"I work," the man in the mask says, standing on the table in the Burger King while all the staff and patrons cower on the floor, "like a virus—"
Aaaaand that's Aubrey's cue.
"You mean to tell me you're a mindless protein machine?" she yells, sticking her head out of the kitchen, her own mask firmly in place.
She'd meant to go into the white hat side of the business, really, but, everybody's kinda wary about partial telepathy — stupid fucking term, doesn't help, it's not as if she does diet mind reading. And then there's what her powers actually do, which is mostly annoy people.
Like, literally, Aubrey has the power to focus on someone and just made them low-grade confused and aggravated. Or a milder close-vicinity version without individually focusing, if she's not careful. Like, say, she's nervous about applying to be a white hat. And then she gets shot down for vague "sorry we didn't hire you" platitude reasons, and.
Story of her life.
So in the end, putting a black hat on it is pretty much just working through how annoyed she is right back at everything. She got dealt a sucky hand, so suck it. And hey, she mostly sticks to crashing other black hats' grandstanding and taunting them into fucking it up, which practically makes her one of the good guys.
"The Heckler!" today's target bellows, which is so gratifying. They sometimes know her name now! "...Oh, fuck off!"
"No, no, no, tell me more about your plot to chemomechanically latch onto cell surfaces and inject them with genetic strands which their own replication machinery will blithely process as instructions to build exact copies of you!" she calls. "I want to know about your species-level survivial mechanism to leverage the massive in massively parallel replication, because right now I can only see one of you!"
"MAYBE I MEANT A COMPUTER VIRUS," her target yells back, and Aubrey grins widely at the red-flushed neck visible below the bottom rim of his mask.
"Awwwwww," she coos, bouncing on the balls of her feet for when he gets het up enough for her to run for it. "Are you software? Are you a widdle computer program? Did someone replace you with a very small shell script?—" and dances back into the kitchen as he kicks a tray off the table in her direction. "Don't worry, dude!" she yells back over her shoulder. "It's not the lines of code, it's what you do with them that counts!" and kicks open the fire door, giggling, as he starts after her.
