Yesterday at 5:32 PMAdd bookmark#2It turned out that the immigration process to a new world as an alien was surprisingly simple. At least, for someone as human-looking as me and fundamentally capable of transforming into a more deceptively human appearance. Reverse-engineering the Henge no Jutsu was remarkably easy, seeing as it was functionally a full physical transformation that ran over a person's body. Basically creating a shell of chakra that had more uses from what I remembered of the anime and manga.
The more advanced usages that Naruto got up to weren't something I was putting much time into researching, if I'm being honest. I just needed a disguise that'd hold up so that I could go out and about without drawing too much attention. Personally, I don't think Cecil was soothed by my capability to effortlessly take on the appearance of just about everyone, but…
Well, you couldn't always get what you wanted in this world.
Or maybe he took satisfaction in the deluge of paperwork that I was being drowned in. There were two effective identities being created for me, one being a more civilian-oriented and outwardly facing Genji Ōtsutsuki, twenty-four-year-old Japanese immigrant working as a consultant for the GDA. For the other, my true identity, age, and as much as could be wheedled out of my origins and capabilities were filling the GDA database.
Frankly, I wasn't too put out about telling him all of this information. Maybe it was naive of me, but Cecil seemed like an alright man. Distrustful of me due to my alien origins, but open to hearing me out and giving me a fair shake. And ultimately it wasn't as if the Ōtsutsuki had many weaknesses that he could take advantage of in the first place.
The real cap on my capabilities was how much chakra I had at a given moment, seeing as I didn't need to eat or breathe. I was, being modest about my powers, capable of traveling at FTL speeds, though I hadn't tested spaceflight yet in truth. In terms of strength and durability, the Ōtsutsuki could likely be compared to the big names in fiction like Saiyans and Kryptonians, though obviously weaker in terms of raw physical statistics.
If I had a genuinely evil bone in my body, there was a lot of damage I could end up doing. Presuming that the defenders of the world weren't powerful in their own right. All of this was by and large supposition, though, since I didn't intend on using these powers and new life for ill. Because at the end of the day, despite the godlike power I now wielded or how often my body had changed, I was still me.
When I was a kid I remember seeing this snippet of a Marvel comic with Beta Ray Bill floating around the internet. In it, he pretty much was saying that it didn't matter what the subjective realities of a situation were so much as the objective fact of right and wrong. If there was nothing that we made in this world, then it was on everyone in the world to put good back into the universe.
Despite the fact that my emotions felt like I was feeling them through a haze of glass, it didn't change right and wrong. That didn't mean I was tremendously enthused with the degree of questions that I was being subjected to. Not when dealing with the immense powers of bureaucracy, which could prove remarkably painstaking the longer time went on.
"Age?"
"One hundred and one."
"Height?"
"Roughly…six feet, five inches, if I'm correctly understanding your measurement system correctly."
The functionary taking down my details glanced up, arching a singular brow my way. "We actually use the metric system."
I take it back. This American-based organization underneath the Pentagon was using the metric system. Obviously I was in some kind of bizarro, evil reality, and I wasn't sure if anyone could convince me otherwise.
"Then it'd be a hundred and ninety-five centimeters."
It was a good thing they'd handed me a tablet in my temporary confinement while my immigration status was being sorted out. During the day after the initial invasion I'd fought off, I had ample time to screw around with the sleek, unfamiliar interface of the device and figure out the ins and outs. Blessedly, it also gave me the opportunity to investigate and learn things about languages and other basic human knowledge, seeing as I didn't have any pesky biological functions to take care of.
Cecil seemed like a competent guy, if woefully stressed out and under some incredible amounts of biological stress, judging by what I saw when I scanned his insides. That meant he was almost certainly scanning my search history and what I was practically looking up with the tablet. Did that mean some poor technician was having to sift through my queries about cat videos and porn?
Yes. Yes, it did. Did I feel guilty about it?
Not particularly. See, it was already difficult enough to grasp my situation for myself, and I was the one living through it. Trying to explain that I'd been a man who was fused with a race of dimensionally traveling world annihilators seemed like a bridge too far. Sometimes you had to give someone an easier theory to swallow rather than a truth they just could not comprehend.
"Planet of origin?"
I paused. "Is that a real question on the form?"
"Standard fare for all alien immigrants who arrive through all proper channels."
"Do you guys actually have the means to check if they're telling the truth?"
The man paused before shrugging. "Honestly, I have no idea. That's above my pay grade."
Y'know what? Totally fair, my guy. "I was born on a moon, hovering over a dead planet, so I haven't the faintest clue of the name of either. My Clan mostly used it as a staging ground for invading other worlds and for holding the main stock of Servants."
That wasn't even a lie, if we were being honest. All the Hyuga wish they could be half as savage to their own family members as the Ōtsutsuki were without really even trying. It was a miracle more of us didn't go rogue, and even in Kaguya's case, her only problem was that she was the one being sacrificed for the chakra fruit.
"I'm going to mark you down as none available. Is that alright?"
"That's probably the best option out of the bunch, yes."
"Moving on, gender identity?"
Needless to say, I was in a specific kind of hell. I had the sinking suspicion that perhaps Cecil was somewhere laughing at me for making his life difficult, but I couldn't prove it. We only went through the gamut of questions until things eventually came to a close. By the end of it, I was being fingerprinted, for all that it actually mattered, and having a few different sets of pictures created for both of my IDs.
For all that I had bitched and moaned about the process, though, it didn't actually take all that long. Maybe a day, and admittedly, that wasn't as horrible as it could have been. I meditated, regained my chakra, and mostly zoned out into my happy place while I steadily got used to the incrementally expanding range of my Byakugan. At this rate, chances were I'd be able to see the entire country within the span of a few months.
In a year I'd have the entire Northern Hemisphere. Gradually growing, provided I trained hard and worked to acclimate myself to the new senses at my disposal. Frankly, compared to everything else that had come with this new life, I found myself endlessly fascinated with chakra. The power system wasn't Nen, but it certainly had a lot of things a sufficiently creative person could do with it.
And like most of the Ōtsutsuki, I was a special kind of idiot savant.
Things that a shinobi would need to spend months, years, or decades learning to do or to achieve, I could probably attempt the first time around if I knew the rough theory behind how it worked. My body was a machine biologically engineered from the ground up for this kind of mastery, with perfect chakra control and effortless manipulation of the basic elemental releases well within my grasp.
That was before you got to the even more cracked advantages that I had, which I was only starting to realize the longer I'd settled into this body. My eyes were useful for seeing through random shit, but that was only the surface-level capacity that they held. The longer I stared at living creatures and focused on them, the more I began to receive…
It was hard to explain the sensory information coming my way, because it wasn't something that the human mind was normally built for. I wasn't seeing their thoughts directly so much as I was reading the state of their spiritual energy, which allowed for a certain degree of hyperspecific foresight. Oriented almost entirely on where their thoughts were going and where their emotions were at.
I suspected there were even deeper levels to the ability, but again, I was also very new to these powers. I'd need a test subject before I could properly test it out, yet I suspected it was somewhat closer to the chicanery that Kaguya could get up to with her Byakugan. If that was the case, all of my other capacities might be dwarfed in comparison to my eye's ability to evolve in the future.
Only time would tell if I was a potential man or not, though.
Focusing on these sorts of things made the time spent alone easier. I wasn't thinking about my fish that I'd left in my apartment, or the things left unspoken between me and my parents. My thought wasn't revolving around that cute girl in my office I'd never gotten around to asking out. Much like a shark, it was easier to keep swimming and refuse to stop and actually reflect on anything.
To do so would invite ruin that I couldn't actually come to grips with at the moment. Trying to dredge those emotions past the haze of Ōtsutsuki indifference just wasn't worth it. Maybe in the future, but definitely not now.
Instead, I'd just focus on the things inside my control, like my new apartment. The GDA were fast when it came to putting together a place for me to live, shoving me in Chicago for reasons that weren't entirely clear at first blush. Of course, if this city ended up being this universe's version of New York and a hotbed of superhuman crime, maybe that was why.
It had all the fixings, too. Rent was more or less taken care of, seeing as this was a safehouse or something, so I presumed that meant Cecil's people also owned the property. Electricity, water, trash, sewage, the works, was also on the house. I'd been offered a maid service for cleaning my apartment, but honestly, that was a bridge too far. There were already several discrete listening bugs and cameras in the place that I could see with my eyes, making it easier for them to scrape skin cells or hair or whatever just seemed like a bad idea.
Was I being too paranoid? God no. My earlier reaction when I called this a superhero universe had been, perhaps, an understatement. Even a casual investigation of the world made it clear we had kaiju, supervillains running rampant across the globe, and all manner of superheroes filling in the gaps here and there.
It went without saying that I'd read enough comic books and manga to be leery of the typical superhero setting tropes. A super powerful alien being getting cloned was one of the most common ones. Literally, how many times had Superman gotten cloned or had a serum derived from his powers or some inane shit like that?
Nah, son. Couldn't be me.
I meant that in a very literal sense, too, since it couldn't be me. Orochimaru and Kabuto were some of the greatest minds in the Elemental Nations, but I had strong doubts that they could take what made an Ōtsutsuki unique and distill it down to something scientific in any appreciable amount of time. Still, all of these were long-term, longitudinal problems.
Instead, I had more pressing things to look into. Trying to find time to go shopping so that I could buy clothes that looked like they weren't straight out of the Heian era. Or maybe filling up my fridge with delicious foods, pricey expenditures that I might not have been able to afford before. I even found a kalimba playing class over in San Francisco that'd only take me a few minutes to fly over to.
The world was my oyster!
If I were going to be trapped in this new world, in this new body, I was going to do my damn best to make it a life worth living. No more half measures or holding myself back because I was worried about social obligations or not having enough money. That was my initial thought, anyway, before my GDA-issued phone rang.
"Hello?"
"The Flaxans are back, Genji. We need you to rendezvous with the Teen Team to fight them off."
This balding bastard, I swear to god.
A long, drawn-out sigh rolled out of me. "...I'll be there."
It appeared as if my dream of learning to be increasingly fluent in foreign and useless instruments was going to have to wait for another time. Teaching the Flaxans why it'd be such a singularly bad idea to interrupt my own personal time almost seemed like some real fun. I didn't know how many times we'd need to teach them this lesson, though.
Honestly, how stubborn could one race be?
I hadn't exactly been shy about slaughtering the alien invaders, which wasn't something anyone seemed to care that much about. It'd be one thing if I had, say, killed a bunch of aliens that looked a lot like humans or hadn't done anything that bad beyond property damage. Public opinion would not have been so generous on my side if that had been the case.
But it wasn't.
To your average person, a bunch of green-skinned, callous bug people came spilling out of portals in downtown Chicago. They then proceeded to start slaughtering people in the street at the initial site of their incursion, without a care for age, race, or gender. It was a total shitshow, mitigated by some new hero nobody had ever heard of, coming into the scene and saving the day.
It wasn't hyperbole to call me stupidly fuckable, in every sense of the word, so I had a bit of the halo effect going for me too. On the chance that I'd been anything less than a 10/10 on the looks spectrum, perhaps there could have been some minor outcry. However, from my surface-level perusal of the internet, most people didn't seem to care that much.
They came to earth, were then violently rebuked, and were forced to retreat after being punished savagely for their trespass. There was the humanity I knew and loved. It didn't matter if we hated each other on racial, national, or religious boundaries yesterday. Against an enemy even more foreign and literally alien, we'd bind ourselves together in an instant to flip them the bird.
Given that I wasn't being directed toward me, I could prove rather pleased about it.
It took me absolutely no time at all to arrive at the meeting point with the Teen Team, which was on the top of one of the buildings downtown. My flight took under a minute, and that was me going about as fast as I could at a speed that wouldn't shatter windows in the process.
I'd heard a little about the Teen Team since I'd first given my time over to researching this new version of Earth, but this was the first time I'd seen them in the flesh. Well, notwithstanding my capacity to stalk them in their hidden base, that was an accidental byproduct of my Byakugan's range. If I wasn't practically disregarding their privacy, this was the first time I'd seen them.
The most striking of the bunch was the member of the team who wasn't even human. Sleek, rust-colored robotic limbs were what powered the figure forward. From what I could tell, there weren't even any biological functions either, though it certainly was a remarkably beautiful work of artifice.
Another, with dark, tan skin and auburn hair underneath his hood, was probably the most biologically modified human I'd seen since I'd arrived here. His body was riddled with cybernetic augmentations that I couldn't tell heads or tails of, grafted to his skeleton at points that might have seemed logical to someone with more knowledge than I had.
If nothing else, he was in impeccable shape, with a level of bodily conditioning that most people couldn't even remotely come close to. He had my respect for maintaining that level of physique when I was pretty sure his power didn't have anything to do with his actual bodily structure at all. He… I think he basically had Gambit's powers, if my memory isn't faulty. It wasn't like I'd done a ton of research on any of them before this moment.
Next to him and clad in a wonderfully tight outfit was an Asian girl with short black hair, cut in a bob cut. She had the build of a gymnast, slender and petite, and a brown-eyed gaze. Altogether, I couldn't spot anything too unusual about her physiology, outside some kind of outright supernatural force that was tied to her spirit. That, and a much longer tie to another mind, or body, a lot further away.
The last of the team was certainly more on the shapely side than Dupli-Kate. Atom Eve's physiology was a touch bizarre underneath the surface, but otherwise she was a rather fair-skinned and exceptionally pretty redhead. Wearing a costume that was decidedly pinker than her fellows. It only really covered her torso and arms, leaving the bottom half to terminate in what was a leotard of sorts.
I did my best not to let my eyes linger overly much on her curves. We had an alien invasion to fight, and I could leer later.
However, there was an additional person that I hadn't been expecting to be present. The same teen that had confronted me when I'd driven the Flaxans off during the first invasion, who stiffened at my approach as I came to a stop on the roof. There was the off chance that he might have held a grudge concerning my slaying of the aliens originally, but if that was the case…
I'd live through his disappointment.
"They're not getting older, Robot. Why aren't they getting older?" Rex Splode spoke, with just the tiniest bit of irritation and frustration in his voice.
From the ostensible leader, Robot could only make an observation that I found more dispassionate and calculating than anything else. "They seem to have made some adjustments to properly handle our timestream. However, it also appears we have other company."
Turning to face me as I landed, the slightest inclination of the figure's head in my direction clued in everyone else they had someone approaching. "Greetings, Genji," Robot was the one to greet, approaching me briskly. "Director Stedman informed me that we could rely on your assistance."
"I'll probably take them head-on again or work to evacuate civilians, but I can manage either one." The fact that people had returned to the area of an invasion was wild to me, but maybe people on this Earth were just built differently when it came to their tolerance for this sort of thing.
In their shoes you couldn't have caught me dead coming around here.
"What do we even call you, anyway? Spooky horned ice man?" Rex Splode, the most bombastic of the bunch from my readings, blurted in.
The subject of a name hadn't exactly passed me by. Who didn't dream of having a superhero codename when they were children? Going by Genji-Man just didn't roll off the tongue well, though, so I'd given the notion at least a nominal thought. For now, I had something of an idea of a name that could work.
"Call me Taijitu."
It was the name for the yin-yang symbol, that interconnected icon that represented the cosmic two halves of everything. Considering what I was now, that felt more appropriate than anything else that I could have come up with. "What's the plan, gang? Letting me go nuts?"
"We'll handle the forward attack to stall for time and drive them back while you can assist in maintaining low civilian casualties." Robot spoke as his sleek vehicle sprung to life, and he hopped aboard, Kate and Rex following suit. "Can we rely on you to evacuate the civilians as swiftly as possible?"
Honesty? I didn't know how capable all of them were, but I was willing to give them a chance to try and contain the threat. If it turned out that they needed the help, I'd step in. Short of someone else on my level, I didn't think I was going to have trouble with anything here anytime soon.
"Of course," I agreed. "Preserving innocent lives trumps everything else."
The three reliant on the vehicle didn't need any further encouragement to move out as they moved forward on the flying bike. For Eve and the unnamed guy, they lingered for just a moment longer. Long enough for me to glance over at the first hero I'd met in this world.
"You ready for this?"
"I…" He swallowed thickly, glancing away. "Not really. Still new to saving the day."
"If that's the problem, that's got a rather easy solution."
"It does?" Both Eve and the guy spoke in tandem.
"Saving the day is too nebulous, too dimorphic of a concept." I already was beginning to mold chakra inside my body, weaving it into new and complex patterns. "Focus on what you can do to fix things, one problem at a time. One person, one fight, one overarching threat. And go from there."
Then, my shinjutsu bloomed from my body.
Hyōton was the elemental release infused into my bloodline, and as far as kekkei genkai went, it was one of the better ones. Even in the anime and manga, you could do some rather insane things going on with it, like the Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals that allowed for instantaneous teleportation.
I took about three seconds to think out the problem in front of me and even less time to craft a technique on the spot. That was the kind of thing that I meant when I said the Ōtsutsuki were idiot savants. On the spot, they could manipulate chakra to do things that most shinobi could never have dreamed of, running off little more than pure instinct.
Like making an all-new kind of clone technique from scratch.
"Hyōton: Ice Clone."
Coming out of my body like malformed spores were figures of ice that grew to match my appearance entirely, save for frozen expressions on their faces. I could probably perfect the jutsu with more time, but with the time I had available this would have to do. Tinkering with the interesting jutsu could come after the civilians were out of danger.
One, two, four, and eight came into being with their orders inserted and tied to my will. After all, I was to save the random people around the downtown area caught in the invasion's wave, and frankly, if I were to do a job, I planned on doing it well. Why settle for saving a few people when I could save everyone?
Then with a blur of movement, I threw myself into the fray. It was almost effortless, seeing as I could spot the entire battlefield in less than a blink of the eye, tagging the various innocents in the line of fire in my mind's eye. Like a blur I was upon them, blocking blasts from lasers with my body and plucking them up and away, at least a few blocks away.
Inside of me…
I dunno. I'd never been a first responder, someone who saved lives for a living, so the looks of adoration and awestruck shock were new to me. Seeing a mother sobbing as she was reunited with her children, out of the blue, as I deposited them to safety made me squirm, as she turned a tearful face my way. "Thank you, thank you, thank you…"
"It's no problem, please," I assured her, and the small child she held in her arms. "But make sure to get away as far as you can." It was all I could spare for her, yet she was hardly the only one with a reaction like that.
Parents being brought back together with their children, spouses grasping each other when they thought they were dead, and more scenes of simple human relief blurred together. But I saw it all, and it made me think on why I was doing this in the first place. Punishing the Flaxans was good enough, the objectively right thing to do given how this invasion was spilling out.
This warm and tender feeling, though. The faces of the people I saved, their gratitude, and how it made me feel, was more than enough reason to keep going. Being Superman was an ideal I might never actually be able to live up to, in terms of his generosity and just plain human kindness. I didn't think I was wired that way before I became what I was.
It didn't mean that I couldn't try. Though, as I was coming to learn, there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to rescuing people.
Some of them might have lost the contents of their stomachs during the swift transitions, but doubtless it was better than losing their lives. Compared to the more brusque treatment my clones were giving them, I was being downright gentle. Seeing as their alternative was being brutally murdered, though, I couldn't find myself being too upset.
All the while it gave me ample opportunity to observe everyone else in the fray. And what I found, if this was the height of the planet's defenders, was giving me no small amount of concern. Whatever relief I'd felt about saving people was very quickly being banished under the weight of worry for everyone else.
Dupli-Kate had a duplication ability that most shinobi would have gone green with envy at. Each copy wasn't just a proper clone or an illusory copy. They were all fundamentally her, in a way that most people might not have understood at first glance. Tethered between each clone was a network of spiritual energy, some kind of vague hive mind, a networked consciousness.
Even more daunting was the fact that I was pretty sure they were all capable of feeling what the others felt. Pain, pleasure, and other sensory information were constantly being fed through each other's link. I would have liked to genuinely study it if she weren't busy using it and her outstanding martial arts skills to beat the shit out of Flaxans as they came.
Granted, she wasn't getting out entirely untouched in the process. Her clones were getting shot by lasers and coming undone in rather gory bursts, the kind that made me question how she kept sane under the pain. To do what she did must have required a singular kind of will.
Rex Splode's efforts were more bombastic, but I attributed that to the boy's powers being significantly more overly destructive than anyone else's'. Using whatever was on hand, he really was Gambit-lite as he tossed around all kinds of explosive items. Soldiers were sent flying, and weapon emplacements were up in flames, though a lot of this was held back by one significant drawback.
Rex Splode wasn't very durable. Much like Dupli-Kate, he lacked any real superhuman durability to tank the laser blasts like me or even the black-haired teen. That meant he had to spend just as much time dodging, ducking, and rolling out of the way of being brutally killed.
At the very least the rest of the team was a bit more effective.
Robot's frame wasn't very physically daunting, but it was still stronger, faster, and tougher than the rest of the bunch. It had all manner of weapons systems built in as well, like a very fancy kind of puppet. Microrockets, for one, that he was using to some devastating effect.
Atom Eve could create her own cover, and frankly, my eyes weren't sure what she was doing at the atomic level. It was manipulation on the level of, say, someone skilled with elemental release. I was just a little more baffled as to why she wasn't being considerably more aggressive with her powers, considering that she could create all manner of pink constructs.
I dunno. Maybe there were restrictions on her capabilities that I wasn't aware of as a newcomer to the group's function. Besides, I think the most effective of them was probably the teen I kept hearing being named Invincible by the others.
He was, to put it simply, a flying brick. There wasn't anything wrong with being a flying brick, either. Considering that he was strong enough to send people flying, fast enough to turn into a blur at high speeds, and durable enough to tank those laser blasts, I wasn't tremendously worried about his survival here.
…There was something else off about his body's atomic structure and the way he flew, but again there just wasn't enough time to make an observation of it. Not when my attention was also on how our foes had evolved in such a short amount of time. I'd been made aware after the first attack that time flowed faster in the Flaxan dimension, and they had prepared for a second attack with a lot more preparation.
After all, they'd retooled their equipment to be prepared for me.
A lot of it was the same in some respects, like their laser rifles and heavier combat vehicles, yet that was where the similarities ended. Many of the infantry now were equipped with these bulky tanks on their backs that were shooting out no small amount of flame indiscriminately. Flamethrowers wouldn't be enough to melt my Hyōton, but it wasn't like they knew that.
"It appears as if they've adapted to Genji's cryokinetic capabilities with the time since the last attack…" Robot mechanically intoned aloud, speaking about the catastrophic damage being inflicted by the flamethrower troopers indiscriminately.
"I'll say!" Rex yelled, sprinting away from flames and leaping over a parked car right before he'd be roasted alive. "Why are we on the tail end of his bullshit?"
"My apologies!" I called out, understanding implicitly that I would probably have to step in if things continued as they were. "Give me a moment to get the rest of these people to safety."
So far I had been taking things slow, but that was a strategy for people with a wealth of time on their hands. The rest of the civilians were being brought to safety, but the reality was that the invasion was progressing to such a degree that it wasn't enough. My direct, physical intervention was going to be needed with the way things were progressing as they were.
Thankfully, I had the right technique to solve this situation. One that I wasn't afraid to use as I channeled chakra to my eyes and to the space-time jutsu I had in mind.
My chakra reserves fell by an amount noticeable to me, but it was worth it for me to concentrate the evacuation efforts to a more noticeable degree. No matter how fast I or my clones were moving, Yomotsu Hirasaka would just be faster with this number of people. The only reason I'd refrained from using it before was an attempt to be judicious with chakra, but the time for holding back had passed.
The rest of these kids needed my help, and I couldn't stay held back by half measures.
Across the downtown area, any civilians still hiding or fleeing found themselves falling into black planes, falling into them, having them slam into them. And in that same instant, well outside of the cordon established by the authorities, they were being deposited in one group. There might be bruises, broken bones, and the odd hurt feeling, but they were alive.
More importantly, they were out of the way. And I could stop being held back by concern for their presence. I'd thought that I'd put the fear of God into the Flaxans before, but apparently I had been too soft. Too easy on their numbers, or perhaps not stupendous enough when I'd demonstrated my strength. To the point where they'd never think about another incursion on Earth ever again.
That was fine.
We still had time to rectify that mistake.
After taking a brief moment to scan the battlefield, I had my targets. Their big, bulky vehicles must have been made out of metamaterials that Earth couldn't even dream of or just didn't have in this dimension. I imagined no small amount of resources went into creating them, training the drivers, and then bringing them over to Earth. Which was why I allowed myself the smallest iota of regret before I went through them.
I meant that in a very literal sense. One moment I was flying above, and then I was driving my body through their metallic frames at a speed just shy of what I'd need to hit a sonic boom. For all that work and effort, their mechanisms might as well have been paper to me as I drove through electronics, the massive laser cannons, and the crew inside.
Then seconds later they were going up like a light, large explosions ringing out as I methodically destroyed all of their heavy weapons. At a certain point they attempted to implement some sort of sticky grey glue as a countermeasure, which was presumably intended to slow me down or stifle