Big Step

Chapter One

...Three-ish Weeks Before the Arrival of General Mayhem

Some people think that Benny lost his arm in battle...well, no. He didn't even lose it accidently at his fix-it shop. He lost it because he wanted to. Metalbeard said he looked like alien bait. I mean, I guess some of the other spacemen had been missing for a while, but I always thought it was because they had nothing to do in Apocalypseburg until we all found out they had been exploring the Systar System without Benny. Anyway, Metalbeard, being pretty much a cyborg already helped Benny remove his arm and replace it with a cool, edgy sci-fi robo-arm and that seemed to do the trick.

Some people think that Unikitty looked the way she did because she was always angry. Well, again. That's not really the case. It was for protection measures from the start. She had almost been abducted in the early days of the war, and if she was angry it was more because everyone decided to take away her pink fur and cute kitty whiskers. She didn't forgive Batman for weeks for organizing the thing even if Lucy eventually convinced her it was all for the best, but she was still her usual self on the inside in secret a lot even if she didn't look like it, though.

I guess the same thing could have been said about me...sort of. I was told I was alien bait for sure. I still remember the day I proudly showed Lucy how I ripped through the reflection tape on my vest. I couldn't tell if she was impressed. She just looked at me sadly and sighed.

I think most of our battle scars, except for a few dents here and there, were more on the inside than on the outside anyway, but for me at the time, I didn't think I felt them, except for one. Actually, it had a lot more to do with Lucy than myself and the war. Not directly towards myself, anyway. See, I hated seeing what the war did to Lucy. It was my mission to make life better for her. She was so on edge, and so unhappy. I knew we were supposed to be edgy, but I didn't think it was just for looks with Lucy. Being "on edge" may not mean the same thing as "edgy" (even if I did not know that until "edgy" was the word), but it sure seemed to mean the same thing to her.

So one special afternoon, the desert sun blazed as usual with the sand blowing on the outskirts of town in that ominous swirly way it did. Actually, it kind of reminded me of cane sugar sometimes, but I wasn't allowed to say that.

After five long years— give or take a month— I felt it was time to bring up something I had not brought up out of respect for Lucy's wishes since after the first battle with the aliens when we thought we had won. I felt it was the one thing that may make her stop being on edge even if we all still had to keep up being edgy. Or something like that. I had made up my mind. I was going to face Lucy about this one important thing that had been bothering me— this one important thing I felt would make things better for Lucy so that we could share something awesome.

I got my doggy bags from the local diner, which was a pretty tough place, and I had to watch out for plate throwing, but I was getting pretty good at that with the coffee shop being just as rowdy. The bags were ripped at the bottom cuz of the junk yard dogs that ran the place at that time. The ownership of it changed hands a lot. The wings were soaked in really hot Tabasco sauce that dripped if you didn't keep the bags level. Oh, and speaking of coffee, I also got some afternoon coffee from the local coffee shop. We didn't drink anything else, which was alright with me except that when we were especially on high alert we couldn't get cream with it, being so frothy and nice and not cool, but now was not one of those times.

Besides, how else was a person supposed to neutralize extra spicy hot sauce?

It had been some time since there had been even the slightest sign of alien activity. Even the little there was had only been scavengers now and then in the ruins of Bricksburg who ran off at the sight of us. Some people thought it was because the aliens were planning something, especially with how they acted all nonchalant that last Christmas, but I was pretty sure it was really because they were giving up— at least, I really wanted to believe that. The Justice League (minus Batman) had just gone on their secret mission, and I thought for sure they had to be working things out from their end.