Media Report

The fight with the robot played really well on TV. I Tivo all the local news and later that night I sit in the Secret Chamber in my bathrobe, eating Tom Kah Gui and watching the coverage. The KORN helicopter got a really great shot of me cartwheeling away from a toppling stack of steel containers, and another cameraman got a quality shot of me holding up my prize, the robot’s claw.

They interview a Burlington Northern official who says, “It could have been a lot worse if the Velvet Marauder hadn’t intervened.”

The Paracrime Unit’s Capt. Sledge is not as charitable. He stares into the camera and says, “The ECPD has both the training and equipment to deal with situations like this. We were cordoning off the area when the Marauder illegally interfered in a police situation. People could have been killed.”

What an asshole. People could have been killed while Paracrime sat on their asses, he means. I can’t help it if I’m a super-fast crimefighting machine and beat his goons to the punch. Dick.

I make the front page of the Times and the Inquisitor (both in color), and I come off like a stud. The Inquisitor has a little article about the Insekt III robot, complete with a neat picture of the thing and some more background information. Apparently there were four of those things on the derailed train, but only one of them went apeshit. Experts speculate that the impact triggered a self-defense protocol in the robot. Fortunately its chain gun wasn’t loaded and its “electro-field” wasn’t online. The Insekt IIIs are the latest in a series of security robots designed by PomTech, a Pomeranian arms and aerospace company. They’re designed for perimeter defense – the Pomeranians use them to guard their nuclear plants. The four Insekt IIIs on the train were bound for Spokane. The buyers?

Interbionics.