Issue #8

(Stat Up) Congratulations?: Not many things get by me. How did I not know you were engaged/married? Anyways, here's a little stat boost for you for the feat. Are you hiding anything else?

(+2 Intelligence)
(+1 Charisma)

You stared at the neon sign hanging in the window that had rearranged itself into that notification. The stat boost was nice, but you had no clue where that memory had come from. There was just no way. You had not had any girlfriends or even really any romantic interactions back in high school. You had spent a year at college with a girlfriend, but it was certainly not that woman. And you all had definitely not come anywhere close to marriage.

The only possible explanation you could come up with was that something had happened back when you used to drink. Well. Drink heavier than you did now anyways. Those first six months after college, before you had found work as an illustrator, had been a dark place. It was all kind of a blur, but you would have remembered proposing to someone, right? Or at least remembered the person.

You jolted out of your thoughts as the door to the driver's side swung open. Red was standing there. And well...her name was apt. Her shirt was dyed in blood and the fluid had pretty much found its way onto every surface of the upper half of her body.

"Jesus! Are you okay? What the fuck happened?" you asked.

"I'll uhh, tell you about it while you drive. I need to get cleaned up a bit," she replied, before she began walking around to the passenger side, "did you get everything that I asked for?"

"Yeah. Yeah. It's all in the back," you answered. You both settled into your seats and you started up the car. She began wiping herself off with paper towels and throwing them in a garbage bag. Once the doors were closed and you were trapped with it, the smell hit your nose like a durian opened inside of a humid closet on a summer afternoon.

You rolled down the windows as you pulled out of the gas station, **** for fresh air. Once she had mostly gotten her arms and face cleaned up, she grabbed a clean shirt from a backpack. "Keep your eyes on the road. If you try and sneak a glance, I'll leave you out here."

"You don't have to worry. No offense, but the whole Carrie thing doesn't really do it for me," you joked with a chuckle. Oh God. You had just joked about the fact that she was coated in dead person. What the fuck was wrong with you. It did make her laugh at least.

Out of the corner of your eye, you noticed her pull on a hoodie and stuff the bloody shirt and shorts into a garbage bag.

"So uhh. Any chance I could get that explanation of what's happening now?" you asked.

Red tied up the garbage bag and set it in the backseat, "Well. It's a long story and I would sorta have to start at the beginning."

"Hey. I'm all up for starting at the beginning as long as it gets us to what's going on now," you shot back.

She pulled on a clean pair of athletic shorts underneath the over sized hoodie and threw the backpack in the back. "I'm decent now," she stated, before taking a deep breath and starting, "My father is the superhero Saturnus, demigod from another dimension, trapped here because of a feud with another god in that dimension."

"Holy shit. That's the guy with the sickle, right?" you asked. You had never drawn any of his stories, but you had read some of them.

"Yeah. That's him," she affirmed, before continuing, "and he trained me to some day take up the superhero mantle. That way he could focus on finding a way home instead of protecting this world. Only problem was that his powers didn't transfer to me in this universe. So Ms. Chandler, a friend of his, pointed me in this direction to try and discover something."

"And why are you so sure that whatever power source Josie felt is able to give that to you?" you asked.

She chuckled and shrugged her shoulders, "I'm not. It's more of a hunch. She was able to sense potential for something within me. So whatever this is, if there's even a small chance that I can utilize it to finally have powers and help send Dad home, I'll follow up on it."

She took a quick break in her story to open and sip the energy drink while you processed. Saturnus was a pretty gnarly guy. He was pretty popular for a little bit before you were born, but he was too violent for the main stream consumer. The alien demigod that cut up bad guys into tiny pieces using communist iconography was pretty hard to market for kids toys and comic books. Other supers did not mess with him, but most would consider him more vigilante than hero.

"So that brings us up to the parking garage. What in the fuck was the machine gu- Wait. Holy shit! You brought that over the border? I was a part of a gun smuggling operation?" you asked, the realization just now dawning on you.

"Oh don't be dramatic. We're gonna dump the guns before we cross back into the US. It'll be all right," she explained, not so reassuringly.

"Guns? As in more than one?" you asked.

She laughed, "Obviously. Why else would there be three sleeping bags?"

"Oh. Of course. No. No. Silly me. Stupid question," you shot back sarcastically.

"I know it's not pretty. It's not as glamorous as the media makes it out to be. But this is part of doing good in the world. The guys I just killed were going to kill us and then everyone at all tied to whatever this thing is," she replied, not at all phased by your sarcasm.

You looked over at her, "You know that how exactly?"

"My dad doesn't just go into missions blind. None of the big guys do. All of them have surveillance and reconnaissance teams. His team helped out for this mission and located them following us as soon as we crossed the border," she explained, gesturing to the sky, "They stitched together some IDs of the crew tailing us from phone cameras, security cameras, and whatever else they could get access to. They were almost all tied in to criminal organizations or were mercenaries for villains with deep pockets."

"Well do you know who they were working for? Or how they found us?" you asked. You were not happy with the explanation, but it made sense. And all in all, you thought you were taking it pretty well for a guy that had been as culture shocked as you had been over the past week and especially over this last 24 hours.

She pointed to a road that pulled off of the main highway. "Turn right up there," she instructed, before answering your question, "They're still trying to piece together who they're working for. I pulled a phone off the goon that seemed like he was in charge, but we can't get anything off of it until we get back," she explained, waving the phone in the air, "And my dad has a lot of enemies. It is a secret that I'm his daughter, but not a very well kept one. Kinda hard to keep something like that concealed forever with the paparazzi these days. So they were probably tracking me, not you."

"Tracked by henchmen and villains," you commented with a small laugh. Maybe you could talk to one of them. See what this whole villain thing was about and what motivates them. The being that gave you your powers did seem to want you to be evil after all.

Eventually she directed you to pull off road and you parked back behind a rocky outcrop. As you all got out of the car, you used Investigative Journalism on her. She had said not to use your powers on her, but you were quite sure she was talking about Gullibility and crossed your fingers that she would not kill you for this.

Julia Red

Strength: 16
Agility: 32
Intelligence: 15
Willpower: 35
Charisma: 20
Sensory: 16

TOTAL POWER LEVEL: 134

It seemed like everyone you had met so far had higher stats than you. You rationalized that she had been trained by a literal demigod, probably for her entire life. So maybe she had a good enough excuse, but still you wanted to start training yourself. It was time to step into these powers.

She gestured to the back seat, "Grab a roll. We'll hike it out for a few miles until we're far enough from the main roads. The surveillance team will keep an eye out for anyone else."