Supermaxx
Half Pint
op2024
Cyberlad
Ezekiel
PatientBean
Mao Mao
Retired
Qia
Festive
Documentation gets stacked and shuffled. Fingers run across the edge as hands flick through the pages, gauging the length. The full document is turned on it’s side and tapped twice on a home office desk to straighten and square the sides. A bulldog clip placed over the top to secure it, before it’s put in a small, heavy-duty safe kept within a desk drawer, the drawer itself protected by lock and key.
The man wanders across to his private bar, pours himself scotch on the rocks. He swirls it vacantly as he stares out the window contemplating the full ramifications of what he has just done, their likely consequences, and the following moves he’ll have to be mindful of making. He looks back at the desk briefly, with no remorse, no morality for the consequences, only a thought for his own personal vulnerability.
Satisfied he’s given enough thought to the ramifications of his decisions for now, he takes his glass and leaves the confines of his home office for his living room. He sits down in a fine velvet chair, turns the television on to a 24 hour news network and watches the clockwork of the world.
* * * * *
Gloved fingers frantically glide around a keyboard, the slap of keys echoing uncomfortably loudly through the empty pitch-black office. In the depths of his mind the Vigilante knew he SHOULD be alright; security only swept through the floors three times throughout the night. But the times were largely unpredictable. The building’s security officers were generally lax, and frequently lost track of time. He could have as much as 4 hours, or they could walk through any second.
He saved his changes, confirmed his desire to do so and breathed a sigh of relief as he set the computer to stand-by mode. Done. Now the window of his vulnerability was down to however long it would take him to safely get out of the building.
He stayed clear of the elevators. That was the easiest giveaway, since the movements of the lifts were monitored centrally and visible to anyone working the security office. He kept mainly to the shadows, knowing the internal cameras cycled through sequentially every few seconds. It was impossible to know which would be viewed when. But fortunately, the same lax security officers were the ones monitoring those cameras. So long as he wasn’t too flamboyant, chances were they wouldn’t be paying too much attention. Hopefully. He noiselessly crept up five sets of stairs, before he heard voices and saw the swinging light of a flashlight above him. Silently he slinked back down one floor and melted away into the shadows. The tapping of black office shoes on linoleum were followed by an increasingly loud murmur of two men discussing some inane local sports result or another, as maglights swept across the floor searching for potential trespassers and the imaginary under the routine pretense of doing work. The Vigilante tucked himself tighter into his hiding place as if he could feel the warmth of the spotlight.
Seconds passed and so did the security guards. The man in black watched as they went down the stairs, and crossed the floor and decided to take the other stairwell to continue back up. He made good time as he felt confident that there would be no surprises on his way up now, keeping to the sides still but racing on quietly towards the roof. The Vigilante got to the top floor and the final door to the rooftop outside, which was a wired-up heavy fire door, but he had come prepared. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wired by-pass, carefully attaching clamped wires to both sides’ contact points before taking a beat to breathe. Finally he shoved the heavy door open and winced in anticipation of it all going wrong and triggering the fire alarm, but it had worked perfectly. He slipped underneath the mess of loose wires, holding the door open with his foot. He pinched one end of the wire and pulled it through the door, trying carefully to let the heavy door close as gently as he could control. Finally, he yanked the wire back through the tiny gap in the door. He recoiled the wire quickly and stuffed it back in his pocket, pulling out his grapple gun and walking to the rooftop’s edge.
And just like that. He was gone.
* * * * *
Isaac tossed his keys in the bowl on his kitchen countertop. He got changed and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He habitually flicked the television onto the news for background noise as he busied himself around the house. He took stock of the sugar in his storeroom, still fine for the week, even with how much he would go through. He vacuumed his empty closet again, just to be sure, before putting it away again in its own power-docked nook on the wall next to it.
He went back to the television and watched it for one cycle. Nothing of importance was happening. He turned it off and started hauling bags. He loaded up the small nook with a familiar amount and made one final pass of the house, checking lights were turned off. The house was black as pitch and felt completely devoid of life. It was the lonely hour between 2 and 3 am, but Isaac’s day was still at its start. He walked into his closet, flicked a familiar switch and let the randomness of quantum uncertainty pick his destination.
* * * * *
Isaac took note of the purple painted closet as he stepped out into Lost Haven’s early afternoon. The purple symbolized he was in his French Quarter rental on DuChamp. He stepped around the closet and grabbed the vacuum from it’s nook, carefully clearing the floor of all the scattered excess sugar granules. He grabbed some keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter as he walked out into the brisk Maine afternoon air.
He’d left his school things at his Little Ulster house, after a quick stop he’d be ready for the rest of his day.
* * * * *
He pulled up to Lost Haven University having retrieved his laptop and bag. Since it was early enough for him to do so, he figured he should put in the appearance and earn the capital for all the days he’d be too busy protecting one of two cities through wanton acts of violence to ever pretend to take notes and pay attention.
He pulled up in the carpark and hit the central locking button; the final precaution to car theft, with the first being his junker’s general aesthetic. The car looked the part of belonging to a regular broke college kid, even if the driver looked considerably older.
He cut through the sports fields to make his way to the Law building, only to see a familiar kid racing across the green to get to him. He cursed quietly under his own breath.
“So..!” The young man enthused, seemingly continuing a conversation Isaac didn’t remember having. “Tryouts for fifteens have to be coming up soon!”
“Yeah… about that. I don’t think the new guy has any interest in me doing that anymore. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t kill the program.” Isaac replied in his thick Terrarian accent.
The younger man looked crestfallen. “The new Dean?”
“With a capital ‘D’. Yeah. Don’t think he likes me very much. Still, not done yet. We’ll go through the motions ‘til he does, I s’pose.”
“I’ll-- I’ll talk to him! Maybe I can get him to understand.”
“You’re more than welcome to try. I can’t hang around to talk. I’ve got class. Probably missed too many as it is.”
“Ok. I’ll handle this. Don’t you worry about this! I’ll handle it!” The youth called back over his shoulder, having changed direction and started running towards the Dean’s office.”
“I’m not worried about that.” Isaac said once he was out of earshot. “I’m worried you’ll either succeed or he’ll think I put you up to it…” He muttered to himself as he started to jog to the Law building.
Isaac got to the lecture hall just as freshmen were starting to pour in. Isaac decided he’d pick a seat on an edgerow in case he had to make a hasty exit due to “other business”, but close enough that the lecturer wouldn’t think he wasn’t engaged in the lesson. As he walked down the steps towards the front one of the more game first years spoke up.
“So, what are we learning today, Teach’.”
“The class is on your schedule, kid. Do I look like a ‘MIZ Pearson’.”
“I don’t think it’s my place to judge you on how you’d fill out a skirt.” The youth responded, and he turned to fistbump a kid sitting behind him.
Isaac stood and stared at the source of his irritation, sucking one of his rear molars and contemplating the costs and merits of caving in the head of a kid who needed a fake ID to buy alcohol. He was sitting 4 seats into the row, Isaac could visualize taking one broad jump onto a desk, a short step down into a seat for stability, grabbing him by the scruff of the shirt and hurling him down to the floor of the lecture hall. Maybe he couldn’t throw him the whole way there. Maybe it would take a bounce or two.
Isaac grinned at the thought, and turned to continue walking down to his seat..
“Nice comeback.” The grinning youth said.
Isaac turned back. “Amazing. If your father could have accurately said that to your mother 20 years ago nobody would have to deal with this kind of shit from you right now…”
The grin dropped off his face. “Ooooooooh!” the kid behind him yelled, “Savage! He got you, bro!”
“That better?” Isaac asked, putting his laptop on his desk. The other students around kept jeering the kid who got put in his place by the older man. His face was reddening more and more by the second. Sensible heels clicked down the aisle and it was clear the class was about to start. As an attractive woman in her mid to late 20s, or possibly even very early 30s, walked to the the desk at the front of the class.
“Alright, alright, get yourselves organized I want to jump right in today. Mr Brunson, is there any chance that could be possible or are you going to be a distraction for the first five minutes again. This is college now, not high school, none of you have to be here if you don’t want to. If you want to walk out those doors, that’s on you. Just don’t blame anyone else when your parents ask why you squandered the opportunity and you’re left paying student loans with nothing to show for it.”
She put her things down next to the desk, retrieved a stack of stapled paper from an expensive legal briefcase and left them on the edge of the desk itself. She turned on the class’ recording device so the lecture could be turned into an audio file for anyone who would be taking the class online. She then went and started to wipe the board clear, still talking loudly over her shoulder.
“I’ve marked your freeform essays, they’re up here at the front. Feel free to retrieve them at the end of class…”
She wrote “TORTS” in big letters across the board
“Alright, does anyone know what a ‘tort’ is? ...Brunson, if you or your pal Overton, tell me it’s a dessert, so help me.”
But Danny Overton was in no mood to tell anybody anything. His forehead was still such a deep shade of crimson from Isaac’s comment it looked like you could fry an egg on it.
A hand sprang up from the back of the class.
“You don’t really have to put your hand up here…”
The young girl eagerly spat out “FITTED CAB!”
Brunson laughed from his seat and shook his head, and the rest of the class broke out laughing as well.
Ms Pearson chuckled from the front as well, but quelled the class. “That’s actually not as bad an answer as it first sounds, and we’ll get to that by the end of the lesson. Your sister took this class too, didn’t she Miss..?”
The girl blushed in embarrassment, “Heather-- I mean, Miss Fox. Heather Fox.”
“Ok, Heather. Calm down. It’s just class. I know what you meant, even if everybody else here doesn’t yet. But at the moment we’re talking more broad strokes. What, just as a general definition, is a tort?”
“Oh! Umm-- a tort is, like, any kind of harmful thing which someone could be responsible for in civil law.”
“Thank you, Miss Fox. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.” She turned and wrote ‘Harmful Thing’, ‘RESPONSIBLE’ and ‘Civil Law” on the board and underlined each.
“And as Miss Fox was kind enough to jump ahead and spoil us for the next answer, examples of the primary actionable torts can be remembered as…”
She turned and wrote the following letters on the board:
F
I
T
T
E
D
C
A
B
I
T
T
E
D
C
A
B
“--Now did your sister say what this means?”
“Umm… The first is false imprisonment, then one of the ‘T’s is trespass, I think. Something-something assault and battery..?”
“Well, you got over half of them…”
Ms Pearson turned and filled in the gaps:
False
Imprisonment
Trespass
Trespass
Emotional
Distress
Conversion
Assault
Battery
“Hey! You screwed up, You wrote ‘Trespass’ twice.” Danny Overton piped up, now seemingly cooled down from the earlier burn.
“Not a screw up, but good point. One is for trespass upon land, and the other is for trespass upon chattel or personal property.”
“Which one’s which?” Chimed in a voice from the back.
“What do you mean?”
“Which ‘T’ is land and which ‘T’ is for cattle.”
Ms Pearson turned to look at the student, then turned back to the board, then finally back to the freshman in frustration.
“Does it matter? This is just to help you remember what the main actionable torts are.”
She turned back to the board and wrote ‘(land)’ next to one of the ‘T’s.
“And it’s ‘chattel’, not cattle.”
She wrote ‘(chattel)’ next to the other. Then drew an arrow with two heads linking the two descriptions showing they were interchangeable ‘T’s.
Isaac sat, listening and found himself staring intensely at the list. He was pretty sure that at some time or another, over the last ten years he was responsible for having done every single thing listed on that board.
And furthermore, at the conclusion of these courses, once he has graduated and has his law degree he knew he would still intend to continue doing so.
It took him ten minutes to realize that whilst he was listening to what was being said, he was far too engrossed in his own head to really be making sense of any of it. It was just white noise to his thoughts.
He wondered if that would always be an apt metaphor for law in his life.
And so the lesson continued.
* * * * *
The class concluded and students walked to the front of their class and found their essay in the alphabetically sorted stack at the front of the class. Isaac took a few seconds to catch on that students had been packing their stuff up to get ready to leave, he’d lost track of time and was taking loose notes on his laptop. As a result he was one of the last ones to get to his feet, as he saved his file and put his laptop on sleep mode, putting it in his bag.
The last dozen or so essays were strewn across the desk, but Isaac was the only one left. Presumably the remaining papers belonged to students who were away and would be taking the day’s lecture online.
“Good to see you decided to come in for a class.” Isaac heard behind him, as he flipped through the papers. “And your choice of essay topic was very interesting as well.” Isaac finally found his work in the loose papers and turned to face the voice’s source.
“Thanks.” He replied. “I guess…”
“Well, it was meant as a good thing. Sorry if that came across as catty at all. Guess I’ve still got my ‘teacher’s voice’ turned way up.”
Isaac smiled in response.
“And I meant it about your paper. Most people usually just write some egocentric paper on what they think I want to hear in terms of why they decided to take law. ...When generally it’s because they had the grades that allowed it and Mommy or Daddy pushed them that way.”
Isaac took a chance on what he could get away with. “Is that speaking from personal experience?”
Ms Pearson laughed. “Maybe a little.”
“It’s hard to blame them though. They’re kids.” Isaac said. “If you don’t give them a topic of course they’re going to talk about themselves. I have to be honest, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to write on. Freeform essay. It’s too broad. Too many options.”
“That’s true.” She replied. “But the main point is to figure out how they’re writing to start with so things can be fine tuned later. Add layers... how to properly use footnotes. It’s a process.”
“So you’re saying mine was overkill.” He smirked.
“Not at all. It broke up my night when I was marking all the others. Interesting choice of topic. What made you pick it?”
“General legal guidelines for a liaison department between self identifying superheroes and law enforcement? Well, we’re in Lost Haven. At LHU. it seems pretty pertinent doesn’t it? Topical. I mean, its pretty clear I'm new in town.”
“I suppose so. Is that what brought you here? Interest in capes and demons? I must say you don’t look the type.”
“No. My father died. I spent a few years travelling the world. And what I realised was that it’s a fast changing world… but it wasn’t going to change in the one way I wanted it to, so I figured I should probably at least go back to school and figure things out with some sense of normalcy.”
She chuckled. “Try again.”
“Pardon me?” Isaac said, surprised at her response.
“If you were looking for the stability of routine, you’d be at classes full time and not have taken a wide array of courses that seem to be almost completely available online with no personal attendance requirements.”
“There’s a difference between wanting to fall back into routine and normalcy and feeling completely comfortable that you’re ready for it. Set myself up with a bunch of online courses, and if I don’t feel I can face the world some day… I don’t have to.”
“Ah-huh. And how do you explain away taking on coaching a team..?”
The Hell..?
“Well, for one thing that wasn’t my idea. Second, so we don’t just make this a one-way street, Madame Prosecutor, what’s someone like you doing teaching freshman law? You were once the most promising young lawyer the DA’s office, I’d heard you were inline for a promotion that would have made you one of the youngest Assistant District Attorney’s in the state’s history and then you left before it was made official. What happened there?”
The lecturer stood agape.
“Don’t look at me like that. You’re not going to spin me a story that there’s a second Josie Pearson, are you? And as best I can tell it’s a lot less unusual for a prospective older orphoned student looking into his teacher’s credentials than there is for said teacher to be looking into a particular student’s extracurriculars and other classes… particularly with as attractive a student as is in this case...”
She turned a deep shade of crimson and spluttered.
“Alright, the last bit was unfair and just me poking the bear. But I think we can both agree, when just meeting people, perhaps an open interrogation isn’t the way to go. Particularly when that person just mentioned their father died.”
“OK. Perhaps, some of that wasn’t entirely unwarranted.” She said, as her skin tone started to be restored and a smile started to crease upon her face.
“So maybe this’ll do better. Josie Pearson? Isaac Fontaine.” He held his hand out.
She took his hand in hers. “Isaac Fontaine? Josie Pearson.”
