It’s Saturday night, and Bob X–the ex-slacker superhero with Kryptonian powers and a kid in middle school–is popping corn with his heat vision while his daughter, Lynn, makes hot chocolate. They’re getting ready for the twelfth season premiere of Doctor Who (Thandie Newton is making her debut as the last Time Lord, while Marsha Thomason is in her second year as Companion), something they’ve been looking forward to for months. Just as they’re settling onto the couch, Bob’s cell phone starts ringing. He picks up reluctantly.
“You need to get to London double-quick, Superdad,” a familiar voice whispers.
“How’d you get this number, Arnie?” Bob replies.
“I’m the world’s greatest thief. Obviously I stole it. Now listen.”
Arnie is one of the lesser supers of Bob’s world, with teleportation powers and thrice-peak-human strength, reflexes, and speed. Using these talents and his computer hacking skills, he’s stolen millions in the last year alone; sometimes of his own initiative, sometimes on contract, always for the thrill. At least two big companies has been bankrupted because of his thefts and industrial espionage.
But Arnie’s not all bad. A year ago, he stopped in the middle of a jewel heist to stop a mugging, for instance, and the year before that, he saved two fire fighters who would otherwise have perished in a warehouse blaze–a particular risk for him because he can’t carry passengers when teleporting. The last time he got arrested, it was because he stopped in the middle of a getaway to administer CPR to a heart-attack victim he happened to pass by.
But back to the conversation. Yesterday Arnie stole a buttload of jewels on behalf of an eccentric billionaire. Upon delivering the gems, he discovered that the client was the head of a cult worshipping the ancient Iranian god Zahhak. Even now the cultists are using the jewels in a magic ritual to raise their deity; next they’ll sacrifice a hundred virgins to it, which will give Zahhak the power to drag Great Britain to its home dimension. “So in sum,” Arnie says, "this balrog-thing is about to literally drag England to hell, and two dozen guys with AK-47s are about to murder a hundred little kids. This situation just screams ‘Call Bob!’ "
Naturally Bob races across the ocean, arriving seconds after Zahhak steps foot on earth; it takes him half an hour to beat it to death and toss its corpse into orbit. Returning to London, he finds the cultists all beaten unconscious, the virgins unharmed, and Arnie being bandaged by one of the latter. The cultists tried to murder the kids during the bigger battle, and Arnie fought them alone and barehanded. He won at the cost to a bullet to the shoulder; Bob cauterizes the wound.
“So what now?” Arnie says then.
“Now I find some lead bars and mold 'em into shackles,” Bob replies. “As I recall, slapping those on your bare flesh will keep you from doing your Star Trek thing. Then I turn you over to the bobbies.”
“Don’t I get any consideration? I mean, I just helped you save the world.”
“You mean Great Britain–and you also helped create the problem.”
“And saved the kids while you were fighting the big beastie–stepped up to do your job when I could have skedaddled to Paris or someplace.”
“You also could have declined to steal the Mona Lisa last month,” Bob says, “or to loot Samsung into insolvency last year. But you didn’t, because you’re a thieving adrenaline junkie, not a misunderstood antihero.”
“And you’re a demigod, not a cop,” Arnie says. “You don’t have to turn me in. Gimme a break!”
This discussion is not idle. Arnie’s teleport process takes about a tenth of a second; from Bob’s super-speed perspective, that might as well be a tenth of an hour. As they both know from the heart-attack incident, he can pinkie-flick Arnie unconscious before he can bamf and have him shackled by the time he wakes up.
That said: As a parent himself, Bob has a hard time not putting himself in the shoes of the virgins’ parents and is quite grateful that Arnie saved the kids. He’s tempted to let Arnie escape. Should he?