Brooklyn, Queens, parts of Jersey if I’m pushing it, Manhattan
by special request. Acting locally, y’know?”
“We do what is required of us. Or live
with the consequences of our inaction.”
“I’m getting the warms and fuzzies here.
If you’re going to share some fortune cookie wisdom with me, do you at least
have some leftover Lo Mein I can eat?”
Cassandra smiled. “You shouldn’t
underestimate yourself, Marco. You are capable of much more than you expect.”
I shrugged. I was a freak with some
superhuman abilities. I wasn’t going to run around saving the planet. If I
hadn’t joined forces with Cassandra, I’d be jumping over rooftops at night
looking for crimes to stop – and believe me, that’s one of the most useless
things a wannabe hero can do. You could spend a year ‘patrolling’ and never see
anything – the chances of you being at the right place and right time are not
quite in the winning-the-lottery range, but they’re still pretty small.
Supposedly Neos seem to find trouble more often than they should, statistically
speaking, but even so it never happens as often as it does in movies or TV. My
buddy Condor had a billion bucks worth of police scanners, surveillance cameras
illegally installed all over town, and he had tapped into the security system
networks of a dozen security companies. He still mostly spent his nights
playing World of Warcraft while waiting for something to happen. Thanks
to Cassandra, I'd been able to do some good, a lot more good than I would have
by myself, but I knew my limitations. I wasn’t going to save the world. I
wasn’t even going to save the city.
There’d been a handful of times in my
dozen years of vigilantism when something major had menaced New York: natural
disasters, or a high-powered Neo on a rampage. That kind of thing happens once
every two or three years on average; it sucks, but people have gotten used to
it. Dealing with major disasters was the job of the licensed and bonded
parahuman team of the city, the Empire State Guardians. The Guardians had full
legal enforcement powers, not to mention a sweet license deal that gave them a
cut of any income generated by anything with their trademarked likeness, from
t-shirts and coffee mugs to movies and video games. They got paid big bucks to
save the Big Apple, back up the cops in dicey situations, and preen for the
paparazzo in their skin-tight costumes. If the Guardians couldn’t handle
something, the Freedom Legion would help them out. If the Legion couldn’t
handle something, it was time to evacuate the city and move to another state.
Luckily that hadn’t happened.
I mostly watched that kind of thing on
TV, or did the superhero version of janitorial work – help people evacuate
areas in danger, beat on looters, those kinds of shit jobs. Early in my career,
I had tried to join the fray, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to help. The
first time I did, one of the Guardians politely asked me to leave. I wasn’t
trained to work with a team, she explained, and I would end up getting in the
way. The second time I’d tried to lend a hand, another Guardian, an officious
prick called Star Eagle, tried to arrest me. I wrapped a light pole around his
neck and left, and apparently he was so embarrassed by the incident he didn’t
press charges. After that I learned to leave well enough alone.
“Capable or not, this doesn’t sound like
my usual gig, Cassie. If this chick is going to be involved in some major
catastrophe, why don’t we turn her over to the Guardians or the Legion? They
handle that kind of thing all the time. This is way above my pay grade.”
“That’s not possible. And no, I don’t
know exactly why.” Cassandra frowned. “I don’t like seeing only fog and shadows
in the future, but that’s what I get whenever I try to focus on this woman. Remember,
I don’t see the future. I see possibilities and probabilities. And she is
blocking me somehow, so what I see is
by special request. Acting locally, y’know?”
“We do what is required of us. Or live
with the consequences of our inaction.”
“I’m getting the warms and fuzzies here.
If you’re going to share some fortune cookie wisdom with me, do you at least
have some leftover Lo Mein I can eat?”
Cassandra smiled. “You shouldn’t
underestimate yourself, Marco. You are capable of much more than you expect.”
I shrugged. I was a freak with some
superhuman abilities. I wasn’t going to run around saving the planet. If I
hadn’t joined forces with Cassandra, I’d be jumping over rooftops at night
looking for crimes to stop – and believe me, that’s one of the most useless
things a wannabe hero can do. You could spend a year ‘patrolling’ and never see
anything – the chances of you being at the right place and right time are not
quite in the winning-the-lottery range, but they’re still pretty small.
Supposedly Neos seem to find trouble more often than they should, statistically
speaking, but even so it never happens as often as it does in movies or TV. My
buddy Condor had a billion bucks worth of police scanners, surveillance cameras
illegally installed all over town, and he had tapped into the security system
networks of a dozen security companies. He still mostly spent his nights
playing World of Warcraft while waiting for something to happen. Thanks
to Cassandra, I'd been able to do some good, a lot more good than I would have
by myself, but I knew my limitations. I wasn’t going to save the world. I
wasn’t even going to save the city.
There’d been a handful of times in my
dozen years of vigilantism when something major had menaced New York: natural
disasters, or a high-powered Neo on a rampage. That kind of thing happens once
every two or three years on average; it sucks, but people have gotten used to
it. Dealing with major disasters was the job of the licensed and bonded
parahuman team of the city, the Empire State Guardians. The Guardians had full
legal enforcement powers, not to mention a sweet license deal that gave them a
cut of any income generated by anything with their trademarked likeness, from
t-shirts and coffee mugs to movies and video games. They got paid big bucks to
save the Big Apple, back up the cops in dicey situations, and preen for the
paparazzo in their skin-tight costumes. If the Guardians couldn’t handle
something, the Freedom Legion would help them out. If the Legion couldn’t
handle something, it was time to evacuate the city and move to another state.
Luckily that hadn’t happened.
I mostly watched that kind of thing on
TV, or did the superhero version of janitorial work – help people evacuate
areas in danger, beat on looters, those kinds of shit jobs. Early in my career,
I had tried to join the fray, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to help. The
first time I did, one of the Guardians politely asked me to leave. I wasn’t
trained to work with a team, she explained, and I would end up getting in the
way. The second time I’d tried to lend a hand, another Guardian, an officious
prick called Star Eagle, tried to arrest me. I wrapped a light pole around his
neck and left, and apparently he was so embarrassed by the incident he didn’t
press charges. After that I learned to leave well enough alone.
“Capable or not, this doesn’t sound like
my usual gig, Cassie. If this chick is going to be involved in some major
catastrophe, why don’t we turn her over to the Guardians or the Legion? They
handle that kind of thing all the time. This is way above my pay grade.”
“That’s not possible. And no, I don’t
know exactly why.” Cassandra frowned. “I don’t like seeing only fog and shadows
in the future, but that’s what I get whenever I try to focus on this woman. Remember,
I don’t see the future. I see possibilities and probabilities. And she is
blocking me somehow, so what I see is
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