“Now, you ask?” I answered Sophia’s question with a rhetorical question of my own. “Do you not know, to be or not to be, that is the question.” I answered with a small smile. In a way, I had already answered that famous question. I had taken control of my own life, literally burning away the remnants of the old, to make room for the new.
“Now, I will stay the course. My old plan was to acquire insurance, a safety net so to speak, before taking my own path. I will have to walk my path uninsured and hope that I can balance on the knife’s edge without falling. For on either side is the unknown and I am on a path into the unknown. But I will walk proudly, forging ahead and creating my own path.” I spoke with conviction and more than a little pathos.
“So you will do what?” she asked in response.
“Well, before the troubles, I planned to make myself a name as a mercenary. I still plan to do so and hope that you will join me. I know that you still want to exterminate that street-gang, something that would be a worthwhile course, so I would be happy to help. Attracting the guilds attention can be done with multiple ways and if I manage to get the Guild’s attention, I would have insurance, an option to fall back on if things go down the drain.
For now, I have a few things to do, to prepare, before going back out. Sunday night could have been seriously bad, something I have little interest in repeating. At the same time, I did not want to keep you in the dark about the ploy I used to escape my father’s control. It felt… wrong.” I struggled a little with my words, not quite sure how to convey my thoughts into words. How to convey the feeling of wrongness that had haunted me when thinking about her stumbling into the bunker, without knowing me alive? She seemed to understand something, maybe not quite what I was thinking but it should be close enough.
I continued, “For now, I will go back into the bunker and mostly stay there, working on a few ideas. I will have to get some extra furniture and other mundane items to live down there full time. Luckily, there is still the money we have taken in our first raid, it should last me for quite some time. In addition, I will have to make myself some sort of identification, probably a cheap fake, just so I have something. Well, I have a lot of ideas, enough that I made lists of things to do, depending on the category. I even have to think about making a list to keep tracks of the lists.
For you, you will have to take care that your normal life looks just as before, only with a little mourning added. Nobody knows just how close we were, but it would look strange if you are not sad about the loss of a friend. I guess, I will have more ‘friends’ at school than ever before, mourning my passing and telling everyone who is willing to listen just how close friends they were, everything for their fifteen minutes of fame, right?” Towards the end, my tone turned rather caustic, thinking of the various social butterflies at school that would try to catch as much media attention as possible, while the light was on something in their surroundings.
Over the next few hours, Sophia and I talked some more, mostly about small stuff, just enjoying each other's company, until the sky started to turn dark. We walked together for a bit, before I split off and went grocery shopping. It was a medium sized supermarket, not big enough to have serious security and not so small that it would be a robbery-target and therefore need security. The perfect size. There was a camera, but it was a wireless signal, something Galatea easily took care off, erasing the frames with me in the picture. Stores that size did not monitor the cameras in real time, they just used the recording in case someone robbed the store. Not that it would be worthwhile. That fact was the most effective security measure, the simple fact that the risk of robbing such a store far outweighed the rewards.
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Soon, I was done shopping and made my way to my hideout, weighed down with my purchases. That was another thing I would have to think about, a way to enter my hideout without walking to the open entrances. Another thing for my lists.
In the hideout, I took care of my purchases first, storing them away. Then it was list-making time. First, I made myself a list of lists to ponder.
The first list to make was a list of holdouts. More gear, some to go with my armour and some that I could carry myself. Especially non-lethal ways to take people down and restrain them.
The second list was slightly different. I was still thinking about a way to reduce my personal vulnerability, but maybe I should not go at it in the way of a mechanical- or electrical engineer or physicist.
A third list was for the good old idea of ‘bigger is better’, ideas for a new armour, bigger, stronger, maybe even changing the concept from personal armour to the militaries concept or ‘armour’ meaning tanks and similar gear. The mental image of me, floating up in a hovertank to stop a convenience-store robbery made me giggle with glee. Just the expressions on the police officers faces would almost make it worthwhile. Almost.
A fourth list for improvements of my bunker. The idea of an extra, better hidden exit, maybe somewhere in the sewers opening into a long, hidden tunnel with secret doors or an exit into a hidden alleyway. So, I’d have to tunnel. And I would have to change the bunker from an almost pure working space into a living space. Right now, it was set-up for work and the occasional break from work, not permanent living. The simple fact that it was lacking a bed was telling.
A fifth list, something simple. A shopping list. Sure, I had just bought groceries, but those would only last for a few days. So, a simple, mundane grocery-shopping list.
A sixth list for something I had thought about. Confusion was something useful. If I could make varied enough gear and, more important, varied and extreme disguises the investigators would spent less time searching for Metis. In addition, if I ever got caught the prosecution would have the devil of a time, providing reasonable evidence that ten or twenty different vigilantes were all the same person under the mask. And the fact that they all used similar gear could be covered by using the Shadowbroker to sell some gear from list one. Well, gear that was useless against me and foolproof to the point that reverse engineering would be useless. So nothing with my energy-crystals for example.
A seventh list for things to do outside. At the top of that list would be something I had not considered. What had happened to the Scourge-beasts that were not killed in the explosion? Were they still roaming the streets? If yes, it would need looking into, I wanted to know how they worked. And saving lives should be useful in the long run, a good reputation was useful, afterall. Another item on that list would be gathering of information on that street-gang, I didn’t even know their name, on the Heroes’ League and other powered parties in the area.
An eighth list, the secret list. My ‘emergency’ list, containing prepared ways to deal with situations that went bad. As in, really bad. As in fouled up beyond any repair. If I had such a list before, the pyre-option would have been the only item on it. Now, I was lacking options, was lacking insurance. If I had been caught before, I would have placed a bet that my father would have used his influence to bury any and all report of it. But now? I had no idea how my father would react if he learned I was still alive. That I had faked my own death to get out of his control. He would take that as betrayal, betrayal of him, of the family. So, he may simply disavow me, saying that I was a fake, someone trying to capitalise on the fact that his daughter died. Or he would do something else. The knowledge that there was someone who had almost unlimited resources and an extremely unpredictable reaction to my continued existence was scary. Seriously scary.
I had to shake my head in order to eliminate the dread I was feeling, thinking of my father's reaction over my ‘betrayal’ and escape. To think of anything else, I started to look over my list of lists and realised that yes, those lists covered most necessary things. And if I realised that I missed something, I would just have to start a list for it. Maybe that would be a good ninth list. Things I had forgotten to put on lists.