Free Metal Deep: Infinite - Damsels in Distress: Episode 1 by GX Knight Page A

doing it. It’s hard to care about people, and then not have any kind of resource to do anything about anything . I’m learning that if you don’t have an outlet for the kindness you want to show, that kindness tends to backlog inside, and then is starts to sour. Unfortunately, I have soured.

    All that complaining to say: I want to get out. No, I have to get out. I believe that I was created for more than just making sure some hick’s steak has just the right amount of red in the center while I kept his tea glass full. Meanwhile the world spins deeper into turmoil, and I can’t lift a finger to do anything about it. If only the great tales were true…

    I grew up hearing some crazy stories. They were the great tales about a world that was so much bigger than most would ever take the time to see. It was said that our planet could be a place where our dreams lived and our imaginations could be turned into reality. I never really knew what that meant, but the longer I lived this life of the work-to-home-to-work merry-go-round, I knew that my dreams were anything but living. Of course, it would help if I knew what my dreams were. At least I could pay them proper respects as I pass their dusting corpses on my way out to my dead end job. I laid the dreams to the side long ago, and every time I came close to picking one back up, Life pimp slapped it right out of my weak hands.

    But isn’t that Life’s job? Everyone needs an adversary, and while most of us don’t have to contend with arch rivals like our favorite heroes in the comic books do, each of us has that nagging whore called Life who keeps taking far more than she puts out, and she is always ready to thwart the latest and greatest plan we have for success. Yeah, she’s a damn wench.

    Once, when I was young, my father, as the credits rolled after an awesome science fiction movie, told me that what we had just watched was a true story. I, being too young to realize that my dad was incapable of telling the truth when a joke could be made at my I expense, laughed but shuttered when I imagined those supermodel space-traveling vampires standing outside our door asking for permission to come in and eat us. If we said no, they’d use their spaceships to vaporize the walls so there would be no magical threshold law to keep them out. Having gotten lost in his thought, almost regretful he had told me that, he returned to the present with a long gulp of diet cola before bursting into uncontrollable light hearted guffaws. He pointed at my face and screamed, “Gotcha!”

    And that was what we did. Growing up it was just the two of us. There was the occasional family member around to help every now and then as my father worked, but he always made sure that we had time together, and I loved him for it. We would go to traveling museum exhibits and he would show me an old Viking helmet that he claimed could make the wearer invisible, or a diamond that was supposedly a unicorn dropping. We would look at maps and he would point to the North Pole and say, “Fire Elves kicked out Santa centuries ago, and instead of toys, they now develop weapons for the military.” At the time I thought it was cool, but in retrospect I ask myself: Who tells their kid that?

    With that there were more than a half dozen other sites with just as many fantastic claims involving werewolves, robotic people, warring pirates and ninjas, and my favorite, the ever elusive nomadic aliens. There were so many, I could never remember them all. Every time we went somewhere it was always something: Tree bark that could be magically turned into metal, hidden bases on the moon, actual superpower-creating properties of moonlight. Maybe that’s why I liked working at night? I hated daytime. He did too. Most of all staring at the moon reminded me of him and all the fun times we had during late night dreaming sessions over hot chocolate and marshmallows to questions like: “If you could be a superhero, what powers