Fatman and Pobin - by Paul Merkel

November 17th, 2012

 Our tale began in the Plottington orphanage, where a young boy by the name of Pobin sat, waiting for another dull interview by potential parents. Pobin was only ten, so it’s not like he was WAY too old, but Pobin’s name was a bit odd and so was he. Pobin’s dithering was interrupted when a large man with a rather odd gait settled into the chair across from Pobin, piercing his apathetic musings. Accompanying him into the drab room where all these interviews took place was his handler, Ms. Devitt.

 Ms. Devitt was a young twenty-something, not the type you’d expect to see taking care of orphans, but in reality she was just waiting for her lumberjack boyfriend from Oregon to gather the funds to marry her and whisk her away to somewhere else, presumably happy and way out of reach for a boy like Pobin.

 “Ulysses, this is Pobin.”

The large man mumbled something unintelligible.

“I’m sorry Ulysses?”

“Call me Fatman.” Ms. Devitt did a double take, obviously taken aback at this request. And who could blame her?

“Well, Pobin, this is Mr...erm...Fatman. He’s a very busy man, and he’s been very generous to take the time out of his day to inquire about your potential as a member of his family.”

“Team.” The man spoke again.

“Sorry?”
“Or duo. Whatever works for you.” This one was definitely a little strange, Pobin decided.

  “Let’s start with the questions, then!” Usually as apathetic as Pobin during these things, today she was more enthusiastic--and nervous--then Pobin had ever seen her. The man leaned forward. “Please. So, Pobin. You’re a young lad without much general motivation. Have you ever thought about becoming a superhero?”

 This struck Pobin as very weird. But, he thought, perhaps this Fatman character was going for a head-in-the-clouds type.

“Well, sure. It’d be great to fly away from everything, maybe beat up some bad guys. I think I’d like that.”

“Fantastic. How do you feel about severe danger to life and limb?”

He had to think about this one. On the one hand, he liked his limbs where they were. On the other, he did NOT like his life where it was, and it wasn’t like “severe danger” was a guarantee.

“I feel like I could-”
“I’ll take him!” Fatman scribbled his signature onto the papers Ms. Devitt had laid out, and the rest is history.

 As they were leaving the orphanage, Pobin asked, “So what IS your angle in all this, Mr. Fatman?”

Fatman looked down at the boy and smiled. “You’re going to be a superhero.

November 17, 2016

 In the four years that had passed since that day, Pobin had learned many things, the chief lesson being Fatman’s incompetence. It took very little time to discover that, despite his generosity, Fatman was simply a manchild who read too many comic books.

  And despite all the talk of teaching Pobin to be a superhero, he ended up outsourcing most of Pobin’s training, which, in retrospect, may have been a good thing. Pobin ended up with four years of martial arts training, altogether too much knowledge about burglary, and basic first aid to boot. As a matter of fact, the possibility of Pobin being a better, if untested, crime fighter than Fatman was very real.

 Pobin had never actually seen Fatman fight any crime. He was assured time and time again that Fatman was a real superhero, but he had witnessed little to no evidence that Fatman could do anything past put on tights and ball his fists.

That all changed on the seventeenth of November, 2016, Pobin’s fourth “birthday.” While Pobin was actually fourteen and had a real birthday(it was May fourth), Fatman insisted Pobin’s life had not really begun until Fatman had taken him under his wing. Early in this momentous day, Pobin was sitting, cleaning the counter of Ex Machina Comics, the store owned and facilitated by Fatman himself.

 Pobin was pondering how Fatman would celebrate this year when the sound of the intercom squawked through the little store.

“Would Pobin please report to The Cave, thank you!”

The Cave was what Fatman called the dank basement of Ex Machina, which served as the headquarters for Fatman’s passive-aggressive crusade for justice.

 “You wanted to see me?” Pobin asked as he trudged down the rickety steps to The Cave.

“I did! Listen to me, lad. You’ve come a long way in the four years you’ve been my protege, and now, I think...it may finally be time...for you to join me in my war on injustice.” This was possibly the best news Pobin had received in four long, boring years.

“Really!? When do I start?”

“As soon as you don the uniform of our campaign against the darkness of scum and villainy.”

  Fatman held out a rather garish costume. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say there was too much red, and too much shoulder padding, and way too much spandex. The costume was a small detractor, Pobin thought, but certainly bearable. Five minutes later, Pobin was clothed in the Garments of Justice and was sitting with his mentor at what Fatman called the “Command Center.” It was really a beat-up card table, but Pobin was too excited to care.

  “So...what’s my first assignment?” He said, barely able to contain his excitement. Fatman grinned a grin that can never mean anything good.

“You will be filling out parking tickets.” A worthy assignment, Pobin mused, if not for one problem.

“I’m not a law enforcement officer. How can you expect me to hand out parking tickets if I don’t have the legal authority to do so?”

“Now is not the time for questions, my boy! I’ve already got the tickets ready.” Fatman reached into his desk and pulled out an assortment of paper documents that looked like they had been made in Powerpoint in five minutes.

“Well, I’ve got important crimefighter business to attend to. Have fun with that!” And he was gone.

  Pobin sighed. He wasn’t sure what he expected, perhaps something a little more...legitimate? It was dumb to get his hopes up. That is, until a thought struck him. What if he proved to Fatman that he really could fight crime? It’d guarantee more real missions out in the field, and he’d get a taste of that “severe danger to life and limb” he’d been promised.  And so, on November the seventeenth, Pobin set out to fight some crime.

  It wasn’t as easy as you’d think. It was really dark and rainy that night. Not to mention that while running across the rooftops was quicker than on foot, it was still slow. Our hero had scoured at least five blocks now, and was beginning to lose hope until, miraculously, he spied two dark figures in the alley below. The shorter figure was backed into a corner, and the other one, a tall, burly fellow, was holding something long and shiny...what looked like...a knife!

  Not wasting any time, Pobin raced to the nearest fire escape and began a mixture of actually running down the stairs and jumping entire flights, making it to the alleyway in probably-record-time. And a good thing, too; that knife was getting dangerously close to the flesh of that unfortunate victim.

“Halt! I’m placing you under citizen’s arrest! Drop the knife and come quietly!” Pobin shouted. The man with the large, scary knife seemed to consider this for a minute, but decided against this. He took a step towards Pobin, and all of our young friend’s martial arts training seemed to vanish in an instant. He only stood frozen as the potential assailant continued to march toward him.

 The man lunged; there was a knife lodged in Pobin’s ribs; and then there wasn’t. Pobin’s red costume somehow got even redder than before, and not in a good way. He fell to the pavement, gasping for breath, and tried to take stock of the situation. None of his vital organs seemed to be punctured, always a good thing, but he wasn’t exactly in crime-fighting shape. Things were looking rather grim for Pobin, and hope for advancement of his superhero career was draining fast. That is, until a familiar voice cried out from the rooftops.

 “Pobin! Hold on, Chum!” It was Fatman! The hefty hero hurried down the fire escape, taking considerably more time than his trainee, and approached Pobin’s attacker with as confrontational a glare as he could muster.  Fatman was not eager to share his apprentice’s fate.

  Five seconds and a swift kick to the family jewels later, and the mugger was curled up on the same ground as his victim, and the victim in question was being helped up by his adopted father. Pobin was equal parts relieved and ashamed, Fatman’s confrontational glare shifting directly from the mugger to himself. On the ride home, Fatman’s tiny station wagon was a cage of ice and disappointment, the silence only broken to ask what Pobin wanted at the chinese takeout place.

 Dinner was cold. Well, the actual dinner was warm and pretty good, but the cold of the station wagon carried all the way back to the cave, where Pobin stared quietly at his noodles, the bandage on his side itching up a storm. Quiet, until Fatman finally spoke up.

“I’ll bite. What were you thinking?” The hole of shame in Pobin’s stomach only grew, and he began to sweat.

“Well, I hope you’ve realized by now that I can’t really fill out parking tickets and I...I just wanted to show you that I’m worth more than that. I wanted to show you that I could be a real superhero, not the kind in comic books. It was stupid, and I’m sorry.” Fatman sat back in his chair, obviously thinking it over.

“Well, why didn’t you just say so, my lad? Instead you went out there on your own, and if I hadn’t been following you, you could have been killed!” This only made Pobin feel worse, and it showed. And while Fatman is a dense man, he’s not THAT dense.

“What really...what really matters is that you’re okay,” Fatman mumbled, not used to this sort of speech.

“And you know, if you really want to, I think some ice cream would be a better birthday present than a stab wound.”

And that’s how an orphan by the name of Pobin got ice cream and a stab wound for his not-birthday