The sharp clanging of abandoned bags full of spray paint and plastic shaping templates joined the mad scurry of feet upon the pebble walkway. Three teens in surprisingly high-class clothing for gangers beat a hasty retreat from the new townhouse they were in the process of tagging. It was as if capes were a plague upon normal members of humanity. Well, given her track record, the look of abject terror on the blonde girl that bothered to look back had much more to do with Shadow Stalker's presence than my own.
The last of the trio, a rather portly straggler fell on his behind four times before he managed to scramble around the corner. None of his friends made an effort to help him. He failed to notice that we made no effort to chase him.
Shadow Stalker gave me a look. She stood ramrod straight, placing a hand on my shoulder. Her grip tightened as the intensity of the silence grew.
Did I do something wrong? She did say that I could get the next one, and the three that were now no doubt very far away were the first that were actually within grabbing range of us since the incident with Goat-ee. Did she expect me to box them? Were capes even allowed to detain people for nonviolent crimes? Were they even allowed to detain people in general? She squeezed my shoulder even tighter. I wrapped my tails around each other to keep them from flittering about in a fit of nervousness.
Then Shadow Stalker laughed. She laughed hard and long enough to transition to a hands-on-knees position.
Looking into the impassive faceplate while the person behind it evacuated her lungs was odd. I found myself imagining what her smile would look like only for there to be nothing to base the picture on. "Did… did you see the chubby one?" She huffed out.
A noncommittal nod was all I offered. I felt equal parts embarrassed and nonplussed at the situation. While his stumbling may have been comical under different circumstances, I felt bad about the whole thing. This was damage mitigation without repair; scaring off or capturing people on the streets just stopped them from doing anything at that moment. In the meantime, McMurder Stick a few blocks down could find a beneficiary to donate several new torso-mounted breathing holes to while enforcers handled someone worse thing about it was that there was absolutely no guarantee that harsh deterrence alone would prevent the one person they did slap on the wrist from going back to do the same thing again if they were certain that they wouldn't be caught a second time around. That is why, I suspected, the police and big name capes wouldn't declare a crusade against every petty crime that they were capable of stopping.
Five minutes to talk to the group would have been ideal. Even if I had to beg, bribe and cajole them on to the straight and narrow, it would do more than just scattering them.
Shadow Stalker's lung capacity finally reached its limits, her chest heaved with deep breaths fraught with the occasional aftershock. I side stepped her, materializing a not-sandpaper scrubber and took to wiping away the half-done graffiti plastered on to the brick townhouse.
Perhaps the word "graffiti" didn't do it much justice.
It was a depiction of Kaiser, clad in a suit of armor fashioned out of an array of symmetric blades. His helmet ended with tall protrusions that gave the impression of a high profile crown. Black and gunmetal grey contrasted with the half-done orange of the sunset behind the man's back, making his cross-armed pose look all the more intimidating. I didn't know that graffiti could be done with enough skill to properly be called a mural, or that people with such skill would be willing to waste it on such an endeavor.
Well done or not, it too perished at the hands of the scrubber and jets of not-water from my tails like the last two crude tags I dealt with along the way. It was more removing a layer of the brick and washing it away than actual cleaning, but it was the best I could come up with on the spot.
"Their just gonna put another one up." Shadow Stalker's steps swayed to one side. She held her stomach with one hand and propped the other against the wall.
"I'd rather them have to go through the effort of starting over if they want to finish it that badly. Besides, I'll be doing..." I leaned to the side so I could read the realtor's sign. It was sunk in next to a blue-grey dolphin themed water fountain that was at least tall as myself. "Tempera and Son's a favor by not leaving pictures of Neo-Nazis all over their property."
"Fine, I have places to be though. Have fun." Shadow Stalker gave a half turn before I called out.
"I don't know how to get back alone."
"That's your problem." She shrugged. I felt a bit injured to be honest. Not because she was trying to dodge the boredom of idling away while I cleared yet another gang tag, but that she would abandon me to do so.
"You'd leave me all by myself to get roughed up by Empire capes?" I suspended my assault on Kaiser, leaving bits of his helmet sloughing off onto his pauldrons.
I looked up at Shadow Stalker with both hands at my chest, allowing my tails to drift about the same way I would when asking Senna for something. Without the exposed ears I doubted that it would be nearly as effective, but I wouldn't give up without trying.
Shadow Stalker groaned, holding out a hand that I promptly deposited another scrubber into.
For a moment, there was only the sound of scraping and not-water jetting against the grainy building material. While it took me many vertical strokes to make any progress on destroying Kaiser's chest, Shadow Stalker leaned forward, putting her entire body into circular scrubs, one palm over the other. She removed much more material at a faster rate than my meager efforts. I tried my best emulate her actions without bumping shoulders with her.
I coughed softly. "Your… methods, don't you think they're a bit excessive?"
"'Course they are, that's why they work," Shadow Stalker huffed. She scrubbed at the remaining pieces of the background, raising herself up on her toes to reach the highest parts.
"Before I got shackled into the Wards, the Empire didn't even have a foothold here. They knew I'd beat them down, and their capes had better things to do than spend their precious time squashing a single vigilante playing holdout on a few city blocks, even if it was on the nicer side.
"Spray." She said, backing up a bit. I obliged. Revealing a clean spot that was a brighter shade than the surrounding brick.
Another lull. Eventually we reached the point where we needed to crouch to get the last bits of spray paint. Her cloak when combined with normal viewing distance masqueraded Shadow Stalker's profile well despite the nigh skin-tight nature of the body suit beneath. In the position we were in, I could see where the metal plates were sculpted around, not over, her proportions. Where one could tell that certain costumes were made to make the person wearing them appear more athletic, closer inspection revealed that she actually had the build.
"The way those stiffs are doing things only works if you outnumber the people you're trying to keep down. There's too many villains and lowlifes around for it to work. So what do you do?" She tossed me a glance, letting the rhetorical question hang. "You beat them bad enough to scare all their friends, that way you don't have to overwork yourself for a poor yield. And, if you happen to get your kicks out of it, all the better."
We left the townhouse after disposing of the remaining art supplies into a nearby trash bin and penning a hastily written note on the building's doorstep to apologise for the discoloration left on the brick. Well,I did. Shadow Stalker just tapped her foot and shook her head impatiently.
The rest of our patrol went without significant occurrences. We circled back to the litter-ridden street I first encountered Shadow Stalker on. As our feet went from roofing to concrete, the cloaked crusader gave a sigh.
"You sure you can find your way back from here, or do you need me to hold your hand?"
"Nope. Thank you very much." I shook my head and tails in tandem. "You're a really nice person, you know that?"
"Don't… Mention it." The first part of her sentence sounded a lot more acidic than the second. It was as though she aborted a harsh remark midway. She grumbled something to herself that I doubt any sane person would repeat in front of a parental figure before settling on holding out her hand again. "You got a cellphone?" she asked.
She produced a device of her own and after a few deft taps of her fingers asked, "What should I put you down as?"
I scratched the back of my neck, immensely thankful for the tinted gasmask preventing the display of heat rushing into my cheeks. "I haven't come up with a name for myself yet."
"Well, better decide quick, or the PRT will slap something stupid or embarrassing on you." With a flourish, she handed my phone back to me, replacing her own in the same motion.
With a hastily executed farewell, I began the short trek home. I must have misjudged the time, staying out for hours longer than I first intended. There was foot traffic in abundance.
And they were all staring.