Gibbons Home; March 17 2008 6:00 AM

Kotoro woke up early. While his life was looking to become significantly more comfortable than it had previously been in some ways, he didn't want to allow himself to become soft. Also, he'd been running on fumes for days now. He'd taken the chance to eat on several occasions, but the meals had been meager by his standards. He hadn't been able to eat his fill. There had either not been enough time, or not enough food on hand. In any case, he could solve both problems by making a short visit to the Techne. Jogging there and doing some shadow boxing and light training would get him some early morning exercise.

Kotoro put on one of his spare sets of street clothing mimicking armor, and placed the dirty one into the laundry bin. It ought to be machine washable, as the fabric was flexible in addition to being quite stretchy. It had to be. He descended the stairs, finding Donald and Janet sitting at the table having their morning coffee and tea respectively.

He voiced his intention to go out for a morning jog, but neglected to mention the Techne. Kotoro wasn't sure how much of his information had been shared with these two. He expected that some of the top secret stuff had been kept from them and wasn't eager to share everything with them right away. After they had earned some trust he probably wouldn't mind, but he didn't want to get on the PRT's bad side, and any additional people who learned of it became a potential leak.

"'s a bit early for that isn't it mate. You might run into trouble. Not that you couldn't handle it, but you don't have a cape name or a costume yet. Could put you in a spot o' trouble. 'specially if you hurt someone." said Donald.

"Will stay open place. Avoid gang. Not want fight." Kotoro insisted.

"If you really must, we'll permit it on a trial basis. If you get into trouble, we'll have to either prohibit it in future or have someone tag along with you." said Janet.

"'fore you go, in case we're out when you get back, we've put your school supplies into a bag near the door, and the PRT called to let us know they've scheduled you for a meeting with the Image department after school today. You're to head over there after school for a meeting at 5:45. They recommended you bring any ideas for a costume and cape name that you might have come up with already."

The jog was mostly uneventful. There were actually some gang members lurking about when he got closer to the waterfront, and a few fights brewing between members of the ABB and the Merchants in the areas where there were a large number of warehouses, but Kotoro was able to avoid them with the help of the spy drone network, which had adjusted its drone placement to optimize for the highest degree of coverage where he was going to be living, where his school was, and the Techne's hiding place as well as the most efficient routes between these locations. If things got really crazy he ought to be able to move fast enough to bypass any obstructions, or even fly over it, but the less he did to out himself the better, and there was always a risk that even if he moved faster than human perceptions typically allowed for, someone with a parahuman power might notice it anyway. Better to be safe about it until he had a cape identity to use.

He arrived at the Techne, and after ensuring that nobody was around, he ducked into the hidden entrance and boarded the ship. He quickly whipped up a meal with the assistance of the on-board equipment and consumed the first fulfilling meal he had had in days. The stockroom only had about a month's worth of proper meals remaining, but he ought to have something set up to deal with the situation with the PRT's help by then. He did some training for about 30 minutes, and took a shower before leaving.

Kotoro had chosen to take his bag with him instead of returning to the Gibbons residence before heading to school. He didn't see the point of lengthening his trip or taking the risk of his presence at the seafront in Merchant territory being traced back to where he was living. Instead, he jogged directly to school, arriving a bit early to give himself plenty of time to find his locker and first classroom.

Middle School; March 17 2008 8:00 AM

The assistant principal met Kotoro at the door. He introduced himself, but Kotoro wasn't really interested in his name. He was sure that if the man mattered the name would be repeated often enough that he would remember it, and if he didn't he could always look at the man's name tag or ask someone. He was a pale balding man past his prime with a few gray hairs and sagging skin but not yet elderly and decrepit. He seemed to have a kindly personality, or was at least a good actor.

He had been briefed on Kotoro's relative lack of exposure to cultural and societal knowledge. Due to the need to coordinate with the PRT, the school administration were privy to his status as a ward, although they weren't being told everything. The man explained that classes were held in 8 periods, with one of those periods serving as a lunch break. Classes were ordinarily arranged with 4 of what they called core courses, and 2 arts or electives and a flex period. There were enough students in the school that the students were divided up into 3 segments. Each segment had their lunch break at a different time of day. The administration had decided to have the lunches in mixed-age groups, as the age demographics were uneven, with there being a lot more 6th and 7th graders than 8th graders for some reason.

As Kotoro had shown strong competency in the STEM coursework, he would be focusing on doubling up on remedial work to pick up what he should have learned in K-6 for the other courses in his first 2 quarters, and then they would re-assess what to do going forward. The tentative plan was to have him take the 8th grader STEM courses where necessary (for official graduation reasons, to demonstrate competency), and allow him to test out of taking such courses where legally permitted. They were more interested in rounding out his education as much as they could than they were with having him stick to a "normal" schedule. Taking more English and history and literature courses would help with his acculturation anyway.

The first half of the day went by mostly as a confusing daze, getting used to the clockwork regime of period changes, walking from one class to the next, finding where everything was, and so on. He was approached multiple times by curious students who all asked basic questions about his past, with the implicit assumptions being so far off base that he wasn't sure how to answer them (obviously he couldn't tell them the truth). The cover story supplied by the PRT was that he was a refugee from an island nation sunk by Leviathan some number of years back, and that he had lost most of his memories due to amnesia. He didn't like pretending to have been an injured bystander in a lost battle, but it was in his interest under the circumstances. Few of them had more than cursory interest. They were mostly polite, but unmemorable and other than acknowledging him politely at first, they turned their attentions back to the class work and mostly ignored him.

He entered his remedial English classroom after his lunch period to find a concerning scenario. There appeared to be overt animosity between 3 groups of students.

One group, consisting of 5 students, were collected into the rear left of the classroom, were all wearing red and green in some form or another, had similar facial features and skin tones of a slightly darker shade, but not quite enough to be brown, and had mostly black hair, the ones who hadn't dyed theirs at any rate.

A second group, consisting of 6 students, were collected into the rear right of the classroom, were wearing red and black. There were all light skinned. They appeared to be trying to achieve some unity in their fashion sense, but Kotoro had nothing to draw on to understand it.

The third, smaller group, of 3 students, were seated at the rear center in a small cluster of desks. They were wearing very shaggy clothes, some with holes in them, had fairly unkempt greasy hair, and smelled like they had forgotten to shower.

These groups seemed to roughly correspond to the intelligence Kotoro and Epistēmē had gathered about the 3 major gangs active in Brockton Bay. They'd anticipated that the gangs would recruit fairly young members, but hadn't anticipated them being quite this young. Perhaps they were family members of existing gang members in the case of the ABB and Empire 88. The merchants were unscrupulous. They'd try to get anybody hooked on drugs regardless of age, and were always looking for dealers the cops would be less likely to hassle or suspect. Gang members of such a young age made a cruel kind of sense, once they were made aware of it, but it had been outside of their initial expectations, and seeing it in person rankled more than he would have predicted.

The remaining 14 students had attempted to separate themselves from this problem, sitting toward the front of the classroom, creating as much physical and mental distance between themselves and the others as they could get away with without getting the teacher involved.

Unfortunately for Kotoro, the only remaining seat was among the middle group in the rear. He pretended not to notice anything was amiss. About half way through the period, when they were released to work on english sentence structure and vocabulary worksheets, the troubles began.

One of the boys wearing black and red hailed his attention with hisses and asked fairly loudly "How can you stand to sit with that filth?"

Kotoro looked at the presumed merchant kids again. He noted that one was of darker complexion, but wasn't sure if it was that or their gang affiliation that the boy was referring to. He gave the boy a questioning look in response.

"You're sitting with a nigger, a hebe, and a gyspy, and all of them are filthy drug peddlers."

Ah, so it was an all of the above situation. While he recognized the skin color reference, Kotoro made a mental note to look up what the two other slurs meant when class was over. For the moment though, he responded with "Empire sells drugs though. How is different?"

The boy flinched a bit and attempted to deflect "they sell shit to the rich. Stuff like blow. Not heroin and crack. They don't sell the shit that makes the slums poorer and dumber. They want to make the city better and clean it up, not drag it down." Satisfied that he had defended the honor of his group, he turned back to his work. From that point forward whenever any of them addressed Kotoro or looked at him, they displayed negativity and open dislike.

"Is that why they killed that gwailou hero with that flower thing on her costume? At least we know what we're about. Killing the heroes is how you make the city cleaner? Talkin' out both sides you mouth. Both sides lie." one of the boys wearing red and green from the other side of the room said.

"Stupid bastard got what was coming to him. Kaiser disavowed any involvement and expressed disapproval of his actions." responded a boy from the black and red crowd.

A girl in the red and green group spoke in Kotoro's direction, more at him than to him, "You, your skin is a bit olive and your eyes look a bit different, you got any Asian in your family?".

Most Saiyajins had features that looked like a mix of Asian in terms of facial traits and skin tones and western in terms of build and body hair. The Saiyajin only seemed to care who was the strongest and most skilled, and were highly individualist. As a result they cared little for superficial physical features, so long as they did not combine to form an ugly whole.

The dominant phenotypic cluster of Centurions mostly looked like a mix of Mediterranean and Nordic features, but there were still sub-populations of both peoples with different physical features that these earthlings would have qualified as different races. From what his mother had told him, there had been some racial strife on her world in the distant past, but they had moved beyond it eventually.

None of these "races" from his ancestral populations directly mapped onto any of the earthling populations though in terms of trait combinations or culture, but he wasn't sure if that was the meaning she was reaching for or not. If they cared more about the physical traits, then to their estimation it might be the same thing as being Asian, but if culture was the point, he didn't have any common ground. He didn't really know how to answer, so Kotoro shrugged. "Maybe, I not know ancestry." Hearing his answer to this and the sound of his speech carrying an accent that could not easily be identified, the group in red and black scowled at him even more than before. After that, the more they heard him speak, the angrier they became toward him. He didn't know what he'd done to upset them.

The kids in the middle didn't really want to be involved in any of this argument or discussion and as class went on they began to visibly sink into their seats a bit and appeared to try to be invisible. The other two sides continued alternately jeering and insulting each other as well as hurling slurs and insults at the merchant kids for the rest of the class time. The kids in the front of the classroom did their level best to ignore absolutely everything going on behind them.

The teacher looked haggard and harried even at the beginning of class, by the end he looked like he needed a nap. He had never acknowledged the gangs or made any attempt to modify their behavior. It is likely he considered it to be a waste of time better spent on the rest of the students. Perhaps if they became a true disruption he might do something about it.

They were a distraction to his studies, but were also interesting, and potentially a source of information about the gangs. They would not know anything of great importance of course, but due to that fact they may let something slip about gang activities and movements that they did not KNOW was actually important. This could be useful, as annoying as it was. He just hoped they didn't make a habit of involving him after the novelty of his joining the class wore off.

After class, he noticed the Empire 88 members from his class looking at him and talking amongst themselves and with other people wearing similar colors in the hallways. After his next class, they began to interfere with him and intrude on his personal space in both subtle and overt ways. They would attempt to trip him. Shove him in the stairways. Bump into him when passing in the halls. Sneer in an attempt to intimidate him whenever he looked their way. Of course he had to work to respond to these actions as if they mattered. Taking a knee, pretending to fall, and so on, so as not to expose himself. It would not do for someone's attempt to trip him in the hall to end with a shattered ankle or broken tibia. He hoped they did not escalate to any attempts to cause serious injury, as those would not work, and so he would have to act to avoid them. It risked outing him. He supposed he would not overly care to dispense with the charade, but it would upset the PRT and endanger his guardians.

At the moment, he was under no actual threat, but it was tiresome and mentally taxing. In some ways they were even more aggressive than Saiyajin children. They were always looking to fight, but they weren't cowards about it, and they had a semblance of a sense of honor, at least with regard to other members of Saiyajin society. It wasn't like he could do anything about it though. He would have to endure.

At any rate, he had more incentive now for achieving proper control of his powers. Once he was back to normal, he'd be able to deal with these cowards in a more direct manner without revealing himself as an obvious superhero. At the moment, if he tried to fight them off, it would end poorly for everybody involved. Thinking again on what happened to the ballistic gel mannequin test dummies, Kotoro gave an involuntary shudder. As much as these people were overt assholes, they hadn't quite earned that.

The second half of the day finally ended, and Kotoro took his leave, putting up with the shoves and whatnot and reacting accordingly on the way out of the building. There was only one problem. Empire goons had apparently set up an ambush for someone or something near the school. Kotoro didn't know if he was the target given the recent attention, or if it was aimed at someone else. A number of youths in red and black were collecting along each of the possible routes away from the building.

Luckily for Kotoro, the ABB students had noticed this show of force and had called in reinforcements of their own. A small but growing crowd of people wearing red and green was growing in the distance and after a short time split and began to confront each group of entire goons. This distraction allowed Kotoro the opportunity to slip past the budding gang conflict.

Navigating the situation outside of school without being noticed cost Kotoro some time. He'd been hoping to have enough time to practice and train KI control, but instead he stopped at the house quickly and left a note for his guardians, picked up his communicator changed his outfit. He stashed a domino mask and some Saiyajin armor of standard design in a bag, and went back outside immediately to make his way to his meeting with Image.

Edge of the Docks South and Downtown; March 17 2008 4:50 PM

The situation that had begun near the school had apparently continued escalating while he was in the residential areas. The ABB and Empire 88 were both out in force. There were adults in the crowd now instead of just the middle school and high school aged youth. They were all over the place in the area from Docks south to Downtown and well into the commercial district. As Kotoro approached closer to the PRT offices the numbers shifted from being majority ABB to include a larger contingent of the Empire 88 thugs. When he reached the area near Arcadia High School, he heard the beginnings of gunfire.

Kotoro avoided the gang infested areas as best he could, but eventually he came upon a scenario he couldn't ignore any longer. The fighting had escalated so quickly that the normally wary citizens hadn't been able to vacate before things turned openly violent. Several families were sandwiched between Empire 88 and ABB forces near the entrance to a medical care center. Weapons had been drawn on both sides, but what made the situation truly dangerous were a few individuals on the Empire 88 side that had just arrived. A woman with a scar on her throat and a cage as a mask holding a pair of small scythes, a tall muscle-bound man wearing loose pants, chains, and a white and blue tiger mask, and a hairy scruffy greasy looking blonde guy wearing a metal wolf mask had arrived and the ABB members present were clearly terrified at this development. These people fit the information for Cricket, Stormtiger, and Hookwolf.

Kotoro didn't care all that much if the Empire 88 wanted to brutalize or kill willing members of the ABB, but Oni-Lee and Lung were known for press-ganging Asian people into their ranks who wanted nothing to do with them, and there were regular civilians in the line of fire, among which there were numerous people who didn't fit the Empire's preferred demographic. While the PRT and Wards program would likely be annoyed with him for getting involved, especially before his official debut and introduction to the public, there were people who needed help here, and no authorities or heroes were yet present to do anything about the situation. It was likely quite a number of people would die if he didn't step in. He just needed to make sure things didn't end in a way that made parahuman heroes look bad.

Having justified his involvement to himself, Kotoro found an undisturbed alley, put on his domino mask, and flew up to the rooftop while using the alley as cover. There he quickly donned his battle armor. This model took its theme from the armor worn before King Cold made his appearance and began supplying their higher tech battle armor designs, but retained all of the improvements, plus a few tweaks that Epistēmē had made, increasing its durability. The color scheme was a bright green for the shoulder guard and abdominal/leg plates and a vibrant blue for the rest of the armor portion. The bodysuit under-layer was black, while his gloves and boots were white. Once he was finished, he leapt into the air and descended to just above the middle of the fray interrupting the posturing and threats and negotiations the Empire and ABB were engaged in. They'd been trying to convince the white people in the crowd to leave while they kept the ABB busy, but the people in the crowd were too frightened by the situation to move, and they didn't entirely trust the Empire capes to protect them from any stray fire.

[author's note: remember what Cabba was wearing in Dragon ball super? Its similar to that in aesthetic, though obviously not in terms of coloration. It also still has shoulder guards and isn't quite as sparse with the coverage.]

All eyes were on him now. He spoke simply. "This ends. All of you", he pointed to the civilians "leave now. I will protect. Anyone try to hurt, I stop. They not like."

"Hookwolf, have you ever seen or heard of a cape like this?" Stormtiger asked.

"Not in Brockton. Little bastard has a tail, but he looks human otherwise. I've never heard of any capes like that at all." the shirtless blonde man replied.

Stormtiger turned back to Kotoro "What are you called kid?".

"My name no matter." Kotoro calmly said in response.

"A newbie then? Your first night out perhaps? You're making a mistake messing with us. I'm not usually inclined to give people a second chance, but if you walk away now, I'll let you live. There are more suitable targets present right now." Stormtiger said to Kotoro.

"New to city yes. Fighting? no. my life many fights. You not scare me." Kotoro said, assuming a fighting stance. The people in the crowd still hadn't moved. Kotoro began to form a protective mobile KI shell around them.

"We warned ya' and gave ya' a chance. We're not going lightly on you now." Hookwolf said, beginning to transform into a metal monstrosity composed of blades and hooks, vaguely resembling a wolf. The air around storm tiger began to shift around and affect the ambient light in strange ways around his hands and fingers and gusts of wind began to blow around the area. Cricket started the attack, and began emitting sounds that screwed with Kotoro's inner ear and messed with his sense of balance and orientation. Several of the ABB members and civilians began vomiting as they were within the area of effect. While disoriented, a sudden gust of wind pushed Kotoro into the ground hard, and he stumbled, not expecting the sudden downward force. Hookwolf slammed into him full force, clearly expecting to shred him or send him flying, and his metallic form bent and warped around Kotoro's form a bit from the impact.

Kotoro began to recover his sense of balance and to adjust to the ambient noise. It was still affecting him, but now that he was aware of its effects he could compensate better.

"My turn" he said.

He thrust his arms into the mass of metal pressed up against him and, gripping it solidly, tore it in half. One of the two pieces continued to move and warp and change shape, so he began tearing off more pieces, and finally slammed it against the ground several times, and punched it, and jammed it deeply into the asphalt, mostly embedding it there. Hooks and metal pieces continued to flow and stream from it, but it was weak activity and didn't reform with any kind of speed to worry about. It would probably take hookwolf quite a lot of energy and time to build himself back up enough to get free. Stormtiger was mid-lunge when Kotoro looked back up at him. Kotoro easily dodged him of course. Knowing that Stormtiger was not as resilient against damage as Hookwolf, Kotoro used the weakest Kiai he could summon to toss him at the nearest wall. The villain managed to slow his approach somewhat, but still hit the wall hard enough to hurt. Kotoro thought he heard a dull crack, and Stormtiger roared in pain.

When he stood again, one arm was hanging wrong. He made a throwing motion toward Kotoro with the other arm, saying "Their blood is on your hands boy". Shortly after several explosions rocked the surface of the protective shell behind Kotoro that was shielding the civilians.

They were unhurt, but this overt violence directed their way finally spurred the crowd into action in their own defense, and they began to flee. The ABB members also began to scatter, their fear of reprisal from Lung and Oni Lee for cowardice being outweighed by their immediate survival instincts. Cricket turned on Kotoro once more and amped up and varied her acoustic attack. Kotoro's vision began to swim and his balance was lost once more. He endured the experience for as long as it took for the civilians to escape. He knew he could take Cricket down but in doing so he risked breaking the unwritten rules. He wasn't supposed to kill deliberately, and under the influence of this ability, he lacked any kind of finesse. Any attacks he used that would be capable of ending the fight would likely end with her death, and since he wasn't currently in mortal peril, would be hard to defend. Since the risk to civilians was now over, he decided to make a hasty withdrawal. Using the fastest speed he could muster, channeling his KI a bit, he rocketed into the sky, taking a sharp turn and landing in the distance. Having regained his senses by exiting Cricket's range, he pushed himself a bit harder, using his super speed to reach his bag, stashed on the rooftop, and then quickly moved toward PRT offices, as he was now in danger of being late for his meeting.