Chapter 2: The Sorriest Thing I Ever Saw
I'll admit, I probably spent at least ten minutes just smiling at the car as it sat on the floating platform inside my void-world, just imagining what Pulaski's face would look like when he realized his car was up and stolen.
He'd be upset. Like… he'd probably be pretty pissed. I hoped he was.
In the back of my mind, I also hoped he would lose some sleep over having his car kidnapped, even though I knew he had plenty of cash to just go to the dealership and buy a new one.
But still.
He would be thinking fuck that cape the whole time he was talking with the salesman and doing paperwork. He might even have to cough up a believable story for why he was in the market for a car to the salesman.
I know it probably made me a bad person — a villain — but it felt so right. Karmic, even.
Maybe I'm getting a complex. Ugh.
After arriving back at my home-base-slash-evil-lair and getting bored at staring at the Viper, I jumped the two-foot gap to the larger platform — about three feet lower than the car — in my archipelago of suspended concrete and Earth.
I took a seat down on the park bench that was situated about six feet from the edge — it was almost directly facing the car platform, but not quite. The piece I was on was maybe twenty-five feet in diameter and was one of my early acquisitions.
I'd taken it after my second day experimenting with my powers. One of the local parks provided ample opportunity for practice, since it was segmented into four quadrants by rows of trees, which made line of sight from nearby buildings and street traffic difficult.
Directly in the middle of my 'home' platform was most of an oak tree that had been at the epicenter of my jump. The area of effect of my abilities had sheared off the top-most branches, giving it a very "bulb-like" shape. The tree was still green and seemed alive, but I wasn't sure how much longer that would last in a place without any sunlight. The grass on two-thirds of the home platform was still green too, though, so maybe it wouldn't?
Powers were weird.
Before heading over to the much smaller alley platform, which was the closest anchor to my apartment in the real world, I stripped out of my hoodie and laid it across the park bench.
I was being super paranoid, I knew. However, I had no idea where any CCTV security might be on the two block walk back, and I definitely wanted to make at least a token effort to change my appearance from how I'd looked when I'd gone to the convention center.
So, sans hoodie, I long-stepped over to the meter-wide cone of another platform and jumped back to the muggy Chicago alley. Checking to make sure nobody had noticed my arrival, I headed toward the sidewalk and down the street.
My head throbbed as I passed a liquor store with a bright neon sign — I had to fight not to move any of the muscles on the left side of my face and only raise a hand to block the oppressive shine. As I got closer, the reality of my injury came into focus.
I hadn't looked in a mirror, but it felt like a serious injury. I'd also never been punched in the head by a full-grown man, so my measure might have been off.
I couldn't just call an ambulance or show up at the local urgi-care, though. That guy probably told the PRT he clocked me, and with a general description of "white girl with a swollen face", if I tried to go anywhere to get medical attention then they were sure to find me.
Would they even consider a punch to the face to be serious enough to warrant a doctor visit, though?
Ugh. I didn't know. My mind was spinning up impossible scenarios as I tried to mentally outsmart some PRT detective who had probably not even finished his sweep of the parking garage.
I was already over two miles away and they couldn't track my movements. Breathe, stupid. You're fine. I chanted that mantra in my head as I crossed the street and then crossed it again, turning the corner.
A couple of preppy-looking women staggered out of a bar and headed my way, one of the blondes giggling like a maniac and only managing not to swerve into the row of parked cars thanks to her taller friend holding her elbow in a vice. I ducked my head and swerved out into the street, walking along the side of the parked cars so they wouldn't catch sight of my face.
Thankfully, they paid me no mind.
I shuffled around in my hoodie pockets for my keys and buzzed myself into the building with my keyfob. If my eye got really bad, I'd have to go somewhere. I resolved not to risk permanent injury to my head or, heaven forbid, losing part of my vision.
No. No no no. Breath in, stupid. I'm fine.
The walk up to the third floor was quiet and nobody was in sight. It wasn't surprising, though — it was a weeknight and it had to be close to nine or ten in the evening. I thought back. What time had I arrived to the convention center?
I moved my eye, squinting, and flinched at the pain and a sudden dizziness. Ugh. I might have a concussion. Fuck.
As I closed the door behind me, I went on mental auto-pilot as I slung my laptop satchel onto my bed and kicked off my pants, stepping into a pair of sweats I picked up off the floor. I honestly didn't feel up to a shower and having hot water blast my face, so I opted to deal with my probably-stinky self in the morning.
My roommate Gary, bag of Cheetos in hand, found me sitting in the dark in the living room watching Pulp Fiction with a plastic bag of ice pushed against my cheekbone. I wasn't really paying attention; I was more staring through the TV like a damn zombie.
I couldn't sleep, though. Doctors in movies always said you had to stay awake if you had a head injury. But for how long? A day? Did I have to have Gary watch me to make sure I didn't die?
"Sasha, do you know if the internet guy is going tomorrow or…" he trailed off, squinting in the dim light. "Are you okay? Uh, like, did someone…?" he pointed at my face.
"No," I grunted, adjusting my angle on the couch. "Allergic reaction." Maybe short answers would make him go away. I tilted my left side away from him.
"But like, wouldn't it be…" he trailed off, the hand not holding the chips coming up to his unshaven chin and over his lips, tapping them. "I just mean to say, if someone hurt you, I can, uh…" he trailed off again, as though he wasn't sure what he thought he would do to help.
"It wasn't…" I hesitated, thinking of a lie. "I didn't eat something — I just got something on me that I'm allergic to." Vague answers were key. Keep it generic.
He blinked, continuing to stare at the side of my face. I could see the gears turning, but I hoped he would just shut the fuck up and go away so I wouldn't end up saying something that let him onto the fact that I did something really stupid with powers nobody knew I had.
I eyed the chips and took a sniff of the air on a hunch, quirking my lips. Huh.
"Are you high?" I accused, knowing that a lot of the time at this hour he was, since he worked nights moonlighting as a server admin to some podunk dark web something. He was always getting high when he thought Alice and I weren't awake to smell it.
"N-no," his eyes widened and he took a step back. He fucking was. "I just...I want to think if you were my sister and someone did something, then I would...y'know?"
"Well, guess what? I'm not your sister," I snapped, more awake now, wincing at the tug at some cheek muscle I'd probably torn. "Now fuck off."
"Fine! Fine, fine, maso-shi-shtic bitch," he mumbled as he shuffled away, Cheetos held to his chest.
I emailed my professors early in the morning, letting them know I wouldn't be in due to an allergy flare-up. I'd nodded off a few minutes at a time on the couch, but between my excitement at actually doing something besides stealing patches of other people's yards and the throbbing of my face, there was no way I was getting anything resembling a good night's sleep.
Coffee, in general, made my pain worse, but I still found myself brewing a pot as the sun started to glow through the shades of my room. I swiveled in my desk chair and powered on my desktop.
My laptop, however, was sitting on my bed. I'd known it was broken from hearing the clinking inside my bag of something that had gotten loose in the altercation with the guard, but the spider-web crack that ran from one corner of the screen to the other made me hesitant to power it on and see if it worked at all.
And that really sucked, since I used the damn thing for all of my on-campus classes.
Luckily, thankfully, Mr. Smith's anal insistence on source control meant I could pull my classwork down from the college repository from any computer, so the progress on my capstone project wasn't lost — at most, I'd lost some of my class notes.
Honestly, though, I couldn't bring myself to even open the repository. I wanted, more than anything, to space out and crawl through Parahumans Online. So, even though I felt the pit in my stomach forming at how my procrastination would impact my project's timeline if I didn't get anything done today, I opened up my browser and got to crawling.
And it really was crawling — I guess I knew why Gary was asking about it. It looks like our internet was still capped at half of what we'd been paying for.
I guess I was expecting my antics to be front-page news on the forums after they finally loaded, but I wasn't. Bagrat, one of the regulars, had created a thread about the attack, but the details were vague and not too many users had commented on it yet.
I clicked through to the top thread, which was an announcement that the Brockton Bay Wards were getting a new member — Shadow Stalker. I skimmed it, not really paying attention.
Was I a little upset that some kid joining a team got more attention than me? Yeah. It was kind of stupid and self centered; I knew that. It didn't make it any less disappointing for me.
Trying to distract myself, I decided to just bite the bullet and try to boot up my laptop. I gently arranged it on my cluttered desk, pushing away my sticky notes and other knick-knacks, and pushed the power button.
The fan turned on and the aluminum body hummed, but the screen didn't even flicker.
That...honestly wasn't the worst — at least it powered on. It meant there was no way to work on it, but I could probably recover some of the stuff from its hard drive that wasn't already in my repositories — personal stuff and, of course, some of my notes and thoughts on cape names and ideas on what to do with my power.
I put my ice-pack down and reached around the back of my computer tower, fumbling for a moment before finding the HDMI input cable. I nudged it out and my computer monitor flashed blue for a moment, showing "no signal", before going dark.
The end I pulled out went into the HDMI port on the side of my laptop and after an eternity of nothing, my laptop's desktop screen flickered to life on my monitor. I gave it a few experimental flicks and clicks to make sure the keyboard was still working — it was — before starting my data-offload onto a couple of flash drives.
This...could take a while. I grabbed my empty coffee cup and padded into the shared kitchen, pouring some into it from the half-full pot. It was only warm now, but I didn't want to bother with the microwave and settled for frowning into the almost-cold liquid as it went down my throat. Once it was empty, I went to refill it again.
On second thought…
I grabbed the whole pot, taking both it and my mug into my bedroom to wait for the sun to finish rising.
End notes: So, I have a few ideas for some other Destiny-inspired capes that will hopefully come into play. I also have some vague idea of the direction I'm going to be taking this story. Y'know. Like...in general.
I'm also trying really hard not to make this character OP as fuck. I usually have a hard time with that, so we'll just see. I do already have her cape name picked out. It's cheesy but it does fit with the theme if you have played a few rounds of Gambit.