"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?"
---
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.
