How can I best put this.

There are essentially two types of people in the world of Justice Wing. There are the people on the normal side of the street, and the people on the super side of the street.

The bank guards and the cops that Leather fought are on the normal side of the street. The cops did moderately better because they’re better trained and paid, but a dozen or more cops got put onto the ground essentially in passing, with even specific note that Leather was doing the sort of moves you saw in movies because they were so outclassed they couldn’t begin to compete.

The bank guards looked particularly in competent because they were clearly narrated. And they were also largely panicking, and they did progressively better or worse based upon that. The first guard essentially had no time to react before he lost his weapons belt. The second guard was scared but did his job — he gave warning and was prepared to strike. The third guard panicked entirely.

As a side note? It isn’t anywhere near as hard to get a job as a bank security guard as it is to become a police officer. These are often not trained professionals — not just compared to law enforcement, but even compared to Brinks Security. Some banks have better guards than others, but some are just guys in uniform with mace and radios and maybe a gun.

Darkhood has no super powers, but he is on the supers side of the street. He doesn’t panic. He can hold his own. If he could have kept Leather at range, he would almost certainly have beaten her. When she closed on him, he still managed to make it a decent fight before he got kicked over the ledge. He is just as human as the guards and the cops, but he is on the other side of that street.

In a very real way, this entire story is about Todd Chapman crossing from the normals side to the supers side. He has no super powers, and he’s not going to get any. He couldn’t fight Leather. But when he first got there and he was threatened with being thrown off the lair’s roof, he went to jelly. At the end of the story, he can be curb stomped by the henchmen and come out of it snarky and asking questions.

The other thing you’re not considering is the time frame involved. Leather smashes through the door, goes into a roll, and lands on a countertop. She announces there’s a robbery in progress. She then hops down, disarms a guard, darts over a civilian, uses him as a shield, and attacks the second, throwing him into the third. However, in that block of time, the second guard actually got a shot off with mace.

She then took the first guard out with a coffeepot, while he was moving to retrieve his weapons.

So. In less than seven seconds, she entered and subdued the three guards. And in that block of time, one guard actually launched an attack and gave her a verbal warning, and a second guard, though disarmed in the first maybe two seconds of her entry, had enough of his head in the game to pursue his weapons so he’d have any chance at all against her. It’s true the third panicked, and grabbed the wrong piece of gear — but he could have done the same thing if a guy with a .33 came in and shot bullets into the ceiling, too.

Chapman’s comment was that a a woman doing handsprings in the lobby probably wasn’t in the manual. This is true. But whatever is or isn’t in the manual, I would be hard pressed to explain what more we could have expected from low paid, not terribly extensively trained bank guards in this situation. :)

It’s inconsistent with the rest of this world that a set of bank guards working for a national chain in a decent-sized city would be reduced to extraprocedural confusion by a supervillains launching a robbery. One of them, maybe, a greenhorn, but not all of them. There would at least be corporate policy, even if this particular branch hadn’t any experience. It’s inconsistent to me, anyway, and it popped me right out of the story.

Normal humans need pretty decent training and small units tactics to be able to effectively deal with supervillains. And even then they usually fail. The police is trained to deal with superhumans and you saw how easily Leather thrashed them. Bank guards aren’t paid enough to attract the kinds of specialists you need in these situations. The folks you can get just try to deal with it like they would any other crime.

My visceral reaction to this can be articulated: Why doesn’t it? In a world where supervillain henchmen have unions, why doesn’t the training manual for bank guards include dealing with supervillains?

I mentioned how tired I am these days right? Right? *sigh*

T-A-N-etc, not T-I-N.