Heeding The Call

“The life of a superhero is a lonely one, filled with hardship and danger. The few who answer the call must leave comfort, safety, and often sanity behind. But someone's gotta stand the heat and stay in the kitchen. Someone's gotta don the oven mitts of all that's right and strangle the red-hot throat of all that's wrong. This is that someone's story.”

The Tick (2001, episode 1)

Most RLSH feel that the system is not working in some aspect, thus they take it upon themselves to help how they can.  They hear that call and answer it.  You could call this the start of "the hero's journey", which is a monomyth popularized by Joseph Campbell.  Its a 4-step process of 1) call to adventure, 2) initiation, 3) transformation, and 4) hero's return.  You can google "the hero's journey" to get more information on this.

Preparation

In preparation to answer the call, starters (not yet RLSH) will go through the process of training, creating their uniform, and coming up with a plan of action.  Preparation is filled with mental turmoil and some never go beyond it.  They fear public perception or criminals or doing something outside the normative (often by themselves).

Uniforms are often constructed with protective layers (the armor layers) and a flashy top layer (the spandex layer).  It takes a little money and some skills to create a good uniform.  Anyone with a job and the ability to save money from each paycheck will be able to acquire a decent uniform.

Training is needed, yet often overlooked.  Why?  It takes long-term effort to get into good shape and to gain skills.  The good thing about training is that it never stops.  There should be an increase of focus on training to prevent the dumb notion that RLSH are "fat cosplayer wannabes" (that always bothered me).

A plan of action, no matter how well-planned, is always going to be crappy the first time around.  I recommend a short patrol route for your first few times out with aims to "observe only".  It gets you out, you are only out to observe, and it offers a period of time for you to revise your route or uniform or whatever - before you go out for a longer, more real patrol.

You don't need some fancy origin story.  "The System Isn't Working" is enough.  It was enough to get you thinking about being an RLSH, so go with it.  Everyone has some sort of specific event/person/thing that shifted them this way.  Just be aware that some people get REALLY caught up in this.

First Steps

Once you feel pretty solid with your preparation, the next step is going out on patrol.  If you want to prepare for your first steps, consider that if you can go on your patrol route in plain clothes and be fine, then you can go out in your uniform.

Something to consider is that, while you feel like all eyes are upon you, they are not.  You would be surprised at how many people won't notice or don't care that you're in a uniform.  In today's world of cellphones and social media, people are highly oblivious to the world around them unless there is something so jolting that they take notice.