“That cloak looks good on you.” Stephanie said as she wore her Spoiler outfit. I smiled. “Yep this is what I spent yesterday making.” She looked at me in confusion. “You made that? Like tailored it?” I laughed again. “No. I added the plastic layer of enchants to it.” I pulled the cloak to the side and showed her. “It does a bunch of things but the main one is levitation magic. It was expensive though… There’s a sheet of plastic worth ten thousand dollars floating over the Atlantic ocean right now.”
She laughed thinking it was a joke but my dead stare in the direction the plastic flew off let her know I wasn’t lying. She asked. “So where are we going on our date?” I opened a portal to the entrance of titans tower. She froze and I had to grab her hand before she finally followed through.
I clicked the buzzer and I’m connected to the vision of Nightwing on the other side. Cool this will make things easier. “Is Tim in?” A whooshing sound of a weapon passing by his head as he responded. “Yea he’s here. What is this about?” They really shouldn’t have a visible camera in their room. “We’ll be right up.”
I made a portal into the room he was in. Portals didn't work like in the movies. I couldn't just think of a name and open a portal to that person. I needed to have been in that location before. Normally you wouldn’t be able to connect a video or picture with a location but you could if it was an accurate depiction of the room nearby. It also increased the mana cost tremendously but it was only like five floors up. We entered as I felt the dip in my mana from not using the teleportation magic correctly.
The two people fighting were none other than Nightwing and Robin. Both stopped mid fight to look at us. I looked Tim dead in his eyes before saying. “Alright. You and Spoiler have a lot to talk about. I'll be heading out to bring back a pizza.” Without another word I flee the scene. I port out and almost drop from lack of mana. I order the pizza and wait for it to cook and recharge my mana before porting back in.
No one is in the training room. I head to the door but it’s an automatic thing that opens when someone with either a communicator or some other piece of tech gets close. I called out. “Any help with the door?” For a brief moment I think I might need to port down to the bottom before the door opens. I follow the hallway to an elevator and go up to where they were.
Surprisingly there weren’t many people around. The Titans tower should have like twenty to thirty residents but I only see five. It must be Nightwings group as the only ones in the tower right now the other four teams must be out on missions. More likely Nightwings team got stuck in case help was needed by the other teams out.
I feel really silly ordering five pizzas now. “Hey you get that sorted out?” I ask the two sitting next to each other watching another team fight an army of robots. Looks like a H.I.V.E base they’re taking down. I recognize Jason Todd, Robin and Wonder Girl. The Atlantean and a metahuman? I couldn’t tell who he was, just looked like a normal kid to me without his costume.
“Pepperoni here, meat lovers, extra cheese, vegetarian and vegan pizza from top to bottom.” I said as I put the pizza’s down. They’re young kids and as expected one goes for the vegetarian while the other goes for the vegan. I pop the pepperoni and sit down next to Stephanie.
I should have grabbed plates, I thought as I caught hot cheese dripping off the pizza almost ruining my new cloak. I changed my hair to the normal blonde color last night so the room wasn’t full of black haired boys. I asked again. “So Robin explain himself. We good Steph?”
She took a bite out of her pizza. “Yea we’re good. Thank you for this. I needed closure.” I finished the pizza and told Tim. “No one cares that you’re gay. This isn’t the eighties anymore. You should have told Steph two years ago when you got that crush on the pink haired boy you thought was a girl at first.”
“All the way back then!?” Stephanie asked and I could only laugh as I remembered she was mad at him because she also thought he was a girl and was jealous. It might have even been before that as it was the first time in the new comics that showed him as anything more than straight. I’m glad they didn’t go the bisexual route with him this time.
This might have seemed like an odd place to bring someone on a date but it made sense in my mind. It would let her know for sure that I was telling the truth and close a potential rift between the two of them for as long as Tim hid that fact from Steph. I mime looking at a watch saying. “Alright folks best to mosey on out of here. We still have dinner to head to.”
I open another portal back to about a block away from the restaurant. This is the fancier place you needed a reservation to get into. At least you did if you didn’t tip the staff a thousand dollars to misplace someone else for that night. We made it a few steps before her phone started pinging her.
“Again!? Can we go on a date without something happening?”
Alright so a lot of people are asking why the protagonist is stealing when he had the money to pay for things. Because he can, it's super easy to do and why waste money when you can just take it with there being no chance of being caught. Also I find it strange you guys care about him stealing when he literally sawed a man's head off because it was seconds faster to do that then figure out how to steal the collar. Like killing is fine but stealing is somehow worse? He placed a tracker on someone so he could hunt them down and kill them later when his girlfriend wasn't around to see it then looks around his apartment for cleaning supplies to get blood out of his robe.
The protagonist isn't a good guy. He likes heroes and he likes villains. He kills for a reason, he steals for a reason. The average daily income of a jewelry store is over 30k. He didn't even steal what they'd make in a single day's worth of gems. The jewelry store owner wont even register the amount stolen as more than a blip and that's if they weren't insured which I'm pretty sure(not positive) they need to be in order to run the store. You can say the employee might be fired or their could be other repercussions but once again the protagonist has killed multiple people.
The protagonist has goals. One is to be one of the richest people on the planet and spending 3% of your networth on something you can get for free is incredibly short sighted. He spent twenty minutes of his day to save 30k and get the gems he needed anyways. When he's racking in billions of dollars do you think he'd steal the gems? Probably not (he might still do it for fun), because it wouldn't be worth his time to do. He'd buy the gems and have them shipped to wherever they're needed. Or more likely have someone else buy more gems so he wouldn't need to. (which SHIELD is in the process of doing. He just wanted to make his cloak first.)
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@deadlywolf234, You've got some things wrong wrt. stealing.
Alright so a lot of people are asking why the protagonist is stealing when he had the money to pay for things. Because he can, it's super easy to do and why waste money when you can just take it with there being no chance of being caught.
It's extremely unlikely for the MC to not become associated with the stuff he steals, given the pervasiveness of the cameras. And you might argue that by changing the look of his hair/face he becomes unrecognizeable, but that's simply not the case as there are methods of identification without using face/hair, for example, using only the body movement patterns. Unless he changed that every time, with would be excessively hard to do, as well as changing his entire body build (too expensive as far as biomatter/energy go), he is being recognized and associated with the crimes. Lack of law enforcement on his thievery in the short term doesn't mean that it's forever going to be the case.
And that leads to the following point:
The protagonist has goals. One is to be one of the richest people on the planet and spending 3% of your networth on something you can get for free is incredibly short sighted.
It is far more short sighted to create yourself a record of petty thievery when you want to associate yourself with law enforcement agencies. When something will go missing (sooner or latter it will happen) the very first person who everyone accuses of doing the deed is obviously the guy who has a track record of stealing stuff even when he can legally buy and afford the stuff.
So no, he's not getting stuff for free. He's getting it in exchange for the track record of thievery.
And if he really was smart enough to play for the long game where he expects to be among the richest people on the planet, the he definitely wouldn't be doing stupid, short sighted petty thievery, since that just sets things up for problems down the line when law enforcement finally decides to pursue him for the crimes committed that they have a record of. And if he doesn't cooperate with going to jail, he can always have his assets seized as he turns fugitive.
So yeah, some people are surprised, for reasons other than morality, as this frankly has nothing to do with morality.
Agreed
Look up crime clearance rates and see that more than half of crime goes unsolved. It's about 25% for theft and that's an insanely conflated number because of drug addicts. Any experienced thief that number drops down dramatically. Someone who can change their appearance makes that number almost zero. They're not going to look at his body movements to figure out who he actually is. That's a TV show thing no one does that in real life.
Most police aren't hyper vigilant they must solve all cases type people. The police will show up probably look around the area realize there's no chance they're going to catch anyone because the crime happened twenty minutes ago and just chalk it up to a loss. There's a reason stores are closing because of theft.
Also Lex Luthor and Norman Osborn have committed almost every single crime and are still walking around some of the richest people on the planet. Worse crimes have been committed and gotten away with than stealing. It's just weird that people are drawing the line at stealing when it comes to what they'll tolerate. There's a torture tag, he tortures people later in the story. Most people aren't going to look up your criminal record and if they do see petty theft on this millionaire's they're not going to assume you're stealing bread. They're going to assume almost anything else than you actually got caught stealing.
Also most of the time cameras can't get a good read on people's faces especially if they're wearing a mask and hoody while staring down. I think you just fell for the news's portrayal of how many people are caught. It's normally like someone steals a bunch of cigarettes and they show up in the same parking lot of the building trying to sell those stolen cigarettes. Drug addicts highly conflate the number of cleared crimes because they're the ones getting caught. I'd probably guess less than ten percent of all theft(Not committed by drug addicts) goes solved. And that's without putting people with super powers into the mix.
You can be caught dead to rights and depending on which state you were caught they'll just let you out without charging you with anything. (New York just had a chance to increase penalties to retail related crime and refused) You can be a professional shoplifter in New York and California.
@deadlywolf234 I would agree with you if it was about the real world. The problem here is that we're talking about Marvel/DC, which while are a lot like the real world, they also have a lot of things that are different from real world. The primary thing relevant here is the technology, which is a lot more advanced from real world. Marvel especially has actual AI running around (not sure if they chronologically exist yet in your story, but even if they don't yet, ~soon they will, and they will have access to all the recorded data). When you combine AI with a lot of data, they will be able to sift though it all and see patterns, and it's not merely limited to body movement patters. It should be trivial for an autonomous artificial intelligence to simply do a screening of all the people that are associated with important people/projects.
Now, as for the law enforcement, I specifically avoided using the term "police", as they're not the only law enforcement in Marvel, and not who I think would connect the dots. SHIELD and whatnot are also a part of law enforcement. And while it's true that SHIELD wouldn't bother with chasing after some low-level thievery, they would certainly make a note of it in MC's file. That note, possibly associated with a list of thefts that can be proven could then later on be passed to the police at the moment when they find it useful. Or not pass it on, and instead use it as a hook for the MC to make him do their bidding, or else. Why would they enforce anything when MC is working hard to create material to use against him later on?
Also, as a side note, the body movement pattern is not something that exists only in TV shows, but it does exist in real world… except it's not something that is really used because of practical reasons - the amount of computing power required, as well as some legal stuff that hasn't been ironed out simply prohibit the usage. But that's not really the case for Marvel, which is significantly more technologically advanced. Not to mention that privacy laws don't really exist as a thing in Marvel.
Same thing goes for cameras not being good enough - Marvel, as a significantly more technologically advanced world would have better cameras…
To add to what a lot of people are saying.
He has already been caught/seen several times for other criminal activity. Lockpicking a door on camera and entering a building not owned by him or with permission of the resident and/or owner is Unlawful Entry, Possible Burglary, and Trespassing; for those crimes, that is not circumstantial evidence, it shows direct intent. While it is circumstantial evidence for him committing the murder as the forensic experts can easily tie in the time of break in with time of deaths. It is very much damning circumstantial evidence and can prove intent to a Jury.
Then there is Batman: the MC is a killer, a known killer to Batman and yet Batman has little to no issues with it.
But my main issue is for all his powers and smarts he is showing a sever lack of common sense. I don't care that he steals. I don't care that he murders. I don't care that he likes both Villains and Heroes. It is a story, he can do all those things he wants. I do care that for someone as supposedly intelligent and as powerful as he is, he is very much short sighted in his actions.
He is a known teleporter, he is a known body manipulator. All businesses that are targets for constant Robberies, like jewelry stores have cameras. He walks in disguised sure, but then he uses his known teleporting ability to leave. All 1st world countries and most 2nd world ones legal enforcement may need evidence to legally prosecute. But intelligence services do not need it to point fingers and take action as they feel the need.
Now if your setting him up for a failure arc. He has set himself up for sure.
Stealing IS far more evil than killing. In fact, killing is not evil in itself. Literally all animals kill. It's part of the natural cycle of all life. You kill plants and animals to eat. You kill insects literally without noticing. People kill to protect themselves and their loved ones. Most would not consider those evil, and those that do are hypocrites. What matters is who you kill, and what effects your killing will have on others.
You've had him kill evil people. I don't have any issues with that, regardless of how he did it. It's not like little kids saw the headless corpse and got traumatized. As for stealing? He's definitely hurr innocents with that, even if he stole from a supermarket. Stores pass 100% of those losses to their employees and customers. Plus, many store owners are innocents too.I actually wouldn't have considered him a bad guy at all if it wasn't for his stealing. I'm fine with it though, as it makes your statement of him not being a good guy actually true.