The Warning

The Warning is the fifth Track in Kiwi Blitz. It is named for “The Warning” by Hot Chip.

Summary
We meet Gear, a cyborg supervillain with attitude, who sets up a bank robbery just to lure Steffi into a battle. (The episode continues in Track 6.)

Plot
We begin on a pre-title page, revisiting the Robot Battle League. Steffi wins her match, of course, but after two successful crimefighting adventures she finds this low-risk competition boring. She wants another excuse to take Kiwibot on the road.

After the title page, we see Steffi just finishing test-driving an RBL robot design for her dad. Then the scene shifts to the outside of a small bank branch, where we meet a young woman in a costume, vaguely reminiscent of Steffi's, complete with balloon pants. Her long pale blue hair completely covers the left side of her face. This is Gear, one of the serious villains in the story, although we don't learn her name for several more pages. As she enters the bank, their security guard asks if she's a bank customer; her response is to stab him with a blade we see only in silhouette. Meanwhile, at home, Steffi turns on the news just in time to hear Gear, in the bank, say "Maybe that Blitz girl will even make an appearance." Steffi, of course, doesn't have to be asked twice. But she does decide to recruit 42 to come along, despite her distrust of the robot's "murder smile."

Meanwhile, the police are gathered outside the bank, but staying outside for fear of injury to hostages. Reed Bahia, the officer who befriended Blitz earlier, calls the Chief of Police "dad." This is just one of the small details we learn in passing, as when Ben tells Steffi he's afraid the whole thing is a police sting operation against her, and he's answered by 42, who has broken into Ben's encrypted connection to Kiwibot, displaying a skill at evading computer security that will repeatedly be important to the story.

While Steffi is enroute to the bank, Gear, inside, is showing a surprising indifference to the actual money she's stealing, and is instead looking out the bank's glass front wall to study events on the outside. She's waiting for Blitz to arrive. Alas, this doesn't stop her noticing, and thwarting, an attempt by bank staffer Natalie to shoot her (with a square-barrel gun like the ones we saw Reed and Cho use in Track 2, so presumably also one that shoots narcotics rather than bullets). But Gear loses interest in the staffer when Kiwibot arrives. (During all this we see more of Gear. We learn that her left eye is covered with a patch with the power on-off symbol, and that the sawtooth blade with which she stabbed the guard retracts into her left arm prosthetic.)

Steffi notices the resemblance between the Bahias and calls the Chief "papa Reed," to his displeasure. Father and son are united in telling Steffi to go away, not letting her get a word in, until finally she yells "I'm not an idiot!" and makes them hear her plan: Since Gear wants to fight Blitz, she'll have to leave the bank, at which point the police get her with their stun guns. Both the police and Ben are surprised at the reasonableness of this plan. Unfortunately, Gear has thought of this, too, and so she brought along a bomb, which she asks two children among the hostages to hold on to for her. She explains to the police that if they interfere with her battle with Blitz, she'll detonate the bomb.

The police ask Steffi to stall until the bomb squad arrives. She attempts to do this by asking Gear what motivates her, a foreshadowing of a similar event much later in the story. But she soon switches to plan B, which is to goad Gear in an attempt to get her to do something foolish. (Steffi believes, quite reasonably in the abstract, that inside her mech she's safe against a mere human antagonist.) But it's Steffi who does something foolish, namely, forget that she's supposed to be stalling. She attacks Gear with Kiwibot's netting, but Gear's blade easily slices through it. Gear then retracts the blade, to expose the built in gun barrels. These guns fire bullets, but they don't penetrate Kiwibot's hull.

Steffi proposes to beakshot Gear, but Ben points out that it's a bad idea to murder someone in front of the police force. (Would it really be murder, though, after Gear fires at Steffi?) 42 suggests that aiming at Gear's prosthetics could disable her without killing her, and Steffi remembers that Kiwibot includes thermography, and that the living parts of Gear will be hotter than the prosthetic parts. Steffi finds the results quite surprising, but we don't see them; instead the track ends with Steffi saying, "Now we can really get started."

Commentary
Would it be murder if Steffi beaked Gear, after Gear has shot at her? She might have a good claim of self-defense, but in the aftermath of World War Three, New York has taken away its police officers' lethal weapons, so perhaps civilization has progressed to a higher reverence for life, even the life of a psycho hostage-taker.

Take note of 42's expertise at breaking through computer security, and also her good tactical advice. Both of these characteristics will be important later, as 42 becomes more and more trusted as a member of Team Steffi.

"I'm not an idiot!" No, Steffi is very smart, but she is rather impetuous.

Sound Bite
We see five-year-old Ben, along with his parents and Steffi's father (looking much younger than he does now). Heinrich thanks Ben for coming along to see Steffi in what turns out to be a hospital bed. She is reading the third Official RBL Annual, just the sort of reading matter that all parents give their five-year-old daughters. "Someone to see you," he tells her. "Who is it?" she asks in German. "His name is Ben."

Characters Introduced

 * Gear
 * Chief
 * Jones
 * Natalie
 * Chris Strauss
 * Kurt Scotts