FIC: Choice Words [DCnU; Henry Heywood Junior]
Title: Choice Words
Author: D.L.SchizoAuthoress
Rating: PG
Spoilers: none
Warnings: none that I can think of
Prompt: Boy of your choice + social media (from Anonymous on Tumblr)
Word Count: 519
Summary: Henry's powers manifest in an... unorthodox way.
Choice Words
The World Army has an official Chirper account, like just about any large organization these days. Even they realize that a social media presence is important. A few low-ranking administrative personnel rotate responsibility for making 140-character announcements as needed on important issues of the day. It's not a very interesting job, and the chirps follow suit -- dry and lifeless.
That changes when Henry Heywood, Jr. -- more widely known as Captain Steel, one of the World Army's rare new Wonders -- drops off a mission report one week. His visit coincides with one of the desktop computers crashing, and he volunteers to fix it. Henry can make machines obey his will. So far as experience has shown, he has this effect on ANY machine. It is an incredibly useful side effect of the Mad Metal infusion that saved his life and made him a Wonder.
Through some odd quirk of coincidence, the computer in question belongs to one of those bored, low-ranking administrative assistants -- the one who has been assigned to send out chirps this week. In fact, she had been in the process of logging in to the site when the crash occured. Perhaps that is why...
Henry easily takes control of the computer, figures out the error, and repairs it, in barely more than a minute. He deflects the praise and gratitude with a quiet, "My job is to help, you know," and continues on his way to turn in his report.
Though no one knew it at the time, this is what led to the change in tone on the World Army's Chirper account.
"The premier of Canada has more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Someone stop this man."
The first chirp appears a day later, and coincides with a tour of the premier's personal home. Certain World Army higher-ups are being shown the home as an option for closed negotiations between two (non-Canadian) member states.
The administrative assistant is hauled into her supervisor's office and threatened with disciplinary action, despite her protests that she DIDN'T write the chirp.
She is saved when @worldarmy updates only minutes later -- when she is standing in front of the supervisor and clearly nowhere near a computer.
"Is... Is this guy trying to do Obama pauses? Man, stop. Nobody does Obama pauses like Obama. You just sound foolish."
The Chirpersphere BLOWS UP. They LOVE it. The follower count on @worldarmy doubles in no time, then quadruples as memes circulate on Ramblr and VisageTome and the humor subforums on Herddit.
The confused administrators finally realize the new author of chirps an hour later.
"Henry do not punch the premier for his sexist attitude."
(Several variations of "PLEASE DO RC @worldarmy : Henry do not punch the premier for his sexist attitude." appear at nearly the same time in response.)
Ten seconds later, "Hell yes! Sonia's got a much better right cross than me anyway." has the bosses scrambling to do damage control.
At the end of the day, though, a lady in the IT department says to her coworkers, "No one tell him he's doing it, we're getting way more people actually following our updates."