xp_logs | Not So Amazing, Intro (Reply)

Kyle shares a fun new Vine account he found with Laurie. But when Doug digs deeper to find out more about the poster, they find out that it's not quite as funny as they thought.

"Dude, I cannot tell you how freaking relieved I am that you are like, no longer writing papers because for serious, either Dori or me was going to make you a trophy for punctuation abuse." Kyle said. "I mean, I'm pretty sure no one's going to throw you a red flag if you're all comma comma comma after every four words in a patient report." He waved the uneaten end of his hoagie roll at Laurie. "So yeah, I am totes happy to like, give you oral presentation pointers. It's gotta be easier than going all red pen on you. Load it up."

"Obviously you have no appreciation for my use of the English comma," Laurie replied with an artful sniff of disdain. It was somewhat spoiled by the twinkle in her eyes, and the fact she was currently crouched atop a chair in what might have been called a meditative position had she been in any way calm. "Rachel told me that Anna told her, that she heard from Justin that everyone thought my first presentation sounded like someone had just offered me a 'shit sandwich' and I was attempting to be polite about it."

She took out the USB stick she'd transferred the recording of her presentation onto and plugged it into Kyle's laptop.

"You use enough commas for you and four other people." Kyle muttered, as he reached over Laurie to tap out his password.

The laptop screen brightened to show Kyle's browser up, with a very short repeating clip of a guy in red and blue and black doing a capoeira like kick while in the middle of a spinning front flip. "Oh hold on, I got totally pulled into Vine last night because it was that or watch Dori's weird cartoons, and I love that girl but I do not get anime like, at all." Except Avatar, because that was awesome.

"Well, they weren't using them enough anyway."

Laurie poked Kyle in the side as the guy on the screen did another iteration of his kick flip, memorizing the combination to try later on herself.

"Who is that? And what sort of anime are we talking about? Magical Girl, or the stuff like Robotech?"

"That." Kyle said, snickering. "That is Spider-Man. Or well, some guy who says he's Spider-Man. It's fucking hilarious. I wanna know if it's, oh hell, that dude from England who played him, or if it's Tobey whatshisface trying to make a comeback." He shrugged. "Really it's some dude, and he's actually pretty agile but damn, that costume."

"You'd think he would have chosen a better fabric then denim"

Laurie shrugged at the rest, considering what they did when they weren't actually trying to live normal lives, she couldn't blame whoever this was, but she hoped it was just a stunt.

"You think he really believes he's a hero, or is it just some sort of stunt for hits?"

Now Kyle shook his head, and made an aggravated face. "Dude, I don't know. Like, I saw it linked off some capioera forum, and they thought it was just some dude, but then that blog that does news in the DX? They think, like, he's one of us. Mutant, obvs, not an X-Man. Like, trying to do the hero thing because I guess no shit has stopped a couple of muggings or whatever?"

Laurie poked her tongue out at him, totally professional. "You keep making that face I'll get Bobby to freeze it that way. You think we should check this guy out? I mean, the Professor is always interested in new mutants, and if this guy is really doing the heroing thing he could get hurt."

"Fuck no, I want to watch you drone on about nerve channels in the elbow." Kyle said, with a snort. "Yo, I have no idea who this dude even is, and if the Prof hasn't like, called his house by now because he's on Cerebro, you think we're going to find him by watching him stand on his head on his Vine for twenty minutes?"

"Those are very important nerve channels and besides, it's all psychiatry rotation right now so you'd be hearing me drone on about clinical psych profiles and patient outcomes, and treatment anyway."

Laurie pulled out her phone and brought up her contact favourites before pressing Doug's number.

"Kyle, meet my boyfriend Doug. Doug, meet Kyle who doesn't believe you can find some guy from Vine in jeans and a Spider-man hoodie who believes he's a super hero."

Kyle waited for Doug to answer, and before Laurie could say anything, called out "Yo, Doug, ima copy Laurie's calendar to Scott so he can schedule her some crap DR rotations on your date nights, kay?"

There was the tapping of keys on the other end of the phone. "Kyle," Doug said over it. "You can't see it right now, but I'm going to prove you wrong about not being able to find this kid from his Vine, and I'm going to do it just using my middle fingers just for you."

"I hope you get the clap from one of Laurie's science projects." Kyle said, gleefully. "For serious have I showed you this because I can't decide if it's like, sad, hilarious, or kind of messed up. If there's a dude in guyliner under this costume I am gonna totally laugh. I have burg in the freezer, like, drive over, laugh at Spider-Man." He snickered again. "and then make your girlfriend stop being a smartass."

"The -clap-? Does anyone even call it that anymore?" The jingle of Doug's keys could be heard, and then his door shutting. "I'll be there in a few, burg me."

~*~
"So yeah," Doug muttered around a mouthful of burger, "there's this stuff called metadata in Vine posts - location data, stuff about the phone that took it, all of that. Granted, it's kept under wraps and encryption and stuff because Big Data, but..." He shrugged and quirked a grin. "Nothing I can't crack into if needed."

Laurie picked up a slice of her own burger with a fork and popped it in her mouth before chewing thoughtfully.

"So you could do that with our phones too? If we were taken, that is?"

"Well, yeah, probably, especially given that Xavier's phones are custom-built with some stuff you don't normally get off-the-shelf." Doug waved a hand and looked a bit more serious. "But there's always ways to get around that, too. Spoofing signals, and rerouting, and all of that stuff." He shrugged. "And in most cases, the low-tech solution is the easiest. Step 1 - separate you from your phone. Step 2 - smash phone into little bitty pieces."

He shifted his glasses a bit farther up on his nose and took on more of a teaching tone. "So, y'know how Master Lee likes to talk about dynamic forces and opposing things and all that? Yin and yang, push and pull, and so on." Master Lee wasn't much on going deep into philosophy, but he did sometimes talk about how to use momentum rather than meeting a strike head on. "InfoSec has a lot of that too - balancing wanting to keep your information completely safe and protected, versus the desire to be able to read the other guy's mail." He'd clearly done a lot of reading, for equally obvious reasons. "It's all about trying to find the perfect code or trying to crack a code without the other person knowing."

He visibly caught himself, realizing that was entirely too far down a rabbit hole for the relatively simple question Laurie had asked. "Anyway, I'm kind of doubting a kid posting Vines and Instagrams from his own phone really thinks about all that stuff." He took another large bite of burger, and watched a couple of the six-second videos. "I mean, for one, he's almost certainly in the DX, judging by some of the backgrounds - he's okay at keeping really recognizable stuff out of the shot, but yeah."

"Okay, now tell me something I don't know. I mean, dude, I can recognize buildings too." Kyle said. "Because this guy, he's like, trying to no shit stop crimes. There's a couple of blogs talking about how he actually left some muggers in a wet dumpster."

"Can you track him to where he lives though? I get the feeling he's not a DX kid, seems like he's got too much time on his hands for that."

Laurie peered at what Doug was doing while cutting another bite of her burger. His ability to get lost in his work to the point of over explaining was one of the many reasons they suited each other so well.
"Hnh. Looks like just the one video's from DX, actually. Judging from metadata..." Doug tapped at the heavy reinforced keys of Kyle's computer. "It looks like he's operating out of Brooklyn."
"Seriously, Brooklyn?" Kyle asked. "That narrows it down to what, half the population of New York?" He munched through a handful of fries, and watched Doug type way, way, way faster on his keyboard than Kyle had ever managed. "I mean, you watch this guy, he moves like me, but then, like once in a while he stands still and I swear, I see like - Gallo, or Matt, or like, Clint. He just doesn't, I dunno, move like he's used to his arms and legs."

"He's a teenager, probably just went through a recent growth spurt. It would explain the awkwardness and the slightness of his dimensions, plus why he only seems to appear at certain times of the day and week, he must have school to attend."

Laurie pointed out the time and date stamps on the information that Doug had just pulled up before stealing some of Kyle's fries.

"Fry tax."

"I'm telling MJ you have a Costco tub of peanut butter energy bars in your underwear drawer." Kyle said. "What seriously, he's a kid? Are you fucking with me?"

"Only if you ask really nice and your girlfriend and my girlfriend both say yes." Doug grinned wickedly. Even if neither he nor Kyle were the other's type, some replies just wrote themselves. "But to answer your actual question, yep. There's the occasional hesitance in his moves, like he's still getting used to how his body is working."

"Oh, and plus I'm pretty sure I've found his Facebook by plotting the Vine posts and correlating them against posts to the bookface from the same locations around the same time periods." Doug buffed his nails against his shirt. "Who's the man?"

"Wait, wait, kid like what? Kid like, a college kid and doing this for play, or kid like, no shit a kid this kid is actually like Molly's age?" Kyle was all serious now - not an ounce of kidding in his voice, or in the way he sat. He'd moved from lounging in his desk chair with one foot on a bookshelf to sitting up nearly straight. "How old is this kid? God, tell me he's not like twelve or something."

Doug brought a few pages up on the computer - a picture of young dark-skinned teenager with close-cut hair. "Meet Miles Morales - about a month past his fifteenth birthday, just starting his sophomore year at Brooklyn Visions Academy."

"We need to go see him, a kid that young, he'll get himself killed."

Laurie pushed her plate aside and have Kyle and Doug a look.

"How do we approach this?"

"Oh holy shit we do not approach this like it's something to be approached." Kyle said. "Dude, there is like no we here, Doug's a ... spy, and his boss gives me the epic heebie jeebies and you just said, you just like said that when you go all speech it's like someone fed you a shit sandwich." He balled up his fists and dug his knuckles into his thigh. "Shit, he's fifteen? Jesus, that's not that much older than I was when freaking Mistra got me. Doug - jesus, get me as much as you can on him, and I'm going to... crap. I've got more of an open schedule than almost everyone. I'll talk to the Prof, and then maybe go talk to the kid?"

"Well, conveniently enough this is your laptop, so I don't have to send you anything." Doug cracked his thumbs and bent down to the task of compiling all he could on the young man.

~*~

In the chill of night at the scene of a crime, like a streak of light, he arrives just in time!

The door to Flames Bar and Grill burst open, and a middle-aged man stumbled out backwards. Blood pouring from his nose stained his shirt. He was followed not a moment later by a tall, lean man who looked like he stepped out of a third-rate Elvis look-alike contest (or maybe a Johnny Bravo cosplay), who kicked the other man square in the chest, sending him sprawling.

“You want to say that one more time, mama?” he inquired, pinning his prey down to the ground with one bedazzled blue suede shoe. “You’re going to disrespect me like that? You think you can get away with that?”

“He probably thinks that if you can wear that, then anyone can get away with anything.” The Faux Elvis looked around for the source of the rude comment, but the street was empty besides him and the fallen man. “Yo, up here!” called a slim figure perched on the streetlight.

“Aw no, mama, no,” Faux Elvis groaned. “You’re that kid they’ve been talking about in the Eagle. Get out of here, you punk. This ain’t your business.”

“Protip, amigo. You go around hurting people, I make it my business. I am anti-hurt. So I guess by extension, I’m anti-all-of-that.” The crouching silhouette made a vague gesture to indicate Elvis’s outfit. “Like, I should take you down just on account of those shoes. That whole getup is just so . . . I mean, come on, man. It’s 2014. It’s time to move on.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” shouted Elvis. The man charged the lamp post and rammed into it with his shoulder, nearly ripping it out of the concrete. But with a grace equal to Elvis’s mutant strength, his taunter leaped off the lamp, flipped in midair, and landed daintily on his feet behind him.

No longer shrouded in the darkness, Elvis could see his opponent for what he was: just a short, skinny twig of a man in jeans, a hoodie, and a mask. Elvis sneered. “You’re going to get it now, Spider-Man,” he sneered and then charged like a mad rhino...

...and plowed straight through the brick wall of Flames.

“Bees in the what now?” Spider-Man asked, bending over the fallen lout and jabbing him in the small of the back with one finger. “Three, two, one,” he counted under his breath. Green lightning surged through Elvis’s body, his howl of pain drowned out by the howls of laughter of the bar’s other patrons. “What have we learned today? Don’t be a dick and grow the heck up. If you wanna be the King then, I dunno, try Kanye.”

After suffering a venom blast like that, Elvis was down for the count, which meant it was time for Spider-Man to leave. He scaled up the wall of the bar amid cheers and hoots and hollers, and with a flourish to please his new drunk fans, leaped onto the roof before running off.

Fifteen minutes of roof-jumping later, the Attack on Titan theme stopped Spider-Man in his tracks. “When my phone rings and I’m running on rooftops,” he said into his phone by way of greeting, “I always gotta look around to make sure a 40-foot monster isn’t about to eat me.”

“A Titan isn’t going to be what eats you if you don’t get back here soon, Miles,” said the voice on the other end. “Curfew is in 10 minutes. If you’re missing again…”

“I’ll be there in 9.” Spider-Man sighed. Sophomore year of high school was already not off to a good start.