milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

enzo matrix

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The door opens, and the young man formerly wearing a Burger Mart uniform walks through, this time in a t-shirt and jeans, with a bookbag over his shoulder. Mark stops and looks around. "Oh hey, this place again. Cool. Beats Physics class." He finds himself a seat at a table, drops his bag on it, and pulls out a pen and a piece of paper with a list of names on it:

Bulletproof?

~~Sentr~~

~~Marv~~

~~Superb~~

~~Omni-Boy~~ (HELL NO)

~~Tigh~~ Titan?

Looks like someone might be trying to think up names....

[OOC: Mark's trying to think of a superhero name. Feel free to offer suggestions.]

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Nosy sprite is nosy.

"What's that?"

Mark looks up. "Oh, hey. Enzo, right?" He looks down at the paper. He really needs to be careful about showing this around. Secret identities are, after all, supposed to be secret. "It's... um, a list."

Yes, thank you, Captain Obvious^*. Mark does not facepalm, but he looks like he'd like to.

(* - Not on the list.)

(Perhaps it should be.)

"I got that."

"Yeah. Figured you would." Mark thinks for a moment, then goes for broke. "I'm... trying to think up a good superhero name."

Enzo is quite delighted at this, but not particularly surprised.

"Cool! For you, or a character?"

"A character? Yes! A character! Absolutely. A superhero name for a superhero character! Exactly! Not for me, of course, because I am not a superhero!" Mark pauses, and then does facepalm.

"God, I totally suck at this secret identity thing...."

Enzo laughs. "You don't need to sweat it around here, dude. I mean, unless you see someone else from your world. But there's plenty of supers around here. My girlfriend's one."

"Really?" Mark looks a little more relieved. "That's a relief. I mean, Dad's always going on about keeping his identity secret." He gestures to the list again, adding, "Anyway, I was trying to think up a good name. Art says that a name is essential to creating an iconic look, so I need to think up a name to use." He shakes his head. "Unfortunately, all the ones I thought up aren't really great."

"Hey, if your family's in on it, you've got it easy."

Enzo looks over the list and grimaces. Omni Boy actually strikes him as the best of the lot.

"Yeah. Dad's in the business, so to speak. Omni-Man. He introduced me to this guy, Art, who makes costumes for different heroes. Art's been real helpful, but nothing he's shown me really felt right. And he said it'd be easier if he had a name, so...." Mark gestures at the list again, and sighs. "I think maybe all the good names are already taken."

"Well, Omni-Boy works, but only if you're gonna be sidekicking for your dad." He indicates the emphatic crossing-out. "I'm guessing not?"

"Geez, no! That'd be weird. And in any case, Dad prefers to work alone most of the time. He moves too fast for anyone but Red Rush to keep up with him, and Red Rush stays on the ground. I'm pretty fast, but not as fast as Dad, yet." He thinks for a moment. "And, I want to make my own impression. Calling myself Omni-Boy means I'm just doing what Dad does. Sorta limits things a little."

Mark thinks for a second, "Plus, I'm 17. Omni-Boy won't play for very long. And then what? I couldn't be Omni-Man unless Dad retired."

"Right. Hmm. Well, what's your power set?"

"Flight, super-strength, super-speed, invulnerability," says Mark. "Nothing unusual, which might be the problem. Nothing stands out. I mean, when you have someone called the Immortal or Red Rush, you know what's coming. How do I label something that's been labeled so many times before?"

"Oh, a FISS. Yeah, that's tricky. Uh... got a favourite animal?" he suggests lamely.

"A fiss?" While Mark does live in a world with superheroes and agencies that monitors said superheroes, he's not particularly intimate with the latter, or any of the terminology that they would use.

"Well, I don't have a pet, if that's what you mean," he adds. "Dogs are cool, though. And, I've started to appreciate birds, now that I can keep up."

"Flight, Invulnerability, Strength, Speed. F-I-S-S."

Enzo considers this. Probably not dogs... "Birdman?" he says dubiously.

"But I don't have wings," says Mark, flexing his shoulders to demonstrate (and, the narration should note, does not sound like Keith Andes OR Gary Cole). "Although, maybe something like 'Raptor' would work...." He scribbles "Raptor?" on his list.

"Or... what's a really fast bird?"

"Umm... hummingbirds?" Mark grins. "Nah. That'd be goofy. Maybe a falcon. They're really fast when they dive."

"You know, I met a flying girl the first time I walked in. Maybe she might have some ideas. I never did ask her what '84' meant."

"I was a falcon once. It was pretty cool.

"Oh, Julie! I think that's 'cause she's the eighty-fourth FISS in her world." At least, he seems to recall her saying something of the kind once.

"Huh," says Mark, bemused. "I thought it had something to do with George Orwell." He grins. "But I suppose that would be a villain."

"How were you a falcon?" he asks.

"A god turned me into one for a little while."

Mark comes from a world with plenty of miraculous people and events. He sees his father move faster than the eye can see and fly off into the sky on a regular basis, to say nothing of seeing superheroes all over the news. That being said, Enzo's statement makes him pause. (Spontaneous shapeshifting is actually pretty rare in his 'verse, either of the self or others, to say nothing of the idea of an actual divinity performing the action.) "That must've been... interesting. I'm guessing that it wasn't a curse. It sounds too cool to be a curse."

"Nah, Belar's cool, he asked first. We needed something small that could fly, and falcons're one of his animals."

Mark files that away, under "Things to Know About Milliways." "Is he the only god around?" he asks.

"Nah, there's a bunch of them around. But he's head of Security."

"I bet that keeps things under control," says Mark, grinning. "Must be nice to have that kind of muscle guarding the place." Then he gets an "ah ha" expression, and scribbles "Guardian" down on his list. "That might work," he says, showing it to Enzo.

"Hey, that's my format!"

Enzo is not sure whether he should be honoured or indignant.

Edited 2012-05-21 21:03 (UTC)

Mark stares blankly for a second, then says, "Oh, right. Computer program. So how does that work?"

"Guardian. Antivirus and system repair." He grins. "You wanna call yourself that, you're gonna have to wear the uniform."

Mark gives the Enzo's suit a critical eye. "It's not too bad. I could wear that. Is that just you, or all Guardians?"

"It's a uniform. This is the cadet uniform, though. The full one's like it, but it's turquoise, and it doesn't have this," he runs a finger down the yellow piping on his chest, "and it's got a black collar."

"Gotcha. Like the ROTC guys back home, or military academy students." He looks at the list for a second, and after a moment's thought, writes "uniform" next to "Guardian."

"So how's that work, dealing with viruses? It looks very formulaic from my end, whenever Dad runs the software on his computer. Just rolling numbers and a progress bar."

"That's just the User interface. There's a lot more fighting on our end, depending how tough the virus is. Though," he adds, "you probably don't even have sprites in your computers. Most worlds don't. Could you bring in a disc or something, so we can test it?"

"Probably. I don't have a computer myself, just the family one. Dad uses it to write his travel books." Mark grins, and adds, "When you can fly around the world as fast as he does, you get to see a lot of it, even if you usually fight villains and monsters when you're doing it."

"Any disk, or actual software?" Mark asks.

"Good day job," Enzo agrees.

"Anything oughta do. Disc, thumb drive, mp3 player, as long as it's computery the digimat can scan the... sort of data patterns. I don't really understand it myself," he admits.

"I'll see if I can borrow something from Dad's office," says Mark. "Hey, if there's sprites in our computers, that's pretty big, isn't it? It'd be like discovering life on another planet."

[OOC: Leaving work. Slowtime, please.]

"Yeah. And..." He hesitates. "It'd make things pretty complicated."

[OOC: Same here!]

Mark looks puzzled. "How so?" Then, his eyes widen, and he says, "Oh, wait. We delete stuff all the time when working with computers. That must be terrible!"

"Well... sort of..." Deletion, for sprites, tends to result from immediate causes in their world. Presumably it coincides somehow with the User's actions, but never obviously so. But...

"It's... more about the Games."

"Games?" As a teenager, Mark has played his share of video games. " Do you have to ... of course you have to play."

"Yeah. Well, sort of. We could just evacuate the whole sector, but if the User wins, the sector's trashed. At least there wouldn't be any sprites in it, but then we'd have to rebuild it, and it's just not good for the system."

Pause.

"I know it sounds like it shouldn't work like that, most Users here say so, and I'm sure it doesn't in their worlds, but where I'm from, Games do damage. So you see why I want to check."

Games are equivalent to a cruise missile. Mark is silent for a moment, and then says, in a much quieter tone. "Dude, that's terrible. I'll get you a disk as soon as I can. And you guys should poke your Users, because I'm not a computer guy, and even I know that's messed up!"

He remembers seeing a woman on the news, called Motherboard, and really hopes that Enzo's scan comes up clean.

"Thanks, dude. I wish we could just tell our Users, but we're too... too far in, I guess, we can't interface directly. Not in a way that'd make any sense to the User. Except in the Games, and we're kind of a little busy then."

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