"What the fuck do you think you're doing here, bitch?!"
I pretended to ignore the gun now in my face, and made a show of looking around the pawn shop. "Here to buy a cheap guitar. You seen any around here? I know you're probably not here for instruments, but I might as well ask."
"Listen, punk," the Nazi robber said, stepping forward, the gun pointed at me now. "You better get the fuck out of here before-"
When you have a gun and the other guy doesn't, your advantage is range. If I remember my Mythbusters correctly, about twenty feet is the distance at which a guy with a knife and sufficient adrenaline starts being able to rush you down and stab you before you can shoot him.
This guy was in arm's reach, and while there were dedicated techniques for disarming a man with a pistol at this distance, this was a situation where a lot of solutions would still work, just not as well or as reliably.
What I went with was brushing the gun and hand aside with one hand, and with the other, I punched this guy right in the throat, which my statistics teacher- a former marine and military police officer- claimed was one of the most efficient ways to end a fight before it started. And what do you know, he was right. To lightly misquote Mike Tyson, everyone's got a plan until you get punched in the throat.
From there, he was strangely unresisting as I manhandled him to the floor with his face down. I had a paracord bracelet in one of my coat pockets, courtesy of a homeless guy who was selling them that I bumped into on the way here, and it took barely a minute for me to unravel that and bind this guy's wrists securely behind his back.
Once I was done with that, I stood up, dusted off my hands, and looked at the clerk, who had just finished calling the cops to come deal with this.
"Hell of a day, huh?" I asked.
"...You could say that, yeah," the poor kid said. He was barely older than me- college aged at the most- and... for some unaccountable reason, I was certain that this guy was Korean. I had no idea why I could tell different nationalities of East Asian apart like that, I certainly couldn't do that before, but... I guess I could do that now? "Um... Are you... a superhero, or..?"
I considered this carefully for a moment, before nodding.
"Sure, let's go with that," I said. "I don't usually do this kind of thing, to be honest- I have no idea what came over me. I was telling the truth a minute ago- I really did just come here to buy a cheap guitar. Do you guys have any?"
"Hey, you saved my life," the clerk said. "The least I can do is give you a discount."
"I'm planning on scrapping it for parts," I warned him. "I don't wanna do that with something that's still good, you know?"
"Ahh, I see, I see. Well..."
---
I'd wrapped my face in my scarf- I'd been born in Texas, and grew up there until I was about 10, and Mom's job made us move to Brockton Bay, and I never did fully adjust to the cooler clime- by the time the police came, and told them I hadn't settled on a cape name yet. I kind of had, to be honest, but if they knew that there was a new vigilante called Ouroboros in town, then people would start talking about Ouroboros and expecting them to do something.
However... a vigilante who's clearly really new to all this, and doesn't even have a name? Well, that's not the kind of impression that leaves you expecting all that much, is it?
So, with my identity protected, the clerk swearing secrecy about my face while also legitimately not knowing my name, and, most importantly, with a cheap old Yamaha campfire guitar from the sixties in hand, I went back home and set to work on the actual project I'd set out to do.
The first thing I did was a lot of measuring, and writing stuff down, and making sure I knew where the new bridge would need to go; the old one wasn't exactly usable for my purposes, after all. Then came a lot of sawing, and some carving, some gluing and nailing, and finally, I had... something that might be a playable guitar by the time I got back from school tomorrow, because I had to let the glue dry first. But then I would have a playable travel guitar!
Admittedly, I wasn't totally happy with it. I'd been given a 3/4 scale guitar, and that changed the fret spacings, and would mean I'd have to relearn all the chord spacings and redevelop my muscle memory, for something that would not translate back to a full-sized real guitar. Sure, being only three quarters the scale length meant it was even smaller than the travel guitar I'd intended to make, measuring in at just over a foot and a half- much more doable to fit in a backpack- but... oh, what the hell am I complaining about, I got this thing for free.
...After punching a man in the throat and handing him over to the cops.
Mm. Didn't feel great about that. Yeah, the dude was a piece of shit who I'd caught in the middle of trying to use the threat of violence to extort money from someone, but he was a person, not some nebulous Bad Guy who did that shit for no reason. There's just... Maybe it's misplaced humanity, but there were no circumstances where I could feel good about beating someone up and throwing them in a cage. Even if I did think that beating him up was a good thing, because he was a Nazi and Nazis are actively awful, bringing the US government to bear on him was...
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...Well, he was white. They'd go easy on him. Something about racism not actually being over, even if the Civil Rights Act did get passed.
Still, just... fuck, here I was, using violence to impose my will on the world. This is what I was trying to avoid by getting this guitar, dammit! Should I... should I even keep this damn thing? It felt... tainted, now.
But... no. No, I'd... I had protected that clerk, and I had already put all this work in. If I threw it out... what would I do next? I still wanted a travel guitar, and I'd still want to go to a pawn shop (a different one, this time) and get a cheap beater to make one out of. This was...
...I mean, what kind of asshole throws away a gift someone else gave them for saving their life? What would it accomplish, besides playing into my own twisted idea that I didn't deserve nice things?
I'd keep it, and play it. And nothing else mattered.
---
I took it to school the next Monday, and at lunch, sitting in a randomly-selected corner that wasn't where I used to eat lunch, I sat down, opened up my backpack, pulled out my new guitar, and began to strum.
"You're not about to start singing, are you?" someone sitting at a table near me asked.
"Nah, I'm not that obnoxious," I said, shaking my head as I played Spanish Romance. "Besides, this song doesn't have lyrics."
"Good."
And with that, they turned back around and resumed ignoring me.
Oh well. As much as it grated up and down all four trillion nerves in my body, I didn't need to be the center of attention. I did not need to live down to the stereotype of Douchebag McSixstrings who brings his guitar everywhere in the hopes of making everything about himself through the medium of the one interesting thing about him.
I mean, it'd be nice if I could do that, and it actually worked, but I knew I wasn't up to that challenge, so I'd just be strumming away on a small, fairly quiet guitar in a noisy room and providing background music for anyone who was close enough to even notice it.
Eventually, I got bored of Spanish Romance, and started to play a more complicated song, from my hallucinations. It had clearly been meant for multiple guitars, but preserving the central elements while compressing it down to a single guitar role had been doable.
After about two minutes of this, the song came to a natural pause, and looked up to notice that the table next to me had stopped talking at some point, and were just listening to me play.
"Well don't stop now," a big, tall, latino-looking guy said. "Play that funky music, white boy."
"...This isn't anything to do with you," I began carefully, "but the last time someone made that joke at me, it was right before trying to kill me with a katana."
"Oh what the fuck," another kid- pale, freckly ginger, with an eerily similar build to the latino boy.
"My name is Joe Norman, and I'm the most interesting boring person you've met in the past five minutes," I said.
"Huh, I guess that is a common name," a third boy said. He was white and blonde, with these eerie cobalt blue eyes that I couldn't be completely sure just looked funky because of my own colorblindness.
"...Pardon?"
"Dean watches that one Roosterteeth show, Chain of Thorns," the ginger boy said. "The protagonist of that show is also named Joe Norman, and I bet you ten bucks Dean's going to be annoying about it."
"Hey now, I'm not that bad," Dean protested.
"Two days ago, I messaged you asking 'what's up?'" the latino boy said. "Five minutes later, my inbox had two thousand and forty three words of you rambling about the Chain of Thorns movie and how it does kind of suck, but everyone else saying it sucks is wrong about why it sucks."
"In fairness, I was already writing that stuff out in a conversation with someone else," Dean protested.
"Also in fairness, I also did not fucking ask you about the movie and whether it was good or not," the ginger said.
"Philistines, the both of you," Dean said, huffing.
"Vicky's a terrible influence on you," the ginger added. "She's tricked you into thinking that monologuing about the thing you just read or watched is an acceptable way to make conversation."
"It is if the person you're monologuing at likes you," I chimed in. "Enthusiasm is infectious, if you're receptive enough for it."
My thinking here was simple: I needed friends. I could keep playing guitar alone pretty much forever, but I really, really didn't want to.
And hey, here was a guy who'd probably be instant friends with me if I humored his rants about the Roosterteeth show- which was naggingly familiar even though I'd stopped caring about Roosterteeth's output somewhere around five years ago when I got bored of Red Versus Blue- at the age of 12, mind you.
That was a small price to pay for someone who'd feel abashedly obligated to listen to me talk once he got it out of his system.
"See, Norman gets it," Dean said.
"That's not my name," I said.
"Shit, whoops."
Okay, he might be a little annoying about it.