Omen

Omen is the second Track in Kiwi Blitz. It is named for “Omen” by The Prodigy.

Summary
Steffi in KiwiBot defeats Barkley in Arachbot. She chooses her nom de guerre: Blitz.

Plot
On the first page (before the title page), we see Ben in front of his computer. We can see five monitors in front of him. He has half a doughnut in his mouth; we'll learn later that this is not unusual for him. One of the monitors is displaying a newscast, displaying a derailed train. The announcer says that the derailment was caused by a criminal attack; the criminal made off with an X37-52, a military attack vehicle. Ben says, "an arachbot!?" From this we learn that he is interested, and expert, in the military; he knows what an X37-52 is. The arachbot is on the move near Steffi's house, so Ben calls her and suggests that "this might be your big chance." (That he encourages her to attack this large military vehicle with her not-so-large Kiwibot, built for nonlethal kid battles, shows us that his attitude toward Steffi's desire to fight crime is more ambiguous than it seemed at the end of Track 1.)

On the next page we meet the main representatives of the police in this story, partners Reed Bahia and Cho. (She does have a given name, but we don't learn it until quite late in the story.) They are frustrated because they have no weaponry that could possibly affect this huge military tank-on-legs, so all they can do is wait for the Army to show up. The Arachbot stops, because facing it is Kiwibot. "This better be good," says Reed. And then comes the title page.

Steffi fires Kiwibot's beak, which is on a tether so it can be retrieved after firing. It has no effect on the tank, unsurprisingly. Ben suggests possible weak points to attack, but then the Arachbot fires back. To evade its missiles, Steffi has to turn Kiwibot on its side, but alas, it continues to flip over, onto its back. She says "Scheiße," a mild German expletive. (She is bilingual, but uses German when she wants to swear. She does also say "mother effer" in English, but not the word that that abbreviates.)  With some difficulty, and with advice from Ben, she does manage to get Kiwibot back on its feet, but Arachbot has left the scene. Steffi catches up to it in a park. After several failed attacks, Kiwibot kicks one of Arachbot's knee joints, disabling it. But Arachbot just jettisons that leg; like a real spider, it has eight of them. Finally Steffi fires Kiwibot's beak and scores a direct hit on a missile launch tube. This causes a huge explosion, which upsets Ben because, as he points out, there's still a person inside Arachbot. Steffi uses Kiwibot's beak to open Arachbot's hatch, but the man inside doesn't want to be rescued. "I'm not leaving ARIS," he says. But Steffi drags him out against his will, just before Arachbot is completely destroyed by another explosion. Steffi doesn't understand what "ARIS" means, but military enthusiast Ben does: it's a computer with an artificially intelligent personality. The police arrive, and Cho shoots the thief, not with a bullet but with a knockout drug. (Police officers in this era do not carry lethal weapons.) They call in the military to remove the remains of Arachbot.

Officer Bahia tells headquarters that Kiwibot has gone away, so its occupant won't be arrested. She helped bring down the bad guy, and so Bahia thinks that makes her a good guy. (He doesn't know that she's female; we learn later that Kiwibot disguises the voice of its driver.) His partner Cho isn't convinced by this reasoning; she doesn't think amateur vigilantes should be encouraged. Bahia asks if she has an alias for them to tell the press, and after rejecting suggestions from Ben she chooses the name Blitz.

Later, Ben explains to Steffi that ARIS stands for "Auditory Responsive Interface System." It was given a soothing female voice, but it turned out that a few soldiers fell in love with it, as if it were human. An old news article identifies the thief as former Private Barkley, who refused to return his mech at the end of the war, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and was released shortly before the events of this track. The track ends with a high five between Steffi and Ben.

Commentary
Little KiwiBot, designed not to kill RBL competitors, takes on a huge military tank and wins! We see the great teamwork between Steffi, inventing tactics on the fly, and Ben, able to retrieve and send her the detailed, and presumably secret, construction plans for Arachbot.

We are not told why anyone in the military thought that an eight-legged tank would be a good idea; Steffi's first successful move against Arachbot takes advantage of the weakness of the legs. (They're weak because they have flexible knee joints, to be able to walk.) This is the first time we are asked to accept for the sake of the story something that isn't a plausible extrapolation of modern technology.

Characters Introduced

 * Reed Bahia
 * Cho
 * Barkley