Meanwhile, back in the city...
Returned to the cluttered coziness of his cubicle, Lilian sat crisscrossed on his computer chair, hunched over his camera as he flipped through the pictures from that morning. His lunch, a bowl of some mushroom-based pasta he'd picked up from a nicer restaurant, was left forgotten on the edge of his desk, barely touched. On the infamous lunch run days he hated so much-- both for the fact that he was always the damn gopher, and because it was obvious that the whole arrangement was only approved to be used as a major tax write-off --Lilian often went out of his way to get the most expensive thing he could for himself without being blatantly obvious in the act. Just his little act of spite against a company that tried so hard to appear good, but was, in actuality, just as corrupt as any other commercial business. Usually, he was happy to eat something that wasn't a Styrofoam cup of imitation noodles or a questionably ‘ripe’ sandwich from a gas station, but...something had been gnawing at his brain ever since the encounter at Chipotle.
That guy.
It was something about that guy.
The twiggy one. With the feathers and the green hair nd the vitiligo.
There was just...something about him.
Something Li was going more and more mad over the more and more he thought about it.
He got to the pictures of Gamma-Burn. The ones where the villain had removed his mask. The ones where the villain had been coughing his lungs out. The ones with the blood.
He stared at the pictures, wondering why they stuck out so much. Sure, they had the villain in a moment of weakness. And sure, they showed an aspect of Gamma-Burn that could be very dangerous if it ever got out. But...why was it bugging him so much?
Lilian continued to flip through that set of the photos he had taken, moving from one to the next and back through in rapid succession like the most gruesome and chaotic flipbook to ever exist.
What is it? he thought as he stared at Gamma-Burn’s blood-dripping chin, Why does this random guy have me so focused on this?
The thoughts continued to eat away at him as he finally gave up on the pictures and moved on with his work. Writing the Cuckoo Cacoa article turned out to be just as torturous as he thought it would be. Maybe even more so with how scattered his thoughts were. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the thoughts of that afternoon or the pictures of Gamma-Burn out of his mind, and it made writing his articles nigh impossible. Eventually, the day came to an end, without Li even realizing it at that, and it took a co-worker popping into his cubicle to tell him it was time to go home.
He packed up his things and shut down his computer, turning off the string lights that littered his space before grabbing his bag and heading out of the mostly abandoned building. It took until he stepped out into the chilly air of the springtime late evening for Lilian to remember his bike had been destroyed that morning and the moment it hit him, he let out a hard, exasperated curse.
“God fucking damnit.”
As if his day hadn’t been crappy enough.
Too tired to deal with walking home and potentially being met with an unsavory sort popping out of an alley, Lilian sat on the barrier wall of a planter box outside the building and pulled out his phone. He usually tried not to use so-called ‘luxury’ services like Ryde and FoodDudes, but in cases like this, he felt it was worth the risk of a surprise overdraft when payments suddenly went through without warning.
It wasn’t long before the crappy Toyota pulled up to the curb, and not much longer after that before Lilian was trudging his way up the hazardous stairs to his apartment. His thoughts were still spiraling like a whirlpool over the events of the day, everything growing tighter and tighter, more and more condensed and compacted and knit together in a way as it was pulled to the center of his focus. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice that someone else was coming down the stairs, annoyingly walking to their left of the walkway, rather than the natural right that made more sense, which put them on Lilian’s right, directly in his path. Somehow, the two collided, and Lilian had to frantically paw at the banister to keep himself from falling head first, backward, on the stairs. As he fell against the railing and slumped down to the step with his heart racing and breath spiking, the other person just continued along, muttering that Li should watch where he was going. Li tried to spit back a venomous comment of his own, but the words came out as an incoherent slur of sounds and syllables, nothing that could be considered words.
He sat there a while, leveling his breath and his heart rate before pulling himself back to his feet and continuing the last flight up to his apartment. Once home, he barely too the time to lock the chain behind him and kick his shoes off before shuffling across the room and flopping onto his mattress. He was hungry. Of course, he was hungry, both his breakfast and his lunch had gone to waste, and now he was at home where, haha big surprise, food had not spontaneously appeared while he was at work.
Gods I hate the fucking country, he thought as he slowly rolled over and stared at the wall stained with...what he told himself was just water and dirt... Why the hell did I move here? he asked himself, then went on in his thoughts, That’s right. American dream bullshit, he laughed as he threw off his backpack and shove it off the bed, then rolled onto his back and focused on the ceiling for a moment, staring at that strange water stain that he swore looked like Nicholas Cage in that one meme. It was equally as creepy as it was annoying when he was going through internal battles like this.
Closing his eyes, Lilian took a deep breath and sighed. He thought back to the encounter as Chipotle, painting a picture of the interaction in his mind as he went over all the little details he could remember. He thought about the phone call, and how he had rammed into that big dude. He thought about the twiggy guy butting in where he had no place being. He thought about how up-his-own-ass that guy had been. The fucking preaching that guy did. He thought about the guy’s mouth. His stupid sharp teeth, the blood he spat and wiped on his sleeve like a child with a runny nose. Blood that stuck to his lips so similar to the blood on Gamma-Burn’s lips.
Li stopped.
So...similar…
In a flurry of motion, Li flew up on his bed and reached back down for his backpack, yanking the bag back up onto the bed and frantically working the zippers before plunging his hand inside and pulling out his camera case. He tore open the case and ripped the camera out from inside then impatiently pounded the buttons to turn it on before flipping through to the close-ups of Gamma-Burn without his mask. He stared at the structure of the villain’s mouth, chin, and just his jaw in general, and he thought back to the guy at Chipotle. In his mental image of the asshole from earlier, he placed a black rectangle over the top half of the guy’s face and focused directly on his jaw, his lips, his teeth.
“No..." he murmured out loud, eyes opening to look at the picture again, “No,” he insisted. But even as he tried to deny it, he knew that his memory and attention to detail were rarely wrong. Camera still in hand, Lilan flopped back on the bed and glowered at Nic Cage on the ceiling, “Oh shut up,” he grumbled, then brought the camera up to look at the picture one more time. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind. He had not just run into, but debated, very poorly for that matter, with the one and only supervillain he absolutely idolized. What the hell were the odds of that?
After a few moments, he rolled over again and pushed to sit up, reaching to set the camera on his nightstand before he pulled out his phone again and opened the Amazon app.
Later that week...
Interview Day
6:22 AM - Dress to Impress...I Guess?
Lilian shifted through the disorderly array of clothing strewn about his studio apartment, ripping through drawers and tearing shirts from the hangers on the metal garment rack he’d purchased some time after moving into the place that lacked a closet. It was the big day. Bug Day, one could say. It was the day he was to interview King Stag at precisely two in the afternoon. As long as everything went according to plan and the hero wasn’t pulled away by some villain’s antics, anyway. This was the day. The day Lilian had been hoping for. Not only was it his first official interview with someone who wasn’t a little old grandma who made a pie for her dead husband’s birthday. His first official interview with a front page headliner. More than that, it was the day he got to actually talk with King Stag. Talk. Not just bombard him with requests for pictures and an interview. This was possibly the most momentous event in his life...positively momentous... positively...
So why couldn’t he figure out what the hell to wear? He had already been up since before his alarm. Truth was, he really hadn’t slept, at all. Between preparing his interview questions and making an outline of how he wanted to try and lead the interview, he had also been working on mapping out the area around that damn Chipotle so he could hit it up that weekend with the Geiger counter that had finally arrived the day before. Like hell did Lilian have the money for overnight shipping!
As his room slowly became the aftermath of a flash sale in a clothing boutique, Lilian finally settled on a simple outfit of a crisp, white, collared shirt under an oatmeal-colored sweater with a soft knit and a pair of dark red pants he rarely wore. He futzed with his brown and rose locks in the mirror for a while, styling it one way or another before aggressively tussling it into a fluffy mess and starting over again. Eventually, he settled on the messier look, deciding that the ‘just rolled out of bed’ style complimented his casual attire and helped him to look more natural and less like an obsessed fanboy trying to get laid-- Trying to say something...trying to say something.
Eating a quick breakfast of cereal and a banana he’d picked up from the store a few days earlier, Lilian got his things together and rushed for the door. With his bike out of commission, he had to leave earlier than usual so he could make up for the lost time walking to the subway station. At the door, Lilian looked at his ratty old shoes, nudging them with his sock-clad toe and wondering if they were too...casual for the interview today. Would King Stag even care? Would King Stag even look at his feet? Doubtful, but then again, what if? What if King Stag looked at his feet and saw the ratty old canvas and tattered old laces and decided he didn’t want to do an interview with a hobo-adjacent reporter?
Lilian frowned, then went over to his garment rack and knelt down to pull a shoebox out from under it. He pulled out a pair of never-been-worn Oxfords that his aunt had sent him for Christmas a few years back and pulled out the packing before slipping the shoes on. They felt wrong. They were tight and pinching on the sides, and yet, at the same time, they were somehow too big, feeling like clown shoes on his feet. Lilian debated if it was worth it to wear the uncomfortable, constricting footwear for the day. He wouldn’t be able to free-run with them on, that was for sure, but then again, he wasn’t supposed to be running off around the city today anyway. Snuffing out his thoughts with a heavy breath, he decided to just go with the dress shoes and finally made his way out the door.
7:45 AM ─ The Seconds Are Dragging Their Fucking Heels I Swear to God
Some hours later, he arrived at work, unscathed, and with no need to run into the heat of a battle. Hadn’t needed to do that all week in fact. Things had been quiet since Earth Day, and as he reached the office, Lilian wondered for a moment if Gamma-Burn, that guy had something planned, or if he was suffering something. Wait-- Why was he thinking that? This was Bug Day not...Radiation Day? Didn’t have the same ring. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the day to be focusing on the green-haired asshole he wanted so badly to hate, yet couldn’t bring himself into doing purely for the connection he had made. He was so sure he was right, he was willing to bet anything on it. Not that he would tell anyone what he figured out. He wasn’t one to reveal a super’s secret identity after all, and...besides that, he didn’t even know who that guy was. All he had was a face and a last sighting. Not much to go on. Not as much as he had for King Stag!
1:37 PM ─ Insert Final Countdown Intro Here
The morning dragged on forever, and as lunchtime hit, Lilian hid in the bathroom for an hour to escape being sent out on another lunch run. He knew his boss would do it just to make him late for his interview so the man could assign someone else to the story. No way was Lilian letting that happen. Not after all he’d done for this chance at having the biggest article to be published on the Word of the Willow website. The final hour stretched on and Lilian found himself pacing the office, finding every excuse to be outside his cubicle that was feeling so, so very confining in those final moments. Bathroom, printer, fax machine, break room, even an in-office coffee run, before finally, finally, 2pm hit.
This was it.
This was the time.
King Stag and his public representative would be walking through the office doors at any moment.
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