Here’s my idea of pretty, in toon form, of course. It’s always been my idea of pretty, since we were eight years old.

Meegan looks nothing like Aurora. She dresses in combat gear, for one thing. And her face beneath her mask was smeared with dirt.

She has crazy hair. Dyed reddish-pink, half dreadlocked, and cut at all different lengths, some going almost to her waist. Her face is covered in piercings that look like wounds and make her hard to look at directly.

She has thin lips that look made for screaming, although I didn’t know why I thought it at the time, and I don’t know what color her eyes are, because she has in colored contacts, one blue and one red, that make her look fiercer than she already is.

I wouldn’t call her ugly, but the Throttler is definitely no Aurora.

I had this thought, then regretted it, because the way she was examining me made me realize that I was no prize, either. And why would it matter anyway? It wasn’t like this was a blind date.

My foot throbbed unpleasantly.

“Hmm, you’re younger than I thought you would be,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“You’re still in high school, aren’t you? At least we don’t go to the same school. That would be, just, embarrassing.”

“Sorry,” I said again. Why was I being such an idiot?

“Do you recognize me?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “I dunno. Why?”

Meegan made an annoyed sound, and her grandma came to my side and whispered, “She’s in a band! She’s very proud about it.”

Suddenly I remembered posters I’d seen plastered all over town all summer. Posters of a girl with pink hair. Screaming.

So that’s where the screaming mouth came from.

“Oh. Yeah. Um,” and then I pulled the name out of nowhere, “Kill All Humans, right?”
Meegan actually looked surprised. “Wow. Did you see any of our shows?”

“Nah. I just remember the name because it’s ripped from Futurama.”

“Hmph. Well, you’d probably hate us, anyway.”

We glared at each other.

And that’s how I became friends, or maybe a better word would be “allies,” with the Throttler.

The question was: what would scare JoyTech?

What would scare a company that wants people to buy all the useless junk they can possibly buy?

Last summer, Aurora got me reading about this thing called VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY. It’s basically a movement of people who minimize their consumption to make the world, and their lives, better.The idea is that if you need fewer things, you need less money, and if you need less money, you don’t have to work as much, and if you don’t have to work as much, you get to spend more time doing the things that are really important.

Stop buying junk, stop producing junk, and start focusing on what’s really important. Sounds pretty scary to me.

Voluntary simplicity is also about cutting down your environmental footprint. I like this because I don’t want to be a superhero like Iron Man. He was supposed to be a genius, but he didn’t care how many resources it took to make and use his powered armor suits.

To be fair, Stan Lee did create Iron Man in the 1960s, back when people still thought nuclear power and wonder bread were the future.

Duane Elgin, who writes about voluntary simplicity, describes it as “a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich, a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living.”

Am I the only one who sees the superhero reference here? Because that’s what being a masked adventurer is all about – LIVING, DOING, creating a new identity that makes you the most real person you can be…

I want my disguise to be something that brings out my authentic superhero self, and makes a statement about what I’m representing.

No capes, no tights, no flashy junk – but maybe something made out of junk - all the weird old stuff that I find on the street that can be reused in a cool way.

Something that looks like it came back from the end of the world.

Yeah.

Every superhero needs a disguise, and every superhero disguise needs to:

1. Conceal his identity.
2. Help him do his job, by:

• Being aerodynamic, for speed and agility, OR
• Being equipped with protective armor, OR
• Being equipped with hi-tech weaponry, OR
• Enhancing his super power, OR
• Making him appear scary, dangerous, or ultra-cool to his enemies.

As I have no superpowers, and choose to use no hi-tech weaponry, and do not possess speed significant enough to benefit from aerodynamic spandex, I have to ask myself – what would scare the crap out of JoyTech?