Chapter 2
At this juncture it is really important that you understand something about the Hippo. And that is that he is freaken scary.
I know that might seem unbelievable to you. He is, after all, a grown man in a giant cartoon hippo suit. When he speaks he sounds like a member of the Three Stooges pretending to be a mobster. Everything about him seems like a joke. In this way, he is very much like his namesake. Which is chubby and cuddly looking and best known to most of the western world as the center piece of a children’s game about how gluttony might fill the void of emptiness that stands poised to consume us all.
Also like his namesake, he is much faster and much stronger than just about anything else on the planet. I know that every time you see him on the nightly news, Haka beats him with one elbow blow to the solar plexus, but let’s be clear about something. Being vastly weaker then Haka still leaves a whole lot of people that you can be stronger then and to the average person the difference between an all-out punch from Haka and an all-out punch from the Hippo is how far your body flies before you hit something and your spine snaps.
One would think that, logically, knocking down the reinforced concrete wall to the bank would be enough to convey strength to the general public and get the customers in the bank to take the crazy man dressed up as a Hippo at least as seriously as they would a normal person in a ski mask with a gun. And had the Hippo pulled this job at a bank in the middle of an Eastern European country with poor access to the internet, things would likely have gone a lot smoother for him.
But instead, he pulled this job in the middle of Megalopolis. Super hero central. And the people living here knew it. So instead of fleeing in terror the people instead whip out cell phones and start taking videos and snapping pictures, they were sure that any moment now a hero was going to come rushing in and easily dispatched the villain. That’s how it transpired every night on the nightly news. Oh sure, sometimes villains did bad or dangerous things that you had to worry about. When Baron Blade attacks everyone takes that very serious, but come on, this was the Hippo.
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that his dramatic entrance has provoked less a sense of fear and cowed obedience then excitement, the costumed bank robber lumbers his way towards the teller counter, holding about 20 giant sacks with dollar signs stitched into them in one massive hand. Actually dollar signs, like he was a bank robber in a cartoon.
That was an important lesson that I learned from the Hippo that day. At a certain point, you have gone so far that subtly becomes pointless. At that point you might as well go for broke.
The giant slammed his sacks on the table and asks for all the money in the place to be stuffed into them. Which was of course impossible. Even for a relatively minor branch of a national bank the amount of currency in the vault could not possible have fitted into the containers he had brought with him. But the way that things were going, I would get to be right about how stupid the Hippo is in his demand and he would get 20 sacks full of 100 dollar bills.
Because what was now slowly starting to dawn on the people in the bank is that a hero is not coming, or at least not coming as quickly as they might once have. The near total destruction of the world had the heroes stretched thin, and more and more things were falling through the cracks as they scrambled to rebuild. This was, in fact, a reason that I decided to start doing things now when I never would have dared before.
That……and for one other reason. I think, at one point, it might be important for you to understand that reason. If all else fails to convince you perhaps that will. But for now it’s nothing you need to worry about.
The point is people were getting scared. The original thought of “oh, it’s just the Hippo and he’s about to get his butt kicked” were faded and being replaced by a creeping uncertainty. It was palpable in the air, anyone could feel it if they took the time. That is something very important that you understand, it’s what makes what I do different from the others. Not everyone can do what Zhu Long does, in fact most people who get closed to it tend to be found with poisoned shuriken in their backs. It took centuries of work for Biomancer to even make the crudest of his creations. The Blood Countess was bequeathed her power from ancient ritual, a lucky book she just so happened to find. But everyone and anyone can do what I do. They just have to be willing to do it.
I had not intended to do much of any about the robbery. The fact of the matter was my own planed crime had been more or less foiled, even if someone had come and beat up the Hippo thirty seconds after he had entered the bank still would have had to close down for the day, at least, for repairs. It would, to put it bluntly, rather suck that I would need to reschedule my appointment and waits weeks or even months to get another shot at the strings free loan curtsey of mind control voodoo, but the charm wouldn’t work on just anybody. It was set up to affect a specific target and trying to force its enchantment to work on someone else would have been wildly dangerous and stupid.
Not quite as wildly dangerous and stupid as the guard who pulled a hand gun on the Hippo and emptied his clip into him, but still wild and dangerous.
I got only the smallest bit of forewarning that the guard was going to act. And really, that I was able to figure it out at all was rather impressive. Everyone in this bank was feeling extreme emotions, and feeling his shift from surprise to excitement to creeping unease to conviction and then the adrenaline rush of action amidst everyone else in the bank could be compared to noticing that a single instrument in a 900 piece orchestra was slightly out of tune.
The bullets didn’t really hurt the Hippo. Well, no, that’s not quite right. My newly granted mystic powers were working on overdrive with all the fear and despair around the room after the blast of gun fire and I was rather focused on the giant in the costume so I can tell you that they did in fact caused a moderate amount of pain. It would be more accurate to say that the bullets didn’t really –damage- the Hippo. They mostly just made him mad and shifted his attention.
The Hippo turned with a thunderous roar and the unease in the room bloomed into full-fledged panic. Screaming, running, and clawing for the exits as the monstrous Hippo charges his attacker and prepares to smoosh the security guard into an ugly red stain on the wall.
If this had been a Haka story, at this moment the Maori warrior would have appeared. Perhaps crashing through the ceiling or else bursting up from the ground with a Magman in a headlock, late to the proceedings because of some whacky misadventure that he would explain over fresh baked pies to all the scared people as he makes sure that they are ok. He would lay low the Hippo with a single blow and everyone would be happy.
But Haka is dead. Or at the very least he is gone, my contacts are somewhat confused on this point. And the only one there was me.
I can’t remember now why I did what the papers would call my first act of heroism. Logically speaking now would have been a really good time to go running for the exits. It could be that it was a flight or fight response triggered by the panic of the crowd. It could be that the magic in the charm wished to be released and was unhappy that it had been confined longer then it expected. Certainly not wanting someone to needlessly die might have been a factor, but then again the guard did shoot the Hippo six times and so it could be argued that he had it coming.
What it certainly wasn’t was being moved by the bravery of the guard, drawing the ire of the Hippo with his attack and letting others escape. He didn’t pull his weapon because he was brave and wanted to save people, he pulled his weapon because he was scared and doing anything was better than sitting there feeling scared. I could feel that in him. As our eyes locked for a brief moment as I stood in front of the charging Hippo I used a tiny bit of eldritch energy to make him feel that in him too. To strip away the comforting lie he would have told himself when his heart calmed down and he was replaying the scene in his head. I do remember why I did that, to spite an idiot who put people’s lives in danger because he would rather be dead then weak.
As the Hippo got closer I reached into my pocket and pulled out the charm. I crushed it with my hand and threw it at the Hippo.
As I mentioned just a moment ago, other people would call the act that I had done here an act of heroism, but I know better. Mind control ranks pretty high up on the list of bad things you can do to people. It is also a lot easier than most people think. The brain is taking in far more information at any one time then it knows how to process and making the best decision it can out of it before jettisoning the rest. If you add one more signal too all of that white noise the victim’s brain will do all the heavy lifting of convincing. Wave your hand and tell someone that the stolen tablets in your trunk are not that Androids they were looking for and you can just move along? Nine times out of ten the victim will come up with a perfectly good reason all on their own why what they did makes sense.
On the other hand, trying to make someone do something they are dead set against is much harder. And doing it leads to much more lasting damage. The mind still tries rationalize why it came to the decision that it came from, but the sense of unease can linger for weeks, months, and even entire lifetimes.
It’s important that you understand that this was my first time doing something like this, and that the charm was just meant for a slight nudge in one direction. I didn’t know the kind of damage this would do to the Hippo. Back then, I think I would have cared.
I supercharged the charm, drawing in all the fear and panic of the people in the lobby and hurled it directly at the charging super villain. I wrapped all those emotions around a single thought, one of the most basic thoughts of any human being and one pulsating though the minds of most the people in the room. Run. Hide. Run and hide so the monster can’t get you. And I shoved it directly into the mind of the Hippo.
He let out a bellowing scream of pure terror and slammed on the breaks in his charge and go running the other way. Unfortunately for anyone standing in front of him, that much mass does not come to a stop easily and he continued moving forward for quite some distance before he could do his about face. I still have the scar on my right arm from when I was scent flying into the plate glass door.
The Hippo, crying for his mother, fled from the lobby of the bank and went directly thought a couple of walls before arriving at the vault door and rushing though it before slamming it shut, actually crying for his mother and wishing he was at the zoo.
There was dead silence following the echoing slam of that vault door and all eyes in the place feel on me. The room was literally drained, both from the natural result of coming down from an adrenaline high and also as a side effect of the magic that had just taken place and those eyes did not quite yet know how to feel what they were looking at. But in another minute or two normal emotions would return and with it normal behavior. So it seemed like in another minute or two it would be a good idea to not be here.
And so I dragged myself up and prepared to hobble out the door when I found myself starring Legacy directly in her incredibly blue and incidentally laser firing eyes.
Better late than never, I suppose.