Sonny was drunk, but “drunk” was not a binary on/off state for Sonny the way it was for most people. For Sonny, drunk was a one to ten scale he went up and down on throughout the day.

He would wake up at level zero or one, grab a couple beers or a morning screwdriver and zoom off to work. He would start work at about level three and fight crime and punch monsters until lunch, then he would have three or four more cocktails and punch back into work at about drunk level four.

He would continue through the afternoon cheerfully punching whatever needed to be punched, pausing for a nap in the GDC tower until his night shift started.

Sleep was the main thing that lowered his level on the scale, so he would have to grab a bottle of wine at dinner before finishing out his night shift, cruising through his evening workload at about level five.

Then Sonny would get off work and the real drinking would begin, as he consumed an amount of alcohol that would straight up kill a normal man twice. At this point it makes more sense to change the scale to number of evening shots consumed.

Most nights ended with thirty shots total, spread over the course of four or five hours in an evening. Sonny arrived at Pink Sensation that evening at a respectable level five drunk and started pounding shots as he came through the door. I watched him drank five shots as he came over to greet me.

It was amazing to see this man I had idolized greeting me like an old friend, making sure everybody had “met Tim” before hugging Donna and looking back and forth between us.

“Aw shit, I’m late. Did I miss Herman’s whole welcome to the house speech and get here late enough to cut into his Donna time? Sorry, kid. You go off with the nice lady, I’ll be here when you get back!”

But Donna looked over at me and let me sit back down. “Sonny, look at his face. He’s here to see you.”

“Why would anybody want to see my drunk ass?” Sonny said. “Donna’s a lot more fun to look at, and she sure as hell smells better!”

Sonny grabbed a giant vodka mixed with some energy drink and pounded it like a can of beer. I looked around at all the smiling faces on this couch and suddenly felt a little let down.

I hadn’t accepted a personal invitation from Sonny Mao. I was in the middle of some kind of Bluestar initiation ritual, where Sonny was the bait. It was still great to be here and be sitting across from an honest-to-god movie hero, but I suddenly felt like my whole evening was on rails, and I was just along for the ride.

There was a weird pressure building in the back of my head, like something was knocking on my brain trying to get in. It started the minute Donna shook my hand and was slowly growing as we sat there. It didn’t feel like Lydia, and it didn’t feel like magic. It didn’t even feel like a mental intrusion, because when Paul tried that, it didn’t feel like anything at all. I couldn’t identify it, but it wasn’t bad enough to be distracting, so I went on with my plan for the evening.

I had something I had wanted to say since I was fifteen, and I didn’t know how much longer Sonny would be conscious.

“Sonny,” I began. “I know everybody says this, but I watched all your movies, man. Me and my friends, we memorized every line from every Angel of Death. Your movies were like my whole childhood through junior high. My home life was absolute shit, but I got a lot of happy memories wrapped up in those movies, and I just wanted to say thanks.”

Sonny got serious enough to put his drink down. He leaned over and smiled at me like he wasn’t just putting on a show anymore.

“I’ve heard that a lot, but it never gets old. I know what I am, kid. I’m a joke, but I’m a good joke. I’m a joke who helps people, and I make people laugh with the stupid shit I do. So yeah, a lot of kids have said that to me, but it warms my heart every time, because it means no matter what else I fuck up in my life, I made a kid happy.

“A lot of people said my stuff was too raw for a young audience, with me snapping people’s necks and setting bad guys on fire, but you know, at the end of the day, I did it for the kids.”

* * *

Sonny paused a minute between stories to look me up and down again. “New guy on a major team, have they slipped you the Mitsi yet?”

“Beg pardon?”

Sonny reached in his pocket and pulled out a jet-black rectangle like he was doing a magic trick.

“The Mitsumi Black Card,” Sonny said, just like in the commercials. “The most elite credit instrument on the planet - completely unlimited, opens doors to places nobody else can go. Ultimate perk for people like us. Buy whatever you want, charge it to your sponsor.

“But you gotta be careful. You can run up as much as you want and party as hard as you want, as long as you let them get it on camera. And as long as your media percentage brings in more than you’re spending, you’ll never get a phone call, and you’ll never see a bill.

“The only thing they won’t forgive is a low profile. As long as I’m out there smacking mutants and busting gangs, I can do whatever I want. But if I get sidelined or spend too long out of the spotlight, they’ll cut the card off and start using my likeness for video games and shit, keeping me on a minimum allowance until they make their money back. They usually give these to young guys as soon as they sign up. Sounds like your sponsor is ripping you off.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“I don’t have a sponsor. VBC offered, but I turned them down.”

Sonny snapped his head up and straightened like he was suddenly sober. “Why the fuck would you turn them down?”

“I’ve got a weird media block from HDI, but it was mostly because of Denise. She keeps her media rights public domain so anybody can make money off her. Says she wants to make people love heroes again and prove we don’t just do it for the money.”

Sonny stared at me, quiet and serious for a long time. “Good for you, kid. Good for you. Shit, I didn’t think they made them like you anymore.”

* * *

Sonny kept slamming shots like clockwork as he told us about his day of fighting junkies and mutants in the Quarantine Zone that used to be the South Side of Chicago.

Now it was an open-air prison surrounded by walls and barbed wire, a giant containment area made to house residents who had been permanently altered by a designer drug called RedStar, RedStar Kool-Aid, or just Red.

RedStar had been created by some kind of evil genius in the 1980s and had been a plague on Chicago ever since. RedStar gave people random temporary superpowers for about an hour, but it changed your DNA a little more each time, until you were deformed or insane.

Each hit was a roll of the dice, but some people seemed to get good rolls over and over, developing useful powers like flight, super strength, invulnerable skin, or energy blasts, just long enough to attack the border guards or claim one of the bounties for killing an automated sentry.

Bluestar 3 fought a constant battle against these RedStar mutants and the gangs who exploited them, trying to keep the drug contained and keep the gang violence from spreading into the civilized, corporate-controlled parts of the city.

Sonny had spent most of the day tracking down a grotesque one-eyed mutant named Bonyak, a super strong, semi-invulnerable super genius who ran a smuggling operation out of Rainbow Beach, shipping RedStar across the Lake Michigan blockade in tiny stealth submarines.

RedStar had been a public health pandemic in the 1980s and ‘90s, but by 21c, every kid had been warned about it in school and seen a dozen educational videos about what it could do to you.

Hardcore criminals still used it to get the edge in Bluestar confrontations and gang fights. Bonyak was trying to innovate and market a new, improved version that could be smoked or vaped.

He claimed his version had less risk of death or permanent transformation, but dealers had been promising this for decades, and the chance of permanently fucking yourself was still about one in ten.

The unpredictable nature of the RedStar threat had created a weird partnership between Bluestar 7 and Bluestar 3. The Detroit team never left town, so our guys would frequently be called to Chicago to deal with some lucky bastard who got godlike powers from the drug.

And sometimes, some new containment strategy would work better than expected, and Sonny and his friends would have time to come help Bluestar 7 with river monster fights.

Bluestar 3 was considered the superior team, and they got way more media attention, mostly because of Sonny.

Donna had been sitting with her hip glued to mine all night, but had made no move to touch me or do anything else to accelerate the seduction process. Just like Lydia, she knew all she had to do was wait.

Sonny had been giving me the eye every twenty minutes or so, urging me to go off with Donna every time he reached a natural pause in his story, but every time, I encouraged him to just keep going.

After the fourth time, Sonny abruptly rose to his feet and said, “Has Herman given you the tour yet? Come with me.”

Sonny took me up a cool floating staircase held up by grav fields. It was actually a bit unsettling, stepping on stairs made of hovering glass like I was walking on air.

The second floor was a series of closed doors that Sonny immediately started to open.

The rooms were apparently bedrooms. Occupied bedrooms. Sonny opened the first one to reveal an old man in a bathrobe chatting with a pretty naked girl who waved casually at Sonny as soon as he opened the door.

The old man looked up and said, “Hey, a new badge! Come on in and meet Candy!”

I tried to smile as I shook my head. “Nice to meet you,” I waved from the doorway. “Sorry to bother you guys.”

I closed the door and turned to talk to Sonny, but he had already opened the next one, revealing three gorgeous naked men of various body types lounging on a giant bed. Another old man in a bathrobe was chatting with them like they were trading stock tips. One of the men waved me in and Sonny stepped aside for me.

“If this is what you’re into, don’t let me stop you,” Sonny said. “I’m old, but I’m not an asshole. You do you.”

I shook my head no, so Sonny opened the next door to reveal two of the legacy porn stars, both women, putting on a show for another guy in a bathrobe. He was maybe in his 40s, and I could swear I had seen him on the news.

Two naked men were watching from the couch with their dicks out like they were on standby, and just hadn’t been invited to put them anywhere yet.

A third woman had rolled off the bed and just stayed on the floor, apparently unconscious, drooling vomit. I immediately pulled up the medical divination spell from Taltorak and used it to check on her. Using this on an intoxicated person turned out to be a mistake, as it transferred enough of her condition to make me sway on my feet.

My first instinct was to intervene, but this was a woman, not a girl, and she wasn’t in immediate danger.

“Wow, I bet it smells great in there!” I said sarcastically, trying to make Sonny laugh, but Sonny just shut the door.

“Sonny, please stop! If you keep opening doors, I’m gonna try to run in and rescue somebody, and Randy says I’m not supposed to do that!”

“Can’t arrest anybody in here, kid. Herman keeps his legal shit tight.”

“You can’t just put your thumb on a glass plate and consent to a rape!”

Sonny shrugged. “In this house you can.”

* * *

I got the impression that the voices and concerns of others were really just an annoying background hum to Sonny at this point, but he seemed remarkably lucid as he crossed his arms and looked down on me.

“So, what is your problem?” he asked. “You don’t want the girls, you don’t want the boys, what do you want?”

“I… I have a girlfriend. She’s really shy and she is not happy about this hero stuff, so I didn’t really come here to party.”

Sonny winced in embarrassment. “Aw shit, kid. I didn’t realize you were with somebody. Is this a new thing? Your DMA file says ‘single, unattached.’ That’s the only reason I brought you here.”

“My official government file says I’m an incel?” I shouted the question at him, embarrassed and exasperated.

“I don’t know what that means, but it definitely says ‘lives alone, no partner.’ I even checked with Hardy to make sure you guys weren’t together.”

“Denise said we’re not together? Ouch. Of course, we’re not together but it still hurts to hear it out loud.”

I should have been grateful that Harry was helping me hide Lydia, but to look like a hopeless loser in front of one of my heroes? I just couldn’t do it.

“Yeah, I lied to Harrison about it, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t give me away.”

“Yeah, it’s no problem,” Sonny said, waving this off as he considered me again. “If you’ve got a girl, you really should get back to her, but could you do me a favor before you leave?”

“Sonny Mao needs a favor from me?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “A big one, but I’ll make it worth your while. Follow me.”