Zero Sum

The frame by frame thunder of war

Matthew Matherson never did anything to draw attention to himself. He was a perfectly content highschooler. Despite living virtually alone while being surrounded by other students. Chatterboxes he thought. These vain, conceited, empty-headed teens only cared about being up to date on the latest pop culture nonsense. 

In Matthew's world, such trivialities did not matter to him at all. The doctors had some sort of name for his condition, but he did not care to give them merit by acknowledging it through repeating it. In fact, what the doctors would call a condition, Matthew considered as a gift. 

Where typically a person would see, for example, a person tripping and falling. Matthew would experience it as a sort of frame by frame instead of a real time event. Put another way, where an average person would be watching it as an episode on television, Matthew would see things as if it's more of a comic page by page. The unraveling of the action seems more like flipping of illustrated pages rather than a continuous flow of visual stimuli. 

To top it all off things seemed to him as more of a cartoon style, with flashy colors, sound effect blurbs, and lines moving in the direction of motion. A walk through the crowded hallways of school would appear to him with blurbs saying "chatter chatter" where there was talking in the distance. Dropping books would unfold in a series of frames, one of the books falling out of the person's hands, another frame with the books frozen in midair, but lines trailing behind them following the motion, another frame of the books slamming onto the ground, accompanied by a "slam" sound effect blurb, the next frame of a person bent over picking them up.

There are benefits to seeing the world in this way. When anyone tries to pick a fight with Matthew, they have little to no chance of hitting him, because of the way he sees the world, he can just about predict where an attack is coming from before it happens. Also, the lines that lead in the direction of motion, converge on any weak spots of his attackers. Matthew can hit there with pinpoint precision and incapacitate even multiple attackers. To top it all off, he is extra agile, since doing a backflip is easy when you can experience it frame by frame, plus there are lines zeroing in on just where he should place his feet. 

Even as he is trying to keep his head down and out of trouble, it has a way of finding him. Or perhaps his gift allows him to anticipate when and where the trouble is going to be before it even happens. So he may have himself to blame for finding himself in one bind after another.

Where he finds himself now is unusual even for him though. He recalls during science class he noticed some special effect blurbs and zoom ins on a fellow student mixing chemicals during lab. Now it turns out he zeroed in on that act, because it was actually a unique concoction.

It looks like the chemical was meant to be used for fuel, to power a rocket powered glider. He knows this because this student is now flying around above in the skies over the parking lot adjacent to the cafeteria.

Unfortunately for that student, it looks like he equipped his science project with weapons. Because of a strict enforcement on any high-end tech or unique abilities, any violation of these strict rules will call forth the security forces.

These security forces are made up of near innumerable mechanized warriors. Each time they are dispatched to put down any violations, they also receive the added benefit of stealing whatever tech or ability that any violators were armed with. These abilities or tech get downloaded into the security forces central database. From there these faceless mechanized warriors can download any ability as it suits the needs of the mission.

Therefore, a chase is now it effect. As it is a goblin looking student riding on a glider versus invading robots who steal superpowers from fighters and then make powered copies of themselves.