Author's Note: Medaka Box is the Intellectual Property of writer Nisio Isin and artist Akira Akatsuki, and Worm is the Intellectual Property of the writer who goes by the pseudonym Wildbow.
Misguided Equality
Blank 1.1
The nightlife in Brockton Bay was thriving if you knew where to look. No one batted an eye as I strode through the crowded room in my showiest getup. The flashing multicolored lights and blasting music were an obstruction to my attempt to scan the room for a certain private dick. The sequins on my dress were reflecting so much light I may as well have been a walking disco ball. As I waded through the sea of drunken dancing, my eyes finally landed on the least appropriately dressed man I'd seen all night sitting alone at a booth.
Colin was the only man I knew who had what it took to go to a gay club in the most boring outfit I'd ever seen. Jeans and a T-shirt were only good for blending in on the street, not in an extravagant gay club. He surely knew that, though, and was trying to make it easier to find him for my sake. He spied on people for a living, so he must've known how to blend in. He waved to me as I approached from the center of the dance floor.
I sat down at the table, noting the lack of drinks on it. "You sure hid yourself well. Never thought the Master Spy would be dressing to Stand Out in a place like this," I said, picking up the beige folder in the center of the table, "Seriously? It's like you're screaming 'I am a suspicious person! Look at me!'" I snarked. Colin looked annoyed for a second before visibly calming down as if he was registering and processing my sarcasm before my eyes.
"It doesn't matter if people think I'm suspicious. If I don't want to be seen, I won't be." he responded matter-of-factly. "You wouldn't have had trouble finding me anyways" He said while proceeding to snatch the folder from my hands. He wasn't wrong, but didn't he contradict himself there? Although the only skills that I had with which I could find him here were either excessively flashy or destructive or vague enough to be useless in this setting.
[Find my iPhone] created a flash of blinding light emanating from the person or thing I was looking for, which would've been just a step above the level of pizzazz I wanted to bring to a business outing. [Graphing Compass]¹ would've given me the general location of every man in the club, which would've been completely useless given how packed the place was. A variety of target-seeking attacks could've led me straight to him, but would also be likely to injure or maim him.
He grunted, snapping me out of my haze. "You were doing the thing again." He said, referencing me getting lost in evaluation over the number of skills I could use to solve basically any mundane problem, at this point. I appreciated having a friend who would call out my negative behaviors, even if he was Mr Unsociable Batman about it. And would vehemently deny being friends with me if asked.
I finally worked up the courage to ask him "Why are we here, Mister Wayne?"² He opened the folder to reveal a variety of polaroid images of people, because the man was a living detective clichè."Victims of a new abhuman³ sicko out there." He grumbled with a note of concern. Despite his lack of conversational skills, it was easy to tell how much he cared about other people. I looked over the photos and a terrible feeling started to stir in my chest.
"Something wrong with your camera?" I quipped, noticing that the photos were all in grayscale. I looked up as a hot lady walked by and gave me a wink. The way that her red dress accentuated her curves... "Sorry, what was I talking about?" I said as I overcame my gay fantasies to focus on the task at hand. "Right, the pictures. They're black and white?"
"They're frozen in time to the best I can tell. The light inside of the time-bubble is completely desaturated. " the detective replied. "Anything that enters immediately gets caught inside. As far as I can tell, they're still conscious in there," he explained. They.. the victims in the photos were all cut up. That would mean. "They can feel it, yeah. Damned Creep. It's folks like this who give Abhumans a terrible name" he said. Ironic, coming from the guy who decided to call us "Abhuman". What's that even supposed to mean?
I paused, choosing my next words very carefully. "..........Fuck," I said. That's a nasty villain. I didn't have anything in my repertoire that could counter something like that. I counted it as a good thing that it couldn't get any worse.
"It gets worse.⁴" he elaborated, cutting through my thoughts as if he could see them. Damned detectives and their people-reading skills. I could cut off
His thoughts, too, if
I had access to the script. "Whatever sick freak it was that did this?" he continued. My heart pounded harder and harder, to the point that I had to use [Hall Monitor]⁵ to get it back under control. It felt like the walls in the room were closing in on me. I knew an impending call to action when I heard one. He pushed a polaroid of a grayscale photo of the words "bring me Slash⁶" engraved into a wall in my direction.
"They're looking for you."⁷
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Author's fun-fact: The name of the club they're in is 'Northern Lights', as a probably unsubtle reference to the name of the only nightclub that I've been to. Will this ever come up in the story? Maybe!
Ending Author's note: If you haven't caught on yet, the main character is based on Anshin'in from Medaka Box, only instead of being a trillion-year-old nigh-omnipotent Goddess, she's twenty-years-old and was born into Human society. So her Meta Jokes are just jokes, not the defining feature of her world-view, and her power level is essentially a bit under Canon-Eidolon. She will probably be the only Medaka Box character that we see for Quite a While (unless I change my mind).
For those unaware, which is probably most of the people who will read this, Anshin'in is a trillion year old Goddess in Medaka Box who has been gaining somewhere in between 3 and 4 thousand skills every year that she has been alive, and this version of her has the same ability but with much less time for development, dropping the skill total from Quadrillions to tens of thousands. I've made a guess as an author that maybe one in every thousand of those abilities is broadly useful, and maybe one in one million is approaching the level of any of the big skills that we see her use in canon.
This would be my first work of fanfiction that I've posted online, so. please be nice! And please enjoy! I'm very embarrassed about my writing! I will try to keep posting consistently, but I'm a very mentally ill person! Also I do not have a beta-reader at the moment! Feel free to ask questions and I will try to answer them!
Footnotes:
- 'Graphing' is a play on 'demographic'. Basically, it's a skill that points you towards the nearest person matching a short, one-word description.
- She's comparing him to Batman here.
- Abnormal Human. Term chosen for a couple of reasons: it's a reference to one of the types of people in Medaka Box, Abnormals, who are born with special powers. The other being that 'Parahuman' doesn't feel right to refer to someone who's power isn't shard-based. The third being that Colin doesn't have superpowers in this AU, and has made up a term that encapsulates his feeling that they're Weird and Unnatural. The proper term would probably be Skill User, as powers are frequently referred to in the General as 'Skills' in the latter end of Medaka Box where several kinds of powers have been introduced.
- Pun not intended
- A skill to manually change her heart rate. A play on 'monitoring your heart rate'
- She picked her code-name after 'Slash-fiction'.
- Four words, barely audible (over the club's loud music. A terrible place to hold a business meeting, really. It's a wonder that they could hear each other at all).
