#260 Making an Exit
While it is highly valuable, and some might argue absolutely crucial, for a superhero to make as grand of a spectacle as possibly possible anytime they enter a room, the same does not necessarily hold true for leaving a room or scene. While exits can sometimes be grand, more often than not a great deal more finesse is required when a superhero needs to extract themselves from a situation.
The first thing you need to consider when thinking about the best form of exit a given situation requires is, obviously, why you’re leaving. If its a simple matter of just being like “hey I don’t live here so eventually I will leave this place” then quite honestly the world is your oyster. If there’s no pressing or specific reason for you to take leave other than the fact that all of your stuff and your bed and your dog are elsewhere, then you can leave any which way you want. It is simply a matter of taste.
Sometimes, however, you need to make an escape because, hey, everything you do ever is actually a crime, so the police are always trying to arrest and capture you. Very rude. What we recommend in this scenario is to just run away. But like really fast. So fast that the police are just like “well he’s gone I guess we should just retire.” That’s your ideal sweet spot. Other times your goal is to dazzle and astonish. In which case you want to try disappearing in a cloud of smoke or flying straight up into space and then coming back down to Earth somewhere else. Exits can be as varied and grand as superheroes themselves, none of them are more right than others, and yet one seems to be the most common go to for heroes: The classic superhero Irish goodbye.
The classic superhero Irish goodbye, popularized by heroes like Hatman or Rudeman. This technique goes a little something like this: You are engaged in pleasant conversation with another party. They could be a fellow superhero, a beleaguered police commissioner, a waiter who for some reason is not at all fazed by your ridiculous getup and the dried blood on your gloves, it’s not super important. At some point in the conversation the other person will break eye contact or look off into the distance or something and that is your cue to get the hell out of there. Or at least, to get out of their field of vision so that when they turn back they assume you’re gone. If pulled off properly this type of exit creates an aura of mystery around you. People will always wonder, “Wow, how do they leave places???” and “Wow how badly do they hate saying goodbye that they think this is an easier way to take leave of someone???” Mysteeerious. Of course, this is also one of the most difficult exits to pull off perfectly. There are so many factors that need to go your way. For starters, the person needs to look away. This is not guaranteed to happen. Most people tend to maintain eye contact while talking to others. Plus, if you’re a superhero, bedecked in gaudy colors with the cape and the mask and the chest cannon and all that jazz, you’re probably the most eye-catching thing in the room. That’s not even taking into account that once you gain a reputation for doing these secret sneak outs, people are going to keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t do it and say goodbye like a proper person. To get around this I recommend randomly pointing at various things mid-conversation, then as soon as your conversational companion turns to see what you’re pointing at, you get out of there.
Of course, you’re then left with the question of where exactly to go. If you can teleport, fly, move at super speeds, or turn invisible then this isn’t issue. Likewise If you’re meeting outside, on the ground, then you’re also good to go. You just run behind something. A nearby tree or building should be fine. But, if you’re literally anywhere else and you don’t have any abilities that would be useful in this situation, then you run into trouble. Let’s say you’re on a rooftop. You’re doing a secret rooftop meeting with a contact. (Or you’re stargazing. {Or, if you live in a big city, smog gazing.}) The person you’re talking to turns around. This is your moment. You can just abandon them on the rooftop feeling like an idiot because you left with no warning. But where do you go? Do you just dive over the side of the roof and hope for the best? That’s fine if you can fly, but what if you can’t? Unless you live in Bounce Town, the town with all of the soft, bouncy surfaces, you’re not gonna survive that fall! So your other options are to find somewhere on the roof to hide until your friend just leaves, possibly moving around as your friend frantically looks for you. Or you can stash a flying carpet or a single person plane right over the side of the roof that you can hop into and use to fly away. But what if you’re inside. When you’re trying to do a superhero Irish goodbye inside, doors are going to be your greatest enemy. You can’t open or close a door while someone is momentarily distracted by something. They’re going to notice that. So the trick here is to get rid of the door before you need to beat a hasty exit. This requires a delicate touch. You might be in someone else’s home, or a police station, or really just any building that you don’t own. You can’t just be going around removing people’s doors. That’s really more of a supervillain thing. (Specifically, the Privateer, who seeks to destroy all notions of privacy while also owning and operating their own vessel during maritime war.) So you need to come up with some sort of reason for you be doing away with all these doors. For justice! Presumably. Your options include: Claiming that the door is an evil shapeshifter in disguise. Infesting the door with robot termites and then destroying the door in order to save everyone from the robot termites. Citing a prophecy you received in which you learned that this specific door will one day be responsible for the fall of the human race if it is not stopped now. Let your imagination guide you here. Then with the door disposed of, you’re good to go as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
One last risk inherent to this kind of exit is that you can never be totally sure that you’ve chosen the correct time to leave. Since this kind of exit does not allow for a natural or organic end to the conversation, you can’t be certain that the other person has covered everything they planned to during this conversation. This can be potentially catastrophic. What if they were building up to telling about some new criminal who is afoot in your city. Or they were summoning up the courage to finally tell you that they love you. If you leave just whenever there’s a good chance you’re not going to get everything out of that conversation that you could have. The solution here is obviously to make the person think that they’re still talking to you. That you haven’t even left. The perfect cool exit. To pull this off you’re going to need a high-definition hologram projector and a small, wireless transmitting, recording device. I think you can probably see where I’m going here. As you leave you activate your hologram projector, placing a prerecorded image of yourself in the room. Then you stash the recording device somewhere and walk out the empty doorframe. This way you’ve made your cool superhero exit, but you still get all the info you need from the conversation. This is a perfect and foolproof solution to the plan.
Superheroes often need to extract themselves from situations. You can’t just live in one situation for all your life. So, as a community, they’ve devised a number of quick and easy tricks to just go about leaving places, without doing it like a normal, non-heroic, non-powered person. So whether or not your move is to just sprint away from crime scenes or hurl yourself off of a skyscraper when no one is looking, be the best hero you can be. And get the hell out of here!
