The world greeted me as I stepped through the hospital….and by greeting I mean I was getting mugged.
See, I was minding my own business and everything, trying to not stand out, keeping my head low and not looking at anyone — You know, like they say on TV and movies, and all that? Turns out all that stuff is bullcrap, I blame it on the movies for making me try that. They make blending in look way too easy, anyway, I'll tell you how it all went.
When I had just gotten a good bit away from the hospital, maybe five or ten minutes away, I heard someone behind saying;
"Give me everything you have, now"
Usually I would just tell them "No way", and get away from the guy… Yeah, okay, I had no clue of what to do in these situations. You see, I had never gotten robbed before.
I'm used to living in some bad places but this? Getting robbed in a random alley? When I'm just trying to maybe find somewhere to live or something to eat? Well, I should probably tuck that thought in for later, I probably need somewhere to go and maybe stay but I need to figure that out later.
Now, you all might be wondering what the robber did while I was off in my head trying to figure out where I would sleep for the rest of my stay here. Well, that's easy! He hit me over the head with his gun, that only now I can visibly see, since I was sent sprawling onto the ground. With a gun pointed directly at my face, I only had one option, to scream:
"WAIT, DON'T SHOOT! I literally have nothing on me! I just got out of the hospital! I was hurt in the blast s-so maybe just uh...let me go without shooting me?" That thought was quickly ended when a bullet was shot next to my leg!
Now the next part may seem a bit unbelievable, but hang with me here, I promise everything I'm saying did happened.
After my glorious mugger gave me an oh-so-appreciated 'warning' shot, he decided to talk again.
"Look, kid, I know for a fact you have at least one thing on you! Doesn't help the fact you came waltzing out of the hospital while all those other people end up dying, for all I know, you look like a perfectly clean and healthy person waiting to give me their shit. Now, why don't you hand me the one thing I know you do have."
He motions towards my shirt that, coincidentally, had a breast pocket on it, and inside it there was, of course he would notice, my small flip phone. Now you may be asking yourselves "Where
did this guy get a flip phone?" Well, to answer that we would have to go back a bit — You see, before I left the hospital, I was allowed to go through the lost and found to find some clothes to wear, which is actually why I'm wearing some pretty mismatched clothes at the moment.
While being mugged, I'm wearing a pink and white striped polo shirt, with jogging pants and some black… What appeared to be some kind of off-brand shoes with the under armor symbol. But anyway, back on track, while I was digging through the lost and found, I found this phone — Now, I'm not one for stealing, so I asked the doctor who was overseeing my so-called 'Charity clothes' and was told that the phone had actually been here a good few months and never collected, so, I was free to take it if I liked!
They even let me charge it while I did the paperwork, and, get this; they even gave me a charger for it!
Oh, right, back to being mugged.
"Come on, man. Can't you just… Look, I don't know, rob one of the other people around here? I'm pretty sure I saw a businessman go, like, the total opposite way you're looki—"
I saw the man's hand tense up, before I could even hear the shot, I felt the bullet pierce my chest. Which lead to me throwing my hand up in some kind of defensive reflex, but, what came out instead was… Well, it was definitely a welcome surprise!
A neon bolt had shot out of my hand and at the mugger, landing directly on his hand as well as his gun, doesn't help that from how the gun seemed to warp in his hand I would say I did some damage.
The mugger, who I will now proudly nickname 'Muggy', did his best to drop the gun he held — screaming, but, uh… Apparently the neon that comes out of me is more of the plasma neon kind than the streetlight neon kind, because, it seemed that had I kinda melted the skin of his hand onto the gun? Making it mix with the partially melted gun grip.
Yay?
I did my best to scramble up to my feet, feeling the weird static-y sensation. on my arm, aiming my arm at the man, I did the thing any normal human person would do.
"See, see! That's what you get for trying to mug someone who only has one thing!"
It seems my yelling brought Muggy back to the present, after all, he looked like he was just about ready to empty his… Well, everything, because he was about as white as some window blinds.
Look, I'm not good at analogies, so, back to Mr. Blinds here.
"L-look kid just please." Muggy had to grab his hand I'm guessing he was trying to concentrate? It almost made him look like he was begging. "Don't kill me. I-I have a wife, a-and kids!" I could now physically see tears welling up in his eyes. I guess trying to come up with reasons to live on the spot while in pain was pretty hard? "P-please, man, I'll do anything!" Glaring at Muggy, I could feel my own emotions running high from the situation, so mix those with what Muggy said well my thoughts started to get pretty mixed and cloudy while trying to think in the situation.
This guy had almost shot me over a damn flip phone. I could easily blast him again to show him what it feels like, or maybe, I could let him go for a price.
Closing my eyes, I did my best to calm down before starting back at Muggy. "Fine, I won't kill you, but, you will be leaving all your money or anything valuable you have — or else I'm shooting again."
At first, Muggy looked relieved, but, once he heard the last part, he seemed to get a bit more panicky… That was until I moved my arm closer to him; which ended with him doing his best to grab anything and everything out of his pockets, turns out dumping them on the ground while having a gun attached to your hand is pretty hard.
He didn't even wait for me to grab anything before he bolted out of the alley, and here I was, hoping to get a goodbye. If you can't hear the sarcasm of my thoughts, you're about as smart as Muggy was.
Scooping up the reasonable pile of, uh, things left from Muggy, I decided to try and get somewhere at least decently safe before I see all that Muggy gave me. Maybe a roof? Well, that thought definitely had some merit to it, but, uh… How exactly would I get to the roof?
I mean, I have neon powers, right? No I have the neon powers. So by definition, I should have the same power set as Fetch, and she could turn into literal neon plasma, and run up things like walls and buildings— but, then again, I don't even know if I have that ability.
I might be like our happy-go-lucky power sponge Delsin, who needed blast cores or blast shares to unlock those certain powers, then again, I did end up in the literal block-destroying explosion that gave Cole the majority of his powers. It was at least worth a shot.
Deciding that the alley would be a pretty okay place to try and get a grip, and hopefully use my powers, I tried to use them. The first thing I tried was shooting a neon blast again, since I'd done that before, it should hopefully be easier than doing something totally new.
And wouldn't you know it, it actually was pretty easy, all I had to do was give my arm a kinda thrust… Then remember that weird static feeling, and voilá! I had neon energy pulsing around
my arm!
Now I didn't get this on the first try mind you, I had to give it a good three or four times before I tried doing both, remembering the static and, throwing my arm back, but. well it worked! Now all that's left is trying to get that feeling around my entire body? Hoo-boy, this is probably gonna take a while…
And a while it did take, because, God, did I keep messing up or doing the wrong thing. But, hey, the good news is that I figured out how to do a few smaller things, like shoot blasts out both my hands, and that I can also shoot them out my feet, which gave me really big Dragon Ball vibes.
Suck it Delsin! I made my own attack without copying anyone...wait couldn't Goku shoot Kamehameha waves out his feet? I'm just gonna leave those thoughts alone for now, totally not because I realized I tried to copy Goku, and it somewhat worked buuut… Because, I did actually manage to do the whole Neon body thing!
What I did was try getting neon on both my arms and legs, making sure I could feel the static feeling in them before I tried well… Running at a wall, which at first, didn't work, and I ended up hurting my face pretty badly However, in the process, I did end up learning I can kinda guide the static once I feel where it all is, and by static I mean the neon energy, all I gotta do is run and guide the static energy to go around my entire body.
So, first get the neon energy on my arms and legs — check… Next thing is start running at the wall. Now, you see, this time I decided to try and get a bit more of a running start,l which lead me to the discovery that once I have enough momentum, the neon covering my arms and legs kinda just spread along my body, which, of course, leads me to turn fully into neon!
Now, once I did finally turn into a running neon sign, I did my best to keep going, and run up the wall, which felt pretty weird. It's like going from running on the pavement, to putting one foot on the wall, and then running up pavement again. The best way I can describe it is to imagine you're running on a road, and you're heading towards a tree — instead of stopping you run directly at it, and once your foot touches it, your legs now change the 'road' to the tree. Almost like it's changing where gravity is pulling you, and moves it towards the tree and pulls you down like the tree is now the center of gravity.
Got that? God, I hope so, because, once I ended up running at that wall, I finally got to the roof of the building and tried to stop… And, well, uh… I did stop, just, with so much momentum I kinda threw myself onto the roof face first.
After taking five minutes to make sure I didn't break my own nose and massage my head, because, ow… Flying face-first into a roof hurt like hell! But now, I could finally look at what Muggy gave me… Or I would, if it wasn't almost completely dark out. Seems like with all that practice with my powers, I hadn't realized how much time had passed, and because of how my powers work they just lit up the area.
Sighing, I realized I'm probably gonna end up sleeping on a roof tonight. That's gonna be fun, but, hey, at least I can look over my winnings. Moving my right arm up, I reimagined the whole static feeling and let the neon encompass my arm, lighting up me and the roof.
Using my left hand, I dug into my pockets, pulling out all the things Muggy dropped for me, turns out all Muggy gave me was about seventy-five dollars worth of cash, some gum, a pack of cigarettes, some lint and another phone.
Well, that's great, I got some money… And, uh, that's honestly about all the good stuff, I mean I could use the phone for something, I guess? It used the same type of charger my own used, plus, I noticed the back had one of those small reset holes you could stick a paper clip through to factory reset it.
The phone itself was one of those old sliding ones, you know, the halfway modern phones that the back of them could slide underneath the top of it showing off its own small keyboard to type with? Deciding I could go for a piece of gum right about, now, I stuck one in my mouth and threw the aluminum wrapped behind me.
"Great, so all I have with me is two phones, one of which I didn't actually need, a gun and some cigarettes. Fantastic way to end my day. Ugh, and here I was hoping that I could find someplace to stay or sleep at for the night. And where do I end up? A roof, of all places. Because some guy decides to rob the first healthy person he saw walk out of a hospital, fantastic!"
I threw my arms up in a huff… Which ended up throwing off a small blast of neon energy blasting into the sky… I really hope that dissipates before it hits anyone, sighing once more, because it seems like I've started doing that a lot lately it seems.
I do my best to lay on my back facing the sky, I end up stuffing my arms into my shirt to try and keep them at least a little warm, I decide to just sleep here for the night. At least it's somewhat safe, since the only people who would see me would maybe be some reapers, but, I never remembered seeing them near the hospital… So, I should, hopefully, be safe… And if not, well, I can take a couple of bullets — and that should be enough to wake me up, get me to haul ass away.
Seeing as this is the last of me for tonight, I wish you all a good night… And with that, I close my eyes and try to hopefully get some sleep.