You scrambled back as best you could on legs and robotic limbs, your harness bumping up against the back wall while you tried to get your bearings. You raised a protective arm over your face, wincing.
"Whoa whoa whoa! Hold up!" you cried, and the figure stopped, fist raised, hooded head askew. Then, their cloak started glowing, more gently this time, illuminating the dark interior of the truck, and they dropped to a knee to take a closer look at you. Now that you were nearer, you could see a black lycra mask and goggles under their hood: it looked remarkably like your own design.
"Shit. You're Arachne!! Oh my god, I'm so sorry!" they said in a babble, a feminine voice swinging wildly between between joy and horror. "I didn't see I just saw a-"
"You couldn't have realized that before the flashbang?" you groaned, taking her hand as she pulled you to your feet. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"
In response, incredibly, she reached down and pulled back her hood, removing her mask in a swift motion with her other hand. Behind it lay the features of a young Black woman, about your age, and an enthusiastic smile.
"Justine Hammer, I'm a huge fan!" she exclaimed, shaking your hand. "You here to blow up the robots too?"
"What are you
doing! Put the mask back on!" you exclaimed in a hiss, and very quickly she did so. "Always assume there's a camera or a drone or something watching just out of reach, okay? And... don't just tell random people your identity!"
"Okay, but... you're not just a random person. You're Arachne, you're a hero!" she said insistently. "You're like, seventy-five percent of why I'm out here."
"Well, you won't be out here very long if you do that." you said, shaking your head. You'd made some dumb mistakes early, but it had never occurred to you to just pull your mask off around
anyone. "How long have you been, uh, superheroing?"
"I've done some street patrols but uh... I stopped a guy stealing a homeless dude's backpack. That's about it." she said, "But this is big!"
"That first things actually really cool, like... people don't realize how big a deal that is." you pointed out. You'd had a pretty up close and personal look at how little a lot of people had, and how important what they kept was, in the last few weeks. "So, uh, blowing up the robots?"
"Yeah, I have, um, this?" she said, pulling something out of her cloak with a casualness that absolutely should not be used for a large block of plastic explosive. "I was going to plant it inside to make sure I got 'em all..."
"Okay, hold, hold up." you said, swallowing nervously. "That's... that's a military grade demolition charge, you don't just
get one of those. And the cloak and all..."
"Yeah... um... so, I stole all this from Stark Industries." she said, sounding a little apologetic if anything. As she did, Athena gently pinged you, and you let yourself slip away a moment to read an article she'd sent you...
"... and their own security is so tight that its a huge hassle so all their guards like, don't bother locking doors and stuff because if they do it wrong it locks everything up for fifteen minutes, and it takes forever to change all the passcodes so you can get through just about anything by pressing 0-0-0-0-1 on the number pads."
"That's incredible."
you said, shaking Liv's head in... well, not disbelief, it was kind of exactly what you expected, but it was still so goddamn stupid. "So where'd you get the cloak?"
"Okay, so this is like, it used to be a prototype of the new intelligent thermal camouflage cloak that they were working on but they lost that one out to General Dynamics because, well, it costs a shitload of money, and there's also their electro-elastic armature and those cool tactical flashbang LED pads and flexible bulletproof nanomaterials? So I kinda kludged it all together, so I have this cool cloak that is... well, generously its bullet resistant, but also I can make it move with pre-programmed commands, and have it blind and disorient people, play sounds, and like... its almost like a powered exoskeleton if I use it right, though I'm still experimenting with that..."
she rambled. It was... actually really impressive, for a nineteen year old who didn't seem to have any kind of magic tech powers. Miss Hammer might be a genuine prodigy, though clearly she lacked some rather vital common sense.
"How'd you get on the truck?"
you asked.
"Well, that's the best bit, I can actually spread it out to cover enough square footage to use it as a steerable parachute, there's some nonintelligent material under here it can use too, so I threw myself off a cell tower which was
super scary but don't worry, I tested it."
she said. Liv was gently letting you know she'd finished the article with a ping to her phone, so you relaxed control a little.
"Hey, uh... I just remembered where I saw your name. I'm sorry about your dad, Justine." you said. She shrugged, her huge cowl moving comically.
Justine's dad was
Justin Hammer (the third), aka the Stark executive who blew the whistle on the mess that was his Jericho missile back in the 2010s, and how between the fuel and the warhead it constituted a violation of like three different treaties. For his trouble, he was imprisoned under the Espionage Act. The Jericho missile was gleefully used in Iran and North Korea, and children would be finding its nearly-invisible dud submunitions for generations to come.
"It's okay. That's why I'm here, you know? He wouldn't want these things on our streets." she said. "So, uh, how were you going to do it? Destroy the robots, I mean."
"Uh..."
"Here, hold up, lemme rig my bomb too, so if yours doesn't work we have a backup. Bombs can be finicky apparently..." she said, turning around and hunting for a good spot.
---
One of Aranche's greatest advantages is that nobody knows that she has tech powers, and telling Justine, who seems to not have a particular good grasp of secrets and secret identities, might not be the best idea.
What do you say?
