LiFS Chapter 37 - Whoosh! Bang! Crash! (Patreon)

Patrolling didn’t quite go how I expected. 

I’ve gone on my fair share of patrols over the years. Before the war got hot, that meant wandering around Camp or through the woods killing the occasional monster that got a bit too close for comfort. Later, that had turned into getting rid of the occasional small army that the Titans sent our way. Once Kronos was dead, it became more about clearing out the remnants of his armies, both the one he’d brought with him to New York and others further afield. 

Patrolling was a bit different here, but I thought I had the gist of it from my day out with Triumph and Velocity. You wandered around a bit, chatted, and then kicked in a couple of supervillain’s teeth. All in a day’s work.

That had been what I was expecting today. An hour or two of chatting with Vicky and Crystal, then a nice simple fight to round out the evening, maybe with a stop or two for snacks. 

What I hadn’t been expecting was well, this.

The boy standing in front of me was maybe nine years old and was wearing a bright-red t-shirt with a stylized picture of Velocity on the front. He was waving his arms around dramatically, his hands balled up into little fists and there was a huge grin threatening to split his face in half. “And then you were like whoosh, bang!” he made an explosion gesture with both hands, “And the bad guys were all like ahhh, crash, smash!”

His mom caught his wrist before he could smack his grandmother, gently pushing it back towards him. He glanced over to the side. “Sorry, mom! Sorry, grams!” he exclaimed, talking so fast that the words blended into each other. Then he turned back towards me, his eyes shining with glee. “You were sooooo coooool! Your armor is so shiny, way better than Armsmaster. Are you going to join the Protectorate? Are they going to make a Riptide action figure! I want a Riptide action figure.” 

He turned back towards his mom, my presence suddenly forgotten in his haste to grab at her sleeve. “Mom, can I have a Riptide action figure? I promise I’ll clean my room and take the dishes out of the dishwasher for an entire month!” He pouted, his lower lip trembling and his eyes very wide as he stared up at her pleadingly.

His mom gently patted his head. “I don’t think they make Riptide action figures yet. Maybe once we do we can talk about it.” She gently turned him back towards me. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to ask the nice hero?” 

“Oh! Oh!” He jumped up and down, then knelt down and quickly pulled a rumpled t-shirt and a handful of colorful markers out from his backpack, which was lying at his feet. He shook it out, then proudly presented it to me, showing at least two-dozen messy signatures scrawled across the slightly-faded blue fabric. 

It was an old and clearly well-loved shirt. There was a picture of the Brockton Bay Protectorate on the front, though I only knew that because of the bold words emblazoned behind them. I didn’t recognize most of the people in the picture. 

“It's my hero shirt!” he declared. “Will you sign my hero shirt, Riptide?” He stared up at me just like he had at his mom, and I was much less prepared for the puppy dog eyes.

“Of course I will!” How could I say anything else?

His pout turned back into the same ear-to-ear grin as before and he shoved both the shirt and the handful of markers out towards me. “Here! You can pick your favorite color!”

I knelt down on the ground in front of him, accepting the t-shirt and laying it down across my knee, but didn’t take a marker. “Here,” I told him in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but I already have a marker with me. Let me show you a magic trick.”

I grabbed Riptide and the boy looked at the pen skeptically. “That’s not a marker.”

“It's not,” I agreed. Then I uncapped the pen and the boy gasped as Riptide lengthened into its sword form. I turned the blade this way and that, allowing him to get a good look at Anaklusmos’ shimmering celestial bronze blade. “Cool, huh?”

“Yeah…” After a moment however, his eyes widened in panic. “You’re going to damage the shirt if you try to sign it like that!”

I tapped the side of my helmet with my finger. “Ah, but that’s where the magic comes in.” Then I took the cap and, instead of recapping the blade, tapped it against the hilt. The blade vanished back into pen form, but this time with the ball-point exposed. 

He still looked skeptical. “Pens don’t work very good on fabric.”

“This one does.” Then I signed the shirt with a flourish, thankfully remembering at the last moment to write Riptide and not Percy Jackson. Not that you could really tell one way or the other. My handwriting was messy at the best of times, and writing on a shirt lying on my knee certainly didn’t improve things. 

Thankfully, Riptide’s brilliant bronze ink easily made up for my handwriting’s shortfalls. The boy gasped and snatched the shirt back from me, turning it this way and that as he stared at the glowing ink in amazement. It shimmered like polished celestial bronze, matching both my sword and armor, and he looked completely captivated by it. 

“Amazing…” he whispered. I stood up, tucking Riptide away, and silently winced when I saw the two-dozen other people crowded around me staring at the shirt in the boy’s arms. Oh no. Now they probably wanted me to sign something too. Hades take me now. 

I cast around for Vicky and Crystal and only found Crystal on the opposite edge of the boardwalk talking to a trio of girls her age and pretending like she couldn’t see my plight. Of Vicky, there was no trace. Where was a slobbering hoard of monsters when I needed one?

The boy suddenly crashed into my leg, hugging me tightly around the waist. “Thank you thankyou thankyouthankyou!” he chanted. “That’s sooo coooool! My friends are going to be so jealous!” He released me and turned back to his family. “Mom, mom, look, look!” he jabbed the shirt up towards her, then changed focus towards his grandmother. “Grammy, grammy, look! He signed my hero shirt and it's glowing! Isn’t that so cool.”

The boy’s mother mouthed a thank you, then carefully steered her son into the crowd and away from me. I smiled back at her, then realized that she couldn’t see that through my helmet, and waved instead as they vanished into the throng of people surrounding me. 

The trio was quickly replaced by three more people, pushing their way towards me. Two of them just looked excited to see me, but the third had a microphone in her hand. Oh no. 

“Riptide,” she called out, half-shouting to be heard. “What do you say about the––”

Thankfully, that was when Vicky finally appeared. She fell from the sky directly beside me, her three-point landing looking like it came straight from a comic book cover or movie poster. I felt her aura wash over me, stronger than it usually was, but with my helmet on and this close to the ocean I just let it splash off of me like a wave breaking against a cliff face. 

She rose to her feet and extended a hand towards the reporter. “Riptide isn’t taking questions at this time.”

The woman looked mulish for a moment and I felt a change in Vicky’s aura. She took a hurried step back and vanished into the crowd. Vicky glanced over at me, then turned back to the crowd and raised her voice. “One at a time, please! Riptide is still new and not used to this kind of thing! We’re on patrol right now, but if you form a line he’ll talk to as many people as he can before we need to move along!”

I wasn’t sure if it was her aura, the confidence in her voice, or simply long practice with heroic meet and greets, but the crowd swiftly obeyed. Well, most of them did. Vicky planted her fists on her hips and glared at the ones that still tried to push their way towards me and they broke after just a few seconds under her gaze, meekly hurrying along their way or moving towards the back of the rapidly elongating queue of people. 

For a teenage girl wearing a short white skirt and golden tiara, Glory Girl could be pretty dang intimidating in a pinch. 

“Thanks,” I whispered just loud enough for her to hear. 

She briefly turned to me and smiled. “It's nothing. Sorry, I forgot how people can get around new heroes. Mom says this is one of the reasons why the Protectorate usually holds a big event when a new hero is announced. It stops people from mobbing them so much on patrols.” She paused. “Well, mostly. It keeps most of the reporters away at least. Are you ready?”

No. I definitely remembered thinking that it would be nice for demigods to get recognized for their heroism, but I hadn’t really considered how that would apply to me personally. “Uh…”

She grinned. “You’ll be fine. You did a great job with that little kid.” Then she waved for the first person in line to approach. 

It was a young couple, college aged if I had to guess. The guy was tall, pale, and very skinny, his prominent Adam's apple bobbing as he moved towards us. The girl next to him was two heads shorter but probably weighed just as much as he did, her arms and legs covered in dense muscles that reminded me a bit of some of the Ares girls. She was as dark-skinned as anyone I’d ever seen, and there was a savage smile on her lips that revealed two rows of pearly white teeth. 

They stopped a few steps away from me. “You really showed the Empire,” the girl said immediately. “Nice work. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of watching you piledrive those fucking Nazi bitches.”

“Thank you?”

She leaned back against his side and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “It feels good not to worry about going out in public with Destiny.”

Destiny rolled her eyes. “The big lug worries too much sometimes.” Then she sighed, “But he’s right. With basically all their capes behind bars, the Empire is done for. I never thought I’d see the day. Those bastards killed my uncle and two of my brothers. I hope they all rot in the Birdcage.”

“I’m glad I could help,” I tried. “I was mostly just in the right place at the right time.”

Destiny laughed. “Yeah. Brockton Bay. You did more in what, three days than the Protectorate has done in decades.” There was little I could say to that. 

We spoke for another minute and I ended up signing Destiny’s sleeve with Riptide, then Vicky took a photo of me, Destiny, and her boyfriend, whose name never came up. The next few people went much the same way. I signed a few pieces of clothing, posed for several pictures, then combined the two and signed one elderly asian man’s polaroid.

After about fifteen minutes, though it felt longer, Vicky loudly announced that we needed to get going. The crowd protested, but she held firm. Crystal flew over to join us and, after a brief discussion (argument), Vicky scooped me up under the armpits and the three of us flew several blocks inland to get away from the hustle and bustle of the boardwalk. 

We landed on the flat roof of a three-story building and I sagged onto the ground, utterly drained. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people, but my ADHD made crowds exhausting. I was constantly hyper aware of my surroundings, which was a good thing when you were trying to avoid getting stabbed in the back by a monster, but much less handy when a whole bunch of people were crowding around me wanting an autograph. 

I reached up and rubbed the eye slits of my helmet with my gauntleted fists. They weren’t actual eye slits––the front of my helmet was a single piece of smooth, solid celestial bronze carved into the vague shape of a face––but the divine magic on the armor let me feel a vague impression of what I was doing. I groaned loudly, my voice slightly distorted by the helmet.

Vicky laughed. “Sorry. It took me a bit to realize how jumpy you were getting.”

Crystal landed beside us, having lagged slightly behind. She glanced down at me, then over at Vicky. “You overdid it again. Riptide’s new to this sort of thing.”

Vicky crossed her arms under her chest. “Like you’re one to talk.”

Crystal bristled. “It looked like you had it well in hand. You’re the one that actually likes big crowds. And besides, I haven’t seen Jasmine and Rachel since we graduated. You fly off to talk to people on your own all the time!”

“Not when I’m out with a total newby––no offense Riptide.”

“Yeah, well you’re the one who decided we should head towards the Boardwalk in the first place! Maybe you should have––”

I pushed myself to my feet and interposed myself between the two of them. “Cry–Lazerdream, Glory Girl, it's alright.” I turned towards Crystal first. “We’ve spent like half the day together. It's totally fine for you to go talk to your friends for a couple of minutes.” Then I turned to Vicky. “And I really appreciate your help. I wasn’t expecting so many people to recognize me right away. Or that they’d actually want to talk to me.”

Vicky dubiously looked me up and down. “You didn’t think you were going to be recognizable wearing that?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, it's been like, a couple days since I went out for the first time around here.”

Vicky rubbed her face. “Percy. You took down basically the entire Empire yesterday. Not everyone knows all the details, but I’ve seen that clip of you taking down Menja and Fenja like, forty times today. A bunch of my friends have been asking if I know anything about you and I bet mom’s gotten a bunch of inquiries too. 

“That many people use PHO?” I asked. It did seem pretty popular, but I’d seen a couple of older men and women looking at me too. Weren’t older people supposed to not like using technology?

Vicky groaned loudly.