[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 7
Everything is moving so fast, the moment I think I know what to do the situation has already changed. I spend hours seething about Raz, and when we went to visit him in the hospital I wound up not saying any of the things I went over in my head an hundred times. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
When the police chief came to visit us after the incident, it turned out he had something for me. The Japanese embassy had sent me a new passport and a renewed 2-year student visa. Which means that (1) someone with the ability to pull strings in both the Japanese and American governments knows what I'm doing, and (2) for the moment they like it.
I finally called home and talked to mom... and everything was fine. I avoided saying too much -- lying by omission -- but I did tell her that I'd met one of dad's old friends. She's met Glenn, and asked me to tell him about how the 10th anniversary memorial for dad would be in 2 months. I forgot to tell him, because the next time I got to speak to him, he got me thinking about plenty of other things. Glenn had no inkling whatsoever that dad was an alien, and really, I only "know" that because he told me when I was about six years old. He pointed to one of the stars in the sky, and said, "I came from there, because this planet needs heroes." He also said he once met my grandfather -- on my father's side. I need to ask mom about that. He also asked whether I'd tried taking my helmet off while transformed. It hadn't occurred to me to try, and now that the notion is in my head, I'm scared.
I have a feeling we're going to wind up going to the memorial. I could use some answers, but I don't want to drag the others into my problems. Only, that's the way things work, and I'm sure they'll wind up pulling me into theirs too.
Sam asked us to come to another of his wrestling shows. Ryo would've loved it, and I'm glad he's in Japan. Apparently it was some kind of big finish, one final match against the Mad Butcher, before he retired from wrestling. I'll spare the details because, really, I can't make heads or tails of them anyway. Jack got involved in it, and it was definitely memorable. Wrestling isn't my thing, but Sam loves it enough to do it in spite of the crappy pay and constant physical abuse, and he had to give it up because he's a metahuman. How far will this go?
Anyway, Glenn insisted we all go to the hospital to see Raz. Not surprisingly, he was already conscious and feeling well enough to make snide remarks. Raz' actions the other day had already started to have repercussions -- the press was having a field day, and a metahuman punching a 50-year-old woman in the throat is apparently much more interesting than the appearance of five new metahumans in the city -- and Glenn's only solution was for us to become an official super-group. When all is said and done, we all agreed to do it. Right now, none of us have anywhere else to go. Eventually we settled on a name: The Gatekeepers.
It's scary and exciting and I may have made a huge mistake, but that's the way it goes. Glenn is like a father figure to me -- he knew that part of my father far better than I did -- Raz is the obnoxious middle-child younger brother I never wanted... and Sam and Jack are just too weird to fit into familial archetypes. When we dealt with Pinnacle we saw how effective we could be when we all worked together, and the confrontation with Swan and Elephant Man gave us a taste of how badly things could go if we didn't.
I really need to explain a few things to Raz. I'm just not good at this, but I don't want to see him drag us all down. He's smarter than that, when he wants to be. I know I'm stressing over this too much, because I got through two and a half cigarettes in the hospital before I realized what I was doing. And everyone else is defintiely stressing too much because none of them seemed to even notice.
When the police chief came to visit us after the incident, it turned out he had something for me. The Japanese embassy had sent me a new passport and a renewed 2-year student visa. Which means that (1) someone with the ability to pull strings in both the Japanese and American governments knows what I'm doing, and (2) for the moment they like it.
I finally called home and talked to mom... and everything was fine. I avoided saying too much -- lying by omission -- but I did tell her that I'd met one of dad's old friends. She's met Glenn, and asked me to tell him about how the 10th anniversary memorial for dad would be in 2 months. I forgot to tell him, because the next time I got to speak to him, he got me thinking about plenty of other things. Glenn had no inkling whatsoever that dad was an alien, and really, I only "know" that because he told me when I was about six years old. He pointed to one of the stars in the sky, and said, "I came from there, because this planet needs heroes." He also said he once met my grandfather -- on my father's side. I need to ask mom about that. He also asked whether I'd tried taking my helmet off while transformed. It hadn't occurred to me to try, and now that the notion is in my head, I'm scared.
I have a feeling we're going to wind up going to the memorial. I could use some answers, but I don't want to drag the others into my problems. Only, that's the way things work, and I'm sure they'll wind up pulling me into theirs too.
Sam asked us to come to another of his wrestling shows. Ryo would've loved it, and I'm glad he's in Japan. Apparently it was some kind of big finish, one final match against the Mad Butcher, before he retired from wrestling. I'll spare the details because, really, I can't make heads or tails of them anyway. Jack got involved in it, and it was definitely memorable. Wrestling isn't my thing, but Sam loves it enough to do it in spite of the crappy pay and constant physical abuse, and he had to give it up because he's a metahuman. How far will this go?
Anyway, Glenn insisted we all go to the hospital to see Raz. Not surprisingly, he was already conscious and feeling well enough to make snide remarks. Raz' actions the other day had already started to have repercussions -- the press was having a field day, and a metahuman punching a 50-year-old woman in the throat is apparently much more interesting than the appearance of five new metahumans in the city -- and Glenn's only solution was for us to become an official super-group. When all is said and done, we all agreed to do it. Right now, none of us have anywhere else to go. Eventually we settled on a name: The Gatekeepers.
It's scary and exciting and I may have made a huge mistake, but that's the way it goes. Glenn is like a father figure to me -- he knew that part of my father far better than I did -- Raz is the obnoxious middle-child younger brother I never wanted... and Sam and Jack are just too weird to fit into familial archetypes. When we dealt with Pinnacle we saw how effective we could be when we all worked together, and the confrontation with Swan and Elephant Man gave us a taste of how badly things could go if we didn't.
I really need to explain a few things to Raz. I'm just not good at this, but I don't want to see him drag us all down. He's smarter than that, when he wants to be. I know I'm stressing over this too much, because I got through two and a half cigarettes in the hospital before I realized what I was doing. And everyone else is defintiely stressing too much because none of them seemed to even notice.
posted by Ewen at 4/17/2006 05:06:00 PM
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