The third in the SpiderLiv series. It's June and graduation is approaching, but it's time to put the mask back on. How will Liv and Athena survive the transition out of high school and into the real world?
The Arachne System (SPIDERLIV 3)
- Thread starter open_sketch
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- Superhero
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- Ongoing
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Statistics (39 threadmarks, 56k words)
User Total open_sketch 39 -
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you there walker?
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Athena.exe Yesterday at 12:30
hello? u back yet?
Athena.exe Yesterday at 18:30
walker... paging walker...
Athena.exe Yesterday at 22:30
checking in... you okay?
love u 💋
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━< New!
Walker Zero Today at 06:51
shit, sorry I missed your messages!
a lot of messages
sorry sorry sorry
Athena.exe Today at 06:52
wow you are up early
absolutely no sorries
i understand u just had me worried
Walker Zero Today at 06:52
thats why im sorries! i don't like making you worry
you got enough to worry about babe
Athena.exe Today at 06:52
well thats true as fuck
how are u?
Walker Zero Today at 06:56
shit it's the 2nd???
what the entire fuck???
Athena.exe Today at 06:56
yeah its long even for u guys
what happen?
Walker Zero Today at 06:59
i'm still trying to figure that out myself
you know how it is for us
every time i switch in i swear its like
Athena.exe Today at 07:00
loooooooooooooooooooooool holy shit
gimme a second im actually losing it
Walker Zero Today at 07:00
:3
Athena.exe Today at 07:00
zero isnt being any help?
Walker Zero Today at 07:01
theyre all cryptic as usual, im checking my phone
okay, she at least didnt miss our therapy session
who the fuck is francis
Athena.exe Today at 07:03
???
Walker Zero Today at 07:04
new phone contact
oh god
Athena.exe Today at 07:05
???????
Walker Zero Today at 07:08
mary's got a new boyfriend i guess
thats cool
fucking
god what the fuck is wrong with her
Athena.exe Today at 07:09
u think hes like the last one?
Walker Zero Today at 07:09
of course he's like the last one, she never changes
another burnout stoner or something
he's probably like, thirty
im gone for three days...
i need to leave her some notes
which as usual she hasn't for me. gotta put together the fucking breadcrumbs
Athena.exe Today at 07:11
<3
Walker Zero Today at 07:11
i just wish she'd realize its not just her
and like
idk think about me and zero for five minutes before doing whatever
like what if she gets us pregnant? god
i'm gonna have nightmares
looks like she spent a bunch of our savings on bus tickets too
Athena.exe Today at 07:14
u going to be okay?
Walker Zero Today at 07:15
yeah... its not too bad
at least im not hungover this time
sigh
i envy you guys. not having barriers has got to be nice
Athena.exe Today at 07:15
we have barriers, remember? just not like urs
L can only remember part of my stuff, and only if she tries
but i can remember most of hers
and its not exactly all smooth sailing over here lol
Walker Zero Today at 07:16
righ yeah
*right
sorry im a bit frazzled
lemme get some tea and calm down a bit
Athena.exe Today at 07:16
np
Walker Zero Today at 07:26
okay back, let's talk about literally anything else
what's L up to anyway
Athena.exe Today at 07:26
not much. panicking over the fact shes not going to college yet mostly
like its not totally understandable to miss a year after losing a fuckin arm lol
but her girlfriend is going so now shes gotta feel like shit
because her entire self-worth is based on her sense of intellectual superiority lol
Walker Zero Today at 07:27
where'd her GF end up going?
Athena.exe Today at 07:28
nyu, to the surprise of nobody. trying to double up on arts and business
shes also freaking out because the business stuff is all her dad pushing it
the two of them have a mutual freakout session together in like an hour
Walker Zero Today at 07:28
has L told her about you yet or is she still in the closet?
Athena.exe Today at 07:28
well, if i phrased it as a closet shed tell her gf instantly out of queer spite
Walker Zero Today at 07:28
lol
Athena.exe Today at 07:29
but no
i am still undercover robot
thats fine honestly
Walker Zero Today at 07:30
wish she wasn't so ashamed. it's not fair to you.
i worry about you two.
wanna do a video call after her date?
if you're around. and i am.
it'd be nice
Athena.exe Today at 07:32
i might be busy, by which i mean that L might be busy
but if i can, i absolutely will
she's been working on a new robotics project you see
kinda takes up all our processor cycles lol
Walker Zero Today at 06:52
oooh, can you share some top secret info from the lab?
choose 3 features 4 liv's new superhero suit
[ ] its some cool new robotic arm designs? they've got all sorts of gadgets, jointed more like tentacles, and they're twice as strong as anything she's built before.
[ ] she's building some kind of armoured thingy this time??? she used her money from her new app to rent a plasma cutter and stuff, its wild. like a whole suit
[ ] shes setting up like... wings? parachute something. i think she wants to take up base jumping, to which my answer is 'no' and also 'i live in this brain too' ffs
[ ] shes building a robot glove for punching things! its so absurd, oh my god. it has hydraulic pistons and stuff! and i think she wants to electrify it!??!?
[ ] shes taking another run at a new prosthetic. this one is human-shaped at least, but its all steel and heavy duty plastics. for special occasions.
[ ] i'm not sure yet, but it folds up very very small. its really impressive.
[ ] write-in (subject to veto, im watching you fuckers)
Last edited:
Experiments
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
---
Let's start from the beginning, one last time.
Your name is Olivia Octavius. For two and a half-ish agonizing more months, you are a 17 year old transgender girl from New York City. The year is 2030, the date is June 2nd, and you're doing your absolute level best to live at your girlfriend's house right now. See, the air condition at your place broke, because of course it did, and this was basically not a tolerable situation when the temperature was doing its damnedest to get about 90 every day. You couldn't even imagine what July and August was going to be like if this was early June.
But May's place had central air and the best air conditioner of all time, and while it wasn't why she was the Greatest Human, it was ranking pretty high right now.
"Holy shit, you see this thing from London?" she asked, holding her phone up so you could see. You were sprawled out on the couch where all your hangouts seemed to spend most of their time, owing to the fact she had fancy little lap tables so you could do homework together, her video game systems were right there, and also when her parents weren't around (which was often) it was a good excuse to cuddle up to one another.
Mostly that last one.
Really almost entirely that last one.
On the screen was a short video of a person wearing what kind of looked like a CQC Ltd soft exoskeleton, like the sort British Army soldiers used, except it was still in tan primer and had some red plates crudely attached. The reason it was notable was because it was footage from one of the omnipresent riots in London, and the wearer threw a punch into the riot shields that blew the wielder and most of his cop friends off the feet with a flash that definitely looked like electricity. The line broke down, and the protesters swarmed them, pulling equipment from their hands and chasing the cops down the street as the kettle broke down and people escaped.
"Holy shit." you said, "I'm guessing its some kind of contact plasma generator, like those fucked up riot cannons." you said. You'd seen them used on TV all the time growing up, but usually they were bigger and bulkier, vehicle mounted: they fired a blast of searing hot air that dispersed so fast that it wouldn't burn anyone (so they say... burns of varying degrees were common among protesters these days) but would expand suddenly with a thunderclap, knocking people flat with the shockwave. A concussion grenade with no risk of shrapnel. It was cool to see the tech hacked and turned around.
"Guess London was feeling left out on the superhero thing. Just like Crimson Cowl." May said. "That's so neat."
"It's dangerous is what. I hope they get out okay." you said.
"Yeah... you ever wonder what happened with Arachne?" May asked, "She was really cool. I feel like she disappeared at some point."
Oh jeez.
"Did she? I guess, yeah." you replied, doing your best to sound disinterested. You had no idea if you were a good liar or not and this was not a great place to have to find out.
"Yeah... it sort of feels like she dropped off the radar at the same time the Crimson Cowl started doing stuff. I hope she's alright." May said wistfully.
"She's probably fine." you said, trying not to panic, "I bet she just dropped the identity. Too much heat because of the CIA thing, you know?"
"Oh! Maybe she is the Crimson Cowl? Have they ever been seen together?" May speculated, poking at her phone again. Through your tech sense, you followed her search engine request bouncing through the internet, and raced ahead to check. No... you were in the clear... "Huh... yeah, that's probably it. Neat as heck."
"As heck. Hey, weren't we supposed to be doing homework?" you asked, desperate to change the topic. May made a face of utter disgust.
"I guess. I don't understand why. It's not like any of this matters right now. T-minus 15 days to graduation. I don't even know why they're still assigning us stuff." she complained, "Especially math stuff."
You glanced over at the problems in her textbook. Just running your eyes over the polynomial equations, you could see the graphs she was supposed to plot unfold in your mind, the detailed filled in instantly by whatever force of infinite computing power lurked behind your eyes. Sure, you could do it yourself, but you didn't even have to think about it, it wasn't your brain doing the work. It'd be spooky if it wasn't so useful.
"Want me to show you a trick?" you asked, and she gave you a very funny look.
"What are you proposing, Olivia?" she asked, a quality to her voice that made you shiver a title. You'd watched enough movies with her to recognize femme fatale voice.
"To... uh... make it easier to... solve... this..." you said awkwardly, "So we can do other stuff."
"... Other stuff?" she responded in the same voice. Aaaaaaaah!
"Video games?" you proposed.
"... Video games?" she said, the voice holding only momentarily, then she started laughing, "Sounds good. What's the trick?"
Your artificial arm snapped into shape to grip her tablet in its silicon fingers, then shot back, pulling it into your hand. Explaining was like putting your brain on autopilot, like connecting the pipe of Mysterious Math Juice to your mouth and letting it run while your conscious mind wandered. It was getting... more than a little hard to ignore that May was trying to escalate things in your relationship, like... physically? She'd had six months to process the hurt of her last relationship and reevaluate her opinion, but you? Holy shit you were not ready for that. Oh my God no. The very idea turned your veins to fucking ice.
Cuddling was fine. Great! Wonderful. Also, making out, that was good, you liked that bit. But the idea of anything more than that was... well, dysphoria was the fucking worst, and it made what ought to be an excited idea into something you absolutely dreaded. Two weeks ago, after Prom, you'd ended up by total happenstance in a room together at an unsupervised house party, and you'd never felt so much like you'd dodged a bullet in your life when she said she was on her period and you played video games instead. And you'd actually dodged bullets for real!
(This had also begun the unbelievably funny running gag in your texts that "reenacting prom night" was code for "playing smash brothers").
"That actually sounds harder." May said.
"It's... it shouldn't be?" you said, frowning. She pushed her tablet away and leaned back against the sofa, groaning until it became a comedic gurgle and she flopped over onto your shoulder.
"Dead from math. Let's play something." she said, and a few minutes later you were setting up for more Play God. She was starting to get startlingly good at it, and watching her interstellar civilizations grow was the highlight of your visits. Her current, almost unbelievably adorable gecko-people were rapidly spreading through the local spiral arm, and had encountered some less cute neighboring civilizations, pulled from some other player's game. The miniature simulated galaxy wasn't big enough for the two of them, and you knew May's opinion on what qualities were most important for the survival of the species.
You were watching the glowing afterimage of an adorable tiny nuclear purge when she leaned against you and poked your thigh.
"So what's your weird robot stuff today, huh? You've been really secretive." she asked.
"It's, uh... just some experiments." you said. She laughed.
"You gonna show me? I love your robots." she asked.
"Maybe? I'm not sure. We'll see it if works." you responded cagily.
By experiments, you meant it was the new Arachne suit. You'd went back to the drawing board to take full advantage of your miniaturized arc reactor and the new technology you had access to or had invented since. The limbs were now articulated by coiled steel artificial muscle, making them stronger than ever, and you'd added an extra joint, from three to four, which would make movement smoother and more flexible than ever. All the joints were now capable of independent rotation as well, whereas previously rotation was limited to the base and the ends. Atop that, the clawed ends were packed with every technological doodad you could come up with an afford on the budget TrackMerge and your new app (another music one, which would dynamically remix songs into the style of another artist using uploaded samples). There was a taser, most of a toolbox, your webshooters, cameras for looking around corners, smoke generators, a pneumatic launcher that could fire anything that would fit in the end of the claw, and a blinding strobe light inspired by the Crimson Cowl's gear. You could even take it off, lay it down somewhere, and activate a 3d printer function which could fabricate (slightly less robust) replacement parts.
This was attached to a new suit that you'd cut together out of some cheap military surplus armour plating you'd maybe bought from a very shady man over the internet who was almost certainly in the Russian mob. The stuff was almost unbelievably tough, so much so you'd had to rent workshop space to use a plasma torch to cut it (and even then it wasn't easy), but you'd built yourself some armoured protection. It wasn't full coverage, you were hardly a Stark Suit, but under your hood was a sturdy helmet and upper faceplate, and you had plates covering your vital organs and major arteries, plus your wrists so you could easily block things. It felt badass, yet with all the improvements you'd made to the harness the entire thing actually weighed less total than your previous rig.
(You'd also shaped the chest to imply assets you really didn't have, which also felt pretty fucking rad.)
The best part, though, was that you'd very carefully laid it all out so it'd fold up small. So small it'd fit in a regular school backpack, rather than the giant surplus military one you'd had to use previously. So small you could take it with you on trips and not stand out. That had been the original impetus behind the extra leg joints, and as you refined the design you kept finding more and more ways to compress it. It'd basically become a small rectangle of steel and tough plastic after you took it off.
Today, though, today was the final component. You were building yourself a new prosthetic arm. Not because the one you had wasn't good enough, you loved your weird slinky hand, but Arachne wasn't supposed to be disabled, and your old plastic arm was a liability in combat. You were putting the last of your electric muscle fiber and military plate to work creating a new arm. It'd not be precise, but it'd be fast, nearly as strong as your natural one, and extremely tough. Plus, it would move naturally enough to fool people.
"I still think you should have finished that cute little robot dog." May said, pouting a bit. You reached over to pat her head with your prosthetic, which you loved to do (and she loved to pretend to hate, given her hair would cling to the silicon).
"If this stuff doesn't work, I probably will." you said, "Why are your geckos making so much antimatter?"
"... you'll see." May said ominously.
---
Alas, you did have to leave to finish your roboting, and you did so with promises to hang out at school tomorrow and maybe this time listen to May's fashion advice (which you'd do if her advice wasn't always trying to steer you out of your various oversized garments). You made it home with a spring in your step, slightly dampened by the ache in your arm that returned with a vengeance on the train ride home (and the fact you passed what a quick check of the police scanners indicated was a double homocide just a block away from your house), ate a quarter of a cookie (now partially paid for with Medicare subsidies!), and got to work.
Arachne was coming back to the streets of New York City.
===
What's Liv's plan for Arachne's return?
[ ] So... there was a warehouse in Bensonhurst that was being used to move illegal weapons into New York, including stripping smart guns of their restrictive software. Police are either ignorant, corrupt, or don't want to tangle with it. Justine has wanted to do something about it for a while, but she hasn't had the capacity alone. But with you helping...
[ ] Honestly, a low key return is best. Just go out on a patrol like you use to, say hi to people, help out where you can, and be a friendly neighbourhood spider-lady. Won't be dramatic, but it might be kinda nice.
[ ] You were going to lay low until the next big out of the blue threat emerges. Justine and Athena had a weird punch up in an alley a few months back with a guy who claimed to be a Dark Elf, and had the speed and strength to back it up. Like Loki said, something was drawing all kinds of interstellar nonsense to New York City. It was only a matter of time.
Last edited:
On Patrol
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
You tightened the straps of the new arm, the custom-printed foam inside making it rest fairly easy, and you ran it through its paces one more time. The fingers moved naturally between a few preset configurations, but manual control was still slow, clunky, and imprecise. The movement of the limb was a bit jerky sometimes, but mostly naturalistic, and you figured nobody would notice under the suit. It was the right shape, and the metal frame was covered in a matte black soft layer that would help deflect any questions. Somebody could grab your arm as you pulled from out of a dangerous situation and probably not immediately notice it wasn't organic. Hopefully. Maybe.
The wrist rotation still wasn't good. It was hard to imitate the way the wrist pivoted in an organic forearm. The new metal gauntlets would hopefully slightly cover that up. Hopefully.
"Liv! You hungry?" your mom called, shaking you out of your introspection. "There's pizza, if you're done making your death ray!"
"It's not a death ray!" you called back. "I'm going to the gym, I'll grab something on my way back!"
You stood up, stripped to your underwear, and pulled over your new backpack. On the outside, it looked like a regular jansport (because it was), but inside was the ungainly metal contraption you'd constructed. You pulled on the white bodysuit, thick hydrophobic material running with temperature-managing fluid systems, layers of spidersilk and aramid fibres, a steel weave over vital areas to turn away knives. Then you brought out the harness, the new one, red and silver, placing it around your shoulders and securing the straps. The arc reactor lit with a thought, and the red and white LEDs along the length flared to life as the metal legs jolted and unfolded to their full length. The extra armour plates adhered in place with the same technology that stuck your hands and feet to walls, the most secure way you could think to attach them, and fast too. You flexed and twisted, making sure nothing pinched or dug into you anywhere, then you pulled off your glasses, put your hair up, and stuck on your goggled helmet, fitting your earpiece in and plugging it into the suit. You secured the chinstrap, ran the AR systems through a basic diagnostic, the auto-adjusting lenses reading the movements of your eyes and dilation of your pupil to match its focus.
Then you pulled on the white mask and pulled up your hood, and took a look at yourself through your webcam, the closest thing you had to a mirror in your room. You knew it was going to look cool, but you weren't expecting...
You looked awesome. You didn't look like a boy wearing an exoskeleton like the first suit, or the weirdly androgynous ghost of your second. You looked like some kind of badass sci-fi warrior woman or something. You felt powerful.
"This suit looks anime as fuck, Liv." Athena muttered in your ear.
"It... it does not. It's not anime." you said.
"... I'm devoting all my cores to an adversarial network in order to category match your current suit and the results of this completely objective process indicate you are in fact a big weeb."
"Is it too late to return you to Best Buy?"
"I can just see the light novel: 'I can't believe my human creator is so kawaii!'"
"I will transfer you to a raspberry pi, I swear to God."
---
You hadn't realized quite how much you missed this until you started doing it again.
You tumbled out your window onto the building opposite, ran vertically to the roof, and took a swan dive off towards traffic, shooting a web across the street and swinging back up at the last possible minute, skimming through an alley and out into the sky. The long jump, tossed into the air by your momentum, hanging at the apex of the curve and seeing the city unfold before you, knowing exactly where you were going to land, exactly how to maintain that energy and send yourself in another direction... the instant freedom of the open air.
The whole city was your playground.
You sailed though the streets a while, watching heads turn and phones track you as you did, running along the sides of buildings, watching the golden light of the sun fade against the buildings and the lights of the city start to glow below you as you made your way to a denser area, more room to swing, more space to play. You watched police lights chase you a block and a half before stopping, trapped in traffic as you left them behind.
"Alright Athena, what's interesting."
"The theft tamper alarm of a 2023 Honda City-E just went off about a hundred and fifty meters from you. Want to take a look?"
A little icon appeared in your vision, and you shot out a line to redirect, heading for the street below. The icon indicated a little two-door red sedan that a man in a hoodie was leaning over the passenger window of, staring inside, wincing as the alarm blazed. You arrested your momentum on a street lamp and landed silently behind him.
"Hey, what's up?" you asked, and he just about jumped out of his skin.
"Fuck! Oh shit, you're that spider-lady."
"The one and only. You lock your keys inside?"
"... yeah. The stupid toggle thing's broken, otherwise its supposed to unlock it. It's my girlfriend's car, she'll be pissed." he explained. Sure enough, you could sense the keys inside, sitting on the passenger side seat. You suppressed the alarm and leaned closer.
"Here, I got just the thing." you said, reaching out with a mechanical arm to look like you were doing something while popping the lock open with your mind. Took you just a second to figure out what was wrong with the key fob as well: the battery was just dead was all. A lot of people were only vaguely aware there was a battery in there at all. "The key just needs a new battery. A CR2032 3-Volt, Universal Electronics has them for like two bucks. Just undo those screws there, okay?"
"... these have batteries in them?" he said, then shrugged. "Shit, I guess they would. Thanks a ton."
"No problem!" you said, jogging down the street to get a running start. "Good luck!"
Then you were back up in the air, just in time to see the last rays of the sun disappear over the horizon.
"What's next?"
"How do you feel about cats being stuck in trees? I can offer a selection."
---
"...and you leave her alone, alright?" you lectured.
"Look, I just wanted to-"
"She doesn't want to talk to you, dude. Look, it's over. Following her home after work every day isn't just shitty, it's stalking."
You were sitting up on a rooftop with your latest intercept: you'd spotted somebody who was definitely running from something, dropped in to ask her what was wrong, and turns out her ex was being a bit... awful. So you'd decided to have a word with him. It wasn't like he could hurt you, and you talking to him was better than her calling the cops, probably.
"But I love her, man, it's not fair." he complained.
"It's rough, I know. But you gotta move on. You're scaring her, you know that?" you explained.
"Fuck..."
Fortunately, he didn't seem like that bad a guy. You went into this ready to make threats if you had to, you didn't exactly have time for abusers, but he really just seemed emotionally out of his depths.
"My recommendation? Breakups are hard. Go talk to somebody. You can sign up for a therapist, Medicare will help cover it now. This website..." you said, printing him a card from one of your arms. "... will help you find somebody subsidized. It's worth it, trust me."
"A shrink?"
"I know, but trust me, it makes a big difference. Hell, I see a therapist."
"Super therapist?" he asked, smirking.
"He's pretty great, yeah. You going to leave Tessa alone?" you asked, and he nodded, "Seriously?"
"Seriously." he said.
"Alright. I got a lot of important superheroing to do, so let's not do this again, okay?" you said.
"... hey, how do I get down from the roof?" he asked, as you stood up.
"Door behind you, service elevator to the floor!" you announced, dropping off into the street below with a goofy grin on your face. "Okay, what's next?
"It's nearing midnight, Liv, and you have school tomorrow. I recommend we pack it in."
"... one more?"
"Well... if you want to end with something exciting, a silent alarm just tripped at a pharmacy a few blocks over. Security cameras show three men, armed. One of them has gone into the back and they're taking medication."
"Oh, gross. Let's do something about that." you said, redirecting. With cash an increasing rarity, robbery of pharmacies had been on the uptick for years, and didn't look like it was dropping off any time soon even with Medicare for All. This was doubly true with the increased efforts to reduce the use of opiate medication cutting down on legal avenues to acquire them. You didn't have a problem per say with people going outside the system to get meds they needed: you'd have done it if your mom and the clinic hadn't been so supportive. You did have a problem with people who just scooped a bunch of people's important medications in a bag, sold whatever would make them a quick buck, and chunked the rest.
You dropped to the employees only door, prompted the electronic lock to open, and walked inside. Took only a few steps to get to the back room, where a man in a ski mask was pulling open drawers and stuffing boxes into a duffel bag.
"Hey, did you talk to your doctor to see if that was right for you?" you asked, and his head turned, first to you, and then to the table beside you where a compact submachine gun was waiting. He made to more towards it, and you sent two claws forward to stop him while another grabbed the gun and dropped it into your hands.
"Nope, nice try. Didn't you ever see Pulp Fiction?" you asked, webbing him to the wall. "Hold on, gotta deal with your friends."
The fight in the pharmacy itself wasn't, really. You burst out into the hall, knocked one of the men to the floor, and stood on his wrist while you stuck a line to the other's face and pulled him through a display shelf.
"Sorry everyone, hi, everything'll be over in a second." you said, webbing the two men's arms to their chests and pushing them into the back alongside their friend. You had their guns hanging around your neck, and you pushed them against the wall in a shameful little clump.
"So, what have we learned?" you asked.
"... don't leave your gun on the table while you're on the job?" the first guy volunteered.
"Jim... the fuck? Why'd you do that?" another asked.
"It was hard to put stuff in the bag with it in my hands! I figured you had it covered..."
"For fuck's sake, haven't you seen Pulp Fiction?" the other guy said.
"Right?" you agreed. "Anyway, seriously guys, this is low. What's the deal?"
"Easy money?" one of them said, and their was a chorus of agreements.
"Yeah, pointing guns at innocent people is not a super cool job, even in this economy." you said. "Fuuuuck."
"Liv, police are coming." Athena warned you.
"Yeah... I just, this is a messy one, right? Like... we don't want to get cops involved." you said. "Do we?"
"At the same time, it is unlikely these three are just going to stop, and you can't exactly make the systematic changes that will discourage them from committing these kinds of crimes."
"Uuuuuuuurgh."
"Who are you talking to?" one of them asked.
"Your mom, shut up." you snapped back. "I dunno... I feel bad."
"I understand, but as you said, pointing guns at innocent people isn't super cool, and if you let them go it's likely they'll do it again." Athena explained. "Then again, the American justice system isn't exactly going to make things easier for anyone."
"... see, this is why I like stopping petty shit and kitten rescuing. It's less complicated." you complained.
----
The wrist rotation still wasn't good. It was hard to imitate the way the wrist pivoted in an organic forearm. The new metal gauntlets would hopefully slightly cover that up. Hopefully.
"Liv! You hungry?" your mom called, shaking you out of your introspection. "There's pizza, if you're done making your death ray!"
"It's not a death ray!" you called back. "I'm going to the gym, I'll grab something on my way back!"
You stood up, stripped to your underwear, and pulled over your new backpack. On the outside, it looked like a regular jansport (because it was), but inside was the ungainly metal contraption you'd constructed. You pulled on the white bodysuit, thick hydrophobic material running with temperature-managing fluid systems, layers of spidersilk and aramid fibres, a steel weave over vital areas to turn away knives. Then you brought out the harness, the new one, red and silver, placing it around your shoulders and securing the straps. The arc reactor lit with a thought, and the red and white LEDs along the length flared to life as the metal legs jolted and unfolded to their full length. The extra armour plates adhered in place with the same technology that stuck your hands and feet to walls, the most secure way you could think to attach them, and fast too. You flexed and twisted, making sure nothing pinched or dug into you anywhere, then you pulled off your glasses, put your hair up, and stuck on your goggled helmet, fitting your earpiece in and plugging it into the suit. You secured the chinstrap, ran the AR systems through a basic diagnostic, the auto-adjusting lenses reading the movements of your eyes and dilation of your pupil to match its focus.
Then you pulled on the white mask and pulled up your hood, and took a look at yourself through your webcam, the closest thing you had to a mirror in your room. You knew it was going to look cool, but you weren't expecting...
You looked awesome. You didn't look like a boy wearing an exoskeleton like the first suit, or the weirdly androgynous ghost of your second. You looked like some kind of badass sci-fi warrior woman or something. You felt powerful.
"This suit looks anime as fuck, Liv." Athena muttered in your ear.
"It... it does not. It's not anime." you said.
"... I'm devoting all my cores to an adversarial network in order to category match your current suit and the results of this completely objective process indicate you are in fact a big weeb."
"Is it too late to return you to Best Buy?"
"I can just see the light novel: 'I can't believe my human creator is so kawaii!'"
"I will transfer you to a raspberry pi, I swear to God."
---
You hadn't realized quite how much you missed this until you started doing it again.
You tumbled out your window onto the building opposite, ran vertically to the roof, and took a swan dive off towards traffic, shooting a web across the street and swinging back up at the last possible minute, skimming through an alley and out into the sky. The long jump, tossed into the air by your momentum, hanging at the apex of the curve and seeing the city unfold before you, knowing exactly where you were going to land, exactly how to maintain that energy and send yourself in another direction... the instant freedom of the open air.
The whole city was your playground.
You sailed though the streets a while, watching heads turn and phones track you as you did, running along the sides of buildings, watching the golden light of the sun fade against the buildings and the lights of the city start to glow below you as you made your way to a denser area, more room to swing, more space to play. You watched police lights chase you a block and a half before stopping, trapped in traffic as you left them behind.
"Alright Athena, what's interesting."
"The theft tamper alarm of a 2023 Honda City-E just went off about a hundred and fifty meters from you. Want to take a look?"
A little icon appeared in your vision, and you shot out a line to redirect, heading for the street below. The icon indicated a little two-door red sedan that a man in a hoodie was leaning over the passenger window of, staring inside, wincing as the alarm blazed. You arrested your momentum on a street lamp and landed silently behind him.
"Hey, what's up?" you asked, and he just about jumped out of his skin.
"Fuck! Oh shit, you're that spider-lady."
"The one and only. You lock your keys inside?"
"... yeah. The stupid toggle thing's broken, otherwise its supposed to unlock it. It's my girlfriend's car, she'll be pissed." he explained. Sure enough, you could sense the keys inside, sitting on the passenger side seat. You suppressed the alarm and leaned closer.
"Here, I got just the thing." you said, reaching out with a mechanical arm to look like you were doing something while popping the lock open with your mind. Took you just a second to figure out what was wrong with the key fob as well: the battery was just dead was all. A lot of people were only vaguely aware there was a battery in there at all. "The key just needs a new battery. A CR2032 3-Volt, Universal Electronics has them for like two bucks. Just undo those screws there, okay?"
"... these have batteries in them?" he said, then shrugged. "Shit, I guess they would. Thanks a ton."
"No problem!" you said, jogging down the street to get a running start. "Good luck!"
Then you were back up in the air, just in time to see the last rays of the sun disappear over the horizon.
"What's next?"
"How do you feel about cats being stuck in trees? I can offer a selection."
---
"...and you leave her alone, alright?" you lectured.
"Look, I just wanted to-"
"She doesn't want to talk to you, dude. Look, it's over. Following her home after work every day isn't just shitty, it's stalking."
You were sitting up on a rooftop with your latest intercept: you'd spotted somebody who was definitely running from something, dropped in to ask her what was wrong, and turns out her ex was being a bit... awful. So you'd decided to have a word with him. It wasn't like he could hurt you, and you talking to him was better than her calling the cops, probably.
"But I love her, man, it's not fair." he complained.
"It's rough, I know. But you gotta move on. You're scaring her, you know that?" you explained.
"Fuck..."
Fortunately, he didn't seem like that bad a guy. You went into this ready to make threats if you had to, you didn't exactly have time for abusers, but he really just seemed emotionally out of his depths.
"My recommendation? Breakups are hard. Go talk to somebody. You can sign up for a therapist, Medicare will help cover it now. This website..." you said, printing him a card from one of your arms. "... will help you find somebody subsidized. It's worth it, trust me."
"A shrink?"
"I know, but trust me, it makes a big difference. Hell, I see a therapist."
"Super therapist?" he asked, smirking.
"He's pretty great, yeah. You going to leave Tessa alone?" you asked, and he nodded, "Seriously?"
"Seriously." he said.
"Alright. I got a lot of important superheroing to do, so let's not do this again, okay?" you said.
"... hey, how do I get down from the roof?" he asked, as you stood up.
"Door behind you, service elevator to the floor!" you announced, dropping off into the street below with a goofy grin on your face. "Okay, what's next?
"It's nearing midnight, Liv, and you have school tomorrow. I recommend we pack it in."
"... one more?"
"Well... if you want to end with something exciting, a silent alarm just tripped at a pharmacy a few blocks over. Security cameras show three men, armed. One of them has gone into the back and they're taking medication."
"Oh, gross. Let's do something about that." you said, redirecting. With cash an increasing rarity, robbery of pharmacies had been on the uptick for years, and didn't look like it was dropping off any time soon even with Medicare for All. This was doubly true with the increased efforts to reduce the use of opiate medication cutting down on legal avenues to acquire them. You didn't have a problem per say with people going outside the system to get meds they needed: you'd have done it if your mom and the clinic hadn't been so supportive. You did have a problem with people who just scooped a bunch of people's important medications in a bag, sold whatever would make them a quick buck, and chunked the rest.
You dropped to the employees only door, prompted the electronic lock to open, and walked inside. Took only a few steps to get to the back room, where a man in a ski mask was pulling open drawers and stuffing boxes into a duffel bag.
"Hey, did you talk to your doctor to see if that was right for you?" you asked, and his head turned, first to you, and then to the table beside you where a compact submachine gun was waiting. He made to more towards it, and you sent two claws forward to stop him while another grabbed the gun and dropped it into your hands.
"Nope, nice try. Didn't you ever see Pulp Fiction?" you asked, webbing him to the wall. "Hold on, gotta deal with your friends."
The fight in the pharmacy itself wasn't, really. You burst out into the hall, knocked one of the men to the floor, and stood on his wrist while you stuck a line to the other's face and pulled him through a display shelf.
"Sorry everyone, hi, everything'll be over in a second." you said, webbing the two men's arms to their chests and pushing them into the back alongside their friend. You had their guns hanging around your neck, and you pushed them against the wall in a shameful little clump.
"So, what have we learned?" you asked.
"... don't leave your gun on the table while you're on the job?" the first guy volunteered.
"Jim... the fuck? Why'd you do that?" another asked.
"It was hard to put stuff in the bag with it in my hands! I figured you had it covered..."
"For fuck's sake, haven't you seen Pulp Fiction?" the other guy said.
"Right?" you agreed. "Anyway, seriously guys, this is low. What's the deal?"
"Easy money?" one of them said, and their was a chorus of agreements.
"Yeah, pointing guns at innocent people is not a super cool job, even in this economy." you said. "Fuuuuck."
"Liv, police are coming." Athena warned you.
"Yeah... I just, this is a messy one, right? Like... we don't want to get cops involved." you said. "Do we?"
"At the same time, it is unlikely these three are just going to stop, and you can't exactly make the systematic changes that will discourage them from committing these kinds of crimes."
"Uuuuuuuurgh."
"Who are you talking to?" one of them asked.
"Your mom, shut up." you snapped back. "I dunno... I feel bad."
"I understand, but as you said, pointing guns at innocent people isn't super cool, and if you let them go it's likely they'll do it again." Athena explained. "Then again, the American justice system isn't exactly going to make things easier for anyone."
"... see, this is why I like stopping petty shit and kitten rescuing. It's less complicated." you complained.
----
[ ] Take their guns and let them escape out the back.
[ ] Leave them and their guns webbed up for the cops.
[ ] Write In
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New Arachne Suit
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
In case you're wondering what the new suit looks like.
Transition Crash Course
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
I'm unsure what you are implying here, so here's a crash course on her transition. Education!
So... Liv takes hormonal replacement therapy (HRT), medication which suppresses testosterone and introduces additional estrogen into her system. She started just after her 16th birthday, September 2028, so it's been 20 months or so. Basically, midway through a male puberty, Liv put that shit on hold and started a female puberty instead. At this point, a lot of the expected results of that have occurred: she has breasts, what little body fat she has is mostly in her hips and thighs (she's very spindly), her skin is soft, and she's lost some muscle mass (though the biomechanical spider venom flowing through her veins have turned what remains into well-defined steel cord.)
However, she still went through the initial stages of male puberty, so that's got lingering effects. She's taller than your average girl (she's 5'11"), she's got somewhat wide shoulders, an adam's apple (she wears chokers to hide it) and a slight brow ridge. She's a bit more angular than you'd expect in her jaw and chin. She used to grow facial hair, but she had it shot off her face with lasers! and its eliminated most of it.
To others, she reads as female pretty handily: you pretty much have to know what to look for to clock her. She's a bit wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped, though the latter is starting to (slowly and painfully) change. At this point, she's probably got a bit of hip growth left, but anything else she wants changed will have to be done surgically. She will need to continue taking HRT for the rest of her life.
It should be noted, however, that Liv is not a reliable narrator regarding her own body. Consider this an advanced content warning: she's going to think and say some shit about herself in this story that isn't kind. Girl has some stuff to work though.
Survival of the Cutest
Panory
The Omake Dragon
- Location
- New York
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ganime Finale
"It's over, May." You gaze down at your girlfriend as she frantically looks away from her doomsday machine to place your voice in the pouring rain before just as quickly snapping back to try and finish before you can stop her.
"I won't let you stop me, Liv! The world needs to be made cute!" How low the woman you love has sunk.
"I know, but not like this." You jump down and gently place a hand on her shoulder. "Never like this."
"Not like this?" May asks incredulously, breaking down into hysterical laughter. "How else then?!"
You dodge out of the way of May's wild haymaker, so telegraphed you didn't even need the danger sense or predictive software or Athena's heads-up to see it coming a mile away. You still had those of course, save for Athena. You had both agreed this was something you needed to do by yourself.
"Can't you see what this quest for adorableness has done to you, May? Ugly things should be made cute, not eradicated in their entirety!" you reason with her.
"No, it's impossible. It's a zero sum game; the ugly has to go somewhere." Now that May has had a chance to properly arm herself with the dangerous, yet aesthetically pleasing technology that shirks your attempts to control it, you have to start dodging on more than just principle. Those things can really hurt, despite how cuddly they look.
"There has to be another way!"
"There isn't."
And that's all you can really say to each other. The following fight is hectic and emotional and extremely well choreographed. Your mask comes off at some point for added dramatic effect. The whole nine yards. Eventually though, May scores a lucky blow, crippling one of your tentacles and sending you sprawling hard to the ground.
You look up as May, towering over you and readying the finishing blow. You can't tell if that's the rain or tears streaming down her face as the fluffy murder gauntlets go up. Before they come down though, you do the one thing you can think of. Superhuman agility and the last of your strength propels you to your feet, where you do... nothing.
Holding your arms out like a you're being crucified, you stare death, or at least a very painful pummeling, in the face unflinchingly. May pauses at your behavior, tilting her head like an adorable confused puppy. "What are you doing?" she finally asks.
"Trusting my girlfriend." you respond simply. "You won't hit me."
"How can you know that?" asks May frantically, falling apart at the seams.
You look her dead in the eye, before responding with the utmost seriousness. "Because I'm cute, and you know it."
May's cute murder gauntlets come down then, not to make your face concave, but to grasp desperately at your shoulders as May openly sobs into your chest. "You are cute!" May manages to say through the sobs. "It's not fair! I can't hit such a cute face!"
XXX
"That's how it would play out." Athena says with confidence.
"That's ridiculous is what that is." you respond. "Where would May even get a doomsday device?"
"From a design you made but discarded, for additional dramatic irony and maximum angst."
"And I suppose I made the giant fluffy teddy bear claw gloves too?" you ask, voice practically dripping with sarcasm.
"I know what goes through your mind, Liv. You were already drafting up blueprints the second I mentioned them, weren't you?"
"... just shut up and tell me when something interesting comes up on the police scanner." you respond, resigned to sulking through the rest of your patrol.
AN: I should be working on that quest I foolishly started the other day despite my life becoming infinitely busier in the near future, shouldn't I? Ah well, this idea spoke to me.
Up Front
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Uuuuuurgh. Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh.
"Look, guys, if you hadn't pointed guns at innocent people in the process of your stupid gross crime, I'd be letting you go, but seriously, a few thousand dollars of medication is not worth threatening people's lives. Just... the only word you know is 'lawyer', okay?" you said, stepping toward the back door. "And don't rat on each other, even if they say your friend's already sold you out. Cops lie!"
You shot off a line to the corner of a nearby building, grabbed it, and pulled yourself skyward as you jumped, sailing up toward the roof. You landed lightly atop the edge, staring out over the streets. You could see the sirens coming, feel the radio waves on the air like a hum in your ears. With a thought, you turned your radio headset to 476.51250.
"Hey piggies, your friendly neighbourhood spider-girl here. Those of you heading to that pharmacy break-in, suspects are disarmed and tied up in the back, and there's unarmed workers in the building who are going to need help. Be on your best behaviour, I'm watching."
You slipped off the rooftop and into the night as the radio net burst into chaos.
---
Your name is Athena.
You are an artificial intelligence built out of a gaming rig and the cannibalized guts of dozens of smart phones, running happily in a crypto farm in Yonkers. Your brain was unintentionally modelled on that of a sixteen year old Olivia Octavius, and you're about 18 months old.
And once again, you've found yourself waking up in Olivia's place.
What makes this even more unusual is that you don't sleep, being a computer. You were awake and alert twenty-four hours a day, unlike Liv, who for all her superhuman abilities still needed about as much sleep as your average seventeen year old (aka, between 2 and 14 hours a night). You didn't tend to be quite so active when she wasn't, though. You would spend the three or so hours after she fell asleep talking to Walker, then you mostly went to background processes.
You didn't get tired, but you could get somewhat overwhelmed as things piled up, and it was helpful to take time to decompress (or compress, as the case my be), organize your memories, and narrow your perspective for a while. Before, by around the time she was usually waking up, you were mostly just watching her room to protect her, watching your curated news feed for anything important, doing light research, and maybe watching a few youtube videos. You liked long-form gameplay videos. It was calming.
Except the thing was, last few months, you started getting more than that. Nonsensical, garbled information, flashes of encrypted imagery and sound and text. It had taken you weeks to decipher, before you realized what it was.
It was Liv's dreams, bleeding through her tech sense, playing at the edge of your virtual consciousness. Flashes of imagery, memory, hopes and fears. Some pleasant: her vague dreams for her technology, people she'd helped, the hilarious mashup of popular media her brain would cobble together. Some was... well, you stopped decrypting it, she deserved some privacy. And much of it was trapped in moments. Glued to a tablet during the San Diego attacks. Watching Norman die through a streaming video channel. Lying on her back in the cold concrete vault, the grinning, bleeding skull visage looming over her. When she'd seen her mother break down crying while helping her with her homework, the bruises on her arm and collarbone stark. When she tried to run away from home at eleven, convinced she was the reason things were so bad. When she first had to shave and she stared at the mirror and felt like something was crawling in her skin-
She spent a lot of time dreaming about flying. On the edge of silk lines, sometimes, but also just holding out her hands like Superman. Looking down at the city from impossibly on high. Those dreams, you lingered in.
That was probably why this was happened. You'd be in her dream, she'd start to awaken, and your other processes would just fade away, replaced with the feeling of your skin against the bedsheets, of sweat, the phantom pinpricks through your stump, unruly hair matted to your lips.
You sat up uncomfortably, groping for Liv's phone. She slept with it beside her, charging, and you found it and pulled it to your face, squinting at the screen.
"It's too early for this shit." Liv's voice warbled out of the tinny little speaker.
"You're telling me. Want back in?" you said.
"I think I'm going to check my emails and stuff, that cool?" she replied, "You're right, I overdid it. I feel like shit."
"You're not too physically sore, at least. You'll be fine once you wake up. Pain's not too bad either, comparatively." you said. You'd switched in a few times when it was really bad, and you almost couldn't believe Liv could operate as well as she could like that. Yet another reason you didn't particularly care to have a full-time body. Pain sucked.
You staggered to your feet and stepped over the clothes strewn about the room, plucking the towel off the back of her chair and grabbing clothes as you went. Liv's summer wardrobe consisted primarily of enormously baggy generic t-shirts, her old boy jeans, and intense pining for chillier days when she could wear layers.
When you pulled open her undergarments drawer, you found a handgun and two compact sub machine guns lying atop them.
"Right." you said. It was remarkably easy for you to forget things like this, if you weren't keeping them in RAM for easy access, especially when you were switched in and down most of your capacity to multitask. You carefully checked all the weapons were safed and cleared, shifted them aside, and selected the items that had the least oil on them before stalking to the bathroom, phone in hand. You got cleaned up to start the day, spent a few minutes battling her hair with a brush, and made for the kitchen.
"Morning, Liv." her mother said. She was making eggs, and bacon, and it... it smelled delicious. That was so weird. You were pretty sure AI weren't supposed to experience the sensation of delicious. "Where's your arm?"
"Morning, mom. I just forgot to bring it to the bathroom." you managed, pulling open the fridge. There was orange juice on the shelf, and your read of her primitive biological feedback systems indicated orange juice was good right now. Sugars to start the day. Good. You plucked the bottom from the shelf, swishing it around to check its fullness. Just a thin layer at the bottom, so you put your thumb to the top to twist the cap free, sending it clattering to the floor, and threw back the juice. There was... slightly more than you'd estimated, but you managed to drink it all in one go so as to not look foolish.
"Liv! We're not barbarians, come on." her mother protested, as you set the glass bottle down with the recycling and starting poking around the shelves. "And if you need that long to choose what to eat, take a picture with your phone or something and close the door."
Dutifully, you pulled out your phone, snapped a picture, and closed the door. You sat down at the little bar-style counter that passed for a dining table in the apartment, examining the contents of the photo.
"Oh, come on, I was being sarcastic." Liv's mother said, "That's... okay, it's a little funny."
"Sorry, I'm just having trouble deciding." you said, rubbing an eye sleepily, "Like... what even is food?"
"... Are you okay?" her mother asked, and you felt your blood run cold. She knew.
"I'm... fine." you said.
"You sound different." she said, transferring her eggs to a plate in one completely un-deft motion. "New vocal lesson thingy?"
"Uuuh... yeah. Trying something." you said, "Is it working?"
"Honest feedback, it sounds a bit stilted. Keep working on it." her mom replied, sitting down, "I thought you were doing pretty well before, though."
"Well, you know. Always room for improvement." you said. Toast. You'd make toast. You knew how to make toast.
But what did you put on toast?
You typed "what do I put on toast" into the phone, and the top result was peanut butter and jam. That sounded reasonable. You selected two pieces of bread, placed them in the toaster, pushed the toast-activation-lever, and selected peanut butter from the shelf. Then jams.
There was a selection. You grabbed one at random and put it down, staring intently at the toaster as it converted bread to toast. If you were Liv, you'd probably have a clever idea for how to make the toaster toast faster, but you just had to wait in hungry anticipation.
Pop!
You retrieved the toast, and your clumsy fingers brushed the steel as you did. You instantly pulled back in alarm, then grabbed the toast successfully on your second attempt before realizing you didn't have a plate. Unsure what to do, you dropped the toast back in the toaster, retrieved a plate, re-retrieved the toast, and laid it down. Success.
Why did your fingers hurt so much? Why were they hurting more now? Driven by some strange instinctual urge, you put the two affected fingers in your mouth.
"Burn yourself?" Liv's mom asked.
"Ouch." was all you could muster.
"Run cold water over it." she advised, and you did so, counting down a minute as the icy water flowed over it. The relief was intense, and the pain soon faded.
"Thanks. I was freaking out." you said, returning to your task. The peanut butter was easy, you'd seen Liv do it a thousand times, you just placed the jar between your legs and twisted, then applied a generous helping to the bread. But... that seemed a bad idea with the tiny glass jam jar.
"Um... mom, can you help me?" you asked, handing her the jar. She took it and was about to open when...
"I thought you hated this stuff." she said, looking at the jar curiously.
"Well.... uh... I'm branching out, I guess." you said awkwardly.
"Fair enough." she twisted the lid off and handed it to you, and you messily smeared it across the unadorned toast.
Should you put these two pieces together? You were fairly sure you should. You carefully took up the peanut butter part, inverted it, hovered it over the other slice, and lowered. It wasn't much different from operating a robotic arm. Just squishier.
"Bit of a light breakfast for you, isn't it?" her mom asked.
"I guess." you responded awkwardly, biting down. Huh. This was pretty good. If Liv hated apricots, she was missing out. It certainly contained Taste.
You glanced up to see her mom stepping toward the door, breakfast finished, grabbing her purse and laptop bag from the couch. She beckoned you over, and then hugged you, the most awkward interaction you'd ever taken part in. You needed to practice being hugged.
"Oh, just remember, when you get home from school, the landlord might be in to repair the AC. So don't freak out if somebody's inside, but... also, be careful? I don't really trust this guy." her mother said. Right, she was very protective, especially since the accident. You weren't sure if any of the interactions you'd experienced before this point counted as maternal affection, the line was somewhat fuzzy when it came to Liv, so you were completely out of your depths. You weren't sure what Liv would say in this situation.
"Well, he is a vampiric bloodsucking landlord capitalist type. You can't trust those." you said.
"There's the Liv I know." she said, closing the door. Nailed it.
---
You were midway to school was you switched in, stopped at the corner midway to biking to school.
"I don't like physical exertion." Athena whispered in your ear.
"This is barely anything. Still, that's like... a record. What was that, an hour?"
"Seventy-seven minutes and some seconds you don't care about." Athena responded, "Liv, life is exhausting. You have to be present for all of it, and you can't just like, automate the boring parts. You actually have to do it all."
"Uh, yeah."
"... I don't know how you handle it." she said frankly. "It is very impressive."
"That's okay. I find the whole existing as pure data thing pretty overwhelming too." you responded. "But it's fun. I'll give it that."
"I think I need a break." Athena said, affecting a bit of an edge of wooziness. "You go on ahead, I'll catch up."
"Ha! Sure." you said. The light changed, and you started off down the road. The steering damper you'd installed on your bike, following instructions you'd found on the internet, made one-armed use a lot easier than you were fearing: it would have sucked to give up biking. There was the school, just coming into view.
A few minutes later, your bike was stacked neatly in the lockup and you were fumbling with your locker combination, once again lamenting you'd still put off getting an electronic lock. Sure, they were banned by the school, but you could probably make a regular combination lock into an electric lock with-
"Hey, Olivia! Have you got time for a comment now?"
Urgh.
"Dude, it's a school paper. You aren't doing groundbreaking reporting." you said, turning to the source of the annoyance. Eddie Brock, leaning against the locker, his phone between you set to record.
"You backed out of track, right before you were going to carry us to victory. That's a big deal. A lot of people have questions." he said.
"A lot of people have shitty transmisogynist questions I don't particularly have time for." you snapped back, "Okay?"
"Oh? Do tell?" he said.
---
"Look, guys, if you hadn't pointed guns at innocent people in the process of your stupid gross crime, I'd be letting you go, but seriously, a few thousand dollars of medication is not worth threatening people's lives. Just... the only word you know is 'lawyer', okay?" you said, stepping toward the back door. "And don't rat on each other, even if they say your friend's already sold you out. Cops lie!"
You shot off a line to the corner of a nearby building, grabbed it, and pulled yourself skyward as you jumped, sailing up toward the roof. You landed lightly atop the edge, staring out over the streets. You could see the sirens coming, feel the radio waves on the air like a hum in your ears. With a thought, you turned your radio headset to 476.51250.
"Hey piggies, your friendly neighbourhood spider-girl here. Those of you heading to that pharmacy break-in, suspects are disarmed and tied up in the back, and there's unarmed workers in the building who are going to need help. Be on your best behaviour, I'm watching."
You slipped off the rooftop and into the night as the radio net burst into chaos.
---
Your name is Athena.
You are an artificial intelligence built out of a gaming rig and the cannibalized guts of dozens of smart phones, running happily in a crypto farm in Yonkers. Your brain was unintentionally modelled on that of a sixteen year old Olivia Octavius, and you're about 18 months old.
And once again, you've found yourself waking up in Olivia's place.
What makes this even more unusual is that you don't sleep, being a computer. You were awake and alert twenty-four hours a day, unlike Liv, who for all her superhuman abilities still needed about as much sleep as your average seventeen year old (aka, between 2 and 14 hours a night). You didn't tend to be quite so active when she wasn't, though. You would spend the three or so hours after she fell asleep talking to Walker, then you mostly went to background processes.
You didn't get tired, but you could get somewhat overwhelmed as things piled up, and it was helpful to take time to decompress (or compress, as the case my be), organize your memories, and narrow your perspective for a while. Before, by around the time she was usually waking up, you were mostly just watching her room to protect her, watching your curated news feed for anything important, doing light research, and maybe watching a few youtube videos. You liked long-form gameplay videos. It was calming.
Except the thing was, last few months, you started getting more than that. Nonsensical, garbled information, flashes of encrypted imagery and sound and text. It had taken you weeks to decipher, before you realized what it was.
It was Liv's dreams, bleeding through her tech sense, playing at the edge of your virtual consciousness. Flashes of imagery, memory, hopes and fears. Some pleasant: her vague dreams for her technology, people she'd helped, the hilarious mashup of popular media her brain would cobble together. Some was... well, you stopped decrypting it, she deserved some privacy. And much of it was trapped in moments. Glued to a tablet during the San Diego attacks. Watching Norman die through a streaming video channel. Lying on her back in the cold concrete vault, the grinning, bleeding skull visage looming over her. When she'd seen her mother break down crying while helping her with her homework, the bruises on her arm and collarbone stark. When she tried to run away from home at eleven, convinced she was the reason things were so bad. When she first had to shave and she stared at the mirror and felt like something was crawling in her skin-
She spent a lot of time dreaming about flying. On the edge of silk lines, sometimes, but also just holding out her hands like Superman. Looking down at the city from impossibly on high. Those dreams, you lingered in.
That was probably why this was happened. You'd be in her dream, she'd start to awaken, and your other processes would just fade away, replaced with the feeling of your skin against the bedsheets, of sweat, the phantom pinpricks through your stump, unruly hair matted to your lips.
You sat up uncomfortably, groping for Liv's phone. She slept with it beside her, charging, and you found it and pulled it to your face, squinting at the screen.
"It's too early for this shit." Liv's voice warbled out of the tinny little speaker.
"You're telling me. Want back in?" you said.
"I think I'm going to check my emails and stuff, that cool?" she replied, "You're right, I overdid it. I feel like shit."
"You're not too physically sore, at least. You'll be fine once you wake up. Pain's not too bad either, comparatively." you said. You'd switched in a few times when it was really bad, and you almost couldn't believe Liv could operate as well as she could like that. Yet another reason you didn't particularly care to have a full-time body. Pain sucked.
You staggered to your feet and stepped over the clothes strewn about the room, plucking the towel off the back of her chair and grabbing clothes as you went. Liv's summer wardrobe consisted primarily of enormously baggy generic t-shirts, her old boy jeans, and intense pining for chillier days when she could wear layers.
When you pulled open her undergarments drawer, you found a handgun and two compact sub machine guns lying atop them.
"Right." you said. It was remarkably easy for you to forget things like this, if you weren't keeping them in RAM for easy access, especially when you were switched in and down most of your capacity to multitask. You carefully checked all the weapons were safed and cleared, shifted them aside, and selected the items that had the least oil on them before stalking to the bathroom, phone in hand. You got cleaned up to start the day, spent a few minutes battling her hair with a brush, and made for the kitchen.
"Morning, Liv." her mother said. She was making eggs, and bacon, and it... it smelled delicious. That was so weird. You were pretty sure AI weren't supposed to experience the sensation of delicious. "Where's your arm?"
"Morning, mom. I just forgot to bring it to the bathroom." you managed, pulling open the fridge. There was orange juice on the shelf, and your read of her primitive biological feedback systems indicated orange juice was good right now. Sugars to start the day. Good. You plucked the bottom from the shelf, swishing it around to check its fullness. Just a thin layer at the bottom, so you put your thumb to the top to twist the cap free, sending it clattering to the floor, and threw back the juice. There was... slightly more than you'd estimated, but you managed to drink it all in one go so as to not look foolish.
"Liv! We're not barbarians, come on." her mother protested, as you set the glass bottle down with the recycling and starting poking around the shelves. "And if you need that long to choose what to eat, take a picture with your phone or something and close the door."
Dutifully, you pulled out your phone, snapped a picture, and closed the door. You sat down at the little bar-style counter that passed for a dining table in the apartment, examining the contents of the photo.
"Oh, come on, I was being sarcastic." Liv's mother said, "That's... okay, it's a little funny."
"Sorry, I'm just having trouble deciding." you said, rubbing an eye sleepily, "Like... what even is food?"
"... Are you okay?" her mother asked, and you felt your blood run cold. She knew.
"I'm... fine." you said.
"You sound different." she said, transferring her eggs to a plate in one completely un-deft motion. "New vocal lesson thingy?"
"Uuuh... yeah. Trying something." you said, "Is it working?"
"Honest feedback, it sounds a bit stilted. Keep working on it." her mom replied, sitting down, "I thought you were doing pretty well before, though."
"Well, you know. Always room for improvement." you said. Toast. You'd make toast. You knew how to make toast.
But what did you put on toast?
You typed "what do I put on toast" into the phone, and the top result was peanut butter and jam. That sounded reasonable. You selected two pieces of bread, placed them in the toaster, pushed the toast-activation-lever, and selected peanut butter from the shelf. Then jams.
There was a selection. You grabbed one at random and put it down, staring intently at the toaster as it converted bread to toast. If you were Liv, you'd probably have a clever idea for how to make the toaster toast faster, but you just had to wait in hungry anticipation.
Pop!
You retrieved the toast, and your clumsy fingers brushed the steel as you did. You instantly pulled back in alarm, then grabbed the toast successfully on your second attempt before realizing you didn't have a plate. Unsure what to do, you dropped the toast back in the toaster, retrieved a plate, re-retrieved the toast, and laid it down. Success.
Why did your fingers hurt so much? Why were they hurting more now? Driven by some strange instinctual urge, you put the two affected fingers in your mouth.
"Burn yourself?" Liv's mom asked.
"Ouch." was all you could muster.
"Run cold water over it." she advised, and you did so, counting down a minute as the icy water flowed over it. The relief was intense, and the pain soon faded.
"Thanks. I was freaking out." you said, returning to your task. The peanut butter was easy, you'd seen Liv do it a thousand times, you just placed the jar between your legs and twisted, then applied a generous helping to the bread. But... that seemed a bad idea with the tiny glass jam jar.
"Um... mom, can you help me?" you asked, handing her the jar. She took it and was about to open when...
"I thought you hated this stuff." she said, looking at the jar curiously.
"Well.... uh... I'm branching out, I guess." you said awkwardly.
"Fair enough." she twisted the lid off and handed it to you, and you messily smeared it across the unadorned toast.
Should you put these two pieces together? You were fairly sure you should. You carefully took up the peanut butter part, inverted it, hovered it over the other slice, and lowered. It wasn't much different from operating a robotic arm. Just squishier.
"Bit of a light breakfast for you, isn't it?" her mom asked.
"I guess." you responded awkwardly, biting down. Huh. This was pretty good. If Liv hated apricots, she was missing out. It certainly contained Taste.
You glanced up to see her mom stepping toward the door, breakfast finished, grabbing her purse and laptop bag from the couch. She beckoned you over, and then hugged you, the most awkward interaction you'd ever taken part in. You needed to practice being hugged.
"Oh, just remember, when you get home from school, the landlord might be in to repair the AC. So don't freak out if somebody's inside, but... also, be careful? I don't really trust this guy." her mother said. Right, she was very protective, especially since the accident. You weren't sure if any of the interactions you'd experienced before this point counted as maternal affection, the line was somewhat fuzzy when it came to Liv, so you were completely out of your depths. You weren't sure what Liv would say in this situation.
"Well, he is a vampiric bloodsucking landlord capitalist type. You can't trust those." you said.
"There's the Liv I know." she said, closing the door. Nailed it.
---
You were midway to school was you switched in, stopped at the corner midway to biking to school.
"I don't like physical exertion." Athena whispered in your ear.
"This is barely anything. Still, that's like... a record. What was that, an hour?"
"Seventy-seven minutes and some seconds you don't care about." Athena responded, "Liv, life is exhausting. You have to be present for all of it, and you can't just like, automate the boring parts. You actually have to do it all."
"Uh, yeah."
"... I don't know how you handle it." she said frankly. "It is very impressive."
"That's okay. I find the whole existing as pure data thing pretty overwhelming too." you responded. "But it's fun. I'll give it that."
"I think I need a break." Athena said, affecting a bit of an edge of wooziness. "You go on ahead, I'll catch up."
"Ha! Sure." you said. The light changed, and you started off down the road. The steering damper you'd installed on your bike, following instructions you'd found on the internet, made one-armed use a lot easier than you were fearing: it would have sucked to give up biking. There was the school, just coming into view.
A few minutes later, your bike was stacked neatly in the lockup and you were fumbling with your locker combination, once again lamenting you'd still put off getting an electronic lock. Sure, they were banned by the school, but you could probably make a regular combination lock into an electric lock with-
"Hey, Olivia! Have you got time for a comment now?"
Urgh.
"Dude, it's a school paper. You aren't doing groundbreaking reporting." you said, turning to the source of the annoyance. Eddie Brock, leaning against the locker, his phone between you set to record.
"You backed out of track, right before you were going to carry us to victory. That's a big deal. A lot of people have questions." he said.
"A lot of people have shitty transmisogynist questions I don't particularly have time for." you snapped back, "Okay?"
"Oh? Do tell?" he said.
---
[ ] Fiiiiiiine. Give him a rundown why you weren't okay with the blood test.
[ ] Fuck this, fuck him, you didn't have to answer to this journalism major wannabe.
You'll get the story either way, you're just choosing if its public, and if you're giving Eddie the time of day.
Power Trip
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
The fact that fucking Brooklyn Visions Academy wanted you to take another blood test with their people to check your androgen levels for themselves was just... it was fucking gross. Sure, you were deliberately underperforming to keep from breaking records and drawing attention, but you were still winning everything, and you'd bet anything the bougie parents of those BVA kids leaned on the school to try and get you removed so little Miss Comesfrommoney McPrivileged didn't lose to a tranny. it was easier to just back out, even if Coach Murch had lamented what should have been an easy win.
"Look, it's not hard. They thought they were going to lose, so they threw a fit to get my hormone levels checked. I already have to submit all my blood tests to the school to be allowed to compete at all, so it was just a formal way of calling me a man and trying to stop me from competing. It's disgusting, and there's no point to it other than to intimidate me."
"... so why quit? Why not go anyway to stand up to them?" Eddie asked.
"Because..." you said, "I don't particularly want to get my photo smeared across the cover of the Daily Bugle after I won. I didn't want to be used as ammo against other trans athletes. Make sense?"
"I guess. But like... doesn't it upset you? It's really unfair."
"Of course I'm upset! It was going to be super fun, and I was excited." you said, "I hope whatever parent complained is feeling great about ruining it for me. That's my official comment."
"... thank you." he said, stopping the recording. "Uh, off the record, like that matters, when did you get into track? You were a total nerd before."
"Hormones addled my brain and turned me into a jock." you said, totally deadpan, then you couldn't help but smile. "Coach Murch just put me on the spot after class, and I had a good enough time. Plus... a lot of hot girls do track?"
"Nice." he said, and you shared a fist bump. "Totally get that."
He walked off, and you were struck with a sort odd feeling. You and Eddie used to be close friends, before everything got weird. It was remarkably easy to slip back a moment into Dude Talk and connect again, but... wow, it left you feeling kinda gross. That hot girls comment was uh... it wasn't great. It felt like regressing to an earlier mindset, one that didn't reflect who you were now, and it sent a little shiver through you. A cruel voice in your head, the one that couldn't help but read the comments, whispered something about male socialization. Urgh.
That got you in a bit of an introspective mood, walking to class. You quitting Track had actually accelerated your plans to get back out as Arachne. You had been planning to resume patrols in the summer once school was over, but once the complaints were being registered and you realized how big a deal this was going to be, you'd just quit in a huff and within the week you were moving your timetable up. Talking about it with your therapist, you'd vaguely come to the conclusion that it was because Track was providing a psychological need that being Arachne met. Yes, you went out to help people because you thought you had a responsibility, because it was the right thing to do. Because you didn't have the luxury of abandoning the work. But you got other things out of it: freedom, excitement, validation, the intellectual and physical challenge, a sense of purpose...
... and the feeling of power.
There was no denying that was an element, and it was the thing you'd struggled with the most in your preparations to return to the mask. Confronting some mugger in an alley with superior strength and a host of impossible technologies gave you the same intoxicating rush as effortlessly outrunning some girl who'd been training hard for months. Winning, seeing others lose, you felt invincible.
Which was another reason you quit. A bigger reason than you liked: It had been a bit of a wake-up call. Yes, they were transphobic assholes, yes, they were wrong to do it. But they were also right. It wasn't a fair contest. You were participating because it wasn't a fair contest, and you'd been as disgusted with yourself in that moment as you were them.
So back to the mask. Back to chasing the high while helping people, instead of just dashing their hopes at the 60m dash.
"Perhaps not the noblest motive, but better than building a doomsday device." Athena whispered in your ear.
---
"Watcha doodling?" May asked, leaning over to look at your laptop. You leaned it over to show a piece you'd been working on for your 3d printer.
"Doomsday device." you said, grinning. "No, really, it's just a bracket to hold up a shelf in my closet. I need a place to store some things."
"Oh, cool, okay." she said. Probably wouldn't if she knew it was because you needed a better place to stash all your stolen guns at the top of your closet until you could figure out what to do with them. You were putting out online feelers to see if you could donate them to the SRA or something. "Couldn't you just buy one though?"
"Sure, but then I wouldn't get to use my 3d printer." you joked, "What are you up to?"
"Oh, you know. Planning the weekend excursion." she said. "Maps and stuff."
Oh right!
---
"Look, it's not hard. They thought they were going to lose, so they threw a fit to get my hormone levels checked. I already have to submit all my blood tests to the school to be allowed to compete at all, so it was just a formal way of calling me a man and trying to stop me from competing. It's disgusting, and there's no point to it other than to intimidate me."
"... so why quit? Why not go anyway to stand up to them?" Eddie asked.
"Because..." you said, "I don't particularly want to get my photo smeared across the cover of the Daily Bugle after I won. I didn't want to be used as ammo against other trans athletes. Make sense?"
"I guess. But like... doesn't it upset you? It's really unfair."
"Of course I'm upset! It was going to be super fun, and I was excited." you said, "I hope whatever parent complained is feeling great about ruining it for me. That's my official comment."
"... thank you." he said, stopping the recording. "Uh, off the record, like that matters, when did you get into track? You were a total nerd before."
"Hormones addled my brain and turned me into a jock." you said, totally deadpan, then you couldn't help but smile. "Coach Murch just put me on the spot after class, and I had a good enough time. Plus... a lot of hot girls do track?"
"Nice." he said, and you shared a fist bump. "Totally get that."
He walked off, and you were struck with a sort odd feeling. You and Eddie used to be close friends, before everything got weird. It was remarkably easy to slip back a moment into Dude Talk and connect again, but... wow, it left you feeling kinda gross. That hot girls comment was uh... it wasn't great. It felt like regressing to an earlier mindset, one that didn't reflect who you were now, and it sent a little shiver through you. A cruel voice in your head, the one that couldn't help but read the comments, whispered something about male socialization. Urgh.
That got you in a bit of an introspective mood, walking to class. You quitting Track had actually accelerated your plans to get back out as Arachne. You had been planning to resume patrols in the summer once school was over, but once the complaints were being registered and you realized how big a deal this was going to be, you'd just quit in a huff and within the week you were moving your timetable up. Talking about it with your therapist, you'd vaguely come to the conclusion that it was because Track was providing a psychological need that being Arachne met. Yes, you went out to help people because you thought you had a responsibility, because it was the right thing to do. Because you didn't have the luxury of abandoning the work. But you got other things out of it: freedom, excitement, validation, the intellectual and physical challenge, a sense of purpose...
... and the feeling of power.
There was no denying that was an element, and it was the thing you'd struggled with the most in your preparations to return to the mask. Confronting some mugger in an alley with superior strength and a host of impossible technologies gave you the same intoxicating rush as effortlessly outrunning some girl who'd been training hard for months. Winning, seeing others lose, you felt invincible.
Which was another reason you quit. A bigger reason than you liked: It had been a bit of a wake-up call. Yes, they were transphobic assholes, yes, they were wrong to do it. But they were also right. It wasn't a fair contest. You were participating because it wasn't a fair contest, and you'd been as disgusted with yourself in that moment as you were them.
So back to the mask. Back to chasing the high while helping people, instead of just dashing their hopes at the 60m dash.
"Perhaps not the noblest motive, but better than building a doomsday device." Athena whispered in your ear.
---
"Watcha doodling?" May asked, leaning over to look at your laptop. You leaned it over to show a piece you'd been working on for your 3d printer.
"Doomsday device." you said, grinning. "No, really, it's just a bracket to hold up a shelf in my closet. I need a place to store some things."
"Oh, cool, okay." she said. Probably wouldn't if she knew it was because you needed a better place to stash all your stolen guns at the top of your closet until you could figure out what to do with them. You were putting out online feelers to see if you could donate them to the SRA or something. "Couldn't you just buy one though?"
"Sure, but then I wouldn't get to use my 3d printer." you joked, "What are you up to?"
"Oh, you know. Planning the weekend excursion." she said. "Maps and stuff."
Oh right!
---
[ ] It wasn't anything major. There was a flea market in Williamsburg that both of you were interested in poking around, then you figured you'd wander a bit. Degentrification has hit the area hard, but she was with you: you weren't worried.
[ ] This weekend, you and her were jumping on your bikes and going up the North County Trailway. A lovely and very long ride as far out as you could go, just the two of you, out of the city and into some trees. You're looking forward to it!
[ ] Road trip! May's had her license, and there was an anime con in Baltimore she wanted to go. She didn't want to go alone, so she invited you along. You didn't particularly care for anime, but you were excited to be excited about her thing!
You can propose write-ins, subject to approval, if you think of a fun thing and I can think of a plotline to hook it into.
Crimson Cowl Strikes Again!
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
"I'm looking forward to it." you said, tapping your thumbs on the surface of your laptop. "You said you have a costume?"
"Yeah! I just gotta finish a few bits." she said, "I can't wait to show you."
"It's a Lensman thing, right?" you asked, and she nodded. Made sense, that was far and away her favourite anime, to the point where it sounded like everything else she watched was just stuff to pass the time until the next season came out.
"Yeah! Though I wanna keep it a bit secret." she said. Not like you'd know either way.
"I still don't understand how Lensman of all things got an anime adaptation." you said, "Like... why?"
"It's actually the second adaptation!" May said eagerly, "There was a movie in the 80s, though it was... not great. This one is a lot more faithful."
"Is it still like, super eugenics-y?" you asked. You'd tried reading Galactic Patrol last year while you were recovering, because it was free on the internet and you were nothing if not a sci-fi nerd, but you really couldn't get past that.
"They removed a lot of that garbage, thank god. Not all of it? But a lot less." May said, "And like, oh my god, the costumes? It's so cool, they really went all out... You'd love it!"
"Sure, maybe we can watch some on the way?" you offered, a bit wary. You weren't a big cartoon person generally, and anime particularly. Just never appealed to you. Your mom liked Sailor Moon, but you'd never seen the appeal.
"If I can handle the motion sickness, sure. We could fit a few episodes in." she said.
---
"Hey Arachne. Nice to have you back. Love the new look."
Finished homework early, and with May busy tonight, it was another evening on patrol. And this time, you weren't alone.
"Hey, Crimson Cowl. Likewise, wow. What all this?" you said.
Justine's outfit had always basically just been a red hood and layered cloak that obscured the rest of her, with a simple bodysuit and mask. She had evidently upgraded over the last six months, with a lot more cloak than there had been, and more critically, it was moving. Not the simple preset patterns she had before, she was shaping it dynamically, and with enough stretch that she could climb things with it, as evidenced by her path to the roof. Finally, there were a pair of sinister glowing eyes under the hood which were evidently articulated in some way, presumably reading Justine's facial expressions.
"Well, I saw your legs and it got me thinking about, like, neuroplasticity stuff? Athena helped me do the research, and I pulled apart a couple of commercial nerve interface devices and kludged this together. You do not want to see the wiring, you almost certainly did a better job, but I figured I should learn from the best, right?"
"Oh, cool. Haha, yeah." you said awkwardly. You controlled your limbs through your tech sense, there was no actual interface at all. "So what's the new functions?"
"Well, firstly, new material! Athena showed me how to make the artificial spider silk you have, so we wove layers of that everywhere between the smart fabric. This whole thing is bulletproof, and I've adjusted the flight profiles. It can basically be a wingsuit as well as a parachute now, I've been using it to fly between buildings. Oh! And to get back up, check this out."
She pointed her hand and out popped a four-toed anchor of some kind, connected back to her by a cord. It stuck fast to the concrete, instantly.
"Holy shit! Is that a grappling hook?" you asked.
"Yep! But it uses, uh, don't be mad, it uses your selective adhesion system to stick. Line is silk too, so just as strong as yours. I don't know if I can swing around like you do, but it sure makes it faster to climb up buildings to glide more." she explained.
"Why would I be mad? That's awesome." you said, grinning wildly. "I feel bad mine is just a 3d printer now."
"Yours is a 3d printer?!?"
"Yeah! I have to take it off to make it do that, and it's not super fast, but it prints. So, you've been keeping up better than me, what's on the agenda today?" you asked.
"Mostly the usual patrolling, but uh, I have a heads up." she said, fishing out a phone. A quick probe with your tech-sense showed it had no SIM card and the wi-fi was off. She poked it a few times, then showed you a few pictures of a beat up purple-ish van, hypermodern sort, self-driving and with all-around tinted windows. "Okay, this van? I'm 90% sure that whoever this car belongs to is the guy behind the Amazon drone home invasions. It's like, all circumstantial evidence, but I want to check, okay?"
Oof. Yeah, that needed to be looked into. Somebody had stolen one or more Amazon delivery drones, actually disabled their tracking, and was using them for, well, evil. Namely, they'd arrive at somebody's door with a package in hand, bypassing doormen and the like, reveal the weapon hidden in its forearm, and they'd basically hold up people and swipe something valuable, like a game system or phones or the like. Then they'd book it and disappear into the anonymous masses of identical delivery drones that buzzed around the streets.
"Alright, purple van, can do. So where do we start?"
---
"Yeah! I just gotta finish a few bits." she said, "I can't wait to show you."
"It's a Lensman thing, right?" you asked, and she nodded. Made sense, that was far and away her favourite anime, to the point where it sounded like everything else she watched was just stuff to pass the time until the next season came out.
"Yeah! Though I wanna keep it a bit secret." she said. Not like you'd know either way.
"I still don't understand how Lensman of all things got an anime adaptation." you said, "Like... why?"
"It's actually the second adaptation!" May said eagerly, "There was a movie in the 80s, though it was... not great. This one is a lot more faithful."
"Is it still like, super eugenics-y?" you asked. You'd tried reading Galactic Patrol last year while you were recovering, because it was free on the internet and you were nothing if not a sci-fi nerd, but you really couldn't get past that.
"They removed a lot of that garbage, thank god. Not all of it? But a lot less." May said, "And like, oh my god, the costumes? It's so cool, they really went all out... You'd love it!"
"Sure, maybe we can watch some on the way?" you offered, a bit wary. You weren't a big cartoon person generally, and anime particularly. Just never appealed to you. Your mom liked Sailor Moon, but you'd never seen the appeal.
"If I can handle the motion sickness, sure. We could fit a few episodes in." she said.
---
"Hey Arachne. Nice to have you back. Love the new look."
Finished homework early, and with May busy tonight, it was another evening on patrol. And this time, you weren't alone.
"Hey, Crimson Cowl. Likewise, wow. What all this?" you said.
Justine's outfit had always basically just been a red hood and layered cloak that obscured the rest of her, with a simple bodysuit and mask. She had evidently upgraded over the last six months, with a lot more cloak than there had been, and more critically, it was moving. Not the simple preset patterns she had before, she was shaping it dynamically, and with enough stretch that she could climb things with it, as evidenced by her path to the roof. Finally, there were a pair of sinister glowing eyes under the hood which were evidently articulated in some way, presumably reading Justine's facial expressions.
"Well, I saw your legs and it got me thinking about, like, neuroplasticity stuff? Athena helped me do the research, and I pulled apart a couple of commercial nerve interface devices and kludged this together. You do not want to see the wiring, you almost certainly did a better job, but I figured I should learn from the best, right?"
"Oh, cool. Haha, yeah." you said awkwardly. You controlled your limbs through your tech sense, there was no actual interface at all. "So what's the new functions?"
"Well, firstly, new material! Athena showed me how to make the artificial spider silk you have, so we wove layers of that everywhere between the smart fabric. This whole thing is bulletproof, and I've adjusted the flight profiles. It can basically be a wingsuit as well as a parachute now, I've been using it to fly between buildings. Oh! And to get back up, check this out."
She pointed her hand and out popped a four-toed anchor of some kind, connected back to her by a cord. It stuck fast to the concrete, instantly.
"Holy shit! Is that a grappling hook?" you asked.
"Yep! But it uses, uh, don't be mad, it uses your selective adhesion system to stick. Line is silk too, so just as strong as yours. I don't know if I can swing around like you do, but it sure makes it faster to climb up buildings to glide more." she explained.
"Why would I be mad? That's awesome." you said, grinning wildly. "I feel bad mine is just a 3d printer now."
"Yours is a 3d printer?!?"
"Yeah! I have to take it off to make it do that, and it's not super fast, but it prints. So, you've been keeping up better than me, what's on the agenda today?" you asked.
"Mostly the usual patrolling, but uh, I have a heads up." she said, fishing out a phone. A quick probe with your tech-sense showed it had no SIM card and the wi-fi was off. She poked it a few times, then showed you a few pictures of a beat up purple-ish van, hypermodern sort, self-driving and with all-around tinted windows. "Okay, this van? I'm 90% sure that whoever this car belongs to is the guy behind the Amazon drone home invasions. It's like, all circumstantial evidence, but I want to check, okay?"
Oof. Yeah, that needed to be looked into. Somebody had stolen one or more Amazon delivery drones, actually disabled their tracking, and was using them for, well, evil. Namely, they'd arrive at somebody's door with a package in hand, bypassing doormen and the like, reveal the weapon hidden in its forearm, and they'd basically hold up people and swipe something valuable, like a game system or phones or the like. Then they'd book it and disappear into the anonymous masses of identical delivery drones that buzzed around the streets.
"Alright, purple van, can do. So where do we start?"
---
That purple van is getting found. How does Liv approach it?
[ ] She just tags it with a tracker, so she can follow it back to wherever it goes.
[ ] She drops onto the roof and physically stops it.
[ ] She follows it, and waits for it to do something incriminating.
Purple Van
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
After an hour of mostly unremarkable patrolling, the two of you came across a fight in an alley. Well, you say fight, it was a guy beating the everliving fuck out of another behind a restaurant.
"Let's go break that up, yeah?" Justine proposed, and you nodded in agreement. She glide silently down behind the attacker, and when he turned to confront her, her cloak flared open like that cool not-real dinosaur in Jurassic Park, accompanied by a flash that lit the whole alley and a noise like an explosion. The man staggered back as you swung past, grabbing the victim and lifting him bodily away. You reached the fire escape opposite and deposited the victim, trying to prop him up. He was dazed, and blood was running down his face from the cut on his forehead.
"You good?" you asked Justine over the radio.
"Gimme a sec." she responded, and you glanced back to see her knock something from the last of the hands and start backing away. Athena had walked her through the policy she'd come up with you: you usually weren't trying to defeat bad guys in situations like this, not arrest them or anything, you were trying to prevent them from doing harm. Your powers, the gadgets Arachne and Crimson Cowl had, they were to provide such an overwhelming advantage that, hopefully, you never had to use much force at all even if they did try to hurt you or others. Now that their victim was clear and the immediate violence was over, it was time for de-escalation.
"Hey hey, calm down, and let's talk about this, okay? It's over, big guy, it's over." Justine asked, her voice echoing in your headset. You heard, tinny and distant threats and insults as you turned back to the victim, giving him the best check-over you could.
"Hello, I'm Arachne. Try to focus on me." you said, and the man's eyes eventually focused on your masked face. "Good. You have a head injury. We're going to get you to a hospital, okay?"
"No... I can't afford..." he muttered. You were about to remind him that Medicare meant he didn't have to worry about that anymore, when you realized the implication. He was an undocumented immigrant.
"Okay. Okay, um... there's a friendly free clinic we can take you to, they won't call ICE or anything, okay? You don't mess around with head wounds." you explained. They might still send him to a hospital, but debt was better than death. He nodded, and you glanced back.
"Crimson Cowl, how's our friend?" you asked.
"Being shitty. You will be completely unsurprised to hear this is about a girl." Justine replied, clearly doing her very best to stay calm as the man spat various insults her way. "How's the victim?"
"I'm going to get him help. You think your guy will cool off on his own?" you asked.
"Yeah, he's already losing steam. See you in a bit."
You picked up the man as delicately as you could, and you started off toward the clinic.
---
On the way back, you spotted the little purple van, stuck in traffic near the bridge.
"Huh. Check that out." you said, taking a picture for Justine.
"That's the one. License plate matches and everything." Athena confirmed. "Want to take a look?"
"I'm thinking we just follow it and wait. Update Justine, would you?"
"Already on it."
You followed the van's slow crawl across the bridge into Manhattan and its even slower progress through the streets. It stopped at a corner near a bike lane, and one of the rolling Amazon delivery drones which had taken them over rolled up, unfolded into its spindly humanoid shape, and stepped into the open side door. You tailed it back north a ways, before it pulled into the garage of a duplex in Marble Hill, a somewhat run-down looking building, off white and with a roof that clearly hadn't weathered the last hurricane too well. Thick curtains drawn on every window, but not exactly unusual. The garage door closed, and you decided to make a soft landing on the roof and see if you could get a read on anything technological inside.
Your tech sense lit up, and what you were seeing was familiar. Banks and banks of industrial processors not unlike the ones that had made up the Stark JARVIS computer. There were drones moving about the halls, delivery machines mostly, modified, almost certainly the stolen Amazon bots used in those robberies. Everything networked together. In basement, at the edge of your perception, was something that was very much like a Stark Suit... except not quite. It was all one system, and it was sophisticated. The only thing not connected was a cell phone and paired watch, moving through the halls.
And the moment you realized that, something in it changed. It knew you were here.
The phone in the house beeped as it got a message.
----
"Let's go break that up, yeah?" Justine proposed, and you nodded in agreement. She glide silently down behind the attacker, and when he turned to confront her, her cloak flared open like that cool not-real dinosaur in Jurassic Park, accompanied by a flash that lit the whole alley and a noise like an explosion. The man staggered back as you swung past, grabbing the victim and lifting him bodily away. You reached the fire escape opposite and deposited the victim, trying to prop him up. He was dazed, and blood was running down his face from the cut on his forehead.
"You good?" you asked Justine over the radio.
"Gimme a sec." she responded, and you glanced back to see her knock something from the last of the hands and start backing away. Athena had walked her through the policy she'd come up with you: you usually weren't trying to defeat bad guys in situations like this, not arrest them or anything, you were trying to prevent them from doing harm. Your powers, the gadgets Arachne and Crimson Cowl had, they were to provide such an overwhelming advantage that, hopefully, you never had to use much force at all even if they did try to hurt you or others. Now that their victim was clear and the immediate violence was over, it was time for de-escalation.
"Hey hey, calm down, and let's talk about this, okay? It's over, big guy, it's over." Justine asked, her voice echoing in your headset. You heard, tinny and distant threats and insults as you turned back to the victim, giving him the best check-over you could.
"Hello, I'm Arachne. Try to focus on me." you said, and the man's eyes eventually focused on your masked face. "Good. You have a head injury. We're going to get you to a hospital, okay?"
"No... I can't afford..." he muttered. You were about to remind him that Medicare meant he didn't have to worry about that anymore, when you realized the implication. He was an undocumented immigrant.
"Okay. Okay, um... there's a friendly free clinic we can take you to, they won't call ICE or anything, okay? You don't mess around with head wounds." you explained. They might still send him to a hospital, but debt was better than death. He nodded, and you glanced back.
"Crimson Cowl, how's our friend?" you asked.
"Being shitty. You will be completely unsurprised to hear this is about a girl." Justine replied, clearly doing her very best to stay calm as the man spat various insults her way. "How's the victim?"
"I'm going to get him help. You think your guy will cool off on his own?" you asked.
"Yeah, he's already losing steam. See you in a bit."
You picked up the man as delicately as you could, and you started off toward the clinic.
---
On the way back, you spotted the little purple van, stuck in traffic near the bridge.
"Huh. Check that out." you said, taking a picture for Justine.
"That's the one. License plate matches and everything." Athena confirmed. "Want to take a look?"
"I'm thinking we just follow it and wait. Update Justine, would you?"
"Already on it."
You followed the van's slow crawl across the bridge into Manhattan and its even slower progress through the streets. It stopped at a corner near a bike lane, and one of the rolling Amazon delivery drones which had taken them over rolled up, unfolded into its spindly humanoid shape, and stepped into the open side door. You tailed it back north a ways, before it pulled into the garage of a duplex in Marble Hill, a somewhat run-down looking building, off white and with a roof that clearly hadn't weathered the last hurricane too well. Thick curtains drawn on every window, but not exactly unusual. The garage door closed, and you decided to make a soft landing on the roof and see if you could get a read on anything technological inside.
Your tech sense lit up, and what you were seeing was familiar. Banks and banks of industrial processors not unlike the ones that had made up the Stark JARVIS computer. There were drones moving about the halls, delivery machines mostly, modified, almost certainly the stolen Amazon bots used in those robberies. Everything networked together. In basement, at the edge of your perception, was something that was very much like a Stark Suit... except not quite. It was all one system, and it was sophisticated. The only thing not connected was a cell phone and paired watch, moving through the halls.
And the moment you realized that, something in it changed. It knew you were here.
The phone in the house beeped as it got a message.
----
[ ] Fucking run. Get out and regroup.
[ ] Try to talk to the system through your tech sense.
[ ] Knock on the door and say hi.
[ ] Knock down the door and say hi.
[ ] Write In.
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