You would like to be pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building? Okay, that’s going to cost you an arm and a leg which, by the looks of it, you seem to have already lost. Oh, this is at night? I’m afraid that’s going to be extra. The Trickler doesn’t have night-vision.
After years of making ends meet by taking up small jobs at newspapers or being born into wealth, one superhero has now made the decision to change the life-saving industry forever.
The Trickler, the hero formerly known as Life Saver, made the change to his payment system after reading about a super-villain in a comic who had the ability to disintegrate people at will. After carefully studying the fictional character he realised that he needs a proper salary in case he gets turned into a pile of dust and has to pay for an experimental procedure to reconstruct himself.
That is of course a hypothetical situation. He has never actually come across a super villain yet. It’s mostly just petty crooks who are on their last legs and need a little bit of support to get their lives back on track. He provides them with a mild pummeling and then has a doughnut at his favourite diner.
Yes, he could have left the world of heroism behind entirely but he doesn’t have a lot of transferable skills. He couldn’t possibly use his ability in the real world. All he does is generate jolts of energy that cause a lot of damage to the top of his enemy’s head before – as The Trickler insists – the pain moves lower and lower till the entire body is in excruciating pain. There is however no evidence that the pain ever goes past the neck. Regardless, there is a very specific purpose for this power.
Instead he has decided that people in a life or death situation need to fess up so that he can finally afford a second house in the countryside so that whenever he gets tired of the city, he can retreat to this clean-aired paradise where occasionally he will stop a cow robbery or whatever misdemeanors happen there.
With his new pricing system, he will be able to do that in the next two years. Especially if the serial arsonist in his city doesn’t get caught in the next two months.
Some media outlets have questioned whether this will create a conflict of interests wherein he needs a constant flow of crime to combat, to which he enlisted a another hero to cast a vague magic spell to make people forget about that question for 10 minutes so he can escape.
I don't know where this is going either.
The Ipe Collection 