Horaki Hikari of Tokyo-3," the girl said before bowing deeply. "I am so sorry for destroying your lab."

"Eh, it happens," Ted replied with a wave, putting aside the BB gun. "You, uh, can stop bowing now."

"Oh, sorry!" Hikari said before straightening up again.

"Yeah," Ted said before looking over his lab. "So, what brings you to my humble abode... or what's left of it?"

"I apologize for that, once again, but I came here seeking your assistance. I hoped you would be able to tell me something about the scarab that's now embedded in my spine, or perhaps remove it?" she inquired, almost instantly being followed by the suit's prongs lighting up and chirping rapidly. "Well, if you didn't want me to ask that, you shouldn't have pulled that stunt back there," Hikari said, seemingly to the air besides her.

The prongs chipped again. "I've known you for like two hours. How in the world am I supposed to trust you on that sort of timeframe?" the girl asked the air again, followed by more chirping. "No, I don't think I have an obligation to back you up just because you're fused to my back."

"This is the blue beetle scarab I was studying all those years ago, isn't it?" Ted suddenly asked, walking over to the still suited girl.

"Yeah, that's what Khaji-Da told me, that you were the last person to speak to her," Hikari told him.

"Fascinating. You know, I was always running various tests on it - or she, as it seems to be - but I could never get any kind of feedback from it. I eventually stowed it in a secure projects case, had it shipped off to storage, and never saw it again. Something must have happened . . . when the storage facility in Tokyo-3 was destroyed. Dang it! That means my shrink ray was destroyed too, and that just sucks," Ted rambled. "Still, from tragedy comes science. Tell me everything that led to the scarab coming into your possession."

"Well, there's not much to tell. After the Angel attacked, one of my classmate's siblings went missing, so me, him, and one of my other classmates went to find her. It turned out she had gone out of the shelter, so we followed, and as it happened, when we found her, a fight between Supergirl and some villain drifted our way. We ran towards the catacomb shelters while Supergirl held him off, but in the process, I slipped down the hill and had to find another way in. I did, but couldn't open the manhole so I had to search through the rubble of a building that was destroyed earlier to find something to pry it open, and in the process found Khaji," the prongs chipped again. "Oh, and respiratory problems. . . . What?! What do you mean?" yet more chirping. "Oh my goodness! You're saying that I would have died if it wasn't for you merging with me? That makes sense and . . . Oh, and I've been such a jerk to you, Khaji. I'm sorry. Could you ever forgive me?" One final bit of chirping. "What?! Khaji, you're being unreasonable."

Ted cleared his throat. "Excuse me. I'd hate to interrupt this heart-to-heart, but I'm guessing you don't want me to remove the scarab now?"

"Ano ~ . . ." Hikari began timidly, her helmet retracting to reveal her freckled face and black hair. "I suppose you could, but that would feel awfully unfair to Khaji. All she wants is someone to talk to - and some other things that I won't go into - and to just take that away from her after so long seems so cruel."

Then the girl got a bit of steel in her eye, like she was about to take on the world.

"So, I have another question to ask you: what's it like being a superhero?"

That made Ted stop and think for a moment, but only a moment. He had been in the business long enough to contemplate that question a few times, and he had the answer. So in the end all he needed to do was sit down on a nearby stool. "It's the greatest thrill in the world. I was terrified every time I went out," he explained. "It's an odd dichotomy."

"I see," Hikari send pensively.

"Don't get me wrong," he continued. "It wasn't all kittens and cream - there were some pretty bad times there, especially towards the end - but when I was out there stopping criminals and mad apes from hurting people, it was the most alive I had ever been. On top of that, I made some good friends, saw the world, and I like to think I made a positive impression on people too. I wouldn't trade those years for anything."

"But you did stop eventually," Hikari pointed out.

"Yeah, I did," Ted admitted. "I got beat up pretty bad in Second Impact, and by the time I got out of the hospital, it seemed like the world didn't need heroes anymore, but it did need scientists. So focused on my day job, got back to work, and managed to make a fair bit of money while helping people out. Now that Supergirl has shown up, it seems like things are getting back to normal, but my time has passed, and it's time for the next generation to take up the torch."

Hikari's eyes widened as she realized the implication. "What? Me?"

"I don't know," Ted said, crossing his arms as he did so. "Are you part of the next generation of heroes?"

"I. . ." Hikari started before pausing. There was some chirping from the prongs, but she didn't respond. "I want to help people. I want to make sure that people like Tōji's sister can live to see another day, and I want to make something more of my life. I don't want to go along as plain old Hikari while titans duel in the streets and heroes fight across the sky. I've been there. I've been in the shelters and running for my life, not knowing whether I'd live or die and having no control over any of it. I want to do good, and . . . and I really wouldn't mind slugging some of those villains in the face."

She then shifted her view to look Ted straight in the eyes.

"So, yes, I'm part of the next generation of heroes."

"Perfect!" Ted declared, clapping his hands together as he did so. "You can be the second Blue Beetle! Or third, depending on how you count it. You've already got the themed suit to go along with it."

Hikari's eyes widened again. "Third? You mean then was a Blue Beetle before you?"

Ted nodded. "Yep, my mentor, Dan Garret, was the first. He only served for a short time, but he served with honor and distinction. Took down an entire mafia family."

Hikari smiled. "Really?"

"Yep," Ted confirmed. "He told me all about it when I found him in an alleyway with a hundred and forty-seven gunshot wounds in him. Gave me all I needed to fight crime and apologized for not telling me sooner in his final moments. A real hero, that Dan."

Hikari's smile disappeared. "Meep!"

"Don't worry, kid. I'm still kicking," he said before getting up and walking over to her. "I'll be happy to teach you all there is to being the Blue Beetle."

Hikari suddenly became confused. "But you just said you were never able to get the Scarab to activate. Do you actually have any idea this thing works?"

"Well... no," Ted admitted. "But I do know a thing or two about being a hero! Lesson one: have all your affairs in order."

Hikari seemed to get even more squeamish at that.

"Lesson two: lighten up. It's good to plan for the worst, but if you go everywhere expecting nothing but, you'll find stormy waters around every port," Ted explained.

"Ports?" Hikari asked, the prongs seemed to chirp in confusion too.

"A little thing a friend of mine used to say. Now, lesson three's going to be one of the most important ones out there: maintain a secret identity. How many people know that you're the Blue Beetle?" he asked.

"Just my family. My sisters Kodama and Nozomi, and my dad. They were there when I found out Khaji was in my back," Hikari explained.

"Ah, well, can't be helped, but no one else. Understand? The last thing you need is for your archenemies to find out where you sleep, or worse, the press," Ted and Hikari both gave an involuntary shudder at that thought.

"But how's that going to work out when I have Khaji embedded in my spine? Even without the suit, a big blue scarab in my back isn't exactly inconspicuous," Hikari pointed out.

"Hmm, good point," Ted admitted. "We'll have to falsify something about how you'll have to wear looser clothes with long sleeves and other concealing items, and how they'll need a specialist to be looked at so the school nurse is out. And you're going to need the medical records to back up those restrictions. Don't worry though, I know a guy."

". . . You heard me, Bruce," Ted said over the phone. "Come on, it's for an up and coming heroine. She really needs this done."

Hikari shuffled uncomfortably as she listened to Mr. Kord talk over the phone. She really wasn't enthusiastic about lying to people as the start of her superhero carrier. I mean, I know I need to protect my family from the press, but can't it be done in a more honest fashion? she thought.

"Thanks, buddy. I owe you one," Mr. Kord said before hanging up and turning back to the rookie superheroine. "Okay, thought we'd send you through the wringer, but first, you'll probably want to call your family. If you need to know the international codes, there's a paper with them next to the phone, and don't worry about security concerns, because that line is as secure as a reference that you don't have clearance for."

"Thank you, Mr. Kord," Hikari said before getting up and walking towards the phone. She looked to the side of the phone and found out that there was indeed a note with the numbers needed to call out of the US, to call Japan, and to call Tokyo-3 written on it. Convenient.

"Moshi-moshi," came the voice of Horaki Kodama.

"Kodama! I'm glad I caught you," Hikari replied in Japanese.

"Hey, sis. You all right?" Kodama asked in an upbeat tone.

"Yeah, I'm fine, and . . . I've decided to take the job," Hikari admitted.

"You sure about this, sis?" Kodama asked. "This isn't something that you can just walk away from. Once you're in, you're not going to be getting out."

"Plenty of people have retired from this job," Hikari pointed out.

"I'd didn't say you wouldn't be able to. What I'm saying is that you won't want to. You'll get started on this, and then you won't stop," Kodama explained. "I just want to make sure you aren't going to regret this later."

"I won't. Besides, now that I can do something, I couldn't live with myself doing nothing," Hikari told her.

"Okay, I can see that, and it sounds like you're pretty serious about this too," Kodama said. "I'll tell Dad and Nozomi then. Dad will be worried, but he'll roll with it. Nozomi . . ."

"Nozomi will probably be bouncing off the walls," Hikari finished with a chuckle.

"That she will. Listen, Hikari, I know you've probably got stuff you've got to get to, so we'll talk later when you get back. That work?" Kodama asked.

"Yeah, we'll talk more when I get home," Hikari confirmed.

They said their goodbyes, and then Hikari turned around to find a smiling Ted Kord holding a large remote control.

"You know," he said in English, "this is the point in a film where things would become a montage. You don't have that luxury."

"Come on, Hikari! This is the easy stuff!" Ted yelled at the panting young girl running on the treadmill.

"There's got to be an easier way to do this. There's no way that this is the easy stuff," Hikari gasped, eternally grateful for the sweatsuit she was wearing.

"Yeah, well, we've got to establish a baseline, so no supersuit!" Ted barked.

"Hey, this is actually pretty easy," Hikari commented, now decked out the Blue Beetle armor and running on the same treadmill.

"Yes, now let's turn up the speed," Ted commented before fiddling with the remote control.

"Oh no!" Hikari shouted before scrambling to keep up with how fast the treadmill was running.

"Come on Hikari, lift those weights! They're only 200lbs!" Ted yelled as the girl struggled to lift them even with the scarab armor on.

"I'm doing the best I can!" she shouted back.

"Actually, you're not," Khaji put in.

"What?" Hikari deadpanned a split second before being beaned in the facemask by the dumbbell she was lifting.

"While you're on the job, you're going to be running into to some bizarre situations. This simulation will teach you to expect the unexpected," Ted explained over the intercom from the control room of the holographic simulation room known as the 'Hero Zone'.

"Unexpected. Right, we can do this. Right, Khaji?" Hikari asked as she psyched herself up.

"Right!" Khaji confirmed.

"Begin," Ted informed them, the entire room changing to become a cityscape.

"Help! Help!" came the imperiled voice of a kindly grandmother nearby.

Hikari jumped into action, flying up into the air and searching for the source of the shouts. She found it in one of the back alleyways where a little old lady was being accosted by a surly looking mugger. Wasting no time, the Blue Beetle hit the ground behind the mugger.

"Stop right there, criminal scum!" Hikari declared to the mugger.

The thug turned around and glared at her. "Beat it, Blue Barnacle! This don't concern you!"

"Resisting, eh? Then taste . . . Khaji, help me out."

"Concussion blast."

". . . Concussion blast!" Hikari finished, her hands transforming into cannons that were slightly smaller than the ones she had spawned that morning. Blue beams shot forth from the guns, knocking the crook down and out. "No need to fear, citizen. The police will be here soon to take care of this miscreant," she declared.

"Oh, that's so sweet of you, dear," the dear old lady said before drawing a laser pistol out of her purse. "But I'm afraid you won't live to see them."

"What?!" Hikari and Khaji deadpanned at the same time just before being hit by the laser, ending the scenario.

"Defuse that bomb!" Ted shouted at them in another simulation.

Hikari looked over from the piles of unconscious ninja bodies surrounding her to find the giant computer with the countdown timer on it. She rocketed over to it, plugged a wire from her wrist into a USB port, and went to work on the computer that had just appeared on her wrist, only to realize that she had no experience either hacking or defusing bombs.

"Hikari! Let me take this!" Khaji exclaimed.

Hikari nodded and pressed the button on her forearm labeled, "Let the AI hack it." Within moments, the countdown stopped at a somewhat anticlimactic 15 seconds.

"Whew. Looks like we got here with time to spare," Hikari said.

"Simulation failed! Reason: failure to properly quip," a dry computerized voice informed them.

"Oh, come on!" Hikari and Khaji shouted.

"Dodge!" Ted shouted, just before a torrent of rubber balls shot out of a side in the wall.

Hikari acted instinctively and brought her arms up in front of her face, and then, just as automatically, a giant metal shield sprung into being from those arms. The rubber balls bounced harmlessly off of it, leaving her completely unaffected. The shield retracted, and she got a big smile on her face.

"That's great, Hikari, but what happens if you're facing an enemy that can get through that shield?" Ted asked rhetorically.

"I die?" Hikari asked unsurely.

"No, you won't die, because you'll dodge! . . . Unless you don't have time. Then, by all means, raise that shield. It looks awesome," Ted elaborated.

"So, what happens if you find out you're dating a supervillain?" Ted asked the assembled class of one.

Hikari raised her hand. "Try to convert them to the side of righteousness?"

"Wrong!" Ted declared. "That was a trick question. The proper answer is to never date supervillains. It leads to nothing but pain. And Batman."

"I really think I'm starting to get somewhere," Hikari told Ted many hours after starting her training.

"You're certainly doing that, but it was only your first day," Ted told her as he stumbled over to a waiting seat. "Come back tomorrow at a more reasonable time, and we'll continue your training."

"What? That's it?" Hikari asked. "Come on. I'm pumped and ready to go."

"And I've been up all night," Ted told her. "Get some sleep, it'll do me some good."

"OK then. See you tomorrow, Mr. Kord!" Hikari declared energetically, flying up into the air and almost going through the roof before correcting herself and flying out the hole she had made previously.

"I've really got to get a door for that," Ted blithely observed. "I never expected the next generation of heroes to be so perky after growing in a post-apocalyptic heckhole. I suppose it's good to be wrong."

Cody's A/N: No more general author's notes due to a lack of simultaneous updates. Something interesting though is that this was originally written in the same GoogleDoc file as chapter one, and finished in the same week too. Yep, I write just about everything using that service these days. I use to rag on it like a lot of other writers, but . . . honestly, it does most of what MicrosoftWord can do, and can be accessed from anywhere. I got really tired of losing or forgetting my flash drives all the time, so it works out great. Besides, if I ever decide to publish anything on FIMfiction again I'll have it easy since they have have a way to add stories to FIMfiction directly from GoogleDocs. Now why does FIMfiction have that, and not FFN? Mostly, it has to do with the unique dynamics of how the MLP fanfic community . . . Wait a second, this is supposed to be about DC and Eva.

Well, as it turns out Ted is a character that is surprisingly easy to write. A little bit of research, a few episodes of TV, a few questions to the right people, and bing-bang-boom suddenly you're writing the character so well that even longtime fans don't find reason to complain. Though, really, considering how many versions of comic book characters there often are I wonder if that could be the start of a blog post on viewing superheroes in a more theoretical sense as opposed to viewing them based on what they did in mainline canon. Perhaps a classic example is the old "Is Superman's secret identity Clark Kent or Kal-El?" debate. (Given the way Lois acts in New Daughter of Krypton I think one should know which side I come down on.)

Rambling aside, I like this chapter. Even more than a year after writing it I can still go back and laugh at it. Which is good, considering that I usually dislike what I write after I write it. The montage scene especially is something I enjoy, and it definitely shows what a few hours of clear vision and a looping play of Joe Esposito's "You're the Best Around" can do for your writing.

Until next time, everyone.