anima-ebben - Tumblr blog

[anima-ebben]

Very happy when I'm doing my study near the gender neutral bathrooms and judging by who goes in, it seems like people really are treating them as gender neutral despite being clearly labeled as one with urinal one without, right next to each other.

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Well. It happened, and I suppose I should talk to you about it, get some of the remaining nervousness out onto the page.

So I was walking right along next to the river, it was dark (time of year does that), I was drinking my tea and admiring the smell of the river, it rained yesterday so there was plant and nice dirt smell in the air. 

Then boom! right out from behind a building came a guy with a mask on. He was holding a knife. For a second I worried he was a cape, but no, holding the knife clearly in front of me, then he lunged forward, grabbed my purse, pulled off my backpack.

I wasn’t really prepared for this, was hoping there’d be a standoff-situation sort of. By the time I’d processed everything, I saw him running off. I couldn’t let my first bad guy go, you know, so I dropped my tea and sprinted after him. I had almost caught up when he was getting on a bike, struggling to balance everything on his shoulder that he stole from me. If he managed to ride off there’d be nothing I could do, I was exhausted already.

One more shot. I jumped forward, and just as I was about to faceplant behind his back wheel, I flicked into my other form. Clothing fell to the ground holding some of my failsafes - I couldn’t bring anything with me. My assailant turned around, probably noticing motion, then back around, as I was now totally invisible. I twinged a little at what he might conclude from the clothes on the ground, but there wasn’t time for that now.

In this form I couldn’t really say how I perceived my environment, but nothing was too dark to see. Inside my zone, every detail of every texture was precisely visible; outside it though, everything began to look warped. The river’s sound was muffled, and it twisted up and down across the horizon rather than into the distance, and instead of a deep blue I saw twists of pink foam and sparkling golden currents under the water’s surface amidst a general flow of bright green and baby blue.

I couldn’t afford to get distracted. I pulled myself back into focusing on the area I did have control over, a small circular column extending a few feet for me. The bike was already moving out of frame, the front slightly twisting, but I grabbed on to the back wheel. Not with my hands, of course, I didn’t have hands, but I was super-strong within my zone and could basically push and pull onto anything. I moved forward slightly until I encompassed most of the bike, but its rider was gone. I didn’t want to let him come back to it, so I crumpled up the back wheel. I really should have just done something small, I now think that was overkill.

Anyway, all this happened in a second, so I still had time to get the guy. I tried moving the zone forward, but I’m just not fast enough in that form, I had to switch back, as much as I didn’t want to. It was dark though, I knew, and told myself, and I’m now pretty proud that I made the right decision, turning back human, racing toward the guy who panicked and was running toward a dead end. He realized that before I reached him, and turned around to see me racing toward him, completely unencumbered by any covering. Somehow he thought it was a good idea to pull out a knife against what he must have known from the spectacle was almost certainly a cape, but I didn’t stop. As I got close, he lunged out and moved to stab me, knife moving faster than my senses caught up with, but just as it pierced skin I switched.

Back incorporeal, I sent the knife flying off - another mistake! :( - and knocked him to the ground. I’m manton limited as a zone, that means I can’t move people directly, but it’s pretty simple to use clothes in most cases and surrounding non-living objects for more complicated things. After that it was easy, I just followed the routine I practiced to tie him up safely, and double-checked with Tommy that he got video of the theft. An anonymous video and a call to law enforcement would soon be made, but first I had to get out of the area. I looked around, saw nobody, so went bodily again, gathered my stuff, and headed home.

Since then I’ve been huddling in my room drinking hot chocolate and trying to calm my nerves down. Hopefully it’ll have been worth it.

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So I now have a cute little bot - Paul named him Tommy - that flitters in and out of sight following me on my evening walks - it seems to go entirely invisible for seconds at a time, but it could just be the way it moves, which is fast but somehow doesn’t catch your attention. So now we can get video of people attacking me, and then just edit out the part where I used my power, leave it ambiguous how the person was defeated. That way I’ll be a total enigma!

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I’ve decided to start taking a mini-class on tinkers and tinkertech so I can be a better teammate to Amanda and Paul. Just barely enough time to register for it.

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Oops! I broke the handle of one of the faucets in my suite’s bathroom. I’ve sort of gotten in the habit of using my power after showering, as it's pretty strict wrt what counts as me and what is left behind, so it’s a super quick dry-off. Just forgot I needed to moderate my force, and now the porcelain handle is lying on the ground completely cracked and broken. I guess I’ll just report it to housing and hope there aren’t any inconvenient questions. Porcelain can break normally, right? I hope so.

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Paper due tomorrow, so though Tommy’s supposedly done, I haven’t gotten a chance to look at it. Met with Amanda again though, I’m going to try going to a (she promises pretty mild) party! Put something fun on my mind instead of Kant and expected values.

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And still no bad guys. Paul has bet me $50 he’ll have Tommy (he’s named his robot, it’s kinda cute kinda creepy) done by the weekend, so either I get some backup or some more savings toward a new smartphone, either way I win.

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Just did my first walk patrol! Of course it was unlikely for anything to happen on my first night out, but I still managed to feel tense the entire time, even with Amanda on auto-dial and my own power able to keep me safe.

I actually really like the way the river looks late at night, with the grass on its banks and the top of the river shining from the moon and my breath glowing from the cold.

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I thankfully still haven’t seen Joseph, I really don’t know what to do if he confronts me about that night. Okay, I don’t think I can talk about this even to you, dear online diary. Bye.

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Finally! one of the tinkers has something working (they’ve been huddled up together without nothing to show for it for so long I was worried we wouldn’t be able to start for real before the next school year). It’s Amanda - surprisingly, as Paul has been promising he’s right on the edge of a finished bot for quite a while now. I really think if he wouldn’t care so much about all the details he’d have it done in no time.

Amanda’s things aren’t quite as useful for me, since she only seems to be able to make all cyborgy stuff. Her right three fingers are all non-functional due to some medical thing, so after I learned about her limitation I suggested she make a cybernetic thing for them first, just to fix up her problem before moving on to serious stuff. She blew up at me! and my intentions were purely good, didn’t mean to be offensive at all. Since then I’ve had to be careful not to press her blow-up-buttons, one of which seems to be her fingers.

Anyway, she now has a special purple-colored contact lens that ~apparently~ only she can wear - though it looks perfectly normal to me - which lets her take snapshots of things she sees and then draw them out later onto paper. We’re hoping this will help with the suspect identification thing. If I could wear one of them it would be ideal, so I could do both steps of the process myself, but I asked and she gave me some technojumble reason she won’t let me wear it.

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I would talk more with my parents, but they’ve decided I need to ~be independent~ and ~step out into the real world~ and so they don’t pick up half the time I call home. That’s how it is in this adult world I’ve been pushed into. I sometimes want to hide from it all, but when I push through, when I book myself a spring break vacation trip with money I earned and without any help at all it’s such a good feeling.

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Midterms coming up this week, looks like I’m going to have to spend my evenings studying rather than heroing. I signed up as a philosophy major, but the amount of math involved here is just so much. At least I can take courses from Amhart with a minimal amount of paperwork.

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So while my two dear tinkers are still working, I want to get going on catching bad guys. Campus police has sent out reports of various bad behavior taking place on Water street west of Singer, so I’m going to be walking around back and forth in the evening in the most oblivious posture I can manage. Hopefully somebody will target me because I’m an ~attractive naive girl~ and then boom! I’ll knock them over, take a picture of them, and report them to the police.

I like walking after dinner anyways, so I think I’ll try to make this a habit starting tonight.

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I know it’s stupid, but I worry when I meet up with Paul that people’ll think we’re dating. Can’t really do anything about that though, and I have a ready-made excuse for why two students with basically nothing in common should be working together so much.

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So we haven’t decided on a name yet, but I’m going to try to make sure nothing goes official that makes us look like a joke. (and Amanda is not going out in her “costume” idea or I’m going to quit) None of us really can afford to join the Protectorate - Paul can’t stop school or his parents will start asking questions, Amanda is really involved with so many of the student groups on both our campuses, and I ... I’m just not quite ready to enter the public eye.

We’re still not quite sure how best to help, but Paul might have something for us soon and I can patrol without needing to worry at all for my own safety, and the walks I’m planning should be doable in my spare time.

They get on my nerves sometimes, but right now I’m just happy that I’ve found some people who aren’t purely focused on base desires for money and power and sex.

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Hi everyone! I’ve decided to start keeping track of what I do each day, so I can look back on this in the future and learn stuff maybe. Keeping this blog private for now, because it’s mostly for me, but who knows? maybe I’ll show it to a few special people who I trust with my secret identity.

I’m all tired now, but I’ll tell you guys tomorrow about the hero group I’ve joined. Trying to put a happy face on things, smiling as I sleep even if it drops off my face once I’m unconscious.