*The biceps of fame.*
(A silly follow up to the sidestory 'Money for Nothing'.)
Taylor had just finished eating and was discussing the current novel from the English class with another girl when one of the football players approached her.
She looked up at him, automatically assessing his fitness and strength. She knew that he was no match for her; but something about her changes made her evaluate everyone that way. (It had nothing to do with teenage hormones at all, of course, even if she liked muscular men.)
He was very well built, with the defined muscles of someone that spent a lot of time lifting weights. That was obvious fom the sheer thickness of his chest and the corded arms that swelled the T-shirt he wore. She had seen him before, of course, and noted him in passing, simply because he was one of just three boys in school that was as tall as she was, and the only one that seemed as muscular as she was.
He looked around, sighed and squatted, so that he wasn't looming over her. "I um, ah, had a request," he muttered.
Taylor had no idea what he wanted, but the PR team for the Protectorate had given her tips on how to put people more at ease. "Well, why don't we start with an introduction? You know who I am, obviously, but all I know about you is that you're on the football team."
"Oh, yeah. I'm Jason Marko."
Somewhere inside her, Taylor felt her passengers sit up and pay more attention for some reason, but she ignored it for now. She'd find out later why his name interested them. "OK, now that we know each other, what can I do for you?"
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a very familiar magazine. He opened it to a previously marked page and set it on the table. Taylor already knew what she would see, of course. She had a framed copy of that page at home. "Would you sign this for me, please?"
Taylor blinked, staring at the ad for a protein supplement tailored for women that had a picture of her arm, in a V flexed position. It didn't show anything but the arm and she blurted out the first question that came to mind. "What makes you think that's me?"
Jason blushed and stammered for a minute as she stared at him and the girl she'd been talking to giggled. "I've seen you in gym class, and I might have recognized the form and swell of that bicep?"
Taylor was torn between the teenage embarrassment of somebody admiring her and the creepy thought that somebody had memorized her body parts to the point that they recognized them even without the rest of her to see.
Jason seemed to realize that she was uncomfortable and started babbling. "I lift, you know, and am hoping to get into it professionally, so I pay a lot of attention to people with the right form, and your form is just awesome, and you'd probably be a big name, if you weren't a parahuman, but een so, you're like a model of how a bodybuilder should look and a lot of the lifters..."
Taylor cut him off with a sigh. She'd known that even if they didn't say anything, almost everyone knew that she was Juggernaut. It wasn't as if Brockton Bay was full of 6' 8" teenage girls after all. Especially not ones that looked as if they'd been lifting for years.
She'd simply never considered that to people that liked muscles, she was quite attractive until her modeling gig. The comments she heard or overheard during that had opened her eyes, but those had all been adults, who were aware that A. She was a minor, and B. That she could break all of them in half, without breaking a sweat, so they'd been very respectful.
This was the first time she'd met a musclehead that was her own age, and it was... honestly, too confusing right now.
She pulled out her pen and scrawled her name on his magazine, hoping to end this scene before her head exploded from embarrassment.
On her way to her next class, she tried to figure why her passengers, mostly QA, were so involved with some sort of shipping discussion.
(Like it says, just a silly follow up; Melissa, the girl that the first scene was based on, had a few encounters with people that admired female muscles, and while some of those encounters were from people who had QQ type ideas in mind, a few were just people that admired the female form. I don't think she ever had somebody recognize her biceps, however.)
