While it's obvious, I should remind you--normal people shouldn't ride a goblin-board. It's really just surfing on top of a scud missile. That's crazy enough. The fact that half of us put scary animal facces on the front is just for show. I can ride one of these, of course--I'm a professional madman.



Of course, I was a normal person, once. Until I met some nice men from Khazackitzan who gave me a Kraven job, and now I have the balance of a cat, which explains why I'm zooming through the canyons of manhattan and not splattered on someones Prius.



This was going to be a simple job. We--Blotter, Shiv, Kanley and myself--were supposed to hit one of Fantastitech's warehouses. Real simple--get in, break some stuff, get out. They wanted us to drop off some hints that maybe it was Parker/Oscorp, but really since Blotter and Shiv are Stark-heads that wasn't really going to fly. But hey--they're paying, right?



My job was really simple--fly to a roof, drop a scrambler on an antenna. It would screw up the signals for the mall-cops so they couldn't call the cops. Give us more than three minutes, and give us time for a proper job. Yeah...real simple.



Until I get a blip on my sensors behind me, and a familiar voice in my com. "Murphy! You are behind on your payments, da? Did you think we would forget?--Kr*glish*ga--SO SPEAKS DOOM!"



Doombots. Feaking Doombots. So now I'm trying to not get flashfried and still get there on time before Blotter has to start shooting at cops and getting pissed at me, listening to their god-awful ranting (seriously, what's wrong with that guy?), and realizing I forgot to grab my reload for my webshooter.



...it's gonna be one of those nights.





So, comic books are filled with people who make amazing things and then use them to beat up muggers.



What if they did something smarter with them?



Say Stark did start off the Armor race. Say a young kid from Empire U breaks his father's glue-epoxy mix, and makes a billion dollars for his poor aunt. Say that OZ ends up on black markets with gliders and pumpkin bombs (just because the army doesn't need them doesn't mean they're not profitable). Say that these megacorps run by supergeniuses hit by cosmic rays become just as powerful as any nation, and say that they will occasionally hire some professionals. Professionals that wear masks and have silly names because that's how the game is played. Professionals that go to their local streetdoc for an adamantium job and to get zapped by rays to give them the relative powers of a house cat or whatever other animal they've got lying around. Professionals that have to do thise because it's the only line of work when you're a mutant.



It's the near future, the super-corps have won, and now you're trying to scratch a living in the shadows. Better get your mask kid.