"Red X"
Xing Fu Lee snickered the first time he saw the name on his laptop screen as he combed through agent Keller's NSA files. That was his grandfather's nickname, Red X. But this was a completely different person. This was some super powered type who'd pulled off a couple big heists in Jump City at cutting edge technology companies and then disappeared. So far so good for the NSA, thought X.
The real issue was that these NSA guys thought that it had actually been . . . Robin.
Robin?!?!
X snickered at the absurdity of it, at first.
Robin? Ahahahahaha!!
Robin! The good midget of Gotham City then Jump? The squeaky clean Boy Wonder Bread? X laughed at his keyboard. Robin?! The little siiiiiidekick who used to wear elf shoes and a green speedo? Robin?! Oh, come on!
But as he kept reading, the file, there seemed to be a lot of circumstantial evidence. They had a sketchy voice identification of a statement made in a lab that this Red X was robbing. The quality was poor but they got a 90 percent match to Robin's voice. And biometric analysis of footage was at least consistent with it being Robin. The file showed a picture of this Red X character. X checked it out. Cool suit! All black with gray gloves and a red X on the chest, a short black cape, a full face mask with a hard shell cover over his face that looked almost like one of those masks from the movie "Scream". They had a computer analysis that said the length of this Red X's arms and legs fit Robin to, again, at least a 90 percent match. This was getting interesting.
X read on and found that they had some kind of sighting of this Red X, after the two heists, entering a warehouse later identified as a Slade hideout and then, immediately afterward they had footage, X played the minute and a half piece, of Robin robbing yet another tech place and fighting the other Titans while wearing Slade colors. X's brow furrowed in confusion at all this. What. The. Fuck?!?
But, reading on, X found that some NSA analyst had put it all together. His version of things was that Robin had tried to pretend to be a bad guy by coming up with this Red X suit. Note that no part of Red X's body or skin is ever visible in the suit! But he hadn't fooled Slade at all and Slade somehow blackmailed him into working for him. But, eventually the Titans overcame Slade. And the feeling in the NSA was that Robin was embarassed by his clumsy attempt to trick Slade and didn't want anyone to know what he'd done. So, he had the suit under wraps in Titans Tower.
X wondered about this. Why wouldn't he just destroy the suit? But, he saw in the file that other NSA spooks had made this same objection. The best guess was that it was such an awesome piece of technology that he couldn't bring himself to do it. A seperate, linked file had a rundown on the capabilities of someone wearing the suit.
It seemed to be skin tight but also just short of bullet proof. It had the ability to fire sort of repulsor rays from the gloves and a short duration sort of jet propulsion from the soles of the boots. The wearer seemed to be able to perform feats of short distance teleportation and also to engage a short lived cloaking function that rendered him virtually invisible. All of this was powered by some tubes of crimson gas/plasma called xynothium that fit into the suit's utility belt. They guessed that the belt had some kind of miniaturized device that converted xynothium to energy that was then wired through the entire suit. There was speculation that the mask was fitted with night vision and heat detection capabilitities and then there were the throwing X's. A series of different X shaped devices sort of like Robin's birdarrangs, could be X's filled with explosives, a sort of even stickier crazy glue, X's acting as shurikens, X's which popped open casting a net over an opponent, X's that functioned as saw blades and speculated upon other X's.
Xing Fu Lee was practically getting a hard on thinking of getting to use this suit. And, then, jumping across files, he read that the NSA wanted to get this suit and have one of their agents use it, some Commander named Jack Armstrong. X looked at his picture and immediately hated him. Grinning blond idiot. The all american dullard. What a dumb smile.
And they want me to steal it for them! They want me to pull off a world class theft and then give it this himbo!? Or at least help them figure out how to steal it, X realized. That's what all those questions about glass tower break ins had been.
Well, there was no question of helping them. Because from the moment he read the description of the suit, this magnificent resource just going to waste, Xing Fu Lee was determined that he, and no one else, would be the new Red X.
When the Kirov had a week off in late January, X went home to his family in Jump City. Jump was so far in the past. It was ancient history to X. He was already an international ballet star. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, officially and many times that unofficially. He'd traveled effortlessly withe the social elite of three different countries and he'd bedded dozens of ballerinas and models. He had about as much in common with kids in high school as he did with kindergarteners.
But X hugged and kissed his mom and his dad. They wanted to be reassured that Xing Fu was still their baby boy even though they knew he was more grown up then just about any 18 year old in all of Jump City. He helped them think that even if he didn't really feel it.
His sister joked about his reputation as a playboy, asking about this girl and that. Madonna?! Really?! She quoted him things from People magazine, TMZ and the National Enquirer. He hadn't seen any of it and found the mistakes and misconceptions funny. His laughing sister said that they even said he'd-he'd kissed boys. X rolled his eyes. They say that about every guy ballet dancer, he told her. His sister laughed, reassured. She knew it, she gushed. He smiled. He realized that she was in a weird position. How many other girls had friends who'd all downloaded sexy pictures of their brother in tights?
He went out a couple nights making perfunctory appearances at parties and meeting all the kids he hadn't seen in a couple years while he had started living his new life as a ballet dancer. Everyone wanted to make the same jokes to him about the tights and all and ask if he was really making that much money. Had he really humiliated Kobe Bryant like the video seemed to show? Was he really screwing all those ballerinas. X didn't give anybody a direct answer to anything. It took an effort to hold back so much. X was a very proud guy. But He wasn't much interested in homecoming week. His mind was completely elsewhere. He didn't care about discussing old times. These kids were a past he didn't care about. All he could think about was that stupid T shaped tower in the bay.
He invented excuses to be out of the house and keep a watch on the place for almost 20 hours a day the next five days. He had a telescope and a set of binoculars and took notes of everything he saw including the comings and goings of the Titans. He tried to work out even some very rough possible plans but without being able to see the damn building up close, he couldn't be sure what, if any, weak points there were. After all his observation, he didn't have any real plan and he only had two more days before going back to St. Petersburg.
He could always keep going the way things were. It was pretty sweet. Dance ballet. Live the high society celebrity life. Screw practically any woman in high society he wanted. And take down big scores. Even after paying Litton his half and Guttman his usual percentage, he still had $10 million from just the St. Petersburg bank job going to his swiss bank account. It was a 99th percentile life. But X couldn't stop thinking about the only thing better.
Xing Fu Lee was not the type to be afraid to take a risk, especially when great rewards were possible. He would never have gotten this far if he was. He went over things again and again. He only had a few things to use. When the little green goof flew out as a pteradactyl at the same time as the jet left, they were never going far away and were often back quickly. The same was true if Raven or Starfire could be seen flying out the top of the stupid building at the same time as the jet departed. When they all went away in the jet, that's when they were gone longest. But it was nearly impossible to tell which of them were in the jet when it took off. Some might remain behind. He didn't know how he would try and enter the place but he knew that he had a hell of a lot better chance if a bunch of super powered doofuses weren't all sitting around inside.
He was pondering this in the late afternoon when, all of a sudden, lights started to blaze atop the tower the way they always did just before there was a sound of whooshing jet engines. Then the T-Jet rose off the roof and went tearing off to the west. X watched carefully from a pier and didn't see any green flying creature of any sort or either of the two flying girls. Even better, they had headed west. The closest anything to the west was, what, Hawaii? They weren't going west for a short trip.
It was now or never and X was a carpe diem sort of boy. He sprinted down the pier and jumped into the speedboat tied there. He'd eyed it for days and reminded himself how to start one of those without the keys. He threw off the line tying it to the pier and easily hot wired it then gave it full throttle, heading out into the bay but with the lights off. He heard a faint shout when he was already a hundred yards out but wasn't about to stop. He slowed the throttle to a virtual stop as he neared the island and let the boat's momentum carry him in. He found a small sandy beach almost hidden on one side of the island and deftly grounded the speedboat there. He gathered his special bag of tools then stepped onto the fiberglass bow of the boat before jumping onto the sand. He found a nice set of stone steps up to the big glass T of a building and stopped there eyeing it. You didn't realize how big the stupid thing was looking at it from Jump City. It was 14 stories high and the base must have had a square foot print seventy five feet on each side. He walked around the base of it, quickly, noting everything, the absence of vents, the one door, what the glass panes looked like, how thick they seemed to be, how they seemed to be joined, everything. Nothing jumped out. He circled the damn thing again. Again, nothing jumped out, no obvious weak point.
X felt angrily impatient but reminded himself that a minute's thought was worth a hell of a lot more than a minute's more action. He circled it again, jogging along the neatly cut grass and staring intently at the glass facade structure alternately in sun, shade or a combination depending on which of the four faces he was passing. Still nothing. Damn it! There was only the one door and that had a full palm pad, retinal scanner and what looked like a voice identification unit. And even then there was a key swipe pad that looked very different from anything he'd beaten when he stared at it up close. Fuck that. There had to be a better way to go than that. But the whole building was glass panels an inch thick or more. Probably just about impossible to shatter or cut through. Fuck!
After the bottom floor, where they were clear, they were opaque, blue. But that's all that seemed to make up the exterior of the damn tower. Glass panels. Most buildings had windows and wall irregularities in masonry or concrete. They had ledges. They had vents. They had neighboring buildings. They gave you something to use. Something! This stupid "T" shaped thing gave you nothing. Fuck!
X stopped circling it and sighed. I probably wouldn't fit into the suit anyway, he told himself. That midget Robin wore it. Why would it fit a good looking athlete?
X sighed out loud. "Okay. Reset. Stop thinking of consolations for failing." X reproached himself for partially giving up and walked around the building one more time. Then He crouched down and stared at the joint between two of the glass panels. He could see tiny metal filaments. Wires. Could be for all sorts of things, activating chemical additives within the panels to filter out UV light. And, of course, alarms. X checked at the edge of another one. Same thing. Damn. Gotta be alarm wiring. Try and move or cut one of these glass panels and you break a circuit. Shutdown. Lock down. Sirens'd probably go off that you could hear on the other side of Jump City. The whole building was a circuit. Damn it!
X stepped back as far as he could on the pacific side of the island, just wanting to see the building from a different angle and that's when he saw it, a variation in the facade of blue panels. He pulled out his binoculars from the backpack over his shoulders and focused.
Yes.
There was a window open, not even all the way but up on the . . 13th floor, one down from the top, there was a window open a foot or so to the side. The panels were smaller up there, not 4 feet wide by 8 feet high like the rest of the stupid thing. They were about a quarter that size. And they were oriented with the long side running horizontally, not vertically like the panels on the rest of it. One of the small panels up there, it was a window. And it was open about a foot. It looked like the windows up there on the top two floors, the only ones that seemed to have them, opened sideways not up and down. This one had been pulled a foot to the right as he looked at it. X sighed considering the challenge. He hadn't even brought the suction cup set he had with which he might have gone up the glass. But the glass seemed to be wired for an alarm system. It might go off just from his 165 pounds being added to the weight of any glass panel.
And then . . it occurred to him that maybe you didn't have to go up the glass to climb this building. He pulled two long utilty knives from his back pack. He jabbed one into the inch and a half wide hard rubber seam between two panels. Probably just something on the facade, he thought. There was probably metal just a few inches in. The hard rubber or plastic in the seams between the glass panels was just to keep the sun and salt water off the metal that really mattered. X tugged downward on the knife he'd jammed into the rubber seam. There was no give. He pulled down harder. It still didn't give. X smiled. Now he thought he could do it. His glance shot up to the next to the top floor where the window was open a foot. Thirteenth floor. All he had to do was make an impossible climb a hundred feet or so straight up the side of a building by jabbing long knives into it and pulling himself up. That's all. If it had even seemed possible, the anal retentive mideget, the little bat would've protected against it, right?
It took him 20 minutes and he almost fell to his death several times. It was incredibly difficult. Each time he stabbed higher with the knife in one hand he had to support all his 165 pounds with the knife grip of his other hand. He couldn't do anything with his legs for fear that pressure against a glass panel would set off an alarm.
He was glad for all the upper body work he'd done for dancing with the Bolshoi and Kirov. His shoulders, both hands and both wrists ached by the time he got up to the 13th floor. But he made it. He'd be dead meat if those doofuses and their stupid jet came back now. He figured he'd be in trouble if anyone else saw him, too. But he was climbing the building on the side facing the Pacific and only a single yacht way out on the horizon was visible. The wind whipped around and pushed against the building and pushed his body from side to side up that high. A fall would mean instant death. But he kept going, clawing not higher but to one side now. The open window was thirty feet to the side of the main vertical core of the tower. At last, it was just a few feet up from him. The wind seem to whistle louder with that aperture to divert some of it. It was cold up there. Not Moscow cold but still too cold.
X swung his body to the right like a pendulum then tried to surge back to the left toward the open window. Not far enough, he only got his left foot to a point still a foot below the window. He swung his legs back over to the right then, straining every muscle in his torso and arms, surged upward to his left and got one foot inside. Aaarrrggghhh! He screamed with the effort needed and got the other one in, too. Now his hands were below his feet and did a sort of handstand on the two knife handles, pushing up with everything he had and working to get more and more of his legs and then waist inside. With one last push he let go of both knife handles and wiggled his body inside the window till he got one hand inside, too. At last he gave a tug on the window frame and went tumbling inside, the loss of light leaving him almost blind with his entrance into the darkened room as he fell beside a bed gasping for breath.
X felt partial triumph and great relief as he looked around now from where he sat on the floor leaning against the side of someone's bed in someone's warm room.
"What a fucking mess!" he chuckled to himself.
The bed was unmade with a black and pink, or maybe it was purple bed spread mostly on the floor. There were pieces of sandwiches and crackers with tofu on them on the nightstand and here and there on the floor. The place had a bit of a smell. Maybe why the window was open. There were clothes, magazines and video games all over the place. Comic books, too. He picked one up off the floor. The Ultimates volume 3 number 2. Ehh. Not bad. And, looking around some more he saw underwear and a PETA t-shirt among the debris. The walls had a lot of posters that looked like they came from National Geographic wildlife special issues. There was a night light plugged in to one side of the bed. And sticking out from between the mattress and box spring was the edge of a sheaf of papers. X pulled them out. There were a few porn photos apparently downloaded from a site called "T&A-arama!", a few copies of lascivious letters from fangirls and a few dozen pictures of Raven.
"O . . kay!" said X putting them back and rising to his feet. No doubt whose room this is. He went to the equally messy bathroom and took a piss, flushing when done but trying not to touch anything.
Now he had to find the Red X suit and he had to do it fast. He didn't know how much time he had. He went out the black room door into the hall which was all black marble floors and navy blue walls with stainless steel accents. He made a circuit of that floor of the building. The hallway made a sort of square ended oval with an exta wide doored elevator in the middle that was accessible from the middle of either long side of the oval. He remembered that the glass panels only seemed different on this floor. He guessed that this meant Titans' rooms were only on this floor. One of these rooms was Robin's. Which one? He examined the floor in front of each door closely. Robin wore steel toed shoes. X went down the hall pressing his eyes nearly to the marble to examine the tiles in front of each door. Two had some scuffing. Of course, one would be Cyborg's. His shoes would scratch the floor, too. But one was on the short side of the building facing north. The other was on the long side facing east. He guessed that the midget wonder would be the sort of sick puppy who got up early and would welcome the sun shining into the room in the morning.
None of the doors had knobs or visible locks. They had handles. X tried the handle on what he hoped was Robin's door. It didn't move a millimeter. Completely solid. Damn. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a micro recorder. He had taped the sound of a press conference, Robin speaking and introducing the other Titans and finishing by adding, "and me. Robin.". X played the last word. Next to the door and pushed the handle downward. The door opened. Sweet!
X took a deep breath and stepped inside. As messy as Beast Boy's room had been, that's how neat Robin's was, obsessively so. It screamed it. It was spartan, too. There was a bed, a night stand, a couple chairs against one wall, a poster of a leaping Bruce Lee on another wall, a low bookcase full of books and a small table with pieces of a birdarang that had been taken apart. There was also a small desk with a computer and what looked like a Titans communicator being repaired. X took the communicator and shoved it into his backpack. He opened one door against a side wall. It was the bathroom. Spotless. He opened the other door. It was a closet. He brushed aside some shirts and pants. Down on the floor at one end of the closet was a rectangular box three feet long, two feet wide and six inches thick.
X, calm even while risking his life climbing the side of Titan's Tower, now felt a surge of enthusiasm. He felt sure, somehow, so sure that he wasn't surprised, didn't gasp when he pulled the box out and opened it on the bed revealing the sought after Red X uniform inside.
X had intended to carry it out in his backpack but found himself, without thinking about it, stripping. He got down to his dance belt then pulled on the pants of the uniform. They were much tighter than he'd have liked on his butt and squeezed his equipment but the material was thin, flexible and tough. When he tried pressing the blade of one of his knives against it, he got nowhere. And, curiously, after a few seconds, the pants almost seemed to adjust to his body and the fit became better. He pulled on the boots. They were flexible too even though he could feel the jet force openings at the middle of the sole. But they were way too small. At first. They must've been size 6 or 7 at most. Ouch. This was a deal breaker. But then, just like the pants, they adjusted to him and felt like the ten and a halfs he normally wore.
X pulled on the top with the attached cape. The fit was tight in the shoulders but not that bad except that the sleeves were short. At first. He tugged on the sleeves a little bit and they seemed to stretch a bit, just as desired. At the waist, the top overlapped the pants with the two almost feeling glued together, sealed as if a bead of crazy glue had been applied between them. Nice. Then he pulled on the gloves. Same thing, small at first then perfect. He reached over and picked up birdarang pieces off Robin's table. The fingers of the gloves were super thin and didn't seem to reduce his dexterity at all. Next was the cowl, almost like a balaclava, X pulled it over his head. It covered all but the center of his face and like the other material overlaps, formed a tight bond, somehow, to the uniform top below it.
All that left was the mask. X carefully lifted it and slowly pressed it to the cowl. Like the other overlaps, it instantly formed a tight bond.
X could not resist.
He breathed slowly in and out as deeply as possible, imitating that trademark sound.
hoooooooooooooooooooo
haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
hoooooooooooooooooooo
haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
"Emperor . . what has become of Padme . . and the children? . . . . . Noooooo!!"
He grinned underneath the mask but quickly returned to serious matters. What could he do in this suit?
First he did a split. No problem. The suit didn't restrict him at all. He did some other ballet moves. The suit felt great. It moved with him perfectly. It did feel a little odd to have a cape but when he reached for it, he found that a couple of those red X's ready to throw were tucked into sort of velcro closed pockets in the bottom of the cape.
"So, that's where those are."
He took one out and inspected it. It was surprisingly light. For a moment he considered whipping it into the wall and trashing Robin's room just for the hell of it but realized it would be better to make off with the suit without it being known about for a while.
Across the room, he noticed the mirror in the bathroom, strode over there and flipped on the light. he admired both himself and the look of the suit. It was cool. He was so cool. Soooooooooo cool. It all seemed so natural, him and this suit, like it was meant to happen. But, a thought occurred to him. He didn't know how to get the damn thing off. He tugged at the mask, then at the cowl, the gloves, the boots, the top, the pants. He couldn't budge any of it. Every place the pieces of the suit overlapped it was like a tube of crazy glue had been squirted out and bonded the pieces.
He went back to the box and found 80 stapled pages with the title "RED X SUIT GUIDE" on the cover. X skimmed through parts and read parts. Some of it he understood right away. Other parts like the description of the material, an "elastomeric textile armor" were a bit much with time so short.
It turned out the whole thing could be controlled a couple ways. There were what the guide called "mode choice sensors" in both gloves. X pressed the palm of either glove in a certain spot three times quickly and all the unbreakable connections of the pieces of the suit let go. There was a diagram to help explain it. It turned out there were metal filaments running all through the suit and there were bands where the different pieces overlapped. The super thin metal band in the top, at the waist, for instance was polarized one way and the band in the pants, at the waist, were polarized the opposite way so that there was an intense magnetic attraction. When he pressed the palm of either glove three times at a certain spot, an undetectable charge of electricity shot through and reversed some of the polarities letting the suit pull apart. X flipped ahead in the book and saw the phrase "Cloaking Function" at the top of one page. He skipped the long explanation of "photon redirecting nanoscale level metamaterials" and went straight to the instructions on how to activate this function. He went back to Robin's bathroom and tried the mode control switch in the mask. He whispered "mode activate" and then "cloaking" as he imagined he might when robbing some billionaire's mansion or bank and didn't want nearby guards to hear him. He looked in the mirror.
He wasn't there.
"Holy shit!"
He wasn't there!
The mirror showed the tiled wall and the door frame behind him but there was no sight of the star ballet dancer and master thief in the form fitting black suit. X moved back and forth. Didn't matter. He wasn't there.
"This is fucking awesome!" he shouted. "Look out motherfuckers! Cuz now I've got the tools to match the talent and nobody can stop me!"
Red X turned out the light and put everything in Robin's room back exactly the way he'd found it, including the box in which he Red X suit had been stored. Well, not everything. Red X removed a tube of powder he'd brought with him. Concentrated essence of the heat rub, Atomic Balm. He opened Robin's dresser drawer and spread the powder inside the crotch of every jock, brief or swimsuit in there. It was harmless until the wearer sweated to the slightest degree. This then activated the powder and it would become fiery hot and extremely difficult to remove. Red X smiled as he closed the dresser drawer.
He left Robin's room and returned to Beast Boy's, which he had left open with a video game blocking the door from closing. Next he read over the section of the suit guide that covered the use of the jets in the boots. He then closed Beast Boy's door and put the backpack he'd brought with him safely into one of the compartments at the inside bottom of the cape. He climbed out the window and stood on the handles of the two knife blades he'd used to climb the side of the building.
"Here goes," he muttered to himself and then said, "Mode Activate . . boot jets," uttering the last two words just as he hopped off the knife blades. At first, the jets weren't strong enough and he fell but he used the power controls in his gloves and stopped his descent down around the 6th floor then steadily rose as he kept throttling more power to his boots and finally reached the 13th floor again where he pulled the two knives out fo the hard rubber panel divider. Then, using his glove controls again, he allowed himself to descend again, and when within 10 feet of the ground switched to voice operated throttle. "Power down . . power down . . " and finally, just before hitting ground, "Power up . . and off" and he stuck the landing with arms raised in triumph.
Red X jogged down to the beach where he'd left the boat, not sure of the power demands of the boots and not wanting to try a flight across the bay just yet. He pushed the speed boat off the sand, hot wired it again, proving that the Red X suit gloves wouldn't crimp his style and drove the boat back toward the pier. It was getting dark now and he wouldn't have been visible very far out from the pier but a hundred yards out, Red X muttered, "Mode Activate . . cloaking" into his mask and watching his gloved hand disappear from view even though it was on the steering wheel right in front of him.
A few people were there on the pier, including the boat's owner and a couple cops. They stared, wide eyed at the boat just magically stopping back at the pier with no one driving it and Red X climbed right up onto the pier beside them. The owner seemed like such a stuck up jerk that invisible Red X made him trip and fall off the pier into the bay then went on his way.
The first priority was to master this thing. In the day he had left at home, Red X did almost nothing but read and re-read the Red X Suit Guide, holding the 80 stapled pages behind one magazine after another. He found out that the suit stretched to fit his vastly superior body because the midget wonder had some idea, probably a fantasy, that he was gonna have a growth spurt and grow to six one. X snickered, yeah, sure, then kept reading. The one time he went out of the house, he changed into the suit and activated cloaking mode in an alley then went through the front door of Guttman's shop. The bell tinkled and the old man came out. But saw no one there, shrugged and started for the back room.
"Aren't you going to help me?" said Red X.
Guttman turned around. It had been Xing Fu Lee's voice but . . where was he?
"I'm right here," Red X said from the other side of the counter.
The old man wiped his eyes. "What-what kind of trick is this? Is that you, X?"
"It sure is, old man. Let's talk in the back room," he said and jumped over the counter. The old man shook his head at the door to the back room opening despite no one being there. Once they were both out of view, Red X turned off the cloaking mode and pulled off the mask and gave the old man a hug. He explained everything he'd been up to including the theft of the suit.
This scared the old man who thought that getting superhero types pissed off at you couldn't be anything but bad for business. But Red X said that it was worth the risk considering how great the suit was. He explained its functions and told the old man that it didn't matter. It was too late to be worried now. He'd stolen it from them. But now, he didn't have to cower on a level below every cape, every Spiff Spandex, below the villains, too and hope that none of them noticed him. He could go against any of them now. And a lot of jobs he had to let go before . . he could do now.
Just don't get too greedy, the old man counseled. And, you still have to plan things out, Xing Fu. Watch out that someone doesn't somehow connect the other you, the prince in white tights, with the times and dates of a bunch of jobs. And you'll have to put some real thought into how you store this new suit ya got on. If those NSA types realize you got it, they'll try everything to get it back. You'd better get yourself some blackmail ammunition that'll keep them from going after you.
He went on and on and as completely cool as X was, he actually felt like this was one of those sentimental sappy moments that idiots seemed to love and that he hated. Only he didn't mind this one. He gave the old man a hug, put the skull mask back on and went invisible to walk out of there.
X took the suit back to St. Petersburg with him. Like always, after a big heist, his interest in new robberies waned for a little while and he put his heart and soul into his dancing. He met some more really hot girls in the St. Petersburg clubs and everything in his life just had a sort of happy glow about it. This whole Red X thing just felt like it was where he was supposed to be. It was his destiny.