To the Internet! Another GitMS Short

[Mayabird]

I was planning on posting this as an apology for taking so damn long on Girl in the Metal Suit, Issue 3 once I finished that one, but since I apparently can't get my shit together enough to write a chapter within a month, I'm just posting it now as an apology for taking so damn long. And as filler. It takes place at some point before the current story. I hope you enjoy this.


To the Internet! A GitMS Short

Yancy had been a bit mopey and didn’t show up at Amy Chan’s house that night. This was fine with her, as she was feeling a little grumpy herself and didn’t want to be guilt-tripped into patrolling. That whole excuse about psychology and “random reward schedules” and unpredictability and scaring criminals because of possibilities rather than her actual presence and the 9% drop in crime since she’d started blazing her career path never seemed to work.

She had plopped herself down in front of her computer with a Coke and a box of delivered pizza to check her email, and ten minutes later she still wasn’t motivated to do anything else. She thought about playing Metroid a bit, but that would require actually getting up and going to her secret “I love me” room in the basement, past the door hidden in her fake linen closet behind towels and pink lace doilies and then dodging around her collection of various objects of personal value, like her giant fossil trilobite, senior project exoskeleton legs, menagerie of stuffed animals, Lucca cosplaying outfit, and the five foot tall neon yellow T she’d stolen off Tech Tower, in order to get to the little TV, NES, and old beanbag chair at the end. Too much work.

She checked her usual online chat but it was apparently dead and none of the usual people she wanted to chat with her online at the moment. Great job there, wanting to do this late on a Tuesday night when most people have a regular work schedule. After that, she decided to scan some news articles and see if there was anything worth reading. A few semi-random clicks and she was reading a story on some environmental group that was raising money to buy some habitat where an endangered tree frog lived. The head of the fundraising was some washed-up former superhero who had gone by Tree Frog Dude during his very short and badly-thought-out career before he’d gotten shot after yet another suction-cup glove malfunction. But at least it got him enough attention so he could do something useful with his life after his early retirement.

Amy had never heard of this guy, and it occurred to her that there were probably many, many minor superheroes and wannabes, even lower in the rankings than her (and she considered herself C-list). She was already at her computer, and if there was anything the internet could do (aside from locating porn, of course) it was satisfying idle curiosity.

Two million, four hundred fifty thousand is a big number, she thought as she saw the results for “minor superheroes.” Yes, there is a great fascination with the whole superhero phenomenon, but for the minor ones, the B and C listers and Tree Frog Dude equivalents? She clicked on a random link.

Superheroesoftheworld.com, part of several web rings, proclaimed itself to be an authoritative listing of all the known superheroes past, present, and fictional, sorted by powers, location, eras, and so on, nearly twenty years old and going strong with its own message board, news listings, and page upon page of discussion and analysis. There were even rankings (the page came with a HUGE disclaimer that all the rankings and levels were highly subjective, and please stop sending hate email and spamming the forums about it). It was fun to read about some of the heroes, especially the ones she knew now. Tevar and Nitram, she noted wryly, didn’t appear at all; West Virginia only had one listing, a guy who’d run around for a bit in the mid ‘80s before disappearing again.

Some of the stuff was actually rather interesting, like the history of the anti-gang vigilante groups in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the directions they took the whole mythos of masked adventuring. From there she wandered into the controversy about a priest who’d been proposed for sainthood, but the Catholic church wouldn’t canonize him because miracles don’t count if it’s actually from a metahuman power, or something. Which sucked because he seemed like a pretty nice fellow, protecting his flock by shooting flaming solid light beams out of his fingers which she agreed was utterly awesome.

There were fans who followed minor heroes like campy cult film fans. It made a certain amount of sense, although the devotion could get...disturbing…at times. Although Amy didn’t care much what people thought of her, morbid curiosity demanded that she know what they were saying about her. She went to the page for “Panzer Pyro.”

Location: Atlanta. Active. Gender: Female (linked to a thread titled “Samus is a GIRL!” that had reached thirty-two pages). Age: Unknown. Etc, etc. The estimate for her weight, suit and body inside, was disturbingly close. The listings for affiliations and superhero associations were being contested (links to several threads), as well as the supervillain battles (does the Rainbow Warrior really count as a super villain? should the Georgia Bulldawg even be classified as a villain or was he just a seriously deluded football fan?). Rating: 2.5 (halfway between B and C list, because she really wasn’t second-string, but damned if her fans would let her be called third-string.)

And damn. She had her own cult following, not just in Atlanta (where there was an actual self-declared official fan club) but elsewhere as well. They gave Panzer Pyro news and discussion its own subforum for goodness sakes where people constantly posted news, rumors, blog posts, and discussions. It looked like an unusually busy section for someone who wasn’t in the big leagues of heroics, but as she looked through the threads, it turned out she just had an unusually rabid fanbase. The whole “keep a low profile and set people on fire” shtick appealed to a certain kind of person, though the subforum was only created after the revelation of her true gender.

One of these people could be Yancy. Damnit. I’d better slog through some of this crap. At least it should be worth a laugh.

Some of it was, like some adolescent boys who thought she should have razor-shuriken guns and paint her armor all sorts of tacky colors (like red and black), and some barely literate posters who wrote all manner of nonsense about her possible origins and secret identity. One gal with hero-worship issues insisted on calling Amy “Metal Phoenix,” because she never actually called herself “Panzer Pyro,” one of Atlanta’s symbols is the phoenix, it’s a metal suit with a flamethrower, and the name is cooler and not stupid. And she’s right! Why didn’t I think of that name before it was too late?

One guy made her suspicious with his alarmingly accurate hypotheses and encyclopedic listings of every quip of hers that people had overheard and recorded. A further check showed similar analyses of sixteen other minor superheroes (including the Lady Avenger, whom he suspected had also been at the High Museum that night, though others disputed it) and consistent off-topic rants about how very boring his job was and the ways stupid people broke their computers. So probably safe. Hopefully. At least he was less pathetic than the guy who had called himself “PanzerPyroNemesis” and declared himself her greatest enemy for reasons she couldn’t figure out before the mods banned him for trolling. Twice.

It was getting late - for normal people – and Amy was already getting tired, so she considered going to bed at the very early hour of 1 AM. And then she definitely decided to go to bed when she saw the link to the Panzer Pyro fanfics. Just, no. If Yancy is writing fics about me, I don’t want to know. I’ve seen enough weirdness already without reading slash fics about myself.