After a fun day of further traumatizing trauma empowered teenagers with the fullness of my adult power, I kicked back at the lab for planning session for handling society's biggest problem on the Eastern Seaboard, an insidious biological danger that walked around on two legs, has two thumbs, and surprisingly isn't Panacea. Who'd have thought that the on the edged biokinentic is only the second greatest bio-threat in my city. Dragon pulled up film for me to study, but soon my op research turned into a a highlight reel and I found myself in mild awe at the brazen audacity of someone else.
"What the hell do you people think you are doing?" yelled the subject on the screen, a man who looked like Thor's bigger hotter cousin and behaved like Conan's meaner hornier brother.
I couldn't look away.
"I'm sorry-" began the dumpy reporter.
"You are not forgiven!" the irate interviewee rudely and awesomely cut her off, and then pointed at the camera, "You, cameraman. What's the meaning of this?" he pointed back at the reporter.
"I don't know what you mean, sir?" came the anxious voice of the man behind the camera, who sounded like an asthmatic AV Club nerd.
"You don't know what I mean." the enormous man leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees with his hands laced in front of his mouth, and my smile widened at the way his calm tone sounded way more menacing than his outraged yells, guy was projecting major murder vibes that the now shaking cameraman obviously picked up, "I don't do interviews with women I don't sleep with, and you people sent me this."
"How dare you!" shouted the now hotly offended reporter.
"How dare me!" the golden haired giga-chad began yelling again, "How dare you come to me looking like that? Apologize! And you!" he pointed at the cameraman again, "The price of this interview just became twenty five grand, and bring the blonde with the massive tits! Now!"
"How can you pos-" whatever words the woman wanted to say were slapped out of her mouth when the man's NBA long arm swept out and his catcher's mitt hand put her on an express flight to the floor.
"The next words out of your mouth will be an apology, followed by thanking me for allowing you to ruin my good mood without reprisal." he then pointed back at the cameraman, "Get moving, boy. Or I'll be sending my complaint to your station at a third the speed of light."
The falling camera caught the woman saying, "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Please don't hit me again."
I leaned back in my steel chair.
"Damn." I shook my head.
For a guy who only seems interested in fighting and fucking, Manpower never seems to miss a chance to make TV gold. Brockton Bay's strongest Vigilante - though only by the tensest of legal fictions - had a savage mind, and as gay as it may sound, for all his electromagnetic power, the shadow of his cock hangs heavier over the world. Shardmaster and I are still trying to figure out how he's using some esoteric expression of electromagnetism to impregnate every single woman who comes into vaginal contact with his jizz, but it allowed him to wage a one man crusade against depopulation since the 90's to the point that two decades later its become a sociological phenomena known as 'The New Wave'.
Now normally I'm all for procreation, team people all the way, but I have finally found my match in fatherhood, a low I'd never thought I'd ever see outside a mirror. The world's premier electromagnetic Trump leaves a dad shaped hole in the hearts of his many many-many-many abandoned children, and a remarkable percentage of those kids grow up looking to make their pain everyone else's problem.
Dragon moved me onto to footage of the consequences of the man's rampant unprotected sexual conquest of the world. I watched two of the three times Manpower's bastards formed a team to take him down. Bro's power makes the Manton Limit the Manton Suggestion, slowly growing over time. He apparently started out as a mid tier brute with an skin tight electromagnetic barrier and a minor blaster rating that added velocity to throw projectiles, but slowly over his decades active he'd pushed both his upper limit and the scope of his powers, inching out his formerly skin tight electromagnetic control into a Shaker field in which he gets pretty Magneto, the power that single handedly forced the local out and out Nazi organization to become more circumspect due to the top members all having powers based round metal.
In the third confrontation with a gang of his pissed off children - which happened on Christmas last year - Manpower absolutely dismantled the group despite being on paper the most powerful of the three iterations. Both beat downs were smooth and through, but the spectacle of the third was pure cinema, and I got the treat of seeing seven teenagers powerful enough to be the villains in their own superhero movies get shut down completely, their father answering everything they brought to the table easily. It got to the point where the last girl standing started screaming at him, and he let her, until he finally responded, "I don't even know you are." and she broke down sobbing loudly that she was his daughter.
I kinda live for the chance to respond to a breakdown like that with a joke, but seeing it played straight like that… ruined it for me. How dare this guy make me experience character growth? How the hell does he think he is? Fortunately he's only a few years older than Colin, so he can't be my dad.
And where the hell does the guy get off being so fucking based? He hit all the fucking lotteries: the genetic lottery, the socio economic lottery, the power lottery. He should be softer than baby shit from the way life handed him everything, but instead he's like Genghis Khan's Aryan flavored power fantasy walking around with the rest of us. And apparently its up to me to stop it because the last time the Triumvirate tried to get this guy to stop making so many new villains, Alexandria ended up taking maternity leave.
Honestly don't blame her, guy is so hot it'd be gay not to.
That's why it's up to me. Two thirds of the Triumvate stand no chance against this guy and the third, probably could do something but honestly seems like a closeted fuck up. It's up to me to save society by getting Manpower to stop fucking so much.
What bleak hell have I come to?
"Dragon," I began, feeling wrong about this from the start, but knowing what I must do, "que up some Therapy tutorials. I've got work to do."
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A shorty so that I remember the direction of this story when I get back to it.