Take Me to the Hospital

Take Me to the Hospital is the tenth Track in Kiwi Blitz. It is named for “Take Me to the Hospital” by the Prodigy.

Summary (spoiler-free)
A serious darkening of the plot leads to a frank exchange between Steffi and Reed.

Plot
This track starts with an eventful three pretitle pages. At the end of the previous track, Reed has knocked the wig off Gear's head, revealing the full extent of the artificial part (the entire left side). Gear now decides that this requires her to kill Reed. (Her reason is not entirely clarified, but is probably that she can't stand to be an object of pity, and Reed's first words in this track are "... the hell happened to you?") They fight; by the end of the second page Reed is on the ground and Gear is standing with her foot on his chest saying "You're way too normal to compete with people like me and Blitz." (It's news to Reed that there's anything artificial about Steffi's body. But her remark is also addressed to the reader, driving home the point that she needs to feel superior, not inferior or even just equal, about her prostheses.)  By page three, though, she says "How about instead of killing you, I do you a bit of a favor." We then cut to Jones, looking for Reed, as she finds him and says "Jesus, don't try to sit up!" Our view of the actual damage to Reed is cut off by the edge of the final panel, but we do see a clean, straight-line cut on his right arm very near the shoulder. This is a continuation of the darker turn of the comic.

The title page, with a big red X where Reed's arm should be, corresponding to an identical big red X where Steffi's leg should be, makes it clear that Gear did cut off Reed's entire arm. We then cut to Steffi, waking up in her bed with Winston on her cheek and bandages on her right elbow and her torso. 42 is keeping watch over her. Steffi, who is still quite ambiguous in her relationship with 42, isn't happy about this, but she's still really tired and immediately falls asleep again anyway. When she next wakes up, Ben is there too: "I come bearing donuts." Steffi replies "Shit yes!" (Interesting that she reacts to serious problems by cursing in German or using English euphemisms, but when she's merely hungry she'll curse in English.)

Ben wants to know how Steffi came to be working with the Raccoon. She's pleased to fill him in, until she suddenly remembers Gear's attack on the security guard at the storage facility. She can't bear to talk about it, but Ben already knows that part of the story, and something Steffi doesn't know: "You know officer Bahia?" "What about him?" We don't hear Ben's answer, but we already know what it is.

Cut to the hospital, where Cho is visiting Reed, who tells her he doesn't know how he feels about his arm yet. Then back to Ben and Steffi. She decides to visit Reed at the hospital. Ben thinks this is crazy (because it'll tell the police who she is). "Ben, you don't know what it's like to--" reminding us that she, too, is missing a limb.

She gets to the hotel room, where Reed says "I guess this means you really are Blitz after all?" Steffi replies, with a somewhat worried grin, "At least that saves some time." This is the first of eleven pages of conversation between them, half the track. It's an important conversation for both of them.

First, Reed tells Steffi they were pretty sure she was Blitz, but because her dad's company has a lot of lawyers they didn't want to question her. Then Steffi apologizes for "everything that happened last night. Especially your... you know." She goes on to say that she can get Reed a much better arm than what the police budget would pay for; her family knows good artificial limbers because of her leg, which she shows him. "So that's what Gear meant," replies Reed, thinking back to Gear contrasting "normal" people such as Reed with herself and Blitz.

Reed asks why Steffi has an artificial leg. "It's a kinda long story," says Steffi, but Reed wants to hear it. The beginning of the story is that Steffi's grandfather started the company (Mecha Machen) of which her dad is now CEO. The grandfather got rich selling military equipment during World War Three, but made a lot of enemies, and shortly after the war, one of them killed both her grandparents. There were many suspects, but no evidence to pick the responsible one. A few weeks later, Steffi and her father were walking together when a passerby suddenly drew a gun. Steffi, age five, immediately threw herself in front of her father, to protect him. Reed rightly calls that "a pretty damn heroic thing," but Steffi won't accept the compliment. "There's nothing heroic about me... Really I've just been selfishly seeking attention this whole time." She takes the blame for the security guard Gear killed and for Reed's missing arm.

Reed's response is to get out of bed and take Steffi down the hospital corridor. On the way, he says "what happened to me last night was between me and Gear." They enter another patient room, where Steffi sees the security guard, not dead after all, but bandaged all over and hooked up to the usual hospital equipment. Steffi bursts into tears. Reed says he thought she'd be relieved. "Ob gourse I'b relieved," she says through her tears. "Nobody'sh dead."

Back in Reed's own room, Steffi tells him to call her when he's ready to be fitted for an arm. In return, he tells her he's met many selfish people, not only criminals, and what Steffi's done is "pretty forgivable... Enjoy yourself while ya can, kid."

Sound Bite
Five-year-old Steffi is lying on the sidewalk after her leg is shot. She thinks, "Is this what dying feels like? ... If I can still hear, I must not be dead... I bet it's really quiet when you die.  I'm scared of that silence." In the last panel of that soliloquy we see present-day Steffi, still wearing headphones, and we understand why she always wears them. The end of this page is labelled "End of Volume 2."

Then come three guest strips. In the first, by Kel McDonald, Steffi asks Reed how he likes his new arm. "It's Rad!" he says, but then the super heavy arm overbalances him and he falls over. In the second, by Magnolia Porter, Steffi and Chandra are college roommates. Chubby-cheeked Steffi has clearly gained the dreaded Freshman 15. She complains that Chandra has stolen something from her. Chandra denies it: "I don't have a problem!" We zoom out to see Chandra holding Steffi's metal leg. "If this was your leg you couldn't be standing up right now!" We zoom out again to see Steffi standing on a yardstick with Winston attached at the foot. It's really funny. In the third, by Shouri, Steffi wakes up (at home, not off in college) to discover that her metal leg ends in a KiwiBot foot. "Okay, who was the funny one?" The notes below the page include a strip sent in by a fan, Simon Ladd.

Commentary
The commentary comes after the Sound Bite this time, because the latter is so crucial to understanding Steffi's character. After saving her father's life and being seriously injured in the process, she has an ongoing fear of death, which she controls by listening to music all the time, even when sleeping. Her decision to fight crime as Blitz, then, isn't just living out a fantasy; it's an attempt to overcome her fear. She's even willing to take on a military tank on her first outing! After she miraculously survives being fired upon by Arachbot, but with Kiwibot stranded upside down, she must have been afraid, and could have just declared that battle a failure, but instead she pursues Arachbot and continues the fight. Then, seeing Gear after the recovery of Kiwibot from the police, instead of just telling Chandra to floor it and get out of there, she leaves the truck, prepared to fight Gear even without Kiwibot's protection, but not prepared to allow Chandra to risk her life. Steffi is seriously brave.

But that's not how she feels. She's taken in Ben's earlier accusation that she's just seeking attention. But Ben was wrong; perhaps she's seeking thrills, in part, but certainly when she was five all she wanted was to save her father. If she has a fault, it's thinking, at first, that real fights against criminals will be as easy as her unbeaten success in RBL competition. But she doesn't think that any more, and she keeps fighting.