Against My Will 16

How the hell is this line eleven deep?

Eleven.

On a Thursday.

Eleven-forty in the morning and this many people wanted a hotdog. Do none of you have jobs or something? He wasn’t being hypocritical, of course, mostly because he didn’t have one. Not unless standing here listening to the guy at the front try to consider the topping options counted as a career.

After ninety seconds, it felt like it.

Bro. It’s kraut or no kraut. He adjusted the strap on his duffel, edging it up his too-skinny shoulder. There’s two options.

Being Green Lantern also wasn’t a job… yet.

For one, he didn’t get paid for it. For two… well, he’d only really started yesterday. All in all, it was pretty much being a hero as a hobby over everything else. And I didn’t have to go bald to do it.

He snorted as he adjusted the bag one more time. Yay me, right?

The duffel bag had been weighing him down since 8 this morning, Orin hauling the thing all over Queens because the green-black bag had his whole — current — life in it. Granted, a bunch of shirts, some dollar store briefs, a toothbrush, and about five hundred in change rolled up in a sock wasn’t much of a life but he could make do.

If anything, he was doing better than most homeless people. I’m setting some high bars for myself man. Orin couldn’t help but snort as he moved up six inches with everybody else, the kraut guy finally leaving the line. Intergalactic space cop and above-average bum. Straight up the Hal Jordan lifestyle.

Granted, his homelessness was more by choice this time. So yeah, above average.

He’d had a basement maintenance room all to himself, slop sink and pipe walls and stained mattress — his little squatter’s paradise. Really, he technically still had the basement, more or less, considering he went back there three or four nights a week.

Sometimes five, if it was rainy.

But, above everything else, Orin liked to think that he wasn’t stupid. He could be as dumb as anyone else — comes with being human, right? — but he wasn’t stupid. So, a month of one address in a city with satellites and sitting right next to SHIELD’s homebase was just begging to get got.

He’d done the math after his first week in the basement, sitting on a bench in Astoria, and then he hadn’t gone back to the spot for almost six days straight just to air it out.

Choice or not, he was still homeless again and, being straight up, he’d been homeless even before the choice. Homeless and squatting, yes, but now he was homeless and mobile which was…

Worse? Orin frowned. Better?

It was something.

Whatever it was, the point was to break up the routine. Never two nights in the same spot if he could help it and never the same subway line twice in a day. He kept the gloves on, kept a hood or a cap up, and he avoided the same coffee place twice in a week. Jesus Christ, I’m Jason Bourne.

He bit down a laugh at the thought of movies he’d never actually watched. They’d seemed like just another bunch of spy movies — and not even cool hitman shit like John Wick — but his dad had loved them.

Too much even.

His dad… who doesn’t exist.

Orin sighed and ducked his head as the line shifted up by two more people, pushing his thoughts somewhere else before he could start dwelling. With nothing else to think about, his thoughts drifted back to Wall Street.

Three days ago was nothing that he’d planned out. At all.

Chilling on a brownstone roof in Brooklyn Heights eating a bacon-egg-and-cheese — because you know, New York — had been nice and all, then a building suddenly started coming apart in front of his eyes.

He’d been up and in the air before he could stop himself but… 

But he didn’t regret it one bit.

Mostly because he learned more in three minutes of actually forcing his limits than three solid weeks of practicing all over New York in the most isolated places he could find.

Big lesson number one: pretty stuff was fuckin’ expensive.

The hands had been fine; just two hands — like his, hands he’d seen his whole life. Nothing pretty, sure, but they’d been cheap enough to barely pull on any draw. But then came the bracing; a diagonal scissor jack he tried to put up against the skyscraper, just a giant green version of the ones you saw people use on cars.

His charge had dropped from just past eight down to edging out six, during just a few minutes of trying to hold the building up. Two whole big ticks.

He’d almost lost his focus by the time he looked down, nearly dumping the jack before he locked in and simply did the job — force and shape his two best friends as he held dozens of floors of building upright and into place.

Detail cost more, obviously.

Size was barely an issue compared to how much detail drained the ring. No ‘size matters not’ bullshit, because it mattered but it was way different when it came to drain. A few hundred tons of a blocky green shove was so much less costly than a precisely modeled car part, and he didn’t have to chew on why for long to figure it out.

Getting specific was a bitch.

And parts and tools were all about the specifics.

So… ugly it is. Low-poly shit from here on out. Orin wasn’t gonna pretend his constructs already didn’t look like something off MegaMan Legends anyway, everything built like a PS1-era cutscene in the first place. That had bothered him at first, because who didn’t want the good version, right? Who wouldn’t want their constructs coming out like one of Guy Gardner’s middle fingers, all smooth and confident?

Not worth the juice, though. No point in running AAA graphics when the PS1 model did the job just fine.

The line crawled further and Orin’s thoughts drifted with it, this time to something he’d been mulling over every time he’d passed by a TV or a newsstand; The Ultimates.

That name, man. It was almost bad enough to make him curl up and cringe, because what was that? What did it even mean? The Ultimate what? It didn’t sound like a superhero team, it came off more like some dickhead naming his fantasy football team. Leave it to the government to fuck up a good thing.

The Avengers was good. It was solid.

It was right there.

In like every Marvel universe he’d seen in all the shows and games, it’d pretty much been just that. So why’d they have to go all edge here? Because it wasn’t like everything else was edgy like that.

Sure, Magneto had gone full ‘Aryan’ with his Brotherhood and slapped Supremacy at the end of the Brotherhood of Mutants. Even still, that was Magneto and the guy was never subtle about his shit.

But the X-Men were still the X-Men, and they still had the classic costumes — all black leather too, just like the movies. The Fantastic Four were still the Fantastic Four and not the Force or something else tryhard.

More than that, Spider-Man was still out there swinging around somewhere; the news and Daily Bugle talking about him all the time. Green Goblin’s kinda uh… different, though. While all the other Spider-Man baddies he’d heard about looked pretty much the same like they did everywhere else, Green Goblin was literally a giant fire-throwing green… goblin.

Like in the Ultimate Spider-Man show. And the game, too, but he barely played that one. I wonder… Correction, he had already wondered if that was where he’d landed but the fact that things were so old was just throwing him off. Plus, they were still the Avengers in that show too so…

Orin blinked as the line moved again, suddenly aware he was second.

And in almost the same second, as the next person moved off with a naked dog on a bun, he found himself first. “Hey, Donno.”

“Kid.” Donno was already reaching for the tongs, a smirk on the big man’s face. “We going for two today?”

“Three.”

“Three.” The cart-owner shook his head. “As much as you eat, you shouldn’t be that skinny, kid.”

“…heh, yeah.” Orin didn’t have a chance to say anything else, green eyes snapping over Donno’s cart; over his shoulder, over the top of a building, and aimed a few blocks north.

Smoke.

It wasn’t too much, not yet; just a column of gray going up and out of a rooftop in a lazy spread that meant it just started. Mm. Fire department’s probably already rolling. It was New York, right?

And Marvel New York too, the way things had just kept going after the Hulk. They’ll be fine.

His eyes trailed the smoke for a few more seconds.

And then the upper windows went.

Orange flame blew out the top-floor glass all at once; three windows going off in a line and sending shards everywhere. “God damn it.”

Impulse was initiative and he was already on the move.

“Hey — kid!“

“I’ll be back, Donno!” He shouted back without looking back, arms and legs pumping as best he could with the duffel. “Just wait!”

“Your dogs—!”

“I’ll be back!“

Orin took a corner and ducked right into the first alley that had a dumpster in it, a hardware place on one side and a Chinese carryout on the other. As soon as he was sure he was fully alone, the dumpster blocking him from sight, he clenched his fists at his sides and said the words.

“…Hero Time.”

Alright, he knew how it sounded and how it looked but he had to say something, because the ring had tricks to it; a concrete referent and a verb and intent were all well and good, but they were a waste of time. Why do all that when you could just give it a keyword to set off a whole set of pre-installed actions?

So, Ben 10 it was.

[HERO_TIME:

    STORE(held_gear)

    SWAP_CLOTHES(civ) -> (hero)

    AURA(basic)

    DISPLAY(chest_mark)

    SET(cmd_profile, hero)

    ACTIVATE(hero_commands: BRACE, CATCH, WALL, HIT)

READY]

Green came up over him, passing over skin in a thin layer like falling code; a thousand miniature lantern symbols rolling from his shoulders to his boots. All at once, the duffel was gone and a new set of clothes were just on him — pulled out of wherever the ring kept his lantern.

The aura came with the green — a sleeve of power running over him bright and hard as the light shone off the alley bricks. “There we go…” Orin grinned down at himself. “Not bad.”

Three days of hauling his clothes around and changing in drafty back alleys and bathrooms like an idiot before it clicked that the ring had been storing the lantern somewhere the whole time and if it could hold a two-foot power battery… why not a jacket?

That’s all his costume was; a brown leather jacket, a long-sleeve black compression shirt, some black jeans, and a pair of yuttas; wheat Timberlands, six-inch, and still crispy.

Not a uniform, though, and I still need a real one. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the uniform to stick around and he wasn’t sure how to even form one properly in the first place. Either way, it was just four pieces of clothing that he’d worn during a hectic three minutes and now there were pictures of it on TV.

A panel formed under his feet — BRACE — as he focused that thought; twelve by twelve inches of flat green to kick off.

And he did.

He shot up all at once, high and fast, before forcing himself horizontal as another plane of green formed under his feet again. Another kick-off and he was out, brace-to-launch once again coming in clutch like he figured. Standing on nothing with nothing to push against was the whole reason I’ve been going around like a bee this whole time. And making something to shove against made his whole flight experience four-hundred-percent better.

The alley dropped out from beneath him, the green trail behind him not lasting a full second before he was already there.

A fire escape zigged down six floors of red bricks, the top floor going hard with flames as smoke pushed its way out — a thick black that edged out the old gray.

No trucks yet and sirens were somewhere, but not here.

Okay.

Glowing green eyes trailed the building for all of a second before the sound of a scream took priority; scouting forgotten as he dove right in through a window. The fifth floor was thick with smoke, enough of the stuff to blanket his vision even as the green of his aura kept him breathing fine.

Unfortunately, other people didn’t have that.

A woman was down at the end of the hallway, towel over her mouth as she tried to force her way out the opened window. “No!”

By the time she’d fallen out, he was already outside with her, the woman bubbled up with a little diamond popping up over her head, the thing spinning slow square over her crown.

I gotta figure out how to turn that off.

It wasn’t even something he’d done on purpose, not even meaning to use it when he caught that redhead lady as she fell. But something about the mix of trying to tag the lady and keep his eye on the right falling object had made his braind go right for the Sims and now it just popped up every time.

If it works…

The woman blinked up at it, the damp towel falling from her shaking fingers as she went cross-eyed trying to track the thing that let him track her.

“Oh —!” Then those same crossed eyes aimed down as she realized there was no floor. “…oh my God, oh my God, there’s nothing—!”

“Ma’am…” The lady and the Eminem looking guy in leather from the other day hadn’t been like this. “Ma’am!”

“THERE’S NOTHING UNDER ME—!!!“

“Okay, okay, just… Jesus Christ, ma’am.” The screams kept going and Orin decided to do the simple thing. “Just calm— just, hold on.” A full second later, he got down on the sidewalk, the bubble vanishing as  she sat down hard on the concrete and stayed sitting.

Right. Floors. Got it, note to self… Orin nodded as he added one more little bit of his list of things to fix. People need floors.

Obvious enough, sure.

Obvious enough he stood in midair annoyed about it for half a second. Yeah, I get weird about standing on nothing. Makes sense.

With that in mind, the next guy got a floor under him; a flat green disc beneath his bubble, open at the top like a little round elevator. Nobody panics in an elevator. A guy in a Yankees shirt was coughing hard enough on his way down the green elevator that Orin had reason to worry, considering he looked around fifty.

The next go-around the fifth floor, he got a little greedy and put two in the same one; a mother and a kid, the kid no older than seven. It was solid logic, one trip instead of two and keep a family together and all that, but the kid wouldn’t stop moving.

Are you suicidal, you little—? Holding a shape steady was hard enough. Add a little brat jumping around like a crazy person and he was juggling a headache along with two bodies. 

Fourth floor — on his way back through to get a couple more people — was where the ceiling started coming down on everyone. Plaster started to crumble at the halfway point down the hall and an entire section of joist gave in with it, a second of reaction time all he had.

“WALL!” His hand snapped out, ring shining as a flat place snapped in to shield two people beneath a horizontal umbrella. The whole load came down over the top of it and held on tight, a couple of civilians doubled over beneath a green ceiling and just hacking their lungs out.

Air? Air. Another problem he needed a solution for. Dome it.

Okay, then, dome it and then— what, fill it with what? He didn’t have air. His ring could let him breathe but did that mean he could make air for other people, filter it for them too? No time for questions, Orin rushed both people out the window fast in their own little bubbles.

Third floor.

Only one person left, an old woman standing in the doorway with wet towels all over her and a strong refusal to take a single step.

“Ma’am…”

“I’m not going.”

“Ma’am, the floor above you is—”

“I’m not leaving without her.”

Without?  “Okay, who’s her?” He tried to look past the older woman, not intending on leaving anyone behind if he could help it. “There somebody in—?”

“Mochimochi, she’s under the bed. She’s terrified, she gets all fussy and I…” She trailed off with a shake of her head. “You know, I just don’t know what to do with that girl sometimes.”

You could die. His eye twitched. Do you wanna die? “Ma’am—”

“No!” Two wrinkly arms crossed over her chest. “I’m not going without my dog!”

The ceiling at the end of the hall chose that moment to make a sound like a knuckle cracking as it dropped about two inches. “Hey, wha—”  Before another complaint could leave the old white lady’s mouth, she was bubbled and launched out a crumbling wall; Orin keeping his focus until she touched down safely on the sidewalk.

Then he went back for the dog.

Under the bed. He pushed the door in, smoke down to knee height now in the small apartment and somehow chest height in the smaller bedroom. Completely horizontal, Orin dropped flush with the floor; the lighting off his whole body enough to give him what he needed as he looked under the bed.

No dog.

He checked the closet, behind the door, and under a dresser that had about four inches of clearance and definitely wasn’t hiding anything. There’s no dog here.

Then he heard it.

A sound that definitely wasn’t a dog.

One hand pushed open the bathroom door. “Mochi…”

A gray cat — fat-faced and fatter-bodied — stared back at him from on top of the toilet tank, the little chubster bubbled in a second. Even all wrapped up, the cat yowled all the way down and out the window, not stopping for a second until she was in the woman’s arms on the curb.

“Thank you. Thank you, thank you—”

“Dog.”

“What?” The old lady blinked up at him, coke-bottle glasses making her eyes look massive.

“…nothing.”

Firemen were already blasting water on the building itself by now, hoses going full-force as he floated there unsure how else he could help. I don’t think construct water can put out a fire…

Then again, it could do anything, right?

“Stop right there!”

Orin blinked down as a blue-white car squealed up the block to a sudden stop, lights behind it still going as the man in the driver’s seat jumped out with a gun up. “You’re under arre-”

“No.”

Before the cop could finish, Green Lantern was already four hundred feet up and out over the city.