However, it should be unnecessary to point out that spending a week in tight-quarters with sick people is exactly the sort of thing Black Plagues start from. So not only did Chuck spend his week-long beach vacation with two sick, elderly in-laws, but within a very short amount of time, he had a sick wife, two sick children, a sick sister-in-law, and a sick niece to make him feel more comfortable with his own impinging infection.
And despite the evidence that you can spread the flu to another person with no real effort on your part -- evidence that Chuck himself witnessed first-hand -- he informs me of these details over lunch the following Monday while still obviously suffering from the plague.
"Um, shouldn't you be at home?", I inquire, shying away from him.
"No, no. I'm alright. It's nothing. Probably hay-fever.", he says jauntily blowing snot into a napkin.
The old adage says that shit flows downhill. If shit were virii, I would be the wastedump at the bottom of that hill. As a child, I was often sick with various colds, streps, nasal infections, stomach flus, and monos. If another child entered the room sneezing, I would be deliriously feverish by the end of the day. I was sick so often and so badly, that I underwent several week-long injection treatments. These I detested and I fought bravely against the nurses any time I was forced to undergo one. My struggles were apparently so memorable that as a freshman in college, when I caught a cold from a classmate in Russian class and ended up with a 21,000 white blood-cell count, the nurse who was attending me got a wondering look on her face.
"Blubrik...Blubrik..." she muttered, "Say, your pediatrician didn't happen to be Dr. Boles, was he?"
"Why yes," I slewed back through fever, "he was."
"Oh. My. God." she said, just like like, three entirely separate sentences for each word. "I remember you." She went on to tell me how, when I was three, I had punched and kicked her as she and six other nurses held me down for a series of penicillin shots. Then she stabbed a needle into my exposed butt with a little more job satisfaction than I am certain was necessary. When the blood left my face for more comfortable surroundings in my feet, she helped me limp to a gurney, cooing all the way in self-satisfied tones.
I think about that moment from time to time, times that always coincide with someone blowing snot into a napkin in front of me.
Two days later, my nose and throat begin the ache with the tell-tale signs of impending infection. Long years of first-hand experience inform my actions now. I immediately cease activity, consume vast quantities of vitamin C, some zinc, as much garlic as I can stomach, and drink copious amounts of fluid. The vitamin C and zinc help bolster the immune system. The excess fluid sends the kidneys into over-drive, literally washing the bug out of the body. And the garlic keeps other people a respectful distance away so that they do not infect me with an opportunistic tribe of streptococci or worse.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can easily work from home. Armed with a fast connection and a Virtual Private Network, I am possibly more efficient at home than I am at work in my cubical (not being distracted by people wanting to chit-chat or hold pointless meetings, for example). My house is quiet, and apart from the occasional demands for attention from Coda Dog or Obie Cat, free of distraction. So, on Thursday, while I sent my subconscience to war against the Evil Rhinovirus armed with freshly forged swords of purest vitamin C, zinc-tipped spears, garlic shields and gallons of water and hot tea, I worked from home. When I became too tired to work, I napped. When I awoke and had no more meaningful work to do, or at least work that I would grant meaning to, I played City of Heroes, one of those "massively multiplayer online" games you've probably heard about where you take on the role of a super-hero in a city beset by crime syndicates and super-villains, mad scientists, monsters, undead and aliens.
Enkidu, my super-heroic alter-ego in the game, is a lone-wolf vigilante-type of character, like the titular character in Lone Wolf and Cub, or, more directly, Grendel. He is eminently capable of swatting down vast numbers of villains and mooks by himself. In this, he appears to be somewhat in a minority in the game, which is designed to deliberately cripple your hero in certain ways so that you must rely on other heroes (i.e., players) to assist you. You (your hero) may, for example, be very, very good at capturing criminals, but very, very bad and keeping them from bashing your skull in. You would, therefore, find a player whose alter-ego was very good at protecting your skull, but not very good at taking down a mook. Thus, everyone is capable of finding a role to play, and so the multi-player part of the game works.
Except for characters like Enkidu, who fly against the expectations of the other players. Enkidu doesn't require another person to help him take down a villain. He can do that quite nicely by himself. He doesn't even require help to take down a horde of villains. He can handle them as easily as any comic-book hero could. He doesn't need to have force-fields or healing auras placed on him to help him survive a fight -- they're nice, but not necessary. He doesn't need another massive hero soaking up all the damage and attention of the villains so Enkidu can beat them up from behind. He doesn't need to rest after a fight or have someone bring him a cup of water to get his strength back. He likes a straight-ahead, toe-to-toe fight.
In other words, he is entirely self-sufficient in a game which tries to deliberately cripple self-sufficiency in the name of "balance".
Therefore, I find I prefer Enkidu to "go it alone", or at least "go it with one or two friends who won't get in the way." This works most of the time just fine, but means that I have missed out on some of the larger grouping aspects of the game. One of these aspects are "Task Force Missions", which are deliberately long and hard missions designed for a large group of heroes to tackle together. I'd never had the time (they take many hours to complete) or the inclination to find upwards of eight people to help me complete one.
But Thursday was different. I was sick and had plenty of time...
...
So, after visiting the tailors at Icon, Inc. and finally deciding on his new suit of armor and what colors to apply to it (blue and gold), he set out to Talos Island to see if anyone needed a hero to participate in the Task Force: Stone mission. He found one quickly enough, and waited while the other heroes gathered. Soon enough, eight heroes had come from across the city to defeat and capture the arch-villain Vandal, leader of the maniacal techno-fascists, the 5th Column.
The task force's leader, Captain Pyric, a bruiser with the ability to exude fire from his body, lead them to the first base where Vandal might hiding, building his robotic mek-men. Sneaking into the base, the heroes came upon the first group of neo-nazis, milling about a cavern-cum-high-tech-hide-out, looking for trouble. From the snippets of conversation the heroes of Task Force Stone could hear, somebody had tipped the 5th Column off.
Enkidu surveyed the opposition. They were numerous, but weak. He'd fought tougher, more dedicated criminals for breakfast. He'd fought bizarre transdimensional aliens, for Bablyon's Sake, and these pitiful pretend-soldiers in their black-and-red uniforms and jack-boots, no matter how many there might be, couldn't even put a scratch his ecto-chitin breastplate. But he held his tongue, and waited for Captain Pyric to give his orders.
These orders were of the most timid character. The heroes would sneak up on the fascists, attempting to place booby traps and smoke grenades to weaken them. Sneak up on them? Weaken them? thought Enkidu incredulously. But he held his tongue.
Slowly and timidly, the other heroes crept forward and planted the booby traps. Enkidu thumbed his sword impatiently. This is not heroic. This is cowardly. But he held his tongue. He was not the leader, after all.
The first explosions went off, and Enkidu's sword sprang from its scabbard. In a flash, Enkidu vanished and reappeared next to the largest, most threatening mek-man he could find and began hacking at the robot's metal armor. Sparks flew, armor fell away, wires disintegrated, and the robot crumpled to ground. Now, this is more like it.
Vandal is still a step ahead of them. Task Force Stone followed the clues to the next secret base, buried beneath the docks of Independence Port. Again, Captain Pyric demanded the timid approach, this while dealing with cell-phone calls from his agent. Magnoman begged off for a few minutes for dietary distress -- bad pizza or something. Enkidu fidgeted. He always turns his cell-phone off before taking a mission. Who wants to have a reporter or agent calling you are surrounded by acid-vomiting zombies in the sewers beneath the city?
Finally, Captain Pyric put away his cell-phone and Magnoman came out from behind the rocks looking somewhat relieved. Once again, they crept forward to another clutch of thugs. We slither like worms, grumbled Enkidu to himself.
Finally, he could take it no longer.
"You do realize," he said, "that I can arrest every 5th Columnist in this base by myself, don't you? I mean, we do not need to be so...circumspect. These thugs are wimps."
Captain Pyric immediately barked back, "If you don't like it, sir, then you are welcome to leave. This is a group effort."
I didn't realize cowardice required a group, thought Enkidu sourly, but he bit his tongue again. No reason to make things worse. He only hoped that Captain Pyric would realize that perhaps Enkidu was only trying to help, only trying to speed things along, only offering his abilities up to the group which here-to-for had pretty much ignored him. Instead, he knew, the Captain had decided Enkidu was a braggard and, worse, a dangerously half-cocked liability to the team. Enkidu resolved to not mention it again and hoped that the Captain paid attention in the next fight. Captain Pyric stormed off, fires blazing off his skin impressively. Enkidu watched him go, comparing the man's brilliant, blazing skin-fires to his own low-keyed glow of ki and wondering if the others would take him more seriously if he ran around setting things a-light. With a shrug, he ran off after the leader.
Captain Pyric rounded a corner into a large group of neo-nazis. Instead of engaging them, he fled, leading them back towards the other unprepared team members. Enkidu immediately engaged the Columnists to stop them. The metaplasmic katana did it's work.
Then cries for help began to come over the comm-link. "We're in trouble back here!" Somewhere, in another part of the cavern, some of the team had run into other 5th Columnists, too many for them to handle. Leaving his current work unfinished, Enkidu ran to find them. By the time he did, Captain Pyric laid upon the ground, unconscious, surrounded by a milling horde of twenty neo-nazis. Enkidu leapt upon them and slew them, standing above the Captain's body.
When the battle was finished and Captain Pyric groggily stood back up, he shot an angry glance at Enkidu. "We'll not have any more of that!" Enkidu shrugged and walked away.
Unforunately, Captain Pyric did not get his wish, and the now fully-alerted 5th Columnists set a more clever ambush of fully-armed mek-men in the next cavern. The heroes charged in and were quickly over-whelmed. Three went down in a matter of seconds, including again Captain Pyric. Enkidu himself found himself surrounded by dozens upon dozens of mek-men and iron valkyries, seized by doubt and wondering if he might have been bragging a little bit after all.
The remaing heroes fled the scene. Enkidu stepped back a few paces so that he could block the entrance to the cave his companions had fled down, setting himself alone between them and the rampaging robots. Suddenly, his read-out began to show that three of the team members were abandoning the mission. Captain Pyric lead the charge out of the dangerous underground base and to the nearest Starbucks, leaving Enkidu, the mentalist Marzz, and the empath Jim Bean to face down thirty enraged, gleaming metal neo-nazi robots.
"Get back!" shouted Marzz over the comm-link, "Enkidu! Get back here before you get yourself killed! There's too many of them. You can't do it alone!"
Enkidu gritted his teeth. Those are fighting words. Building up his power, he leapt into the air. His katana turned into a solid sphere of whirling death around him.
"It's..."
Ten mek-men exploded into pieces as Enkidu's katana connected with their bodies.
"...O..."
Like a peeling a bloody onion, a dozen neo-nazi soldiers fell away, clutching at their opened guts spilling on the floor.
"....K!!"
With one final flurry of silvery, shining death, the remaining horde of evil-doers gasped, exploded, died, fled, or begged for mercy befrore Enkidu and his metaplasic blade. And it was over.
Enkidu ran the back of his bloody hand across his forehead and smiled as he glanced at his armor. It was dripping gore, but he was happy anyway. See? Not a scratch.
As he wiped the katana off on the body of one of the thugs, Marzz and Jim Bean came running up.
"The others fled." Marzz gasped. "They fled. Can you believe it? Heroes that flee?"
"Wusses.", mumbled Jim Bean angrily. The mentalist and the empath looked over the silent room, at the pile of bodies, at Enkidu as he slid the katana into its sheath.
The two younger heroes glanced at each other uncomfortably for a long, silent moment. Then, Marzz spoke up. "I have something I must say to you, Enkidu."
"What's that?"
"When you said you could handle all these guys by yourself. I...well, I thought very badly of you."
Enkidu nodded. "I know."
"But now I know what you're about, what you can do. I know what you were trying to say."
Enkidu realized the young hero was trying to apologize for thinking Enkidu had been a lousy braggard, a self-important newbie. He shrugged.
"That's OK." he said, "But right now, there's an arch-villain threatening the city and its up to us, just us, to bring him to justice. Are you with me?"
Jim Bean and Marzz said, as one, "Hell, ya!" and the three heroes ran off into the depths of the cavernous base to find their destiny. By the end of the day, the nefarious Vandal was resting uncomfortably in his own private cell in Ziggursky Prison.
Sometimes, it's good to be able to lay one's enemy out, viral or imaginary.
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