"Superheroing isn't like, a real career I don't think." He said, rolling his shoulders to work the stiffness out.
"It depends, the Protectorate certainly seems to be able to pay their bills," was Parian's half-distracted response.
Oliver paused in his response for a moment to line himself up with a nearby rooftop, then sprinted forward and leaped. His aura-enhanced jump easily cleared the gap allowing him to land in a crouching roll that he came up from with all the grace of a professional gymnast.
Then he immediately lifted his hand back up to put his cellphone against his ear. It was kind of inconvenient, but Taylor hadn't really provided them with fancy ear communicators like the Protectorate had, and Trainwreck had professed to being largely unable to engineer such a thing. Well, he had actually said that he could, but that his power insisted that a speaker which allowed your voice to be heard across the entire city, and that was big enough to crush a full-sized truck beneath its bulk was technically long-distance communication.
So, well, they hadn't done that.
"Yeah but those guys go through like, job interviews and stuff. They get training and certification and all that. I uh... I just kind of live in the base because Taylor said it was cool," he pointed out.
"I'm sure there are other ways to monetize your powers. I could use a model actually if-" Parian offered, her tone pitching up somewhat excitedly.
"No that's- I mean, I don't think going from one job where I need someone else's goodwill to function to another is really the best idea. Besides I... don't really want to be famous or anything." He quickly cut her off before explaining.
He had been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. Most of the team had been studiously avoiding the media crews outside the grounds ever since they had shown up. Despite being himself photogenic by default, Oliver simply felt too uncomfortable to actually talk directly to any of the reporters. At least, not without Taylor around. The whole team felt the same way to varying degrees, which was why even Parian was currently running a patrol on the opposite side of the Heap from himself.
Not that either of them ever really found anything of note to stop.
Oliver had... not really put a lot of thought into his future. If he was being honest, he felt pretty strongly that he didn't have one until recently. A lot of what he was doing was just... going through the motions. No one would say it back when he was with the Travellers but... they were sort of in a no-win situation. Sure, they all wanted to cure Noelle, but looking back on it he couldn't even tell why anymore. They had long since reached the point where it should be obvious they couldn't, and should probably just turn themselves in, but they just... hadn't. Sure Trickster usually managed to get them all out of any problems they came across, but even he was being pressured by the constant downward spiral.
If he was being honest, until recently... until the Simurgh had finally been defeated, Oliver had just been... well.. passive. He was aware that he was just coasting in Taylor's wake. His powers were so weak he never actively participated with the other Travellers. He was more like a mascot character than a real team member. So things like finishing school, what job he would take when he was older, how he would live his life in general, most of those things just hadn't occurred to Oliver. What was the point? He was never going to be able to go back to school. He was never going to have a house, a car, two kids and a wife.
He was going to die on the run.
Now he was thinking about those things, and he didn't particularly like what he had allowed himself to become.
Dating for instance, for... ah... no particular reason. Could he get a date for himself? Yes. It wasn't hard, his power was literally being attractive. But that was just a foot in the door. He imagined himself sitting at a table with his hypothetical girlfriend talking about themselves, and it always went terribly to him.
'What are your hobbies?' Oh you know, hanging around his bosses house breathing the air.
'Education?' Never graduated high school.
'Job?' Mooching off his crush, mostly.
Basically, if Oliver didn't just happen to know Taylor, he'd be a particularly attractive hobo and not much else.
So now he was trying to solve at least some of those problems but it was... hard. Mostly because he didn't really know what he wanted to do with himself, besides the fact that he didn't want to be mooching off Taylor to do it.
It was... kind of hard to ask someone on a date when all the money you planned on spending on the date was basically an allowance they gave you.
"The offer is always open. Anything on your end?" Parian asked, drawing him out of his... uh... brooding, basically.
"Nope," he responded lazily, making a popping noise on the 'p'.
"I've got someone suspicious on a street corner here but he isn't really doing anything but smoking and looking around. Going to wait a minute to see what happens," Parian replied, then hung up. Oliver sighed, then put his own phone away in one of the pouches at his belt.
Then he eyed the boundary where Taylor's 'territory' ended and the rest of the city began. The thing about patrolling in their 'zone' as it were, was that nobody was truly stupid enough to commit any kind of crime anywhere near Taylor. Some one-off villains still braved the streets of the city, albeit in a much more subdued or subtle manner than Brockton's previous supervillainous residents. But those guys had the wherewithal to understand that they might run into New Wave or the Protectorate, and that they might win that fight and might get away.
There was approximately zero chance of anyone who wasn't Triumvirate tier escaping Taylor when she felt like capturing you.
Glancing back the way he had come, Oliver warred with himself for a moment, before grunting in frustration to himself.
"Come on man. You're like, Batman now! You've got skills, you're strong, you're bulletproof." He talked himself up, pulling his hood up to hide most of his head and shadow his domino mask covered face. He had no idea what held the hood in place - probably some magic bullshit Taylor had thrown into the thing - but once the hood was up, it stayed up until he took it down. The entire cloak was convenient that way. It swished and swirled in a way that almost always hid his hands and equipment from view, even when it had to move it the most improbably ways to do it. The armor he wore was great and all - for all he didn't really need it much anymore - but his favorite part of his costume was definitely the cloak. If he closed his eyes and let it dance in the wind he could almost believe it was alive.
Taking a deep breath, he took off at a sprint. No longer held back by trying to keep a conversation going or having to hold his cellphone, he was able to really pour on the gas, and in no time he was making his way across the rooftops of downtown. It was dark out so it was hard to see everything that was going on in the streets and alleys below, but he felt like he had a decent enough grasp that if something was happening, he would notice it.
For the most part though, he just ran. He really loved aura. It wasn't just that it made him useful. It was how free he felt bouncing about like this. Like, if he wanted to he could circumnavigate the whole city and nothing could stop him. He had never been the 'sporty' type, but he wondered idly if this was what people called a runners high. Instead of stopping to take in his surroundings, he allowed himself to just... focus on the movement. Vaulting over obstructions, carefully picking his way across rooftops that looked right on the edge of collapse, breaking his falls using conventional skills to conserve his aura.
He was practically a blur as he traveled, and as he did so, he let all his worries and concerns fade away. There was just him, his cloak protecting him from the stiff night breeze, and three guys dragging a woman into an alley below.
That... that last part caused him to lose focus on running caused him to skid to a silent stop atop a nearby building to peer back the way he had come.
"...where the hell am I?" He muttered to himself as he fished his cellphone out and quickly fired off a message to the local police department with the names of the nearby streets in it.
It was an unfortunate fact, but despite Taylor's best efforts, she hadn't exactly 'cleaned up' all the normal crime in the city. The fact was, the city still had a lot of problems with poverty. With normal criminals, people who didn't have superpowers of any kind. People who were pushed to do desperate things to survive when they couldn't afford rent and couldn't find a job.
Of course, he really doubted that any of the three guys below him were dragging a cute girl into an alley because they were down on their luck.
"H-help! Someone!" The girl screeched in a sort of youngish tone that made Oliver's blood boil just thinking about the fact that she was probably Mem or Mun's age.
...Physical age that is. One was technically only a month old, and the other claimed to be a few thousand. He wasn't sure how seriously to take that second one.
Eyeballing the scenario below, Oliver considered his options, before stepping off the ledge and allowing his aura to take the brunt of the impact, as his combined mass and velocity was channeled directly into his heel - where it slammed into one of the men's outstretched feet with perfect accuracy.
Everyone he knew, knew what Oliver's powers were. They made him hot, and they made him learn skills quickly. The thing most people didn't grasp, was that his learning ability wasn't really a thinker power. He didn't magically understand things better than most. Oliver simply had perfect control of his body. Most people used the phrase 'threading a needle' to describe an overly delicate and difficult task. Oliver considered such things entirely trivial. If he wanted to move his hand exactly an inch to the left, that was what happened. There was no variance or room for error. He just did it. And he could continue to do it, perfectly, and accurately, multiple times in a row. If you showed him how to throw a perfect punch, all he had to do to throw a perfect punch of his own was to want his body to do so. And it did. So really, mastering a martial art was just a matter of having it shown to him once.
"Fuck!" The man he had landed on screamed, and Oliver obligingly lifted his foot to allow him to stumble away in pain. Knowing there was a vulnerable, squishy, civilian behind him, he was mindful of any firearms the other two men might draw on him.
Which is why he responded to the gap in their formation created by his first target stumbling away, by stepping between the two remaining thugs and swinging his fists outward with perfect accuracy, ramming both mens elbows with his enhanced strength and breaking both of their arms instantaneously. Not thinking overmuch about it - he was in the zone - he pivoted on one foot, mule kicked the knee joint out of place on the guy behind him, then unleashed a blinding combination of punches on the man in front of him.
"Good afternoon gentleman, my name is Huntsman and I will be your designated ass kicker tonight," He said with a dry tone before instantly cringing inwardly. God, that was horrible. He should just avoid bantering when he fought. It was impractical anyway. The girl he was saving must think he was a fucking idiot now. Damn.
Now, he wasn't really expecting any of these guys to banter back at him. For one thing, both of them were in significant pain, not that he... really cared. As much as he wanted to be a hero, he also couldn't help but acknowledge that he didn't have much sympathy for people who turned to crime for stupid reasons like getting laid. He'd been a supervillain, but he had also been dimensionally displaced by and Endbringer and forced to babysit what the PRT report indicated might have been a baby Endbringer.
These guys were probably just drunk, horny, and stupid.
Still, he had sort of expected some level of interaction, even if only to surrender. He was not expecting the guy whose foot he crushed to pull a gun out and point it at him.
"Yeah that's-" He opened his mouth to point out the futility of the motion, but then quickly had to step to the side when the man with the gun stumbled to the side and point the gun behind him.
"...Is there like, a henchman school? I mean, do you guys learn to be this scummy somewhere? Is there a book or something or-" Oliver asked curiously, even as he idly stuck his hand behind his back, allowed his rail gun to unfold, and stuck the barrel directly against his nearest foes crotch when it looked like he was going to try and pull his own gun out while Oliver was distracted.
"Fuck you! We weren't fucking doing anything wrong! You broke my fucking foot!" The man with the gun screamed.
"Pulped it really. If it were broken you might be able to walk again but-"
"FUCK YOU!" The man cried out again, getting angry enough to fire at Oliver instead of continuing to hold the girl behind him, hostage. Oliver braced himself against the incoming pain, and took the opportunity to use the barrel of his gun like a club, bringing it up and around to smack the other thug in the side of his head and technically saving his life, since he hit the ground like a sack of bricks, thereby avoiding the hail of gunfire that might have hit him had he been standing.
Aura had some downsides. For one thing, even though he didn't get injured by the bullets that started to slam into him, he did experience a not-insignificant amount of pain when a bullet plinked off his glowing aura anywhere that his armor wasn't covering. For another, he only had so much of the resource that made him bulletproof, which is why he was sweating slightly when the guy shooting at him finally ran out of ammo, his gun clicking quietly empty as he frantically eyed Oliver.
"Just out of curiosity, this isn't like... some kind of weird roleplay thing I interrupted by mistake right?" He asked, turning to look over the girl behind him, who had been cowering in place during the entire fight.
"No! I- I was- I just wanted to go to the corner store! I wanted a drink and- and I thought-" The girl blabbered, her short brown hair a disheveled mess. She was cute in a childish kind of way, and Oliver had a hard time determining if she was a childish-looking teen, or an adult-looking child, before shrugging the thought off as irrelevant. Both options made him angry.
"Bullshit! The girls always hung out on that corner! You lying bitch!" The man yelled.
"Yeah, I hate to tell you this man, but I'm pretty sure most of those women you're talking about are my neighbours now so..." Oliver trailed off with a shrug, before dropping his gun and dashing forward. Before the man could even determine what was going on, he had broken his wrist, elbow, and shoulder - all on the same side - then punched him in the head until he stopped screaming about it, and fell unconscious.
Oliver watched the guy pensively for a second before grabbing him by his pulped foot and dragging him back to his compatriots. Then he pulled a healing tag out of one of his pouches and ripped it in half, causing a golden burst of force to sweep across the three criminals and the girl.
"Are you okay?" He asked, finally turning towards the girl once he was certain none of the men he had bludgeoned would die or something.
Fun fact about 'assault with a parahuman power'. Did healing them without their consent count as technically illegal? Yes. But so did a civilian punching them in the head until they stopped moving so unless he did something really fucked up, he was pretty sure no one actually cared.
"Um..." The girl said quietly, obviously trying to clear her head now that the encounter was mostly over and just as clearly, not sure what to say or do.
"Do you want me to wait with you, until the police get here?" He asked again kindly.
He had sort of a code he tried to follow. Not like... an actual code of honor or anything. Just a sort of list of priorities he liked to follow. Stuff the heroes in movies never did, stuff he'd always complained about comic book characters not doing. So, instead of disappearing into the night to fight more crime - like a jackass - he walked over to the girl and pulled his hood down so he wasn't looming over her. Then he held a hand out to help her up.
"Y-yes!" She blurted out, face turning slightly red when she saw him. He typically ignored this response. It wasn't uncommon for him. His power was literally, being attractive. He didn't love it, because it made it hard to tell if a girl liked him, or just liked looking at him, but in situations like this, it made the plain domino mask he wore worth it. An attractive person was always more comforting to the victim of a crime than an ugly one.
"Good. If you were hurt before you shouldn't be now, but I would appreciate it if you wouldn't mention that when the police get here. Not uh... not really supposed to do that." He explained sheepishly as she stretched a hand out to grab his hand.
"I will! I mean, I won't! I um- so you're... Huntsman?" She asked tentatively.
"Yup. Least impressive member of my team. I'm working on it." He said with an overconfident wink he didn't really feel. He was aware that he was often considered an afterthought. He didn't really have any feats or notoriety to his name, not compared to the rest of the Oathbound. Parian was well known for her commercial exploits, Aspirant was well known in the city from as far back as when the Nazis were trying to take over, and Trainwreck...
Trainwreck had selfies with the Simurgh's corpse. Didn't get more noticeable than that.
"I didn't mean that! You're great!" The girl blurted out, before visibly calming herself and continuing. "I'm Madison. T-thanks."
"Don't worry about it. It's my job." He said with an easy smile, stepping over to retrieve his gun, then pulling his cellphone out and dialing Parian's number.
"Hello?" She whispered back to him.
"How are things on your end?" He asked curiously.
"Boring. He isn't doing anything," was Parian's irked response.
"Huh. So, don't tell Trainwreck but I kind of went way outside of my patrol zone..." He said hesitantly.
"And you want me to help you with this, how?" Parian asked. Trainwreck was pretty lackadaisical, but he was also sort of a tyrant about making sure no one was patrolling anywhere they weren't supposed to. He contended that there was always a bigger fish, and that new parahumans popped up all the time. So if someone mystically triggered with powers that trumped theirs somehow, it was for the best that they were close to home, so they could make a swift retreat.
"Well, if he thinks both of us went together..." He offered suggestively.
"Just this once. You're safe though right?" She asked him with obvious concern in her voice.
"Peachy. Saved this girl- say hi Madison - and now I'm just waiting for the cops to get here." He said easily, glancing at the girl who was watching his conversation with a weird intensity.
"Just... don't do anything stupid and text me your location," Parian finally replied with a sigh, before hanging up. He obligingly sent her the message, then put his phone away.
"Was... that T-Nexus?" Madison asked anxiously the minute he was done.
"Nah, Taylor doesn't really uh... patrol. She's sort of the nuclear option if you know what I mean," He answered with a snort. He was pretty sure that the entire city preferred Taylor stay home really. It wasn't that she was incapable of subtly, it was just that people had come to expect a certain level of... gratuitous ultraviolence... from her presence. She was just kind of intense that way, even when she was acting like nuking a city was no big deal.
"Oh. Are you and her...?" She blurted out, causing Oliver to blink stupidly at her then snort again.
"No that'd be... uh, that'd probably be a bad idea," He said, trying not to sound desperate or whiney about it. He wasn't sure if he was successful or not with that one because Madison immediately perked up at his response.
"Is she too young for you?" She asked with renewed intensity.
"No, she's like a year younger than me. Maybe two. Why-" He started to ask.
"Just curious." Madison quickly responded, blushing and turning away from him.
"Uh...huh..." He said, not sure how he felt about this.
On the one hand, he knew objectively that he was attractive. He was aware that people who didn't know him probably thought fondly of his looks if nothing else. On the other, he got out so little and had so few friends that he was kind of blindsided by the sudden interest. Even knowing that he couldn't possibly agree to see the girl - she looked too young for him, and it would be taking advantage of someone vulnerable, given the situation - it made him feel ten feet tall just to get some admiration from someone else.
"Uh..." Madison said, her eyes going wide as he looked down at her.
Then his own eyes grew wide as he realized that - while he had always been taller than her - he was not literally looming over her, his body having somehow increased in size. It passed almost as soon as he noticed it, and because of that, he was much more cognizant of the sudden shrinking he experienced as he returned to his normal height.
"Is that... a normal thing for you or...?" Madison asked gamely.
Numbly, Oliver harkened back to Taylor's once description of Aura. Strength, Durability, and a random personality-based bonus power.
"Let me get back to you on that one," He responded, before settling in to wait for Parian to arrive.