4.0 - Decisions Are Made - Not All of Them Particularly Well Thought Out

[Quest: Path of the Hero]

Madison perked up as what she was mentally thinking of as her 'main' quest popped into the view. The week of school had passed by in a strange blur that paradoxically had her more relaxed and yet somehow also more horribly tensed than she had probably ever felt in her entire life.

To say she had been on the outs with the popular crowd would have been an understatement and she was pretty sure even the teachers at Winslow had noticed, not that they would have said or done anything regardless though. Madison had swiftly found out what it was like to basically be a pariah all over again, as she was avoided and sniped at by almost everyone she previously spoke to.

It was strange being so much more aware of it, especially when the new semester had only really begun, so it wasn't like she had any reprieve to look forward to for another month or so before mid-winter break started.

If her power hadn't already given her a wakeup call then her sudden change in fortune would have probably done it. Even with everything Quest had already shown and told her, Madison still felt like she had gotten an even better appreciation for what Taylor had suffered through on a daily basis since she'd essentially first met the girl.

Even then Madison knew her treatment was a far cry from Taylor's own. Taylor had previously had no one, no friends, no allies, not even any teachers in her corner and Madison for all that it might have felt like it could hardly say the same. Whilst most of her fair weather friends had turned on her in a heartbeat, it still looked at times like Roz or Daphne had wanted to speak to her and they were still the only two of her previous social circle who hadn't yet participated in the uptick of barbs and looks that had started to be thrown her way.

And that was still more than Taylor had.

The weirder part was the odd sort of... Respect? It felt like she had suddenly gained out of nowhere. It wasn't exactly a great feeling to have a couple of the skinheads nod to her (and boy hadn't that been a confusing moment until she'd figured out why). But apparently standing up to Sophia - And probably more importantly getting away with it had seemingly elevated her a little in the eyes of everyone else, especially when as the week drew on Sophia didn't do anything about it.

Sure she joined in on the name calling and all of the other petty bullshit Madison could mostly ignore, but that was about it. There were a few times later in the week where Sophia had seemed to be trying to intimidate her with her presence alone and whilst she had definitely been nervous, she'd been more nervous about accidentally teleporting away. It had gotten to the point where she'd been so focused on that, she'd essentially ended up ignoring the other girl or any of the other more unpleasant girls every time they drew near.

It had been hell on her nerves, wondering if Sophia in particular would finally try something every time she got close enough to do any of the things she'd seen the other girl do to Taylor on a daily basis in the previous few months. The fact she hadn't had only made her feel more paranoid and she'd definitely gained a far better appreciation for the almost 'hunted' look she'd seen more than once on Taylor's face in the past.

Still, as awful as it had been, constantly feeling like she was walking a tightrope whilst waiting for the other shoe to drop, Madison was hoping it had at least been good for training of a sort and by the time the weekend finally rolled around again she did actually end up feeling more confident about her chances come the Monday following. That if Sophia did start trying to trip her up or shoulder check her, then she'd be able to try and just get out of the way without revealing to half the school that she was a surprise cape.

And then there was Taylor. At some point it seemed she'd decided that Madison wasn't lying or setting up a prank, though it had probably helped how publicly and viciously most of the other girls had immediately turned on her the moment the weekend passed. But whatever the reason, Taylor had stopped completely ignoring her and when she'd said hello to Taylor when she saw her on Tuesday morning Taylor had actually said hello back!

Taylor had even adopted her into her group for World Issues, albeit reluctantly and they'd even had a whole conversation outside of class! Madison hadn't even bothered trying to hide her smile.

If it wasn't for the fact she'd gotten literally nowhere with her personal brand of power testing she'd have considered her whole week an unmitigated success. But as it was it seemed like she'd hit the limit of what she could figure out in her room, or at least she'd run out of good ideas and still being grounded hadn't helped things either.

Beyond accompanying her mom to get groceries earlier in the morning as she'd tried to figure out what to do with her Saturday, the excursion hadn't exactly given her a wealth of other options to try. After that she'd just been laying on her bed browsing, her phone held up lazily above her face as she'd read a cute Case Fifty Three slash fic she'd been recommended until the quest had suddenly popped up and she'd almost dropped the phone on her face in surprise. That would have been an embarrassing way to get her first cape injury.

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[Quest: Path of the Hero]

Madison Clements has committed to her path and with newfound resolve she has cemented her ideals in action, spurned her enemies whilst offering the hand of friendship to those who would be allies. No matter the obstacles she's faced, Madison Clements has continued to move forward as she attempts to forge new alliances and friendships upon the foundations of those values she holds and the virtues she strives to embody.

It is upon such foundations a Hero is forged, yet she knows full well that a Hero is many things, but they must be seen above all else. Not only through their deeds, but as the crystallisation of these things, of character, of valour and the promise of the brighter tomorrow they wish to create.

Madison Clements now requires a Hero costume if she is to take up the mantle of Hero to the public at large, for without this she knows how easily her actions, her character, her very Heroic essence will be so easily defined by those around her instead.

For Madison Clements knows that a costume is more than mere clothing, more than its function and more than its form.

It is a symbol and promise both. It is that which will inspire hope in those who are afraid, stoke the fires of courage in the hearts of her allies and the chill of fear in those enemies she faces in the pursuit of her ideals.

[Objective: Acquire a professionally made Hero costume]
[Objective: Acquire back-ups of a professionally made Hero costume]
[Optional Objective: Acquire a professionally made Hero costume variant]
Rewards: Costume, Replacement Costumes, ?, Unlocks ?

[OK]

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Madison didn't even realise she'd sat up, phone forgotten until she was done reading the notification window, feeling both inspired and slightly terrified at the sheer weight of responsibility it felt like her power had just offloaded on her again. Idly she wondered if that was going to become a running theme when it came to her main quest.

Somehow she hadn't really thought about a costume, not in any concrete way at least. It had only been around two weeks since she'd got her powers and it felt like she'd barely stopped. From breaking into the school, to the confrontation with Sophia, to just stressfully waiting for some kind of physical retaliation that would inadvertently out her as a parahuman, when she inevitably panicked and tried to get away...

Her new quest, still waiting silently in the air in front of her had made everything feel real in a way other things simply hadn't. A Hero wasn't just someone who had powers, they were someone who used them to do good, to fight and maybe even die trying to do the right thing.

When it came to her own powers she couldn't truly call herself a Hero, not yet at least. She hadn't forgotten that ironically if anything she was technically a Villain, since all she'd used her powers for outside of experimentation and to skip her journey home at the end of the week was to break in to Winslow, which was still an absurd memory that made her want to shake her head at times.

If she ignored that though she was at most a Rogue, someone who had powers and didn't use them in pursuit of anything particularly heroic of villainous.

Though in a world of Heroes and Villains, Rogues were definitely the perpetually endangered species. They existed of course, there were even a couple in Brockton Bay as far as she knew, but they usually didn't last long. There were a lot of laws that meant a Rogue couldn't normally compete with regular businesses and using their powers otherwise sometimes only served to paint a massive target on their back.

Either the gangs forcibly recruited them, they ended up falling into the villainous lifestyle for one reason or another or they joined up with the good guys, if only for the protection that came with having a nationwide governmental agency backing them up.

Though thinking of Rogues had her thinking of the two she knew of in Brockton Bay. There was Tin Man who occasionally popped up with his little sculptures made out of scrap, though no one had seen him in a couple of months and it was hard to stay optimistic when it came to the Bay. There was usually a thread on PHO with photos whenever he did appear to sell things at the market, but considering how long it had been, there were even odds he'd been snatched up by one group or another.

The other Rogue was Parian who actually had her own boutique on the Boardwalk, Madison had never visited since she'd always just assumed things would be way out of her price range. Especially when Parian apparently made everything herself with her power too.

"Would Parian make me a costume?" She couldn't help but wonder aloud to herself as she found her phone again and it wasn't much to bring up the wiki and do a little preliminary research. She couldn't help herself from quickly checking Tin Man's page first, but the sightings section hadn't been updated in a while so Madison doubted it would be. She did hope he was okay, he'd never bothered anyone as far as she knew and 'Tin Man' wasn't even his cape name. It was just the alias the PRT had given him since he never spoke except to say greetings and thank yous to anyone who wandered by his wares.

Parian's page was next and she got lost for twenty minutes just reading about the enigmatic Rogue. The details were pretty sparse overall, more theory crafting than anything concrete beyond the obvious when it came to Parian's textile telekinesis. At least as far as PHO was aware Parian only used it to make clothing for her store, animate puppets for the children's shows she sometimes put on, or the times where she did something similar to help promote other businesses along the Boardwalk or Downtown.

There wasn't anything Madison could find about Parian accepting commissions for Hero costumes one way or another. There were plenty of threads about it, though even several pages deep into a seemingly promising one had just turned out to be more argumentative speculation, especially when Parian herself seemed to refuse to comment whenever she was asked.

Brockton Bay had a few Independent Heroes operating at any one time and none of them had commented either that Madison could find, which did make her wonder where exactly everyone was getting their costumes from. Granted a lot of them looked homemade, but anyone who made it long enough tended to manage to upgrade their wardrobe and equipment at some point, so clearly she was missing something.

Though even then she had to admit that was probably survivorship bias talking since Independent Heroes were a lot like Rogues except that they tended to have a significantly shorter life expectancy. At the end of the day a Rogue was just treated as a neutral player that could be turned, they weren't a threat or a problem, an opportunity if anything really. Whereas on the other hand an Independent Hero - Unless they had an Alexandria package and could obviously look after themselves were seen as an annoyance at best and an easy target at worst.

And Brockton Bay had gone through a lot of Independent Heroes over the years. Though the more organised Independent scene outside of New Wave had since largely petered out with all of the various factions well entrenched enough to quickly snap up or put down any new Independents when they appeared.

With the way things currently were, whenever a new Independent Hero popped up they either got themselves killed, got recruited or got out within a few months from what she'd kept up with on PHO. That or they made a mistake and then either went Villain or joined the Wards and got a probation deal with a shiny rebranding on top.

Realising an hour later that she was browsing more for the sake of browsing than anything Madison dropped her phone back next to her, wondering what a potential costume would even look like for her. Almost immediately her thoughts turned instead to all the other Heroes she knew of as her mind wandered. As much as she was a cape geek, she wasn't the sort of person to actually buy the merch, even if she had received a few figurines as gifts over the years that were stuffed in a box in the attic somewhere.

The big three of the Triumvirate immediately came to mind, though she only really dwelled on Alexandria herself as the only woman of the three. Her costume was an abundance of blacks and grays, the giant tower symbol on her chest and cape on her back, which despite the subdued palette managed to pull off being authoritative and attention grabbing without being garish or tacky.

The easy comparison to make was to Brockton Bay's own Glory Girl, Victoria Dallon who had gone in the complete opposite direction for her outfit. The image of Glory Girl in her full costume was easy to picture in Madison's mind with how photogenic she was and well, thighs.

Glory Girl in contrast to Alexandria, maybe purposely now that Madison thought about it had a white dress accented with gold, which the Hero definitely had the confidence to pull off. Madison sure as hell couldn't imagine herself in a skirt and tiara teleporting around the city, that was for sure.

She lingered for a moment on the thought as she considered Glory Girl's costume, before grabbing her phone again and pulling up a recent image to refresh her memory of the actual details of it. It should have been tacky, but outside of the tiara which was a choice, Madison had to admit the look worked for her, especially with the way her blonde hair complimented everything else. Honestly it was kind of unfair really. With an idle thought she saved the tab for reference, opening a new page to search through the other Heroes that had started to come to mind.

Really there weren't that many female Heroes in Brockton Bay to begin with, especially if you ignored the rest of Glory Girl's other family members in New Wave and they all stuck to the same brand of plastic white skintight outfits with lots of bright colours for the accents anyway.

Glory Girl and her sister were more the outliers of their family than anything, with Glory Girl's dress and completely bare thighs like she was trying to show as much skin as possible. Meanwhile Panacea was basically the opposite, with her giant white robe and hood that made her look more like a medieval monk than anything. Not that Madison herself wouldn't have picked Panacea's outfit, given the choice between that or Glory Girl's if she was being honest with herself.

The Wards did have Shadow Stalker and Vista. But Shadow Stalker was an edgelord who somehow managed to keep their costume from when they were a vigilante and that was about as boring and brooding as all the personality she'd shown since then. All matte blacks and a full metal face mask, which was probably supposed to look stern? But in Madison's opinion looked more like a permanent resting bitch face.

At least Vista actually had some colour in her outfit that didn't look as corporately bland as most of the New Wave outfits did. Sure she had a skirt for some reason, which in Madison's mind was just another point against joining the Wards. At least not without first having her own costume she could get grandfathered in like Shadow Stalker had managed, but Vista's at least looked nice! The blend of forest greens gave it a pop of vibrancy that seemed to match the bubbly attitude she sometimes showed off in interviews and even then the colour was actually broken up a bit with some tasteful black and white fades to de-emphasise the fact she was still a twelve year old girl wearing armor plating, because that was the kind of place Brockton Bay was.

"I feel like I'm sorta getting nowhere" Madison muttered out loud to herself as she ended up scrolling through some of the female Villains of her home city. Faultline just looked like a mercenary, Rune was a teenage Nazi so that was right out along with a mental note not to use black and red and gave her yet another reason not to go for a robe. After that she'd tried looking up a few of the more well known female Heroes like Narwhal and Dragon, but the former was basically naked all the time thanks to her power and no one even knew what Dragon looked like beyond a lot of very complimentary speculative fan art.

What did she want her costume to look like?

The first thing that actually came to mind was 'pockets'. Being able to hide that she was putting things into and pulling them out of her Inventory would be an obvious advantage, though an actual cape wouldn't really work for that. A coat maybe? Trousers with pockets too she pondered as she absently chewed on her lower lip in thought.

Her mind kept drifting back to colours and as much as she liked Vista's outfit for the most part, she wasn't sure she could pull off a good green and she didn't want to look like she was trying to rip off the other girl's costume anyway. The more she thought about it, the more she kept coming back to white. She kind of understood why New Wave had picked it, it was 'clean' and fit their whole image of trying to be the new iteration of Heroes who didn't have a secret identity, even if that was never going to happen after one of their members got killed because of it.

Madison found white appealing to her for a similar reason. It was like a fresh start, like being able to visually say 'this is the new me,' even if no one but her and her power knew who she was. It definitely wouldn't be the whole outfit though. No way she was getting mistaken for a New Wave groupie or something, but maybe just the top? The coat or whatever she went with?

"Wait" she paused out loud as another thought struck her and she frowned at it with a tilt of her head. "How the hell am I going to pay for this? How much are costumes anyway?"

It wasn't like anyone ever talked about that sort of thing, or at least not on the boards she visited on PHO. The Wards and Protectorate all got theirs from the government if they didn't make it themselves and she assumed there was some group of villainous tailors out there somewhere for all the bad guys too. But what did everyone else do she wondered, her phone finding its way back into her hand as she proceeded to try and find out.

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Another thirty minutes later and she was no closer to figuring out the answer. There were plenty of people offering services, but it was hard to tell which were scams or not and she wasn't sure how she'd manage getting a fitting without her parents noticing something weird was going on regardless.

She did find some professional services, there was even a company in Boston which was basically next door for her, but when she'd tried to see their prices it was obviously a case of 'if you need to ask, you probably can't afford us darling' and she'd given up on that avenue pretty quickly.

Madison frowned, feeling like she'd just spent an hour not really achieving anything at all, even worse because her power clearly expected her to get it done. If she sat down and thought about it she could probably put together a full costume in her mind compared to the vagueish ideas she had right then, but that still left the question of how on earth was she going to pay for it all?

Sure she had gotten a bit of money from her relatives at Christmas, but her birthday wasn't until June and even then she was pretty sure something that was supposed to survive Brockton Bay was going to be more than the couple hundred dollars she could maybe scrape together and that was a big maybe.

It wasn't like she could approach her parents and ask for the money either and the only other person who might actually be able to loan her what she needed was Emma and she'd burned that bridge down to the foundations and into the earth itself.

She was stumped.

She hadn't really had a concrete plan when it came to the whole hero-ing thing to begin with, but she'd been pretty sure she would have been able to put together a rough outfit until... Okay she hadn't figured out the next part between her current very improvised getup and having a proper costume and her power just reminding her of that wasn't exactly helping her self confidence right then either.

"Okay think Madison, what's your first step?" She asked herself, pausing for a moment before it struck her. Well she supposed the first step would be figuring out how much she actually needed right? It shouldn't have felt the entire epiphany it was, but she'd take the win!

"Right and Quest said I'll need multiple back-ups and" her eyes darted back to the ever present quest window. "variants maybe, so maybe several hundred dollars per costume?"

She frowned, wondering if that would be enough or maybe even too much before shrugging to herself. It was better than nothing and it at least meant her next step was obvious, she'd have to ask Parian herself!