Jakey_K

Chapter 3 - Part 1 of 2

The night was a quiet one, in patrol terms. Drexall broke up a few gang fights – admittedly by laying about himself industriously with a big stick – and helped rescue a woman from figments of her own imagination. That had been a bit of an odd one. The woman in question, called Lucy ‘Dreamtime’, had been pragmatic about both her own powers and his appearance to rescue her.
People like that made Drexall wonder if super-powers were all they were cracked up to be. He returned home with a few extra bruises and washed the painkillers for his arm down with a little beer. After Sandra left, he checked the baby monitor batteries in his room and Pixie’s. She was used to people moving around in her room at night and slept on, wheezing only slightly in her mask. Drexall quietly cleaned the flat, doing the washing and the laundry, the usual never-ending tasks. When his alarm went off, he went into Pixie’s room to wake her up for her nebuliser. She was always crotchety during night medications and he couldn’t really blame her.
Once she was tucked back in to sleep, Drexall could finally think about going to sleep himself. Once in bed though, sleep wouldn’t come. He shifted from one side to the other, his sheets too hot and then little noises bothering him.
‘Need to get the AC fixed,’ he thought to himself for the hundredth time, listening to its uncomfortable whirring. Everything in his life was broken.
He ground his heels into his eyes, trying to force himself to sleep but all that came were the memories of the Second Invasion. A burning tightness in his chest welled, a years old trauma.
It had been the summer the year Pixie was born, back when Drexall was still called Druscilla. He’d come off maternity leave and was back at work when the sirens started to wail. At first he and everyone in the office had just looked at each other in confusion and growing horror. There wasn’t a native Paragonite who didn’t remember that sound from the First Invasion. It took thirty minutes for people to decide it was real and their manager insisted they went down to the shelter.
Drexall had, with three other parents, separated from the others out into the back alley. They’d split up then, two of them to a pre-school, one to a primary school and Drexall to the daycare where his baby was.
The streets were already emptying as he ran, breaking a heel and having to hop three steps as he yanked the offending shoe off. He threw it and its partner aside wildly, his ankle twinging unpleasantly as he stretched into a proper run. The fear came to him then, the one that had never left since. The daycare had only been six blocks from his office but the run seemed to go on forever as the sky darkened to a strange green like a storm about to break. A bomb landed on an abandoned delivery truck in the street, punching through the cab and cargo compartment with a pop of glass and grinding crunch of metal.
You never forget the smell of those things. As they geared up to explode, they had a hair-raising acrid stench about them, one that cut through the usual odours of the city. It was the plasma fumes starting to leak out before they ignited. Drexall remembered only the shadow of the dropship above, he’d never looked away from the growing sign of the daycare centre. He remembered bashing through the door and recoiling from that awful stink of a bomb close to exploding.
The force of his maternal instinct overruled his self-preservation and he belted up the stairs. The bright, cheerful decorations burned onto his mind, forever associated with the smell. He could hear his child’s screams along with the screams of other children. The glass paned door to the daycare smashed open when his stockinged foot hit it with enough force to shatter the panes.
The entire back wall was open, the Rikti bomb lodged in the rubble. He thought he saw the childminder’s arm in the rubble, but that might have been a figment of his imagination. He saw Pixie on the floor, blood frothing in her mouth as she screamed and tried to breathe past the pain. He seized her and one of the other children, a toddler, under his arm.
He’d left three other children there, all clutching their faces or chests, screaming and howling like the damned.
Drexall had barely reached the ground floor when the bomb exploded, throwing him off his feet. He’d just covered the children under his body as the masonry fell around them but, it was being in the threshold of the doorway saved them, nothing but dumb luck. The support above the door held under the crushing weight of the building collapsing on them.
Drexall remembered digging manically until his hands bled and he was able to shove a table aside and bring Pixie and the toddler into a stinking street. By the time they’d got out, the pass on that side of the city was over and whine of Rikti teleports could be heard a little way away. Drexall, a survivor of the First Invasion, ran from cover to cover, keeping himself and the children invisible from the sky as long as he could.
He couldn’t remember the route he took any more, like his higher mind had switched off for the duration. All he remembered was Pixie and the toddler’s blood coughed up on his blouse. The emergency room of the hospital was already filling up by the time he arrived. Both children were taken off him and he’d had to wait. His injuries were less critical. He agreed but having his damaged daughter taken off him and left to wait in silence had been torture.
But what really kept him awake to this day, were the three children he’d just left behind. Three lives not lived because they weren’t related to him or in arm’s reach.
Why had he picked the toddler?
Why did three mothers have to know the pain of losing their child because of his arbitrary decision?
Drexall sat up in bed. He wished he could cry. Tears wouldn’t bring those children back, but anything to release the awful pressure in his body, in his mind. Just something to show he did care about their lives.
But those injections of testosterone every month had silenced weeping. No tears came.
Not for those kids. Not even for his own child.
Not even for him.

Chapter 2

Atlas Park was enjoying seasonably hot weather, Drexall sat in the shadow cast by the titular statue of Atlas. It was the most central place in the city and all heroes at least passed through, some hanging around long enough to chat and exchange stories with each other. He was listening to two magical heroes arguing about some new concept in a magic journal. They made it sound a lot like science, another thing Drexall didn’t know much about.
He leaned back on his elbows, puffing out. It was too hot to run around in so many layers. He needed to make some work clothes that breathed easier. He lazed there for another few minutes before pushing himself up with a groan. He’d come to Atlas to talk to City Hall and that conversation couldn’t happen while he was hanging around under Atlas’s crotch.
Unlike veteran heroes, whose costumes or faces were well known, Drexall got no nods or greetings from others as he walked up the steps. That was fine. He still felt kind of like a pretender amongst them. His ‘weapon’ wasn’t even his, it still technically belonged to the Rusty Rivet. A stick and a temper didn’t make a hero, but he did need that grant.
He pushed open the door to the blissfully air-conditioned interior of City Hall. The high polish on the marble floor reflected the domed ceiling above and the statues of great heroes in their niches along the wall. It was a quiet day, only Heroes used this branch of City Hall and most of them were out fighting crime or eating lunch. Drexall went straight to the desk and asked to be directed to the relevant FBSA office downstairs.
Repeating the instructions softly to himself, he descended a floor to where the FBSA had their speciality offices. He was looking for the E.L.I.T.E. office, who dealt with Heroes with a ‘natural’ origin. Whoever had come up with these classifications had a simplistic way of looking at the world, thought Drexall. An angel could claim to be natural origin, because its powers were natural to its species. He’d always figured ‘natural’ was meant to cover people like him, who were using weapons and tools to put themselves in the game.
A junior member of the department was available to deal with Drexall’s request, but she was an industrious, busy sort, who expected him to keep up with her as she moved from filing cabinet to shelf to computer and back again.
“How can we help you today, Cue Ball, was it?” she asked, checking the titles of her files as they walked briskly back and forth.
“I need to get my hands on some armour, but I don’t have no money for Icon’s prices,” he explained, sidestepping another, equally busy, office worker.
“Hmm,” she actually spared a precious few seconds to look at him before shelving the folder she was now holding. She returned to the computer and, still standing, bashed a few keywords into a search.
Thirty seconds later – an eternity in which she’d accepted two other files from a colleague, drunk a few gulps of her coffee and answered an email – she swiped the results of the search off the printer and handed it to Drexall.
“Here, this is the address for the meta-equipment dump outside the Walls. The owner keeps the better stuff repaired. He might be able to hook you up with something.”
“A dump?! You’re kidding me, right?” Drexall looked at the address, it was a good thirty minute drive beyond the Walls. He’d need to borrow a car or van.
“Hey, you’re the one who doesn’t want to pay Icon’s prices. Don’t be picky,” she said.
Drexall grumbled internally and gave her as much thanks as he could muster before stomping out of the busy office and back up into the hot day. He knew a few people he could borrow a van from, and headed to the monorail station.

Two hours later found him surrounded by the vomit-like smell of rotting metal, heaps of it shimmering in the heat. There were even pieces of Rikti technology, mangled beyond all use by salvage teams and FBSA alike. Drexall covered his mouth and nose with his hand, trying not to breathe in that unpleasant smell. He made his way to the low string of garages that served as office and workshops for the owner.
The owner himself was sat outside them, under a striped awning that on closer inspection was made from old capes. He was lounging on a lawn chair, fanning himself idly with an incongruously dainty fan patterned with what looked like daisies.
“What can I do you for, cue ball?” drawled the owner, his pock-marked face florid and shiny in the heat.
Drexall, who was mostly bald, was always called ‘cue ball’ by a certain type of person. The type of person he could go drinking with. The type of person he understood.
“The girls at ELITE sent me, I’m trying to score some discounted armour,” he said, gazing wistfully at the fan.
“That so, you got a licence?” asked the owner, not moving an inch. He wasn’t going to stir himself for a fraud today, clearly.
Drexall took out his licence and showed it to the older man. His choice of hero name got a laugh. Once the licence was handed back, the owner pushed himself up off his chair laboriously, reaching for a crutch propped against the wall.
“You’re a little fella, I might even have something half-way decent for you. Get too many of these barrel-thighed, six foot plus egoists in here to equip. I ran out of armour that size years ago.”
Drexall grunted to indicate he was listening. The owner led him between the piles of junk organised by type and function. There was a hanger-like building behind the garages and when he entered, Drexall stared around, eyes widening.
For someone born and raised in Paragon City, the hangar was a museum to heroes going back at least thirty years. There was the Gold Hawk’s sky-skimmer, there was Raging Bull’s immense mini-gun that took three other people just to lift, behind them was Black Venom’s car.
Weapons, suits and vehicles were arranged with care, some missing pieces, others in a process of repair.
Drexall paused by a tall, slender suit of grey metal. He picked up the helmet, which had distinctive backwards facing scallops.
“Are these all from the first Rikti War?” he asked, having recognised the helmet. He couldn’t remember that Hero’s name though.
The owner nodded, mopping his head with a dirt-stained handkerchief.
“You know they still pull intact bits of armour out of the ruins around the Walls?” he said, with a kind of twisted smile. Drexall could believe it, so many heroes had died and so much had been damaged that outside the Walls, between the city zones, whole sections of the city were still just rubble being slowly cleared and rebuilt.
“Quit spacing out over there and come look at this,” called the owner from beyond Black Venom’s car. Drexall hurried over, still distracted by the memorabilia some. He joined the owner looking at two long racks of armour pieces.
After getting permission from the owner, Drexall walked slowly down the racks, picking up gauntlets and helmets, turning them over to inspect the state of the armour. This was all in nearly pristine condition, barely used.
“So what are your powers anyway?” asked the owner, chewing on a toothpick he’d found in an upper pocket.
“I’ve got a stick that I hit people with,” said Drexall, picking up a helmet and discovering it weighed enough to give him arm strain. He put it down again with a grimace.
“You’ll need high grade ballistics armour plating then. It’s no use if you start farting lightening, of course. It’s just metal and ceramics,” grunted the owner, walking further down the rack to the five complete sets of armour. Like most of his stuff, he’d sorted them by size, all of these should fit easily enough.
Drexall looked at the stocky green one as the owner clapped a heavy hand on the shoulder plates. It was a seriously ugly contender, with visible bolts and heavy duty buckles to keep the arm segments closed. His opinion must have shown on his face, as the owner chuckled.
“She’s no beauty queen, but she’s got it where it counts. This used to belong to a young Hero called Glorious. He was an empath. Stupid kid,” muttered the owner, picking a bit of dust off the helmet. Drexall had never heard of ‘Glorious’, and thought it was a pretty girly name for a male Hero. But it took all sorts, after all.
“What happened to him?” he found himself asking, even though it couldn’t have been anything nice.
“Joined up with Alpha Team, got his lungs burned out by plasma fumes and died spitting blood all over the floor. You know how it is with empaths, they don’t ever want to withdraw when their ‘team needs them’.”
Drexall winced. He thought of Pixie’s laboured breathing and her gurgling, blood-splattering screaming when he’d found her during that attack. The cold dread that had lived in his chest ever since shifted, like a monster preparing to come out of hibernation. He shook himself.
“Think it’ll fit?” he heard his voice ask.
“Try it on,” was the answer.
Forty minutes later, Drexall was carrying the suit into his flat in pieces. Sandra didn’t work days, so Stacy was the nurse who helped him with a few of the boxes. Like her counterpart, Stacy didn’t approve of him working such a dangerous job when he had such a sick child at home. She offered her opinion on it while Pixie just watched with curious delight from the sofa where she’d been watching one of her mind-numbing kiddie shows.
“Daddy’s a hero now,” was all she said to Stacy, beaming like a little Cheshire cat.
Once Stacy had left, her shift over, Drexall unpacked the armour in the living room. The junk yard owner had given him some cleaning sprays and told him to get familiar with every bolt and strap the thing had.
Pixie watched him from her place on the sofa. Stacy had dressed her in her favourite dungarees and t-shirt today. She was small for a five year old, not being able to run around like other children gave her a fragile, too-thin look. The medications frequently interfered with her appetite so getting enough food into her for her to grow as a constant battle.
“What did you have for lunch, Pixiesticks?” asked Drexall, putting on a gauntlet to wave his fingers at her.
“Fish fingers. Stacy says fish is good for your brain, because it has Mega 3 oil in it. I don’t like oil,” said the girl.
“It’s not like car oil.”
“Oil’s yucky and it kills birds.” Clearly Pixie wasn’t going to let her father’s assurances change her mind on this. Drexall regretted letting her watch some of those documentaries now, but at the time he’d been so sick of twee kiddie shows about nuclear families with gender-stereotyping that he’d not thought it through. Poor kid had had nightmares about the heat death of the universe for a week.
“Grandma called,” said Pixie, pointing to the flashing light on the answering machine. Drexall pulled a face.
“Was she drunk?” he asked. Pixie shook her head.
“She was cross with you though. What does ‘psychotic bitch’ mean?”
Drexall wished he could reach down that phone line and tie his ex-mother-in-law’s vocal chords in a knot. It was bad enough when the woman got a little wine in her, she called up to scream every kind of obscenity she could think of, but leaving loud abusive messages where Pixie could hear them was out of line.
“It means she doesn’t like me very much,” he said dryly.
“Is it because Daddy left?” asked Pixie.
Drexall had tried to explain why his ex-husband had left them, but maybe the complexities were too muddy for Pixie’s five year old brain to understand yet. She knew Drexall had been a woman once, and given birth to her, but he’d explained it to her well enough that she accepted he was a man now. She didn’t understand why her other Daddy, who had loved Drexall and her, now didn’t.
Sometimes Drexall couldn’t figure it out either.
“Grandma just believes everything in the world should be how she wants it. She gets real upset when it doesn’t fit in.”
“Well then she’s a psychotic *****.”
“Whoa! Hey now, none of that!” Drexall put down the helmet he was fiddling with. He frowned at Pixie and pointed his finger resolutely, “I don’t want to hear you ever repeating anything your grandma says. What she says is bad and rude, and only bad or rude people say that kind of thing!”
Pixie looked put out at being told off, it happened that rarely. She stuck out her lower lip and weebled a bit.
Drexall got up and sat on the sofa by her, pulling her into a hug. He told her he wasn’t angry with her, he just didn’t like to hear that kind of language from her mouth. Grandma was an adult who’d never learned any better, but Pixie was a much nicer person already, even though she hadn’t had long to practice being a person.
The storm of tears averted, the four-hourly alarm went off and Drexall helped Pixie walk into her bedroom so she could take her medication using the nebuliser. Once she’d inhaled her medicine and the spittle from her coughing had been wiped off her chin, Drexall took her back into the living room with a promise to watch some of her shows with her. As usual he fell asleep during them, his daughter tucked against his side, avidly watching the adventures of the animated dog over the sound of her father’s snores. Another alarm came and went before Sandra turned up to mind Pixie while Drexall prepared to go out on patrol.
He tucked Pixie into bed and stroked her dark hair back off her face.
“Are you going to rescue people tonight?” she asked, hope in her face.
“If anyone needs it, I’ll do my best,” said Drexall. He kissed her cheek before putting the oxygen mask on her. She held onto his arm as she drifted off to sleep.
“Love you, Daddy,” she mumbled.
Drexall sat there for a few more moments before tucking her arm under the covers and leaning over to kiss her forehead.
“Love you too, baby girl. Sweet dreams,” he said softly.
He turned on the nightlight even though the sky outside was still bright, and left the room. He told Sandra what Pixie had had for tea and the details of pressure on her oxygen unit as he made her a cup of coffee. With the hand-over complete, he packed the armour back into its boxes and carried them back down to the van and drove off, ready to start his night’s work.

This is dedicated to the bravest men and women I know. Better days are coming.

COURAGE


“Alright, Cue Ball, you’ll have some tenderness and swelling in your arm for a few more days. Take these if the pain becomes a problem,” said the young doctor as he held out a small pot that rattled with dozens of tiny pills.
Cue Ball, a short, leather clad ‘hero’, took the pills with some bemusement that was hidden behind his large green goggles and face mask. No insurance forms, no sitting around for hours and hours while medical staff rushed back and forth amongst the bored, crying children and coughing adults in the waiting room. Just ‘here you go hero, have some medicine’. Cue Ball left the mediport floor, taking the express elevator down to the ground floor and the hospital’s exit. His arm had been broken not thirty minutes ago, and a fist from a Devouring Earth monstrosity had laid him out cold five minutes after that. That’s when the teleport had kicked in, removing him from harm.
Once out of the hospital, he lifted the ubiquitous hero radio to his mouth, pulling down his mask briefly.
“Sorry guys, I’m way out of my league. I’ll call out for back up for you in my place,” he said. As if they needed that. He’d been star-struck when the Kung Fu Cat had offered him a place on her team, to give the newbie some training and taste of what was to come.
Devouring Earth were way out of Cue Ball’s comfort zone. Not to mention tolerance if one could break his arm just by swatting at the annoyance by its feet.
He unscrewed the pool cue that classed as his ‘weapon’ and slung the two halves back into the document carrier on his back. The painkillers went into his pocket as he walked down the street towards the monorail station. He only paused in a deserted alleyway for a few minutes to take of his jacket, turn his shirt inside out to reveal the normal workaday fabric that lined it. His jacket was also reversible. The goggles and facemask went into now-inner jacket pocket and he zipped the lid shut on his document holder to hide the pieces of pool cue.
Nobody cared who he was, and that was fine with him, but he didn’t want his neighbours knowing he was working as a hero. He wasn’t sure which one of them had told his ex his new phone number. With a sigh he carried on his way home. The monorail from Steel Canyon to Skyway was nearly empty at 3am. There was a young woman in Cue Ball’s carriage who looked exhausted and bruised. He was fairly sure she’d just come off patrol herself, but he didn’t want to say anything just in case. She looked too tired to want to chat.
The monorail finally pulled into Skyway North and Cue Ball disembarked. A few newspaper sheets blew in lazy spirals across the ramps leading down from the station proper. It was amazing in the digital age that you still found those, or had they just been on their aerial journey for years and years. Cue Ball habitually took the paths that avoided the usual hanging out spots of Trolls, but avoided the back alleys where the Lost preached to the converted.
His apartment was high up on one of the sooty, square apartment blocks that spent most of the day in the shadow of the overpass that gave Skyway its name. At this time of night, most of his neighbours were asleep, though annoyingly loud dubstep was thumping behind the door of one of the ground floor apartments. The sound of it diminished as Cue Ball took the piss-smelling stairs up to the fourth floor where his own apartment was. The lift was still broken. A lot of residents were using their fire-escapes to go up and down to avoid the stinking stairwell, but climbing to the fourth floor when he could see how far off the ground he was through the gridding was just not going to happen.
He unlocked his front door and entered a tiny, but meticulously clean hallway. He closed the door then knelt to take off his heavy-duty boots and put them on the rack to the side under the coat hooks.
“Hi Drexall, want something to drink?” came the voice he expected from the living room.
Cue Ball – Drexall – hung up his jacket and walked through the living room to where it connected to the kitchen with an open doorway. Sandra was already in there, halfway through making a cup of coffee for herself. She was a tubby woman, wearing the blue shirt and trousers of a professional nurse. Hers was soft blue though, with cute motifs stitched onto the pockets and collar. It was to make the uniform less intimidating to the children she cared for, apparently.
“She been okay?” asked Drexall immediately. Sandra took a bottle of lager from the fridge and popped the cap off before handing it to him.
“Good as gold, as ever. She still won’t say if she’s in pain, though,” she said. Drexall took the bottle and took a reassuring swig before turning and setting it on the coffee table. He went into the larger of the apartment’s two bedrooms. It was dimly lit by a lamp that threw star shapes onto the wall. His five year old daughter, officially named Geraldine Kimberley Skinner, was asleep in her bed. To her left was the large respirator that led to the mask strapped over her face, and to her right was the dormant nebuliser unit.
Drexall sat down on the edge of his daughter’s bed and pushed a bit of dark hair off the plate of the mask. He bent his ear down to her chest to check the sound of her breathing. Sandra was an excellent nurse, but he just needed to hear for himself that she wasn’t gurgling or crackling as she inhaled with damaged lungs. Satisfied with what he heard, he sat up again and leaned over to kiss the bare skin on her forehead.
He returned to the living room and sat down with a heavy sigh in the armchair. Sandra had settled her impressive frame into the two-seater sofa at 90 degrees to him.
“Are you going to carry on being a registered Hero?” she asked, watching him toy with the beer bottle without actually drinking from it.
“Apparently I can get a grant from City Hall for doing it. It’s more than I’d make on all three of my jobs together,” he muttered.
Sandra sipped her coffee, probably hiding a disapproving look. She’d given him what-for when he’d told her about how he’d lost his rag with all this gang nonsense finally and beaten a group of Skulls armed only with a pool cue and his famously fiery temper. He’d had to call her from the Police Station, having been arrested for Vigilantism Without A License. The police had been pretty good about the whole thing, basically telling him to get his *** to City Hall to register or next time they’d throw the book at him. One particularly annoyed looking detective had told him in no uncertain terms that unlicensed justice was just a trip away from being a gang-member so he’d better sort his **** out.
“There’s a reason for that. Drexall, the Hero game is for people with powers. If you get killed, who’s going to look after Pixie?” asked Sandra after a while. ‘Pixie’ was the name Drexall’s daughter preferred to be called. ‘Geraldine’ was his ex-partner’s mother’s name, and neither Drexall nor Pixie really cared for it all that much.
“Shouldn’t you be going home?” asked Drexall, frustrated.
Sandra was used to both his ineloquence and his frustrations and ignored the tone. She finished her coffee in dignified silence before looking at her watch.
“Actually yes, but not because you don’t like to answer difficult questions. I’ve got another patient to mind across town,” she said.
Drexall saw her out and took her cup into the kitchen to add to the washing up. He pottered around the house for a few hours, cleaning up the usual detritus that built up over a day. His arm ached nearly continuously and he decided to have an ‘early’ night. He ran a bath and flung his clothes into the laundry pile.
Normally he never took baths, preferring the brevity of a shower, but he hurt so much all over he needed to soak. Baths gave a man too much time to sit and think about his situation. Drexall hated that. He also hated to see his own body. Throughout the day, other concerns crowded out the knowledge. Caring for Pixie was his primary concern, surviving as a licensed Hero his secondary. But at the end of the day, when he had to take his clothes off, there was no escaping the harsh truth.
Drexall’s name on his birth certificate was Druscilla, an unfortunate product of his mother’s delight in vampire fiction. For years he had been an odd, maladjusted, angry little girl, treated for ‘personality disorders’ by unimpressed child doctors. His mother couldn’t understand the nature of his dysfunction, his father eventually decided to let his ‘daughter’ behave and dress in any way that would let the child feel comfortable in her own skin.
The increasingly boyish dress and mannerisms just puzzled both parents, and confused strangers. They had to home-school the girl, the violence ‘Druscilla’s behaviour and mannerisms had provoked in her classmates became so threatening her mother was convinced she would be killed. It wasn’t that Druscilla never tried to conform, she did, but both parents could see it buried their child under a mountain of anguish and torment.
Then the First Rikti Invasion occurred when Druscilla was 16. Her parents were among the staggering death-toll. Sent to a Children’s Home for two years, Druscilla struggled fiercely with the other youngsters. She made few friends and was constantly in trouble for fighting and screaming ‘temper-tantrums’. As soon as she could, she left to enter the world of work. Her experience in the Home told her that she’d better work hard at being female, no matter how awkward and stressful it felt. She found a job as a secretary, wore skirts and heels and make-up, playing up a mental picture of what she thought being a woman was all about. But she felt dead inside.
Until she’d met Thomas at the office.
He seemed to actually like her oddness. She was able to become more and more like her true self with him, relaxing the fake walls of exaggerated femininity. The freedom their relationship gave her was like paradise. Thomas made it possible for her to dress and act how she wanted, how she needed to be. His acceptance of her oddness lessened the tight bonds of anguish that poisoned her soul.
They decided to marry once they realised Druscilla was pregnant. That was the first time she met her mother-in-law, who was quietly complaining to one of Thomas’s sisters about the unorthodox wedding dress – black with orange embroidery – and the celebration afterwards – inspired by heavy metal and computer games. Druscilla hadn’t liked the woman much, but she did her best to get on with her. Her mother-in-law made no bones about how she didn’t care much for her daughter-in-law either and was only trying for Thomas’s sake.
Perhaps Druscilla and Thomas could have made it together if it hadn’t been for an unexpected encounter at their local bar. They had been playing pool together, one of the things they liked to do as a couple. Thomas had often commented that his wife was also his best friend and favourite person to hang out with. He’d popped away to the toilet, leaving Druscilla to contemplate existence at the bar when a statuesquely woman sat down in the stool next to her.
She had impeccable hair, nice shoes and wore a pencil skirt and light, silky blouse. She was everything effortlessly feminine that Druscilla could not pull off and secretly hated. The woman struck up conversation with her and had an unusually husky voice that she fluted from deep to high whimsically.
Drexall couldn’t remember most of what they’d talked about, except one question. The woman had tilted her head at him and looked him right in the eyes.
“Darling, do you have a **** problem?”
He couldn’t say at the time, but the answer screamed in his head, ‘yes, I don’t have one’. He couldn’t remember that woman’s name, she’d mentioned she’d been on a business trip and he’d never seen her again. Now, he knew why she’d asked him the question. She was a kindred soul, someone trapped eternally between the sex of the body and the gender of the soul. A ten minute conversation with a stranger had thrown up the pieces of his life and overthrown every truth he’d thought he’d ever known.
Only his body was female. His mind and soul was male.
With the support of his husband, Drexall had started the long, emotional procedure to help the rest of the world see him for what he really was. Thomas had been supportive at first, but as the changes started to manifest, when his wife’s voice started to break and her beard started to grow, he became more and more uncomfortable. It was an awkward, sad realisation that Thomas started to see a strange man instead of his wife. He complained that she’d changed, said she was unreasonable and selfish. He left to ‘take a break’ and went home to his mother’s.
It wasn’t long before he applied to have their marriage annulled, cutting Drexall out of their shared accounts and any financial support. They’d been half-way through a vicious custody battle when the Second Rikti Invasion hit. The question of custody had to be put on hold when Pixie was injured, inhaling hot plasma fumes from a bomb explosion, scorching her lungs.
Drexall didn’t have the time or money to fool about with lawyer’s fees, he had a sick daughter who needed caring for. His own treatment had to be put on hold. His daughter’s came first.
Knowing he’d made the right choice where his daughter was concerned didn’t make looking in the mirror any more comfortable. Man down to the waist, woman from there onwards. It was just depressing.
Drexall was ridiculously pruney by the time he got out of the bath and dressed for bed. The sky was starting to turn a lighter shade with dawn as he set his alarm for when Pixie would need her next dose on the nebuliser, and threw himself face down on his bed to get some desperately needed sleep. Maybe tomorrow would be less ****.

Yes yes yes!

MUCH better!

I felt the first pass lacked the gravitas of antiquity, but this is a much better pass.

I for one welcome our new spiky overlord- punching bags.

Okay, so I've been on holiday and my job has kept me so tired I've not had much energy to draw, so here's what I've been doing on holiday. Shout if you like, don't if you don't.

Cyber Valkyrie - a birthday present for my good friend Winters. His Ice/ice tank in her 'cyber valkyrie' look that occurred in some fanfiction ('Broken String' by myself). There was a demand for me to draw this and it's the second attempt, one I'm actually pleased with and it's my first real attempt at colouring with markers, so any advice is welcome.

Draconis Grant - another present, this time for Lionheart UK of her toon: Draconis Grant (kinetics/radiation blast defender), who was to leave our community due to offline issues when I went on holiday, but has since been able to continue with us, so it's now a sort of 'yay, you're staying' present. this is done with my trusty old karisma pencils on a rocking boat, so forgive when the colour strays out of the lines.

Rosie aka "The Mint Muse" and Maralitu the succubus - more an exercise in pen control than anything else. That's why I drew them quite small on the page. Don't worry (or should I say 'sorry'?) there's nothing kinky here. Rosie and Mara are just good friends and Rosie is in fact the first person who has ever called Mara 'friend' in all her life. Rosie's quite fluffy that way.

Agme - Black and white doodle while I was at training. or on the train to training. She appears in a story I'm writing but she's one of the heroes that died in the Rikti War.

Andreas Smith - sketch for the upcoming card "Freedom" feat. my peacebringer/tank Andreas Smith (yeah, I don't like playing pbs so re-made him as a tank. C'est la vie).

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'd like to nominate Captain Cathode for his rather rockin' promotional vid for our Sg, Honourable United. The post can be found here.
Cheers!

[/ QUOTE ]I second this nomination.

[/ QUOTE ]
I third it, for I know just how much time and trying to marshal the scattered elements of HU Cap had to engage in to get this. That's what I call tenacity and dedication. Well done, Cap!

Whoo! Cap is brilliant! Cap is awesome! Cap needs an ego boost!

Seriously, it's clear a lot of time and effort on your part went into this and the result is a very cool video. Well done, man.

I was on a train for a very long time. There were screaming children. I was not permitted by Society to drop kick the offending shrieker out a window. Clearly time for a SKETCH!

Karl Wolfbane and Gracie Bennett

Karl's a rifle/rad corrupter, Gracie is an ss/invun brute. Karl's like a father, big brother and uncle all in one for young Gracie. At some point soon, she may even become a lady. Nobody hold your breath though.

Loyalty
"You can say what you like about me, I cheat at cards, I crack wise, I steal the capes off heroes, but you can't ever say I only look out for Number 1. Well, that's only half true. Usually people say it and mean Number 1 is themselves. That's not how I work. I put her first. Always. It's not about debt, it's not because I owe her father for my livelihood and indeed, my life. It's because she earned it. She's the kind of woman who stood tall when things got bad. It's as simple as that. I do look out for Number 1, and that's Don Gerise. My boss, my leader, my sister."

Red Coat - ninja, gangster, card sharp. He's the right hand man of Don Gerise and helps run the Wild Cards. He's light hearted and genuinely fond of animals. He's not so thrilled with metas and will happily slam a whole bushel of them into the hospital (and if he gets lucky, the morgue). He doesn't actually like wearing ties, but the Don is a difficult woman to argue with.

Red Coat - Thugs/Poisons Mastermind. Hangs out on Defiant.

It's been a LONG time since my last update, but a new job has cut into my doodling time. However, while at training, I had some free time:

Innocence
"Is not always being easy. Is not always being safe. Is okay. Know it all becoming of good. Will be good places one day. Is okay."

Soul Rain - the most gentle soul who will kill purely on reflex with his ripping claws. He can't speak very well, and there's oft a bamboozled team-mate wondering what the hell he just said, but on the whole, people can just about get the gist . Claws/Energy Stalker.

ahahaha! That's ace!

Serenity
"You ask so many questions and reject so many answers. You do not have to always be on. It's okay to switch off. When everything is in disarray and the spool unravels in your hand, just stop. Breathe. Return to your place of sanctuary and become renewed. Once you have conquered your within, you may start to deal with your without."

Madam Delphine - katana/SR scrapper, diplomat, spy and priestess of Love. She is many things to many people, and to all she is a bastion of calm and a sympathetic ear.

Faith
"Even though the distance between us might aswell have been infinity, I know you are always there for me. I know you have suffered with me in my moments of pain and smiled with me in my moments of joy. You took a journey of a thousand miles to reunite us on nothing but a slim belief it was right. I believe in no higher power than your love and our bond."

The Mint twins. Mint Muse - empath/psychic defender and Mint Sage - mind/kinetic controller. A pair of mutant psychics separated at birth but reunited. All together now, awww. Maybe Muse can start making a civil human being out of Sage, but we're not holding out much hope of that, to be honest,

Six Weeks Later

Max broke into a run as he cleared the gate of his home in Salamanca. Behind him he could hear his sisters still clashing around with their mother, each one trying to get hold of another hero of Honourable United. Max raced out of the village and down the winding lane through the fields.
"Ellie! Ellieeee!" he yelled as he saw the converted farmhouse looming out of the ever-present mist. His mentor was already on the porch.
"Did you read it too?" she called, clipping the baby carrier to her back. Inside the carrier, Cleo complained about the jostling.
"Yes! They're trying to spread the word. I think it's going to come down in Siren's Call!"
Ellie grabbed up her radio when it fizzed, switching it to answer.
"Winter's Knight here."
"I'm heading out there now!" Max said, getting just a wave of response as Ellie spoke to Meggan Grant.
Max didn't wait for his mentor, he turned and ran back up the lane for a few steps before kicking off the ground. The air opened around him and pulled him up into the sky. Max caught a surge and shot over the fields so fast they were a muddy blur under him.
The train ride to Steel felt far too slow. Max's imagination was fixed totally on the roil of unbelievable power heading straight towards Earth from deep space. The shelf he and his sisters put their experimental divining equipment on had become a hotbed of jumping rocks and splashing water as they all simultaneously registered the huge surge. No satellite had picked up anything. Max knew it without having to be told.
The tall buildings of Steel Canyon whooshed past the train as it slid along the single track. It was tempting to open the door right then and just jump out to fly away. Max sighed and tightened his hand on the railing. Since he'd made the mistake of agreeing to pose for a few photos for a teen magazine, Max was all too aware of all the eyes on him. Everyone noticed Heroes, but somehow he'd become more noticed. He blushed tightly and shrank a little as he remembered the first bout of posters that had gone up in the base. The group's young women took great delight in the embarrassment it caused him. All the attention really meant was that he had to always be aware that what he did and what he said was subject to public scrutiny. He had to hold himself to the highest standard.
The train proclaimed its arrival in Steel Canyon and thanked him for travelling on the Green Line. Max didn't wait to hear it repeat, he tore out of the train and dodged past the civilians waiting to get on it. He summoned ice to coat his feet and kicked forward. The slick surface made him shoot out of the terminal into the open air. He jumped onto the railing and skid along it so he could bypass the crowd. The end raced towards him and he jumped off it, letting the air catch him and carry him up. He rolled over himself and soared higher, setting off for the entrance to Siren's Call.
A familiar cloud of curling mist and deep shadows was waiting for him at the fortified entrance to Siren's Call. Max grinned and dived, landing in a crouch.
"Meg! Twiggy!"
Meggan Grant let her mist peal back and Mire stepped out of his shadows. The latter smirked a little.
"You took your time, Max."
"Did Ellie call you?" Max asked. Meggan shook her head, already walking to the security guards and showing them her ID.
"I called her. There is something very powerful heading our way."
"Yeah, our divining equipment went nuts all at the same time."
Mire passed them both and took their elbows as he went. He nodded to the security guards as he towed them through the short tunnel to the other side of the War Wall. The other side was not much different, except for better defences. A police drone cruised past them as they emerged from the tunnel. Max looked up at the sky, expecting to see a bright light already.
"I'll get high and see if I can see it," he said to the others. Mire just nodded and said something that Max missed as he kicked off the ground.
Mire shook his head as the younger man shot upwards.
"Fliers. So you were saying?" he looked at the woman beside him. Meg pushed some of her hair back from her eyes.
"I believe our lost friends are being returned to us."
"It's about bloody time."

When the beam finally hit it was bright enough to illuminate the entire zone. Stark shadows were thrown back, sharp as knife edges. The gangers who were fighting for territory in the ruins fled, the Arachnos base went quiet and the Longbow patrols scrambled to contain the area. In exactly the same place where the magic circle had smouldered six weeks before a new one smoked. Seven people were immediately surrounded by Longbow and Honourable United members.
"I need a specialist magical unit at the nearest hospital put on high alert!" Gaze said, before the smoke of the magical circle had dissipated fully. Beside her, Avenger was carrying a short man wrapped up in his trademark purple jacket.
Max, Mire and Meg hung back as the returned heroes were escorted out of the zone to Steel Medical Centre. Mire frowned grimly.
"Where's Mr K? Shouldn't he be with them?"
Meg put her hand to her mouth, her eyes shining suddenly with building tears.
"I can feel his magic clinging to them! It cannot be!"
"What can't be?" asked Max, looking at Meg curiously. She turned her head sharply to look at him.
"Can you not sense it, Max?"
Now that she had drawn his attention to it, Max could smell the drifts of spice that always hung around Jakey K. He didn't know what that meant. The shadows seemed to thicken and draw in as MAGI researchers thronged onto the scene. Longbow patrols soared overhead in the evening sky.
"Sense what?"
"I believe … I think … Jakey K is no longer with us."

"Six weeks after their mysterious disappearance, the city welcomes back some of her finest Heroes. Midnight Gaze, Midnight Avenger, Shingi, Esher, Chillblaze and the Music Teacher returned to Earth yesterday in what witnesses called a 'blaze of light'. Details of where they were taken and what happened there have not been released but we can tell you that Jakey K, former house-cat and epic ranked Hero has been killed in the line of duty. His passing will be marked by a private service in the Honourable United base in a week's time. Our thoughts go out to his comrades and friends. In other news, the Echelon-"
Delphine turned off the television with the remote and turned back to flower arranging at Andy's bedside. Saph was asleep in the chair next to it. The monitors that constantly showed Andy's vitals were stapled above the bed. She moved one of the vases so the taller plants would not get in the way of reading them.
"Shouldn't you be resting?" the elf asked, seemingly to the flowers she was arranging on the cabinet.
Gaze put her hand on the doorframe, pausing on the threshold.
"I heard Andy was in a coma …" she said. Delphine turned to look at her before going to the second chair in the room and taking her coat off it.
"Sit down, Gaze," she stepped over to the empath and took her hand. Gaze didn't resist as she steered her over to the chair and set her down.
"What happened?" she asked, her eyes on the unconscious [censored]. Delphine sighed and went back to Andy's side, picking up one of his arms and gently moving his hand and fingers.
"It happened not long after you and the others disappeared. He'd just remembered that he was a Kurukt before he was a [censored] and for no reason went into a coma. He was last seen by a new recruit called Corvus Ascendant who said the last thing he said to her was 'if you see the others, tell them I have gone to sleep'."
Gaze propped her elbows on the arms of the chair and leaned her forehead into her hands wearily.
"He wasn't injured at all?"
"No. I put the team's reports in the top drawer of your desk for when you're ready. Gaze, this conversation can wait. Tell me what happened."
Gaze said nothing for a long time. Delphine did not rush her, she went about Andy's physio with a quiet professionalism, manipulating each of his limbs so the muscles would not atrophy.
"Jakey killed himself. That's what happened."
Delphine was quiet for a while. She finished with Andy's legs and covered him back up tenderly.
"He … there was this reactor … it needed so much power and we couldn't … it was so advanced there was nothing we could do. There were these invaders and …" Gaze's voice trailed off and she sniffed deeply. Delphine came over and knelt before her, resting her hands on Gaze's knees.
"Immemoria nearly died. He deactivated that chip in his brain and … there's permanent brain damage. I didn't get to him in time. There were so many injured I had to … I just couldn't get there in time … I don't know if he'll wake up!"
Delphine reached up and took Gaze's hands from her face and held them tightly. Tears rolled freely down the younger woman's face and her lower lip trembled wildly.
"I should have … I should have got to him faster. I … I failed him when he needed-"
Delphine made a shushing noise and put her hand to Gaze's tear streaked cheek.
"You did not fail him. He is a soldier and I know he would not wish you to forsake those who have put their lives in your hands just for him. You did all you could and you still got to him. He is alive. That is a good starting place. As for Jakey … just believe that his motives were true. As much as he would try to deny it and hide it, he is a god, and sometimes gods are called upon to make hard sacrifices."
Gaze hiccupped.
"But I miss him … he didn't have to do it … we could have worked something out!"
"There is so much in the Universe that we do not understand that sometimes we must trust to another to do what is right. We must have faith that someone sees a way out. We can't always have everything we want. Death is a part of life." Delphine sighed out and then put her finger under Gaze's chin to lift her eyes to hers. "Where I come from, there is a god we call the Phoenix. You have one in your own mythology. Our Phoenix is the one who destroys and remakes the world. All perishes before it is reborn. The legend teaches us that death is something you can accept. Jakey has died, but there is no reason to believe that is his end. Here."
Gaze looked at the hand Delphine was still holding as the elf placed a ring on a chain in the palm. Before she could see what exactly it was, Delphine had closed her fingers over it.
"When all seems lost, just believe. Believe it will get better and trust that belief."
The ring felt warm in her hand. Gaze did not feel like things could get better. Grief had opened up a hollow place in her that she didn't think would ever be filled again.
"You need to rest. I will walk you home, my friend."
"What is this?" Gaze asked, looking at her closed hand as she rose to her feet.
"A promise. That things will get better."
Gaze did not open her hand and look at the ring until Delphine had left her in her apartment. The curtains were still drawn, the cups on the side she had meant to wash up before leaving the house six weeks ago were still waiting. Her laundry was well and truly dry and still hanging from the airers.
She opened her hand and looked at the ring. It was delicate and a simple design of a looped feather with a ruby set in the pointed feather tip. The gold was still warm, more warm than her hand alone could make it and the ruby seemed to glow in the dim light. She took the ends of the chain and hung it around her neck.

Sapphire Serenity sighed out as he unlocked the door to Andy and Dell's flat. He pocketed the key and then knelt to untie his sneakers. A rack set against the wall by the door held a few pairs of slippers, one for Andy, one for Dell, one for himself and three for guests. Saph took the blue slippers off their shelf and placed his sneakers there. Once his feet were correctly dressed for walking in the flat, he headed down the short hall past the living room and bathroom. Andy's door was ajar and Saph tapped it softly as he opened it.
"Andy?"
The room was messy and gloomy, the blind pulled all the way down. Discarded clothes and cases and old food packets littered the floor. Saph started to tidy up quietly, mindful of the huddled lump under the covers. He loved the [censored] dearly, but Andy was not a tidy person. He listened to the deep breathing of his partner and smiled a little. He must have worn himself out against the Freaks. From what Glance had said, Saph was given to understand that changing shape from energy to matter was harder than the reverse.
Once some of the carpet was revealed, Saph considered his work done and sat on the edge of the bed. He reached a hand over and traced a knuckle down Andy's cheek. The [censored] didn't even twitch. Saph looked around and located the overnight bag he usually left in the wardrobe. Andy had moved it again and he found it eventually under his desk. He left to use the bathroom, reflecting that an early night was probably not a bad idea. There was likely work to be done later when the search for the missing heroes went on into the night and people needed someone to take over.
Saph brushed his teeth and drank a glass of water before returning to Andy's room. He closed the door softly behind him and settled under the covers, putting an arm around the deeply sleeping [censored] and tugging him close for comfort. He rested his head down in the crook of Andy's neck and let himself drift off into sleep with the kind of meditative discipline only years of training could bring.

The sound of the front door opening and a chirruping that could only be Dell's dragon woke Saph up. He blinked in the total darkness and wished Andy had a clock of any sort. He didn't think he'd been asleep for that long but it was hard to be sure. He eased out of the bed and walked over to the door, listening. He couldn't hear anyone moving around but Dusty was squeaking happily, which indicated Delphine herself was home. He opened the door and padded into the living room.
Dell was sat at the table, dragon in her lap and a strange brass instrument out between three candles. She looked up, ears pricking.
"Saph! I didn't wake you did I?" she asked. Saph nodded.
"Yes, but I expect I was soon to rise anyway."
"Taking the night shift then? Is Andy awake?"
Saph nodded to the first and shook his head to the second. He headed into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He noticed Dell's teapot, open and waiting, on the side. He poured some water from the kettle into it and put the lid. He took it into the living room with him and placed it down on the low table.
"What is this instrument?" he asked, eying the delicate arms and lens. Glass teardrop slides moved of their own accord on the middle rings and Delphine seemed fixated with the glass orb at the centre of the device.
"In the simplest terms, it's a god detector. I thought I would use it to pinpoint our absent friends."
Saph's eyebrows raised and he decided to sort Delphine's tea out himself, as she was clearly distracted.
"Will it help?"
"I have no idea, in truth. I'm not usually very good with machines and Tengu technology is pretty advanced. I think I've managed to locate Ellie with it so far-"
"Ellie is a god?" Saph looked a little surprised. Delphine shook her head.
"Do you recall when I first met you we had a conversation about gods? I said the heroes of this world would be considered demi-gods in mine?"
Saph nodded, now that he had been reminded, he did indeed remember the conversation. Delphine drank her tea without paying it much attention.
"It's a question of giving the device the proper search parameters. I think this is the bit that indicates elemental alignment …" Delphine pointed to one of the curving, notched arms of the device. Saph looked at it without much comprehension. There was another, smaller, teardrop slider and markings down the curve. He watched as Dell moved the slider with two fingers, her eyes on the centre orb.
"Well, I have no idea who that is, but he certainly seems to having a good time with those two girls."
The next three hours saw no better results. Delphine hit the table with her forehead, the sliders moving out of alignment. She groaned.
"I give up. This thing makes no sense to me. I'm just far too primitive to work it out!" she moaned into the varnish. Saph fetched her more tea and set down some sandwiches. Outside the night was thick with sodium light from street lamps but little else. There wasn't a single green flare on the roofs anywhere to indicate the Circle were at their foul work.
"It cannot be completely past you, it does belong to you," said Saph reasonably, trying to cheer the elf up. Delphine lifted her head from the table, her hair sliding off her shoulders.
"It's not mine. It belonged to my bodyguard," she said. Saph sat down opposite her and ate a sandwich.
"Can you not send your marvellous dragon to fetch him?" Saph eyed Dusty where he was cleaning his feathers. He had no idea how the dragon traversed between Dell's world and his own, but he knew he could and that was enough.
Delphine sighed out deeply and sat back against her cushions.
"No. Akim was killed not long before I came here. And there's no use applying to the Tengu for aid. If I even got a reply letter it would only be to tell me that the Tengu do not share their technology with 'children'." She huffed out, taking up her tea cup. She eyed the glinting sliders with resignation.
Dusty made a chirrup sound, drawing Saph and Dell's attention again. He was looking intently at the window. Dell frowned slightly and pushed herself smoothly to her feet. She walked to the window and opened it. A tiny, bird-like dragon toppled in with a squeak.
"Dew?"
Saph looked at the small creature with mystification as Dell gathered it up against her chest and closed the window. The elf woman smiled warmly as she carried it over to the table to show him.
"Look, it's Max's dragon," she said. Saph blinked, as he hadn't been aware Max had one too. The tiny creature peered out from over Dell's hands, feathered crest on its head raising and lowering like a cockatiel. Dusty padded over and sniffed at it curiously, earning a jabbing series of grooming motions.
"He's been trying to train him like Dusty's trained. We weren't quite sure if his type would take to it so well, but he's made it here at least. Even if it is the middle of the night." Dell untied the message from the dragon's hind leg, getting her finger licked thoroughly in the process. She passed the small beast over to Saph.
"Here, give him a treat for a job well done while I read this."
Saph had given Dusty enough treats to know where Dell kept them, and indeed, enough to give the furry dragon a bit of a paunch. Dusty walked over the table, long ears pricked up as he kept a watchful eye on the feathery dragon. Dew was much smaller than Dusty and so light in his hands as to feel like he weighed nothing at all. His tiny claws prickled not unpleasantly as he shifted his miniscule weight around, tail curled over Saph's wrist. The monk offered him a treat from the covered dish on the sideboard, chuckling when Dusty pinched one from the bowl. He was pleased to see the big dragon offer the stolen treat to the little one after biting it in half for easier consumption.
Dell had once told him that dragons of Dusty's breed had a basic level of empathy, which was made them such loyal pets. Dusty himself was unusual as he hadn't been with Dell since his birth but had accepted her at adulthood. Saph wondered if the little bird-like dragon had something similar.
"Well, Max is asking me to bring a supply of minerals to the base, he's going to try some scrying. Want to come help me drop them off for him?" Dell was already opening up her rosewood cabinet and taking out jars and bags. Saph tore his attention away from the tiny dragon in his hands and nodded to her.
"Dusty, be a good boy and watch the place for me, alright?" Dell told her dragon as she pulled a rucksack now filled with the jars onto her shoulders. Dusty sat down and made a low cough sound that must have been an affirmative as Dell bent down to rub him under the chin.
"Come, Saph. Don't run too fast with Dew on your shoulder." Dell helped the little dragon curl his tail around Saph's neck for added security. Saph held still patiently and mindful of his tiny passenger, put his sneakers on.
Dropping off the minerals and returning his dragon to Max didn't take very long, but neither Saph nor Dell could resist drifting into the 'Diabolical Plot Room' where Dax Furnice, Captain Cathode and Raphael De Arca were still throwing ideas around with several other high ranking heroes. There'd been no progress on the whereabouts of the Midnight twins, Muse, Shingi, Esher, Jakey or Chillblaze except that apparently the Circle of Thorns weren't responsible.
"Jakey will be so disappointed," said someone as Saph left the plot room. He saw Enkou march past him with reams of paperwork, muttering something about a tracking system and triangulation. He expected it was very technical and she was probably on her third cup of coffee.
He felt redundant as the magic heroes got on with their scrying in the Library, the scientists and technicians got on with their tracking systems and satellite data. Dell wished Saph a good night as she left to see her extensive network of contacts, to see if anyone had heard of a rumour.
Saph didn't have a spy network, or magical abilities, or a great aptitude with machines. He sighed, feeling a bit useless but then consoled himself that with so many brilliant minds on the job, it couldn't be long until they were found. He smiled a little to the thought and headed home. He thought Andy could use an update or maybe something to eat.
Letting himself into the flat and taking off his sneakers, Saph pondered if Andy would like eggs and fried bread for a very late breakfast. Or would it be early? He checked his watch. Early, by a few hours. The base had been so busy that Saph wondered if Andy was the only hero of Honourable United who was getting a good night's sleep. It was strange, but understandable that people were so worried. It was a high risk profession and each one of them owed their life to someone else. It wasn't to say they all got along all the time and that nobody ever argued, but that never seemed to get in the way. When one of them was in trouble, they didn't rest until they were recovered. This time it just happened to be seven.
Saph sighed as he slipped into Andy's room and sat on the edge of the bed, putting his hand on his partner's shoulder.
"Andy, wake up," he said, giving him a small shake. Andy didn't move, as solidly asleep as before. Saph leaned down and nibbled on his ear, it was always a sure-fire way to wake him up. Except this time it didn't work. Andy didn't even twitch.
Saph frowned a little, shaking Andy again. The [censored] made not even a mumble of complaint. Alarm started to creep into Saph's mind.
"Andy?"
There was no answer.

Mr Metabolism sighed as he finished checking the [censored] over. He straightened and looked around the untidy room with a frown of displeasure. He turned and gave Saph a sympathetic look.
"He's a in a coma. I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."
Saph looked at Andy, who was now lying on his back, looking peaceful.
"Nothing you can do?" he repeated, struggling to assimilate the information. Mr Metabolism sighed and tapped his side with the folder of Gaze's notes on the alien's physiology.
"I'll go set up the infirmary. Or would you rather he goes to a hospital?" he asked, his voice calm and measured. Saph knelt down beside Andy, taking his hand in both of his.
"A hospital. You have enough to do without watching him all the time," he said quietly.
Mr Metabolism nodded a bit and put his hand on Saph's shoulder, squeezing it slightly for comfort.
"I'll see to the details."
Saph didn't really hear him leave, he just held onto Andy's hand and stroked his inert fingers with a thumb.

"Guys, this is Corvus Ascendant. Corvi, these are my friends. This is Saph, Andy, Glance and Twiggy." Max made the introductions over a shared bag of toffee popcorn. It was very early morning and a chill hung in the air so they were huddled close together by the Steel Canyon tunnel in Independence Port.
A small myriad of salutations followed the introduction and Andy smothered a yawn as he hugged Corvus.
"You've got yourself a good looking sidekick again, Max. Lucky human," he grinned around his hand. Max immediately blushed bright red, spluttering.
"I- What?! It's not like that!!"
"You'll have to forgive Andy and Glance, they seem to be in competition to see who can make Max blush the brightest," Mire said to Corvus. She nodded, a bit quiet in the company of two peacebringers and looked mildly shocked to have been hugged by one off the cuff.
"It's okay if you want to go talent spotting amongst the newbies and show off your amazing skills. There's no shame in that!" Glance had joined in the fray.
"And don't mind the hugging. Andy does a lot of that. It's his way of saying 'hello'."
Corvus looked up at Mire, staring at his hair, which grew straight up.
"I suggest we head to the warehouse before Max's blush alerts the Freak Show to our approach," said Sapphire Serenity. His ever calm voice and even tone made Andy and Glance break off their teasing with wicked grins at each other.
"Yes Saph!" Andy and Glance kicked off the ground, their bodies gleaming slightly as they went. Max rammed his helmet onto his head and disposed of the empty popcorn bag in a recycling bin before following their example.
"See you guys there."
Sapphire Serenity waved and sprinted off, hiking over a railing fence with fluid ease. Corvus blinked and looked at Mire. Where he had been was only a lingering whisp of darkness. He'd sped on ahead. She shrugged and let her body coat itself in her own brand of darkness, disappearing in an inky flash.
Once all the heroes had assembled with varying degrees of promptness and Andy and Glance had been persuaded to come down from chasing each other around the chimneys, they headed into the warehouse.
"So why are we here again?" Andy asked, latched onto Sapphire's back with his arms wrapped around his neck. The monk leaned his head against the [censored]'s with a small smile.
"Big Freak meet going on. You know how these things go. We need to break it up before it breaks up the city," said Max, his voice muffled by his helmet. They could already hear too-loud garage music being played elsewhere in the warehouse behind enough walls that all they could hear was the bass.
"Freaks?" Corvus asked. Max fell back to explain the usual tactics of dealing with the Excelsior fuelled Freaks. Corvus looked a little concerned at the physical descriptions. 'Freakshow' was a very good name for a group of nihilistic anarchists who cut off perfectly good parts of their body to augment them with cybernetics.
"So where were you last night, Saph? I expected to see you out in Siren's," Glance said conversationally. Sapphire tried not to look too duplicitous with very limited success.
"Dell had a few leads she wanted to follow up and she asked me to help," he said. Andy caught Glance's eyes over Sapphire's shoulder and smirked. Glance nodded a little.
"Oh really? You weren't doing anything that could be construed as … illegal, were you?" she asked innocently. Sapphire bit his lower lip and widened his eyes.
"Us? No, of course not. We are dedicated to upholding law and order."
"Uh huh …" Glance grinned, seeing right through his inept lie. Andy dropped off Sapphire's back and shook his arms. As good as Chichis were at holding onto things and not letting go, heavy gravity always told.
"So long as it's not putting anyone in danger," he said. Sapphire shook his head.
"Never. In fact, it's saving a few people from danger."
"Well then, that's okay then." Glance peered around a corner and arched an eyebrow, "Freaks at three o'clock. And all other hours of the day."
"Excelsior knows no clock!" Andy piped up. Glance grinned.
"I don't think many Freaks can even tell the time."
"TEMPUS FUGIT!" Andy ran past her suddenly.
"Maaax! Andy's running at danger again!"
Max raced past Glance a bare second later, just reaching the mass of dancing Freaks before the [censored] did. He slid the last few feet and his ice armour banged against a Freak Tank's armour. The Freaks were more than a little surprised to see a large ice cube in their midst but they recovered with their usual style.
A hammer the size of a small car cracked down on top of Max's head. His ice held. Just.
"Move along, nothing to see here," Max said, as if his head wasn't ringing from the concussive blow. Blasts of light and swells of darkness filled the air and the entire scene was pitched into false night that even the laser lights ahead couldn't pierce. All around him, Max could hear his friends fighting fiercely. He concentrated on keeping his subtle pulling magic going, calling the Freaks to see only him. It worked more or less. The false night fell away and Max let his ice drop so he could pull his helmet off and check it for cracks.
"So, Andy."
"Hello!"
"Could you be an awfully good chap and wait for everyone else to be ready?" Max asked. The terrible fear that Andy would get tore apart was now leaving but it never went far. Max knew he could take a beating that would kill another person. He would rather be in the way of such beatings and his friends.
Andy hugged him, tail flicking back and forth.
While it wasn't a promise not do be dumb, it would probably have to do. Max sighed and having settled that his helmet was sound, patted his shoulders.
It seemed that the hug was a promise not to be dumb, as there were no further heart-stopping moments of sheer terror for Max caused by a lone [censored] peacebringer racing headlong into hordes of the enemy.
"Young Max seems to be quite responsible," Corvus yelled as she and Andy rested behind a forklift truck. The sounds of battle were raging loud and strong around the corner, nearly drowned out by the loud music. Andy nodded, feeling flat. He wished there was something he could do to relieve the constant pressure of Earth's gravity.
"He's a good kid," he shouted over the music so she could hear him.
"How long have you been a peacebringer?" Corvus yelled, kneeling down beside him and giving him a slightly worried look. She was looking him over very intently but before he could answer, she started with surprise, "You're a [censored]! You're a long way from home!"
"Yes! I am. And I've been a peacebringer for some twenty Earth years. Maybe a bit more. Not entirely sure what the conversion is!" he yelled back. It was the first time anyone on Earth had recognised his race. Which wasn't a surprise. He'd come to Earth because there was no Confederation presence in this region of space. He was 'across the border' as the saying went and safe from Confederation law.
Corvus looked a bit awkward.
"I thought your race didn't fight, ever," she nearly roared over a particularly heavy bit of bass. Andy smiled lopsidedly.
"I think we can safely blame that on whatever influence my kheldian had!"
Corvus gave him a funny look.
"You've been blended for twenty years, wouldn't you know by now?"
"All I know is what his name was. But enough of this, we have to get back in there." Andy dragged himself to his feet and staggered a little. Corvus helped him stand. While she was hugely and awkwardly uncomfortable with peacebringers, it was hard to feel so about Andy when he hugged people so readily. As if responding to her unease, he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a hug.
"Don't be scared, I'll protect you!"
Andy turned away from Corvus and paused.
The words melted into his very being. To protect. That was what he did.
An explosive wave of energy knocked Mire staggering. A series of heavy thuds interrupted the bass and he grimaced. Another tank must be coming. He spun around, ready to open the way to the horrific sub-dimension when he saw what was coming.
"Angelic judgement for all!" A massive, armour-plated beast tore into the fight. It's carapace was shiny with kheldian energy and it seemed unsubstantial. Until it slammed its massive clawed hand into a Freak's face and picked him up.
"Andy?!" Glance darted out of the way as the Freak was hurled bodily into a rack of boxes so hard the entire thing crashed down with a squeal of torn metal.
"Yo." The massive beast waved a bit casually before spinning and stamping its foot down, shaking the ground so hard everyone around him fell over. "Oops, sorry Saph."
Sapphire Serenity blinked a bit when large glowing claws picked him up and set him back on his feet.
"Freaks on our six!" yelled Corvus. Andy turned around and picked up Max.
"Ready?" he asked. Max nodded. He'd seen this move demonstrated a dozen times by Avenger and Jakey but had never had a chance to play 'cat to the face'.
The Freaks 'on their six' were led by a Freak Tank who was shouting something they couldn't hear over the music.
"Hey Freaks! Catch!" Andy hurled Max with all of his considerable strength. The young ice tank curled his head into his arms and hit the oncoming mass like a bowling ball to skittles.
"STRIKE!" Glance whooped.

Their ears were still ringing when they reported clearing the warehouse to the Hero on desk duty back at the base. Andy let his knuckles rest on the ground and eased himself down into a sitting position. He felt wonderfully relaxed. He felt like he was home of all things. Sapphire peered into Andy's deep set and shielded face.
"Have you recalled something of your life before?" he asked simply. Andy gave a rumbling laugh.
"Yes and no."
Glance put a finger in her ear and wiggled it. She blinked several times.
"I feel left out," she said. She stepped away from Max and let her body glow with kheldian light before she exploded outwards, expanding and swelling. Her form stopped transforming into the same 'dwarf' form Andy was currently using. Andy waved.
"Hey, wait a minute … you're a boy!"
"In this form, yeah. My kurukt host was male." Glance gave the equivalent of a smirk which passed completely unnoticed by the humans. Corvus had gone very quiet and stood a bit closer to Max.
"Kurukt?"
"I am given to understand that that is the name of the species you have taken the shape of," Sapphire said, looking at Andy with frank admiration. Andy picked up his lover and gathered him into a much larger hug than usual. The monk didn't mind in the slightest.
"I remember how the shape works, but I don't remember anything about being one. But I'm sure it'll come to me."
"Damnit, sorry to break this up, but we've got a problem." Max looked at the others, having been listening to his radio.
"What is it?" Mire asked.
"Stephanie just called me, there's a ship about to leave that has some 'sample' on it that the Council are treating like gold dust. Whatever it is, letting them keep it is probably a bad idea, given their track record."
"So what's the problem, let's go!" Mire said. Max looked at Corvus awkwardly. Andy set Saph aside.
"I'll escort Corvi back to safer territory and rejoin you guys later. I'm kind of tired after all that fighting anyway," he said. Max looked grateful.
"Hopefully we'll have sorted it out by the time you're done. See you later Corvi."
"Why can't I come with you?" Corvus asked, feeling a little hurt. Glance, still in her kurukt form, made a deep rumbling sound.
"Because you haven't proved yourself up to it. Striga's dangerous. Nobody's allowed there who hasn't earned the right security clearance, which you haven't yet."
Whether it was the size of Glance or the way her claws flexed, Corvus bit back any response she was going to make and looked at Andy.
"Alright. Good luck."
"Thanks, we may need it." Max put his helmet back on and looked at the others. Sapphire nodded and hugged Andy around the arm one last time before taking off at a sprint. Mire sped off and Max called for reinforcements to replace Andy and Corvus.
"Dell's going to meet us there. Be careful, Andy, take care of her."
"Of course!" Andy waved as Glance and Max departed, then looked down at Corvus.
"Come on then." He picked her up and popped her onto his shoulders as he started walking. Corvus blinked and had to take hold of the ridge of his crest plate tightly to stop from falling off. It felt very bizarre to be sitting on a mass of energy simulating form. She was silent for a while before sighing.
"I don't think Glance likes me."
"Sure she does. She hasn't tried to blow you up, right?"
"Is it because of what I used to be?" Corvus asked, feeling a little sick in her stomach. Andy made his rumbling noise again.
"Don't be daft. Glance believes in redemption. As do we all."
Corvus bit her lower lip. Andy had not been present when she'd met up with Max that morning to come join them. He'd given her a strange message that Glance had asked him to relay on her behalf. 'Blueshift welcomes you to the side of light'. She was still not sure what to make of it, or how to feel about it.
"So how is it that a [censored] is here, on Earth?" she asked, anxious to change the subject from Glance. Andy made a deep resonating chuckle sound.
"I'm hiding out from Confederation enforcers. I may have committed a few acts of piracy!" he said. Corvus couldn't help but smile a little weakly.
"That's very unChichn behaviour."
"I'm not your average [censored]."
"Yeah, I'm getting that. I can see the attraction they'd have though …" she sounded slightly wistful. Half remembered memories told her that Chichis had been deemed too physically weak and puny to be of any use as hosts and they were largely ignored.
"I'm not sure I made a choice on the subject," said Andy dryly. Corvus frowned.
"How could you not? Isn't that the peacebringer way?" she asked.
"From what I can remember, which isn't very much, I'll grant you, I was dying. Both bits of me. I remember lying on the ground near the edge of the swamp surrounded by the others of my work detail who'd been caught in the same cave-in. And this ball of light came zipping out of the swamp, like a crazed firefly or something. It just kind of lurched into me and I was able to move again. That's when I saw the thing chasing it and I just ran and ran and ran."
Corvus moved her legs into a better position and she rested her hands on broad shoulder plates. She sighed out in sympathy.
"But it was beneficial for both of you, at least," she said.
"I know. And I have no resentment. I may have been set apart from my entire species, but I was alive. Besides, I think … I think he needed someone."
"'He'?"
"I've recalled his name. It's Veriskavi. Which is funny, because that's also the name of one of the [censored] gods."
Corvus took a sharp breath and let it out.
"I've heard of him." She patted Andy's shoulder again. He paused for a moment before taking the tunnel to Kings Row, walking along the sidewalk almost carelessly.
"You have? Can you tell me something about him? Anything would do. I would so like to know." Andy sounded so wistful that Corvus rested her head down on the warm shoulders. She watched the cars going past.
"He was a warrior. An extremely good warrior. He was exiled by the other Kheldians, for being too extreme, if you follow. He was best known for his all-consuming hatred of Nictus. He didn't have much love for the pacifists of his own kind either. He disappeared though, a long time go."
Andy was quiet for several yards.
"I can't imagine hating so hard I got exiled by my own people."
"I know you can't. Everything I know of [censored] tells me you can't."
"I wonder what happened to him …" Andy let his voice trail away. Corvus sighed.
"I don't know."
"I wish I could remember …"
"Sometimes memory is a two-edged sword. You might find something you don't want to know and all your wishing can't undo it," Corvus whispered. They passed out of the tunnel and Andy set Corvus down. He put both, massive clawed hands on her shoulders.
"Sometimes yes, and I know you understand that. But I am not complete. I want to know what has driven me all these years to do the things I do, to make the choices I have made. Do you understand?"
Corvus looked up into his shining eyes and nodded a bit.
"I suppose I do." Something felt odd about the way he nodded, inclining his whole upper body gently. She had seen Veriskavi in full combat once, from a very safe distance. He had been terrifying in his intensity and violence. It was no puzzle as to why the other Kheldians thought him too extreme. There was something dangerously indiscriminate about him. He was exactly the type of Kheldian that warshades would never be able to convince they had changed. He'd probably be all for killing the lot of them so that 'justice was served'. It was nearly impossible to imagine such a soldier had become this gentle creature.
"If you see the others, tell them that I have gone to sleep." Andy sounded like he was smiling and he let go of her shoulders. She watched the large creature walk off with a rhythmic thud of his massive feet, arms swaying.

The base felt unusually quiet in the dark of the night. Andy padded through the common room to the kitchen, his stomach growling so fiercely it was probably about to jump someone. He rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. It had been a long day and the weariness from slogging through heavy gravity was pulling on him, but he just couldn't settle down for some reason. He lurched when he stood on his own lace as he pushed open the door to the kitchen.
"Whoa!"
He dimly heard the bang as his head struck the work surface. He slumped to the floor, holding his forehead.
"K'duah!" he swore. He pulled his hand away to check for blood. There wasn't any on his fingers but splitting pain made light dance in his eyes.
"Beg pardon …?" A head popped around the door. Andy smiled sheepishly up at Mr Metabolism.
"Nothing," he said, struggling to his feet. Mr Metabolism helped him up and frowned at his forehead.
"That is an outstanding lump you have there. You should come to the infirmary," he said.
Andy tried to wave him off but Mr Metabolism, being human, was stronger than him and easily steered him out of the kitchen.
"I'm fine, really!"
"From the notes left by Miss Gaze, I'm given to understand that you have quite delicate bones compared to humans and that was a steel worktop you just Billied."
"I just what?!" Andy arched an eyebrow. Sometimes he wondered if American English and English English were two entirely different languages that just seemed similar. Mr Metabolism kept dropping very bizarre words into conversation. It caused some amusement amongst the others. Apparently Mr Metabolism was seen to have quite the sense of ironic humour. It was all lost on the [censored] though.
"Head butted. Billy Gilbert … you know? It's a joke." Mr Metabolism sighed and gave up, shaking his head. He physically lifted Andy onto the bed and turned away to find his file. Andy felt light headed and braced his hands on the edge of the bed, letting his legs dangle.
"Has there been any progress on finding Gaze and the others?" he asked. Mr Metabolism left the file open on the side and walked over to put a cool hand on his lumpy forehead.
"That depends on your definition of progress. The mages and specialists have identified the circle as characteristic of a teleportation spell. One of extraordinary power, which means great distance, apparently."
Andy looked up at Mr Metabolism's wrist as a faint glow pulsed down the veins.
"But they're okay, right?" he asked.
"From what Azuria and Gregor were arguing about, I'm given to understand that they could still be in transit. Something about 'markers' and 'triangulation' was involved."
"So basically we have no idea?" Andy said. Mr Metabolism nodded then removed his hand. The fierce pain of impact had dwindled and only a cool spot remained.
"Take better care to watch where you are going, Captain Smith. Go on now."
Andy caught Mr Metabolism for a hug before he slipped off the bed.
"I should go give Saph and Dell a hand on patrol," he said. Mr Metabolism caught his shoulder.
"No, I don't think so. You were on patrol all today and Gaze's file clearly shows that you require more sleep than a human. Bringing yourself to illness is unnecessary. There are plenty of people out on patrol and everything to locate our friends is being done. Go home and get some rest. Doctor's orders." Mr Metabolism smiled a bit but Andy sensed his no nonsense edge. He sighed and nodded.
"Alright doc," he murmured. He left the infirmary to Mr Metabolism's capable hands and ambled to the main door of the base. Going home and to bed seemed like a good idea, but Delphine would be out and she and Sapphire Serenity would not finish their patrol until some time before dawn. If they were even patrolling. Though Delphine was an extraordinarily good liar, Sapphire Serenity was not. When he and Delphine were out 'on patrol', Andy always sensed duplicity in his partner. He had no concerns that there was a relationship going on that he was not aware of, Delphine as far as he was aware was disinclined to go in for them. They were definitely up to something though.
Being in a flat by himself didn't appeal to Andy. He ran the duty shifts through his mind and perked up suddenly. Twilight Mire was off duty tonight. He didn't share his love of atrociously bad horror movies, but company was company. He liked Mire. He had a fun sense of humour.
Andy took his radio off his belt and brought it to his mouth, isolating Mire's personal frequency.
"Hey Twiggy, it's Andy here. You there?"
There was a few moments before the radio crackled with a response.
"Hi Andy. Yeah I'm here. Something wrong?" Mire asked. Andy looked both ways before crossing the street, even though he'd hit the crossing button. Sometimes people drove like lunatics here and he couldn't pick up a turn of speed to get out of the way when he was walking.
"Nothing's wrong, I'm just lonely. Is it okay if I come stay over yours tonight?"
"Damnit, that means I have to put my clothes back on … oh fine. But 'Hair Deather II' is on and I am going to watch it."
"No problem, be there in a few." Andy switched his radio back onto standby and put it back on his belt.

The stars spiralled slowly overhead. Their brilliance was obscured and cheated by the ribbon of colour that flickered between them, dancing like a snake in the water. He walked slowly through the forest, his high shoulders knocking the leaves and spraying water down his armoured back.
"You know I love you. We don't need to talk about this again," he said. Beside and slightly behind him she stopped. He paused and turned, gazing at her deeply set face. She was simply beautiful from the smooth horned head to digging claws. The colour of her carapace shone in the twilight. Beautiful mottled brown and gold with a ripple pattern down her limbs.
"'Skavvy, sometimes I just need to hear it. You … you scared me, what you said to him." She flexed her large, grubbing claws, pushing them into the soft, moist soil. He made a long, reedy sound from his mouth.
"He was a Nictus. He was threatening us. If what La says is right, then they aren't going to stop until they've torn this moon a new one. I will not let that happen, so I'm sorry if I scared you, but he got what was coming to him!"
She sank onto her haunches and rested her massive arms on her comparatively short legs.
"… Do you forget that I am as much Nictus as I am Kheldian?" she asked quietly. He stamped one foot angrily, white light blazing from his eyes.
"Don't talk utter drivel, Mreh. You're all Kheldian! Your actions alone prove that!"
"My actions?! LOOK AT ME!" She surged to her feet and threw up her arms. Black energy coiled down her right arm and white down her left. Her eyes burst with their opposite colours, black on the left and white on the right.
He stamped his foot again.
"You didn't walk the whole path. You came back to the side of what is good. That alone makes you Kheldian, no matter how much negative energy you fling around. Doesn't matter what everyone else thinks and says."
"'Skavvy … you hate Nictus. Too much. How can I believe you when you say you love me when you said such things to that Nictus?"
He strode over to her and gripped her arms with his hands. He pulled them down and gave her a small shake before gently butting the prominent horn on his head to hers.
"Mreh, by your definition, maybe you're not Kheldian, but by that same definition, neither am I. Don't turn away from me because I fight for what I believe is right and good. I couldn't bare it if you cast me away too."
"You would survive, as you always have. Oh Skavvy … it hurts so much …"
He frowned and looked at her.
"What?"
"What he's doing to me. It hurts … help me. Help me, Skavvy …"
"But you're right here. You're with me. I'm protecting you!"
She grabbed his elbows and drove her claws in, glaring at him.
"This isn't what happened. You can't change what happened to suit yourself. I'm dead. La is dead. Stop pretending you saved us. You didn't. You couldn't even save yourself."
He tried to pull away but she held on.
"Pathetic. The warrior so terrible that even the other Kheldians feared him afraid to face his own memories."
He tore free of her grasp and spun around. Burning with black energy that coiled off the writhing tendrils at its shoulders. Its ant-like head bobbed to some unheard rhythm.
He stepped back, heart starting to hammer.
"Too afraid to even scream? How does it feel to fail so totally, mighty Veriskavi?"

Andy jolted awake, heart racing so hard he thought he was going to choke. He looked around the room wildly. A tall figure standing over the back of the sofa looking at him made him scream and lurch. He fell off the sofa with a loud thump and cracked his head on the small table.
"Jeez, Andy, chill out! It's just me!" Mire's voice said. The young man skirted around the sofa and grabbed the [censored] before he smack his head against anything else. He sat him up and put his hand to his forehead.
"Twiggy?! I thought you were someone else for a moment …" It all came flooding back to Andy as he felt Mire's warm hand probe the tender spot. He was in Mire's apartment because he hadn't wanted to sleep alone. There was no jungle here. The images of his dream dissolved onto the periphery and he sighed out in a deep shudder.
"I didn't mean to wake you. I just thought I'd take your nightmare away so you could stop whimpering." Mire sounded terse. Andy bit his lower lip and hugged him tightly, not even caring that Mire was not, strictly speaking, dressed.
"I'm sorry I screamed at you."
"I've had worse." Mire let him cling, "you haven't broken anything, I don't think. You'll have a really nice bruise in a bit. Want some ice for it?" he asked.
Andy clung even tighter when Mire tried to move away, his heart was still in turbo.
"Take my nightmare? You can do that?" he asked, voice shaking. Mire realised he was going to have a [censored] firmly attached to his front if he stood up so he settled himself to sit more comfortably.
"Yes. I can."
Andy could remember nothing of his dream, just a lingering feeling of terror. He looked at Mire. The light of a passing car shone through the gaps in the blind for just a second, revealing the young man's face.
"Can you see it?" he asked. Mire cocked his head slightly.
"I could. If I wanted to. Why?"
"I want-" Andy sighed and rested his head against Mire's shoulder, staring at the sofa cushions, "I want to know who I am. Who I was."
Mire sighed and locked his arms loosely around the [censored]'s waist. He wished more people were disposed to sit on his lap and cuddle him in the night. He turned his mind back to what Andy had said.
"And you think it's in your dream?"
"Yes."
Mire shrugged slightly and closed his eyes. Calling the nightmare to his mind was not hard with it being so fresh. What had distressed Andy so much was not particularly stressful for him. The chill only set in when the female in the dream whispered that it hurt. He swallowed, mastering the alien perspective and the dread that formed. He saw it though to its completion when Andy woke and breathed out a long, slow breath. He should be used to this kind of thing by now. He was suddenly very glad of the warm body holding so tightly to him.
"The name applied to you is 'Veriskavi'," he said quietly. Andy frowned.
"But that's the name of one of the [censored] gods … the only male god, come to that. We're kind of big on female deities."
Mire shrugged.
"That's what they called you. And you know, you're half Kheldian. Bright white celestial being and all that. Anyway, as fun as it is to have you on my lap, could you get off now please? I'd like to get some sleep before morning."
Andy tightened his arms around Mire. The young man sighed and got to his feet. As he'd predicted, the [censored] remained firmly latched to his chest.
"Fine, but don't complain if I snore." He walked back into his bedroom with the peacebringer still attached.
"Don't complain so much, you don't like being alone any more than I do," Andy muttered. Mire made a face, as he would rather Andy kept such observations to himself. He sat down on the bed and lay back.
"Wouldn't Saph be a little iffy about you getting into bed with other people?" He asked lightly. Andy released some of his death-grip but remained attached, getting comfortable.
"Why would he?"
Mire shook his head slightly at the comment, but smiled in the dark. It was nice to know that some people still retained a total innocence. He ruffled Andy's hair.
"Go to sleep. No more nightmares, okay?"
"Mmhmm," Andy just murmured, already closing his heavy eyes. Mire waited until he'd settled into a deeper sleep before he started to drop off himself. It was nice to have company, even if only for a few hours.

Helping Andy clear out an old Council base had disturbed Max on too many levels. It wasn't the fighting itself, though he wished it was not a necessity, nor was it the company. He liked the others and was proud to call them friends. No, it was the old research notes they'd found there. Arakhn, a nictus who allied herself with the Council as one of their top brass, had been using the base years ago. She'd been 'splintering' other nictus by starving them of the essential life energy they needed to maintain their energy matrix. It disturbed him that even other nictus weren't safe. Did they all have such a selfish disregard for the value of another's life?
He sighed out gustily, leaning to the side as the monorail curved in a turn. The city rushing past outside was enveloped in blackness as they entered the tunnel through the War Wall. Max tapped his helmet against his armoured leg, letting it dangle from just two fingers. He knew the Council had him on some kind of special surveillance. That's what Echo told him. He didn't know why, but he felt like he could trust the strange woman who'd just popped up one day. It was customary for Heroes to hide their real identities, or try to at least. Keeping their families safe from the reprisals of the kinds of criminals a Hero dealt with made secrecy necessary. Nobody had done as good or as thorough a job of it as Twilight Echo and her friend, Autumn Fallout.
He didn't want to imagine what the Council wanted with him, though he was pretty sure it had something to do with the blood running through his veins. When he had challenged a Circle of Thorns librarian to combat and taken the dangerous books from him when he'd won, he'd found himself in possession of the Codex of Bloodlines. He'd only wanted to see if he was, like so many other magic heroes, of Mu ancestry. All the book required from him was some blood. A quick [censored] of his finger and a touch of it to a fresh page had been all it took. The words had fled out from the spot of blood, etching his ancestry for all to see. Wholly unremarkable and devoid of Mu blood until his grandfathers were revealed. One a decorated meta hero of the Second World War, retired before he was born. The other …
His radio disturbed him out of his dismal thoughts and he rammed his helmet on quickly, rocking as the monorail turned another corner.
"-nine. I repeat, this is a code nine." Lionheart's voice came over the radio on the group frequency.
Max's blood ran cold, a code nine meant 'Honourable United member missing'.
"Winter's here, who is it and where?!"
Max kept quiet, he listened hard for the answer.
"Midnights Gaze and Avenger, Jakey K, Shingi, Esher, Chillblaze and the Music Teacher. Siren's Call."
"I'm right there."
"I'm already here," Singh broke in, he sounded angry, of all things. Max took a moment to feel sorry for any Rogue Islander confronting him in the next hour. SinghMC was not a man to act entirely on impulse, but seven heroes suddenly vanishing in a contended zone could only be the work of Rogue Islanders. It would not be the first time a hero had disappeared there.
"Wait for me, Singh."
"Me too!" Captain Cathode had to shout over his background noise. It sounded like he was in some kind of factory.
Max wanted desperately to volunteer his services as a meat shield and tapped his fingers on the contact points of his hand, setting his radio to 'transmit'.
"North Face here, I want to help too."
Almost immediately, he got a blip that indicated his radio was picking up a private frequency. He switched to it.
"Max, I know you want to help, but I just realised I promised Brawler I'd help him with some of the rookies today. Can you … fill in for me?" Winter's sounded almost strangled, like she knew what she was asking him.
Max burned to reject the idea, but he found himself nodding. His mentor did not make many demands on him and she'd been in all ways an exemplary Hero and teacher. She had more cause to go than him, Jakey K had been her own mentor. He could do this for her at least.
"Of course. Good luck, Ellie." He tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice, she had enough on her plate today without him being troublesome.
"I can't imagine anyone abducted them. Can you imagine boss going willingly?" she said, trying to be light. Max did try to imagine Jakey going quietly anywhere with anyone. He failed spectacularly and smiled, not realising he'd needed her reassurance until she'd given it.
"Nah. He'd yowl and scratch their eyes out."
"Don't worry, kiddo, I'll find your '[censored]' for you," she said. There was laughter in her voice and Max covered his face with his hand, clacking his fingers against his faceplate.
"Am I ever going to be allowed to live that down?" he mumbled.
"Maybe, like when you're fifty or something. I have to go, Black's just arrived. Thanks for this Max, I owe you one."
Max let his hand fall to his side when the line went dead. He wished he could go to Siren's to help but it wasn't his turn. He'd helped find missing members of HU before, once going all the way to the Rogue Islands in disguise. Of course, he'd gone there to try and find his father too.
Thinking about his father brought on a fresh wave of dismay. His youngest sister was still asking when 'Daddy' would come home. He felt so guilty for inferring he'd be home soon. His father had hidden so well and so absolutely, he might as well be dead right now.
Max was glad his helmet was on so nobody could see the tear rolling down his cheek. He sniffed a bit, scrunching his eyes tight shut, his fingers following suit. All he wanted to tell his father was that he forgave him. Even if nobody else could, even if some people thought he deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison, he, Max Lockhart, forgave him. He hadn't always been the best father, but he'd tried. The mistakes he'd made with Max he'd corrected in time for Clarissa and Jodie. He was far from perfect, but he was his father.
"Next stop, Galaxy City. Next stop, Galaxy City."
The impersonally cheerful voice of the monorail jolted Max as effectively as the code nine had. He took a deep, steadying breath, retreating in the eternal bastion of calm that was the mountain presence. It was always with him, the most passive of observers. As a mountain, it didn't tend to speak or think very quickly. He took great comfort from the solidarity it offered.
Feeling strengthened, he walked over to the doors and waited for the monorail to stop. It did, sliding into Galaxy station with a sickly cheerful proclamation on the matter. Max stepped out of his carriage, stepping out of the way of other commuters who wanted to board. Several were Heroes, most didn't have their capes yet. Galaxy was rookie territory. Back Alley Brawler had it so well patrolled that only the most insignificant of rogues prowled its streets. Perfect for a rookie hero to learn the ropes.
Max himself 'graduated' from Galaxy and he smiled as he walked out of the station and climbed up onto the railing of the walkway outside. He kicked off and soared into the sky. He never felt it was polite to suddenly take off in the middle of a crowd. A few people stopped and pointed at him but he paid them no mind. Heroes could not go unnoticed in Paragon, even though there were so many of them. He'd read in a newspaper that Heroes were 'rock and roll'. He wouldn't ever call himself that, even if there were rumours of a drunken bar-room brawl connected to him.
Freedom Plaza was a bare step away from the station, but Max preferred the aerial approach anyway. He soared down over the roof of the Freedom Corps building and formed ice on his feet. He swung them down as he came close to the ground. He skid along the plaza like a duck coming to land on water. Unconsciously he adopted a surfing posture and grinned, loving the feeling of controlled speed. He slid in a wide curve that brought him to a stop right in front of Brawler. The huge man folded his arms, fighting to keep his grin from showing.
"Well hey there, North Face. Nice showboating."
Max saluted him before pulling off his helmet. He pushed a hand through his hair to shake it loose.
"Hey sir. Winter's Knight had an emergency come up, she's sent me to take her place today. Is that alright?" he asked. Brawler pretended to think about it, then slapped Max's shoulder so hard he nearly fell over.
"Of course it's alright! You're pretty competent at rookie training. Blaine's come on pretty well and you gave her that firm grounding she's built on."
Being called 'pretty competent' by Brawler was quite a compliment and Max tried not to blush. He was secretly rather proud of Blaine. She'd come to Paragon feeling like a freak and feared her powers, but she was growing past that. Privately, Max thought it was the acceptance she'd found in the other members of HU more than his showing her the ropes around Galaxy.
"How do you feel about warshades?" Brawler asked suddenly, giving Max a sharp look. Max blinked.
"How do you mean, sir?"
"I mean do you hate them for what they used to be?" Brawler was not a man to mince words.
Max shook his head.
"I believe every soul should be given a chance at redemption, sir. I find most warshades to be a great inspiration, that they can try to make amends. It takes courage, sir." Max kept his voice calm, that glacial serenity for which he was known. Brawler nodded.
"Good. Because you're going to play advisor to a newly merged one. She's right over there by the unnecessary water feature everyone sloshes through instead of walking around."
Max took this to be a dismissal and looked over in the direction Brawler had jerked his thumb. The big man was always busy with rookies, so he didn't keep him any longer. The ice was still formed on his feet and calves so he skated over to the concrete pond to meet his charge.
The woman sat at the edge of the pond was staring at her own reflection. Max let the ice on his feet melt, jolting slightly as the soles of his boots met concrete resistance. He walked over to the woman and waited for her to notice him.
It took her a few moments and she looked at him quietly, as if sizing him up. Like most warshades, she was dressed in tight clothes that revealed the very nice curves of her body. Max wondered briefly why they did that, but dismissed the thought as she stood up and brushed off her hands.
"Hello," she said. Max felt very conspicuous in his brightly painted armour, but he offered his hand after a moment.
"Hi, I'm the North Face, I'll be your advisor today," he said. He hoped she wasn't going to laugh in his face. He was only sixteen and he looked it. He couldn't even vote yet but he was proclaiming himself to be experienced enough to mentor her.
"Ah, I've heard of you," said the warshade, looking closely at his face as she shook his hand. Max felt the scrutiny was a bit much but it would be rude to put his helmet on mid-conversation.
"So, uh … what's your name?" he asked, feeling a bit awkward. He reminded himself that she was newly blended and was probably having some difficulty with two minds and souls merging into one. From what Glance had decided to share with him, it was a complicated process and unsurprisingly exhausting, both mentally and emotionally.
"Corvus Ascendant."
"Hi Corvus. So, shall we go then?" Max asked, desperate to put his helmet back on to avoid her stare. Figuring it was about the right sort of time for it, he pushed a hand through his hair to try and push it back before sliding the padded helmet on. It didn't offer spectacular peripheral vision, but it was the best several thousand dollars could buy.
"Right, first lesson is how to correctly break up a purse-snatching. Civilian safety is paramount, so it's not as easy as you might think it is." Now the faceplate was between him and Corvus, Max felt more confident. A thin layer of ice formed over his armour as he started striding away from the plaza.
"I see one."
Max looked in the direction Corvus pointed. He saw a young man ahead, trying to wrest a purse from a young woman. She was smacking him in the head with her shopping, yelling her head off. It wasn't a surprise they attracted attention. The ganger had to step sharply to avoid a high-heel to the groin, making their altercation a strange kind of dance.
Max reached his hand out and the ground beside him buckled slightly as a shaft of stone speared up. He grasped it and pulled it up. The head of his hammer breached the soil, scattering sods of grassy earth in a small ring. He hefted the weapon in both hands as he walked over to the confrontation.
"You are under arrest. Do this the easy way and come quietly!" he called. The young man saw him suddenly and panicked. He shoved the woman down, breaking her hold on her purse and started running. Max sighed internally and lunged into a run. He was a pace behind the man when he brought the hammer slamming down from an overhead swing. The ground beneath the head bucked and the shockwave knocked the man sprawling. Max grabbed the back of his jacket and heaved him up, holding his mallet easily in his other hand.
"This is not the easy way."
"It's mine! It was a present! She gave it to me!" shouted the young man, trying gamely to hit Max over the head with the purse. It bounced off the ice covering and Max pulled a face.
"You have the right to remain silent. Please be quiet or I'll knock you out."
When the man started spouting dire predictions of how his brothers were going to avenge him and about how screwed Max had just become, the boy knocked his head gently against the head of his mallet. The man was unconscious in a split second.
"And that's how we arrest people. This is a teleport tag, fix to him and he'll be 'ported to the station or prison, depending on the tag you use. Small time thieves like this go to the station, you'll meet the kind we give the other tags too soon enough, I guess." Max showed Corvus the two tags and fixed the blue one to the man. As he disappeared in a scattered flash, the woman ran over.
"Oh, North Face! I'm so glad you were here."
Max handed over her bag.
"Sorry for the wait, ma'am."
"Could you sign it? I have a marker!" The woman found her marker in the bag and held it out to Max hopefully. Max was glad nobody could see him blush. He took the pen awkwardly.
"Uh … okay …" He signed the bag and gave the pen back. The woman clutched the bag and waved as she hurried off.
"Does that often happen?" Corvus asked, dryly amused. Max looked up at the sky for a moment.
"More than I'd like. I just never know what to say." He turned to Corvus. "Do you have any jobs you need to do?"
Corvus nodded.
"Low level infiltration of a Council cell to get some ciphers. Sounds like it should be easy from what Shadowstar said," she said, sounding mild. Max nodded.
"Well, it's kind of our mission to defeat the Council everywhere and anywhere, so let's go. Where is this cell?"
"Gemini Park."
"Okay, I'll give you a ride, wait here until I'm in position, I'd rather give you the short cut than let you run through there. Extensive knowledge or not, Gemini Park can still be a rough place." Max didn't wait for her response and kicked off the ground. He soared up on a wave of air, the people below dwindling to the size of dolls.
Behind him, the immense statue of Galaxy Girl herself towered, challenging the very skyscrapers in her size. Her arms were raised up to the sky in a gesture of open giving. Max hovered for a moment and saluted her. Galaxy Girl might no longer be alive, but her spirit lived on, he hoped. She was someone he admired greatly, for her compassion and perseverance.
Rolling back around himself, he spied out the distant green slash through the city, as though someone had cut the urban skin to reveal the verdant growth within. Max soared towards it, the snapping of his cloak almost drowning out the sounds of traffic and people. Galaxy City was a small zone and had been part of the port before the Rikti War. Now that the War Walls had severed Galaxy City from the port, it felt a little lost, like it was no longer sure what its role in Paragon was.
Max dived down into Gemini Park and landed on the grass with a solid thud. His back twinged only slightly to the impact. Gaze's work on it had it nearly as good as new. Max smiled wryly at the heady idea that his back could ever be as good as new as he pulled a length of rope out of a pouch on his belt. He knotted the ends deftly and then flicked it into the air before him. It stuck like there was an invisible wall. Within its ring, Max could see the plaza he'd left behind and immediately in front of him, he could see the back of Corvus's head and shoulders. He reached through and tapped the woman's shoulder before hooking his hands under her arms, lifting her through easily.
"WHOA!"
Max set her on the ground and peeled his rope off the air, untying the knot. Corvus stared at the rope. Max stopped what he was doing, rope dangling from one hand, and stared back.
"What the heck is that?!" Corvus stabbed her finger at the rope. Max caught himself gawking and shook his head slightly.
"It's a spell rope," Max left it at that and stuffed the rope back into its pouch. He wasn't supposed to let people see how the things worked. A long lecture from Jakey and Winter's on how such a thing could be horribly misused had put the fear of God into him about it.
"How does it work?" Corvus looked enthralled. Max shook his head and looked around.
"So where abouts is this cell?"
"Right by your feet." Corvus was looking curiously at him, like she was thirsty for information. Max looked down at the plain rock and cracked his knuckles.
"Alright, I'll use my passcode."
Max drew his fist back and slammed his whole body down, going onto one knee. His fist struck the rock and there was a crack sound before the rock hissed and slid open. Max rose to his feet and dusted his knuckles.
"Ladies first."
"You're a versatile young man, aren't you?" Corvus smiled at him before she descended into the Council base. Max had to fight to keep the silly grin off his face even as he blushed. Compliments from pretty women never got old.
"Not really, rocks just talk to me," he said. Corvus looked around as he closed the door behind them.
"What do rocks have to say from themselves?" she asked. There was no mockery in her tone, just curiosity. Max shrugged.
"Sometimes they can be very interesting and have useful information. But not often. Because they're rocks." It was difficult to describe a rock's point of view of the world. Things that would be of incredible importance to animals had absolutely no relevance to rocks.
Corvus chuckled and they slipped down a tunnel like almost every other Council base Max had ever been in him. A security camera in the wall moved to watch them. Max looked up at it. The moment they recognised him as the North Face, the footage would be sent to the special surveillance channel.
Corvus walked confidently through the base, almost instinctively taking them right to the command centre, like she had been in as many as Max had. He thought that might not be so hard to believe. There were a lot of Nictus in the Council and affiliated with it.
"Hey, wait a second, that's North Face! You're not a Nictus!" The base commander was rising from his seat, pointing at Corvus. Dark energy coiled around her hands. Max stepped in front of her.
"If you want my team mate, you have to come through me."
Just standing in front of her was enough. The Council soldiers responded to the subtle magic tug and all their attention was on him. Through the explosive gunfire, Max could just make out the base commander speaking on his phone. A quick series of taps to his contact keypad isolated and enhanced the commander talking, an upgrade courtesy of Shingi.
"-peat, North Face is in the base! Permission to use deadly force!"
The answer came through loud and clear to Max's receiving equipment.
"Denied. Lethal force is expressly forbidden. Take him alive. You may use lethal force against his companions."
Max groaned inwardly, half wishing he hadn't listened in. He rammed his stone covered fist into the face of a soldier getting too close. Really, 'stone' was the wrong word for it. It was packed earth. He didn't want to really hurt someone, so had never brought the full power of solid rock against anyone.
"Can't we all just talk about this over coffee?" he asked. A grenade hit his face shield and exploded violently enough to throw shatters of ice off in a cloud. Max wiped frosty chippings off his face so he could see again.
"Guess not." He hefted his mallet.
It didn't take he and Corvus long to deal with the Council soldiers. The warshade had obeyed his instruction to stay behind him as much as possible and other than some frost in her hair, she was fine.
"How was that, mentor?" she asked, wiping her hands off after the last soldier had been tagged for prison with the red tags. Max sat down on one of the seats as she started to download something from the computer network.
"Pretty good. Half the battle is having the will to fight," he said, pulling his helmet off. The air inside always got so stuffy and the padding, while necessary, could get very hot. He pushed his hand through his sweaty hair.
"They didn't seem to really be trying," Corvus said off-hand. Max half smiled.
"Don't expect that from the Council. They really do want to off as many of us as they can. It's just because you were with me." He regretted saying it the moment it was out of his mouth and looked down at his helmet. He picked at one of the ears with an armoured finger. There was a short silence as Corvus looked at him.
"Why does it make a difference if it's you?" she asked quietly. Max sighed out gustily.
"There's a do not kill order on my file. The Council keep intelligence on all heroes, but someone out there had decided I am not to be killed under any circumstances. Captured yes, killed no." He rose to his feet, "Do you have what we came for?"
"Yes sir." Corvus tucked the tiny device into her pocket. Max nodded and led her out.
"You don't have to call me 'sir'. I might have more experience than you, but I'm still only sixteen you know? Just 'Max' will do."
"Very well, Max." Corvus was looking at him again, her eyes tracing over his features. Max would not have described himself as 'attractive', but there was a certain promise to his features. It had been said by more than one person that he looked like he should taste like mocha if you licked his cheek. Currently nobody had gone through with this threat and Max wasn't sure how he felt about the description 'mocha'. It wasn't meant offensively, which he told himself often, but it was a little hard not to be sensitive about descriptions of his complexion after having heard so many of his mother's stories about growing up with a black father and white mother.
He hoped Corvus wasn't pondering coffee-beverages as she looked at him. Once they'd left the Council base and Max had tagged the entrance for a clean-up crew to come see if there was anything else they wanted from it, he and Corvus went back to Freedom Plaza. Max was hungry and Corvus seemed to want a coffee for some reason, so they sat at one of the picnic benches in the park with their take-away drinks and food.
While Corvus sipped her coffee, Max called into the base to see what progress had been made in the search. He listened intently to Ferdas explaining something about 'magic circles' and that he was escorting Azuria to the scene.
"Is something the matter, Max?" Corvus asked. Max nodded, taking his helmet off again and setting it on the table beside him. He picked up his frappy-something-or-other and sucked on the straw with a distant expression. He wasn't sure he remembered asking for anything raspberry flavoured. He shrugged and put the cup down.
"Just before I arrived to mentor you, there was a code nine on the radio. That means one or some of our group are missing in action. Happens to be about seven. All in one go. They were out in Siren's Call but from the sounds of things, it wasn't the work of Arachnos or any of his minions."
"Oh? How do you know that?" Corvus asked. Max shrugged.
"Big smoking magic circle where they were. A bunch of MAGI people are already there and even Azuria's going out to take a look. Which is odd, as she usually never leaves her office."
"Hmm … can't say I know much about magic," she said, resting her chin on her hand. Max met her eyes for a moment.
"I know a bit. I just kind of get it, y'know? But my teacher's already out there, so if there's anything any of us can do, she'll work it out." Max sounded confident and indeed he was. He had great faith that his mentor would know what to do and how they could help their friends.
Corvus smiled a bit, tipping her head to the side slightly. She was seemingly engrossed in his features again. Max blushed a bit and looked down.
"What did you mean when you said the Council don't try to kill you?" she asked suddenly. Max pulled a face, shrugging.
"Like I said, there's an order. I don't really know much about it, just that they aren't allowed to kill me. Whoever gave the order has a lot of influence, so there's probably some kind of punishment attached for trying to off me … I expect," he said heavily. Corvus drank some more of her coffee.
"It's because my grandfather is a Nictus." Max didn't know why he'd said it. He stared at the wood of the table and bit his lower lip.
"I thought you looked familiar," Corvus's quiet response made Max look up in surprise. She was watching him with a great sympathy.
"You know him?"
"Knew. I have some of the memories of … what I was before. I think the Nictus I was knew your grandfather." Corvus looked away and Max immediately felt bad. He reached out his hand and closed the gauntleted fingers around hers.
"You're not a Nictus any more. There's a rule, you know. You don't have to tell anyone anything of what was done before. Not even if they ask. You're a new person now."
"Thank you, Max," she said, almost silently. Max tried to catch her eyes.
"If anyone gives you any grief, just send them to me. I'll put them straight," he said, full of earnest. Corvus finally met his eyes and smiled weakly to see her young champion.
"I bet you would too."
"Well of course. People should look out for their friends." Max nodded. Perhaps it was just being called 'friend' that cheered Corvus up. She smiled, whatever the reason and squeezed his fingers a bit.
"So, mentor, what next?"

nowt wrong with all that vodka. *hic*

Though I have to agree with Swissy that photobucket > imageshack, because ... um ... he paid me? I don't know, I just like the idiot-proofing more. I need that kind of help.

Whether Andy's kheldian was little more than a residual set of instinctual impulses and destroyed psyche or not, it didn't seem to bother the peacebringer as he went about his daily life. Thoroughly unaware of Gaze and Delphine's close observation of his behaviour and health, weeks passed, filled with the usual.
A large, reeking tentacle slammed Andy down onto the grid floor. He coughed out, winded, his hands up, trying to keep the vicious barb from gouging into his tender skin. His tail thrashed from side to side as his feet slipped off the slimy surface. The impassive ceiling of the deserted Council lab met his eyes before it was blocked out by the hook of another tentacle. Andy slithered to the side, putting his head out of the way when the hook punched into the floor where it had been. The body of the tentacle heaved and warped as it tried to free itself. Andy kept his arm braced against the first, reaching his free hand down to his radio. His slimy fingers slipped on the casing but he fumbled it to his mouth and switched it to transmit.
"Hey, this is Andreas Smith, anyone free to give a peacebringer a hand?" he asked, his tone light as if a third tentacle wasn't oozing into his field of vision, this one topped with a grotesque mutated head.
"Hey Andy, me and Max just finished clearing out some caves under Perez, where are you?"
"I'm in Kings Row, transmitting co-ordinates no-AAAAGH!"
One of the hooked claws had punched through his shoulder, breaking every bone in its path. There was a burn of toxin followed immediately by a sickening numbness. The tentacle heaved, dragging the chi-chi out from under the first, lifting him up from the floor with a series of audible cracks. Andy grabbed it, screaming wordlessly as it shook him, trying to dislodge him. His hands burned with coils of white energy that seared the slimy skin, making them reek more.
"Hold on Andy, we're coming!!" said the radio on the floor with Glance's voice.
The tentacle whipped around suddenly, sending Andy hurtling down the corridor he'd come down. He hit the ground with a crunch and skidded a further twenty feet. He reached a shaking hand to his numb shoulder.
"O-ow … that wasn't cool …" he whimpered. He was just lucky the corridors were so wide, if he'd hit a wall, he could probably have added spine to the list of broken bones. The tentacles flailed from the break in the floor they were coming from. The one with the disgusting head writhed around until the three eyes caught sight of him lying on the floor and they suddenly all sucked back into the hole. Andy propped himself up, looking around urgently for any more holes. The corridor seemed intact here and he slumped back onto the floor with a long groan.
He nursed his shoulder, spreading his fingers and pressing his glowing palm to it. He felt the warm fizz of healing start to chew away the poison that was working through his body. He winced as the anaesthetic quality was burned away too, leaving an all too vivid feeling of splintered bone. He let his head hit the concrete floor and he stared up at the ceiling, breathing deeply and wincing as he felt the fragments of his bone knit back together.
A rhythmic thudding made him frown and tip his head up. The tentacle with the head was staring at him, dripping with noxious slime, its mouth working as though it could speak. Beyond it, Andy could see the shambling bulk of a Hydra Spawn stomping down the corridor. It had no distinct head, instead its hideous face was set into the trunk of its body. Interlocked, bulbous muscles rippled under the slimy skin and its trunk-like legs created the thudding. Andy rolled onto his good side and used his elbow to pull himself away, his legs struggling to co-ordinate, resenting Earth's heavy gravity that made getting back up so hard. He could hear the massive beast coming closer, easily out-pacing him.
"Get UP!" he hissed to himself, dragging one leg under him. Gravity kept a stubborn hold on him, like he was wearing weights on every part of his body. He felt something grab his ankle and looked around. The spawn's massive fingers were locked around his slender leg. Andy couldn't help but shriek when the physical contact gave him a look at its tortured psyche. He didn't notice the sudden drop in the air temperature.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a huge stone hammer rammed into the spawn's flat face with enough force to throw it back. Andy tore his empathy back to himself, feeling dirty just by contact. He looked up at Max who stepped past him, covered with a foot of clear, hard ice. A hand appeared in his vision and he clasped it, sensing Glance. She pulled him to his feet and pulled him into a tight hug, as if to wrap his tender body away from harm.
"You mess with my friends, you mess with me," Max said to the spawn, in an almost conversational tone. Andy heard rather than saw him reform the damaged head of the hammer with concrete from the floor, causing a ripple that passed under his feet.
"Saph's coming too." Glance distracted Andy away from what Max was doing as she peeled his clothes away from the weeping, open wound on his shoulder. She tended to it with her first aid kit.
There was a loud thud and sound of cracking ice and then a long sound like a train whistle. Andy looked around to see several tentacles wrapped around Max's body, claws scratching uselessly at his armour. They bled from the razor-sharp shards of ice that speared out from the boy at random. As he watched, Max grabbed the head tentacle in one hand and punched it several times with his other fist.
Glance finished tending to Andy and tucked her pack away before running towards where Max was fighting. A shell of shining blue energy covered her and her hands lit up. She leapt into the air and slammed her whole body down into a concussive strike that seared the corridor with brilliant light.
"I feel an explosion coming on!" she grinned fiercely as she darted back from a retaliatory strike by a tentacle before Max grabbed it and hauled it back, bracing his legs and heaving back. The tentacles were stretched taut.
"Go for it!"
"Clean up on aisle five!" Glance shouted before she threw her head back and arms out, an even brighter explosion blasting the corridor. The tentacles slipped from Max's grip and slapped against the floor, no longer green but brown and smoking. Andy covered his nose as he walked over to them.
"Thanks guys, they were having a field day with me," he mumbled past his hand. Max reached his hands up to his helmet and he twisted it off, ice shield still in place around it. He shook his head slightly and gasped, sweaty hair plastered to his forehead.
"I'm baked in here. Hey Andy, you okay?" he asked, concerned. Andy nodded, amused to hear the ice-tank complaining about being hot. Glance grinned, slapping Max on the shoulder and then shaking her hand from the extreme cold of his icy coating.
"Mountain boy here was really worried about you, nearly violated aerial conduct several times," she sniggered. Max coloured on his cheeks and hung his head, fiddling with the long 'ears' coming off the side of his helmet that stored his radio equipment and satellite navigation. Andy grinned and ambled further down the corridor to retrieve his own radio. He turned it off from transmit and tucked it back into place on his belt.
"And we love him for it," he chimed. Max covered his face with his hand, as if to hide away. Glance and Andy laughed before Glance's radio chirped. Still grinning, she picked it up and brought it to her mouth.
"Glance here … oh hey Saph. Yeah, hang a left from the police department. You've got Mire with you? Brilliant!" She grinned wickedly at Max who very firmly put his helmet back on.
"Alright, so what's the situation here?" he asked, as if they couldn't hear the fact he was still blushing. Andy grinned wickedly, his tail flicking back and forth, he knew better than to try and hug Max while he was still covered in ice. Last time he'd lost several layers of skin.
"It's an abandoned Council lab. Well, Sunstorm assumed it was abandoned …"
"Oh when does that idiot know anything for certain?! He hasn't be out in the field for ages," muttered Glance. She had some severe misgivings about Sunstorm and turned to hug Andy again, almost fiercely. "Sending you into a place with tentacles?! That moron."
Andy leaned into it even though his shoulder objected to the tightness. Glance was his good friend and always strived to protect him. Max crouched down a few feet away, tilting his head about as he surveyed the floor.
"Andy!" The new voice made the chi-chi look around from Glance's embrace and he squirmed free immediately.
"Saph!" He ran to Sapphire Serenity and clung to him gleefully, making a deep churr noise in his chest. Glance threw up her arms.
"So fickle!" She grinned as she dropped her arms to her side to welcome the young man who'd entered with Sapphire. Twilight Mire was playing on his reputation as a man to whom bondage was less a fetish and more a life-style. He was wearing tight leather with more buckles than were even sensible, his limbs festooned with chains and the cloak hanging down his back looked like it had lost a fight with a shredder.
"Hi Glance, Max."
"Hey Twiggy," Max said, waving a hand as he straightened up.
Andy stopped hugging his lover long enough to bounce on his heels.
"Alrighty, everyone follow me, I know the way!" he said, grinning widely. As a chi-chi, he didn't like being alone, so the arrival of so many people at once had cheered him right up. He bounced off down the corridor, his mostly bald tail flicking back and forth, the puff of blue fur at the end of it standing on end.
"Andy, that's back towards the entrance."
Sapphire's voice made Andy stop and the peacebringer spun around on his heel. He grinned at the others. Glance grinned back and Mire looked amused, albeit in a grim sort of way.
"Okay, so I know the way out," he said, not in the least abashed. Max pointed deeper into the dark corridor.
"Um, that way?"
Andy tried to suppress his shudder at the thought of going deeper into the facility and likely finding more tentacles. It was no great secret that he was terrified of them in all their forms. He'd had to train himself out of the instinctual response to take a safer form, particularly his Nova form, because he made himself feel sick with dread.
He didn't succeed, as Sapphire put his hand on his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
"Stay close to me, I will protect you," said the monk, his expression earnest.
Glance waved her hands.
"Oh can we stop the mushy stuff and go? I need to fill my quota of [censored]-kickery or when we go back to report to Sunstorm, I'll kick his [censored]," she said sharply.
Mire flexed his fingers, black swirls of miasma coiling around them. He faded into the darkness, intensifying it so much that the shining light of Glance's irises stood out like disembodied lamps.
"Oh let's do. I have a nightmare I took from Max earlier at my fingertips." Mire's voice slide out of the darkness.
"Maaaax, what were you doing sleeping with Twiggy?" Glance asked, her tone wicked. There was a slightly choked sound that was muffled by Max's helmet and then a splutter.
"I was not sleeping with him! I just fell asleep watching horror movies is all! I was on the sofa!"
Glance laughed at his swift justification, followed very quickly by Mire's chuckle. Andy grinned, able to feel Max's embarrassment like a burning coal a foot away. He kept hold of Sapphire's arm as the monk started to follow the slightly luminescent glow of Max's ice. The boy seemed to have no trouble seeing in the dark even though his suit was not augmented for other spectrums of vision. In essence, it was simply a bipedal wheel chair, with servos and assisted motor functions in the legs and lower torso. While Max could walk unassisted, his back was still weak and he needed the extra armour on it for adequate protection.
In the artificial night that followed Mire around, the other hydra spawn and various tentacles sticking out of holes in the floor and walls failed to see them coming. The five Heroes working together with the ease of long association made quick work of the monsters.
"I feel very sorry for them, you know," murmured Glance as she wiped slime off her hands using Max's cape.
"What happened to make them like this anyway?" asked the tank, standing still until she was done. In the pale light cast by Andy's hands, Glance looked grim.
"Mutation, contagion … Doesn't seem like there's much we can do for them."
"They don't know anything but pain any more. It's enough to break your mother's heart," said Andy, affecting a countrified drawl.
"Sorry to interrupt this fascinating insight into the lives of hydra spawn, but who invited the Vahzilok gut-munches?" Mire's voice pierced the conversation as easily as his glare could. Max gave a muffled, tinny groan through his helmet.
"I thought I'd had my quota of zombie vomit …"
Despite the misgivings in his voice, Max strode to the front of the party. He could generally be relied upon to be between danger and everyone else. Sapphire's hand found Andy's in the darkness and he squeezed it gently before letting go to break into a run at the Vahzilok mortificator who was stitching up part of the abomination that sat before him. The abomination was larger even than the spawn, made of cannibalised bits of human tissue and muscle augmented with a mechanical skeleton. They looked hideous and smelled worse and had a horrible tendency to projectile vomit on people as their first line of defence.
As soon as the butcher realised the dark was not normal, he panicked, dropping his suturing tools and took out the saw-edged meat-knife all of his ilk carried. Andy stiffened when his senses overlapped the man's mind and he recoiled physically from them. He felt like he was suffocating in warped desires and drives. The man idolised life, to the very deranged sense that he would pull a body from its final rest and tear bits of it out to create another abomination. Life was his obsession and he would kill anyone who stood in the way of his great work.
Tears stung Andy's eyes and he curled his hands to fists. Life for life's sake was not right. There came a time when everything had to die. Prolonging life, while usually a good thing, could sometimes be the worst punishment. He could barely hear the others engaging the man. In the sporadic bursts of light from Glance, he could see the abomination. He bared his teeth, a feral feeling of outrage that was entirely his own burst within.
"Veriskavi!" he screamed, lunging forward. His sneakers squeaked on the floor as he forced himself into a run. Gravity clung to him, trying to pull him back. He refused to give into its insistent pulling, skidding under the abomination's first swing and kicking off the ground. He delivered a brutal upper-cut to the monster's chin, his fist flaring with white light. Now airborne, he rammed both feet into its chest and flipped backwards over its arms. From above, he swung both arms up above his head.
"I've got some angelic judgement right here for you!" As he spoke, Andy flipped his body and kicked off the ceiling hard. He slammed both fists into the abomination's face, knocking it down with the sheer force of his assault.
The thrill of battle surged past his inbred love of peace and Andy dropped to the ground on all fours before driving himself upright to pounce on the abomination again. He was careful not to get into a head to head with the abomination. It was powerfully built from all the best muscles a mortificator could find, not to mention its reinforced skeleton. With a single blow, it could break every bone in his body. Yet that thought didn't preside, Andy could barely think about the danger. He goaded his enemy fiercely, nimbly avoiding its massive fists. He was almost disappointed when a flying spin-kick to the head dropped it. Sapphire landed neatly beside Andy.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
Andy sighed, the fierce joy of fighting left, leaving him just a humble chi-chi again. He smiled up at Sapphire.
"Of course."
"What does 'veriskavi' mean?" Mire asked, looming out of the darkness next to Andy, looking down at him severely. Since it was just his default expression and the chi-chi could not feel any severity from him, only curiosity, he shrugged.
"Did I say that? That's an odd thing for me to say."
"Why?" asked Sapphire, motioning for them to follow Max and Glance who were already striding off down the corridor.
"Oh, veriskavi is a word in my language. It's …" Andy hesitated, thinking hard and picking through his English vocabulary for the right words to fit. "It's madness when applied to a chi-chi. To be veriskavn is to be dangerous, mad, wrong in a way. Like … violence? Feelings of hostility and aggression."
"Yours must be a wondrous people that feelings of aggression are so unusual to be classed as a 'madness'," said Sapphire, his voice warm. Andy couldn't help but smile, winding his arm about the monk's. Since it was dark, nobody could see Twilight Mire's thoughtful expression.

Gaze walked along the streets of Kings Row, not wearing her purple jacket and leggings, but a pair of jeans and a shirt tied over her strappy top. Her blue hair was left to stir idly in the stiff breeze. A few Skulls saw her coming and even though she wasn't wearing her Hero 'costume', they decided to hurry off down the alleyways rather than tangle with her.
It made for an uneventful trip to Dell and Andy's apartment. Gaze smiled to herself as she considered the amount of time Andy was spending in Saph's apartment. It was probably more Dell's apartment now. She entered the building and climbed the stairs to the unassuming door. A polite knock was all it took and the door opened.
"I swear you're psychic sometimes," Gaze said, smiling at the shorter woman. Delphine inclined her head, her eyes twinkling with that mischievous sense of humour that she didn't bother to hide around Gaze.
"But your extensive tests proved I am not. Come in, come in, the tea is just brewing." Delphine stepped out of the way, shooing Gaze in. Gaze kicked off her shoes as she entered, picking them up and putting them on the little shelf to the left of the entrance hall. She picked up a pair of guest slippers and slipped them over her socks, knowing the elf preferred people didn't wear outdoor shoes in her home.
"Oh good, I'm parched."
Delphine led the way into the sitting room and sat down beside the low table, curling her legs under her as she took her veil off. A china tea service stood on a tray on the table. Like most things Delphine possessed, it was decorated with flowers and leaves. Gaze sat down opposite her, noting the plate of little cakes and biscuits, each one exquisitely decorated with delicate sugar vines.
"Are these from your god?" she asked politely. Delphine's very personal relationship with her god was still a source of intrigue for Gaze. The elf nodded as she poured tea.
"It's a special day in the elven calendar, so he sent me gifts from my nearest and dearest. Dusty is quite exhausted from all that fetching and carrying." She nodded her head to the small potted tree in the corner. Her house-dragon, another gift from her god, was curled up around the base of the trunk, grey-furred sides rising as he slept, front claws over his face to keep out the light. Gaze loved the little creature, it was about the size of a house cat but as affectionate as a dog and intelligent enough to understand slightly complicated commands.
"What day is it?" she asked, turning her attention back to Delphine.
"It is the day of blossoming. Traditionally this is the day for girls to undergo their rite of passage to become women. It's custom for the men in the family to give gifts to the women, legend says it is the day that women are at their most magically powerful."
Gaze smiled, sipping some of her tea.
"That sounds lovely. You have two sons, right? Did they send gifts too?" she asked. Delphine nodded, lifting her hand to her hair and pulling out the clasp that held it back from her face. She showed it to Gaze who made the appropriate noises of appreciation. It was a rather fetching design of crossed swords with vines coiling about them and an unknown spray of flowers in the centre done in mother of pearl.
"My coat of arms, would you believe?" Delphine put the clasp back in her hair, driving the gold pin through to anchor it. Gaze raised her eyebrows.
"Are you a knight amongst all your other talents?" she teased. Delphine laughed.
"A knight Templar, back when I was just a lass. Long, long ago." She smiled into her cup before sipping. Gaze took one of the cakes, almost loathe to eat it and ruin such craftsmanship. However, the slightly spicy smell was too alluring and she bit into it. She made a wordless sound of pleasure at its flavour.
"You've been everything and everywhere," she chuckled after she'd swallowed the cake. Delphine laughed.
"I have not. It just seems that way. I still put my trousers on one leg at a time." She winked at Gaze, who entertained herself momentarily with the mental image of Delphine putting on a pair of clown's trousers.
"So, how's your week been?" asked Gaze, banishing the thoughts of polka dot pants and comedy braces. She watched Delphine pour a bit of honey into her second cup of tea.
"Oh, the usual. My teaching job is incredibly rewarding and the amateur dramatics society want to put on Romeo and Juliet. Myself and Saph also took out another Council base filled with killer robots. How was your week?" Delphine made taking on killer robots sound mundane. Gaze grinned self-consciously. In Hero-work, it was pretty mundane, now that she thought about it.
"I finally got hold of Andy for his medical and found out some very interesting things. Did you know he's related to Earth lemurs in the same way humans are related to the bigger primates?" Gaze's voice immediately took on a deal of enthusiasm. She had almost dismissed the results of her findings as impossible, but had sent a sample of Andy's DNA to a geneticist who owed her a favour for a second opinion. The result had been the same. Andy was related to the ring-tailed lemur of Earth.
"That is strange." Delphine's eyes lit up with the prospect of mystery. Gaze knew that Delphine loved puzzles, which made her a natural investigator.
"I know. It's just bizarre that an alien should be evolved from an Earth animal. Makes you wonder if all those stories of alien abduction have some truth to them."
The pair of them speculated wildly about alien abduction for about an hour before Delphine got up to brew another pot of tea. Gaze leaned against the sofa, stroking Dusty the house-dragon who'd stirred himself only long enough to saunter over to slump in her lap. His long tail flicked and his wings rustled slightly as he settled his head back to his fluffy chest, eyes closed blissfully.
"Would you like me to read your fortune?" Delphine asked, coming back with the teapot. Gaze grinned.
"Oh go on then. When do I get to meet my tall dark stranger?" she chuckled. Delphine set the teapot down gracefully and went over to the dark wood cabinet. She took a silk-wrapped packet out of one of the drawers before returning to kneel at the table. She pulled the ribbon that held the packet closed, unfolding the purple silk. Gaze leaned forward, caught up in the girlish delight of quasi-magic. She reached her hands forward to receive the cards from Delphine. The only difference from her young forays into tarot card reading was that Delphine pulled a coin on a chain out from under her kimono. The elf held it between her hands in the prayer position, whispering words in her native tongue. After a moment, she dropped the coin to lie outside her clothes and held out her hands to take the cards back from Gaze now they were shuffled.
Gaze cleared a bit of space, pushing cups and plates aside so Delphine would have space for the reading. The elf turned over the cards, placing them in a different alignment than Gaze herself had used in her youth. She surveyed them critically for a few moments. Gaze could see the Tower card and the Devil, both were bad cards to been drawn. She couldn't quite remember why, but she recalled they were cards of misfortune and evil energy.
"I see great sadness in your future, a terrible loss." Delphine reached over to tap the Empress card with a curious finger, "but once you have known this terrible pain, you will know extreme joy. Your future is in balance with itself, loss and gain, pain and joy. I see that you will be offered a choice on which this future joy hinges. It will be the turning point of your life. If you are strong through the crisis that comes, you will know happiness for the long years of your life."
Gaze laced her fingers and rested her chin on them.
"No tall dark stranger?"
"I see a short dark person, but no stranger." Delphine flicked her eyes up to Gaze's and grinned. Gaze laughed.
"My secret's out, then?" she smiled without any remorse. Delphine chuckled and gathered up the cards, tucking them back into the deck.
"Let's just say I was curious when you asked me to start looking into a specific break-in at a garden centre."
"I really think he was wrongfully accused, Dell. Jakey told me that Azuria had a meeting with loads of high ranking magic origin heroes over Immemoria. She seemed to think he was really dangerous but …"
"You're quite right to believe him innocent of the charges." Delphine wrapped her cards up in their silk and tied the ribbon to hold them secure. She set the deck to the side and poured both she and Gaze another cup of tea.
"You've found something out?" Gaze asked, looking hopeful. Delphine nodded.
"I thought the name just a coincidence, but my research says otherwise. As you might remember from one of our other conversations, I have been to this world before, a hundred years ago," she said quietly. Gaze nodded.
"I do remember."
"During my last stay, I made contact with the Fey population and managed to wrangle my way into the royal household as a teacher."
Gaze just nodded, remembering Delphine had said something to that effect.
"Teaching the young princes and princess their letters and about other cultures fell, naturally, to me. I remember the eldest son was a terrible student. He was always skipping class and I'd find him up to his horns in trouble. He was a born warrior and a day didn't go by when he wasn't hauled out of a fight."
"Wait a minute, do you mean-"
"I do. Immemoria Furl Cinnamon was a terrible handful. He was in his sixties at the time, I believe, a very brash age for his race. He had a hard time fitting in, his mother was a mixed breed. I believe she had goblin, sprite and even human blood in her ancestry. I seem to recall that there was a lot of dissatisfaction that the crown prince could be of such questionable stock."
"… Crown prince?" Gaze looked a bit puzzled. Delphine chuckled and sipped her tea.
"Oh yes, Immemoria is the heir to the Fairy Throne."
Gaze opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She blinked a few times.
"Wow."
"Not every day a girl finds out she's attracted a king-to-be as her lover-to-be." Delphine's eyes were crinkled up with that mischievous sense of humour and Gaze realised she'd been desperate to share this knowledge with her, just to see her face. For herself, Gaze just puffed out, blowing some of her hair out of her eyes.
"You're enjoying this too much!" Gaze chuckled, feeling the heat rising to her cheeks. Delphine looked dignified.
"I'm certain I have no idea what you're talking about. Anyway, after his governess despaired of ever making a gentleman of him, I took him under my wing. Boys like him do not always need strict discipline. With a little understanding and encouragement of his better qualities, he became a much sweeter boy. I left when he entered the military, but my sources tell me he made general the old fashioned way. You are right to believe he is incapable of some of those charges. I suspect a good old fashioned political intrigue to be behind them. With Immemoria trapped up here, the succession of the throne is in contention."
Gaze sighed and drank her tea.
"I just wish he'd chosen a more sensible place to hide out than the Rogue Islands. When we met in Pocket D, he was with some real scumbags. He was like the square peg trying to fit into the round hole. He talked tough and looked the part, but he was all wrong for it," she said quietly. Delphine nodded, just listening. Her silence was encouraging and Gaze took a deep breath. "I need to prove his innocence so I can beg leniency. I could sense he was a good man. A little rough around the edges maybe, but a good man."
"What draws you to him so much?" Delphine asked quietly. Gaze sighed deeply, smiling wryly.
"I don't know. When I met him, his friends were trying to get some of us to help them with this problem they had with Arachnos super soldiers or something. We negotiated an exchange of talents, we'd help them if they helped us. When we headed into that Arachnos facility, we just clicked, Immemoria and I. He was always where I needed him to be and he was truly compassionate. It was more that … we were two jigsaw pieces that fit together. Like he knew when to treat me like a comrade and when to treat me like a lady. Does that make any sense?"
"Surprisingly yes." Delphine smiled for her younger friend.
"I don't know if it's 'love' yet, but I look forward to the letters I get and the moment I can see him again. I think with time, I could probably be more certain."
"Well, love at first sight is rare and I haven't noticed that humans are more disposed to it than any other race. Did you know that it's so rare in werewolves that they don't even have a word for it in their own language. They staunchly believe that love is something that doesn't just pop into exist, but something that fosters slowly. That said, werewolves mate for life and have the highest marriage success rate of any species I have ever known. Much more successful than elves, who are by comparison, extremely frivolous and loose." Delphine chuckled as she imparted this wisdom to Gaze, who shared her amusement.
Gaze sighed out and drank her tea.
"Well, enough about my love life, how's Andy's therapy coming along? Is he still having nightmares?" she asked, taking on a more professional tone. Delphine nodded, her ears moving down an notch.
"I'm starting to be convinced that he's suffered marwolaeth o bersonoliaeth."
Gaze frowned.
"What does that mean?"
"You know the condition some people slip into after severe and horrific torture? The catatonic state?" Delphine met Gaze's eyes with remarkable ease. Gaze knew she still had a difficult time talking about torture even when it was in regards to someone else.
"I've read about it, yes," said Gaze, who had never seen it herself. Delphine nodded, the corners of her mouth twitching grimly.
"I believe it happened to Andy's kheldian half, which is why he has no access to its memories. I sincerely believe that there was very little left of the kheldian when it blended with Andy. All but its very core had been destroyed. And I think he knows that, deep down."
"So it troubles him at night?"
"Exactly."
Gaze shared a silence with Delphine for a few minutes as she considered the ramifications of this. It bothered her than any part of Andy had suffered, he was such a sweet person. Sweet people didn't deserve torture. She sighed and put her empty cup down.
"I suppose we're in for a long haul then?"
"I guess so."

"Ah, there you are Andy, come in, come in." Gaze came out from her little office in the base medical bay. Andy's tail flicked behind him as he climbed the last steps and came in. He knocked a table with his leg and yelped as he pitched wildly onto the floor. Gaze rushed forward and caught him. She helped support him as he got his legs under him again, chuckling slightly.
"You're the most accident prone person I know …" She noticed his laces weren't tied again. She wondered how they always managed to come undone. Maybe he just wasn't very good at tying them.
"Sorry, Gaze." The chi-chi took advantage of their closeness to hug her, the tip of his tail flicking back and forth happily. Gaze ruffled his hair in amusement, knowing he meant it only innocently. It was just the way his race said hello.
"That's alright. Ready for your medical?" she asked, giving him a tight squeeze. The chi-chi nodded, pulling away and brushing the palms of his hands over Gaze's cheeks. She repeated the gesture to him and then let go. He followed her into the check-up room and hopped up onto the bed. He kicked his legs boyishly as she picked up her stethoscope from the side and hooked the ear-pieces into her ears.
"Take your shirt off, please."
Andy did so, the skin of his chest pale and soft but covered with a fine blue stubble. Gaze pressed the cold disk of the stethoscope to his rib-cage, looking for the best place to hear his heart. Once she'd found a good location high on the right side of his chest, she listened intently for a bit, then took it away and unhooked the device.
"You didn't run here, did you?" she asked. Andy shook his head.
"You told me not to."
"Good." She put the stethoscope aside and wheeled an electrocardiograph out from the corner. "I see your fur is growing back."
"Yeah, took it's sweet time." Andy wasn't looking forward to the sticky pads the ECG machine used on his furry chest. He lifted his arms when Gaze told him to and tolerated the sharp pulling sensations as the pads took hold.
"How are you finding Earth food? You've been careful to avoid ginger, right?" she asked.
"Yeah, didn't want to have another choke-a-thon." Andy watched the lines on the screen of the ECG machine, fascinated by the rapid spikes.
"I don't think anyone wants you to have one of those. Interesting." Gaze was watching the spikes too. Andy looked askance at her. She smiled at him reassuringly.
"It's nothing bad. I was just observing that your heart-rate is almost twice as fast as a human's. How long does your race typically live?" She let the machine take its readings as she located a clipboard. Andy looked thoughtful.
"You mean in the … uh … wild?" he asked. Gaze looked around at him.
"'Wild'?"
"The opposite of captivity?" Andy scratched at his cheek. He was pretty good with languages, but this was more than a basic concept. Gaze put her pen down and came over, gently easing the sticky pads off his skin.
"Ah yes, your race are all slaves, aren't they?" she said softly. Andy nodded.
"It really depends on where we live, you die young in the mines."
"You were born in a mining facility?" Gaze walked over to the counter and found a thermometer, wiping its already pristine end with an anti-bacterial wipe. Andy nodded, opening his mouth so she could tuck it under his tongue.
"Yuh, I 'hink thuh awidge 'ife-'an therh wuh hihfty."
Gaze chuckled and noted that down.
"How about other places?" she asked. Andy frowned and the thermometer stood up as pursed his lips thoughtfully. It bleeped a little and Gaze took it out to check the digital screen.
"There were a few others at the palace, but they avoided me. I never got to talk to them." Andy put his elbows on his knees, peering at Gaze's notes.
"They avoided you?" Gaze picked up a strange device and held it up, "Take a normal breath and breathe out through this."
Andy did so obediently before answering.
"Well, yeah. Of course they did." He blinked a bit at Gaze, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. She frowned, taking his blood pressure.
"Your race are empaths, correct? Did the presence of your kheldian disturb them?" she asked. Gently, as if his emotions were delicate things. Andy half smiled, looking away.
"Because I'm violent. Chi-chi's abhor violence and violent thoughts. Someone like me … I'm savage beyond their tolerance."
Gaze paused, looking at him with a slightly perplexed expression. Andy could feel her confusion running deep into him. He turned his head slightly, letting her feel his loneliness. She put an arm around his shoulders and then drew him into a hug. It wasn't quite the same as being with another chi-chi, but it was close enough.
"Your race must be incredibly peaceful if you are 'savage' by comparison," she murmured. Andy chuckled.
"Humans are scary, you know. So vicious and turbulent. So many passions that can go in so many ways. It's like being in the middle of a firestorm that never ends, just swerves in different directions."
"Even me?"
"Even you. You have so much love in you, but it burns too, it's so intense."
Gaze let him go, rubbing his cheek.
"You handle it very well, in that case."
"Hey, I'm the most violent chi-chi who ever lived, I can handle most things." Andy grinned widely, making her chuckle.
"Your race must be a lovely people."
"Sure, lovely. Exploited too." Andy shrugged, sounding off-hand. Gaze saw what he meant and carried on with the medical.
"Not me though. They'll never put me back in a yoke. I'd rather die first," said the chi-chi emphatically. Gaze caught his eyes for a moment, then just nodded.

There was a knock at the door. The empty bottle fell over with a hollow clatter and rolled across the wooden floor.
"Matt? Are you up?"
Muse opened one eye, sprawled over his bed, arm hanging off. He dragged his knuckles up from the floor and rubbed at his forehead with his palm.
"Ellie?" he mumbled. The woman on the other side of the door could hear the hang-over in his voice. She frowned tightly.
"Adam's coming home today. Back from the Shard. Aren't you going to Portal Corps to meet him?" she asked.
Muse rolled up into a sitting position, his bare feet on the floor. He rubbed at his face with his hands and pushed one through his hair.
"M'yeah. Of course. Just need to freshen up." He tried to sound light. Winter's Knight turned away from the door, walking down the hallway. She hoped Avenger wouldn't ask her if Muse had been 'good' while he was away. She didn't want to have to tell him about the empty bottles of bourbon she'd found hidden behind the toilet. She gripped the ancient, leather bound tome to her chest. She was very fond of Muse, fond enough that she felt awkward confronting him about his drinking problem. She returned to the living room where Cleo was lying on her mat on the floor. She watched the baby flail at the brightly coloured toys suspended from the bar over her head.
Maybe she should tell Avenger, if the moment was right. He had to know that Muse was struggling to give up the drink. She crossed the room to the notes Max had left last night and looked them over. She smiled warmly when she saw his calculations. He was coming along very well. She should tell him so when he dropped by later.

Glance soared down over the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, her eyes scanning for movement. She paused, slowing to a hover when she saw the work detail in the northwest corner. It was hard to tell them apart at that distance, but she could see a few people with spades. People with spades in Lincoln were always heroes. Non super-powered people used mechanical diggers. She swooped down and landed on the warm grass. The sun was burning high in the cloudless sky and the sound of birds and crickets filled the gaps in muted conversation.
"Can I see your ID please?" A voice from behind her made Glance jump and she spun around. She blinked, then hurriedly located it. Without his trademark shield and helmet, she hadn't recognised Blue Steel.
"I'm sorry sir." She pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over. Dressed in his civilian clothes, Blue Steel was rather unremarkable looking. He had a strong jaw and a nose that had once been broken. His eyes were very dark, but there was a sympathy to them. He looked her ID over and then handed it back.
"Don't think I've seen you on re-burial detail before. First time?" he asked. She noticed his hands and feet were stained with dirt. She nodded.
"A friend of mine said I might like to try it out. I've been helping some people out with the Banished Pantheon and … well, I just think if I'm going to make a mess, I should help clean it."
Blue Steel smiled and held out his dirty hand. Glance took it, noting the calluses and firmness of the grip. He shook it twice.
"Welcome aboard. Come on, I'll introduce you to the others." He let go and started walking towards the others. As he went, he pulled a shovel out of where it had been driven into the ground by a grave stone. Glance kept pace with him, looking around curiously. Graveyards held no grisly quality for her. They were so often well tended and peaceful that she couldn't imagine being afraid of them. Blue Steel slapped another hero on the back as he passed. The woman was leaning her arms on her shovel, wearing a plaid shirt tied in a knot over her breasts. Her luxuriant blonde hair was tied up and away and she was wearing a straw hat to keep the sun off.
"Kelly, this is Midnight Glance, she's joining us today."
'Kelly' looked at Glance and smiled.
"Hey there, newbie. You wanna help do some good for these poor folks?" She had a southern tinge to her accent and her red lips were almost mesmerising. Glance nodded.
"Yeah. If I won't be in the way, y'know?"
"S'long as you don't stand behind Blue when he gets goin', y'all be fine." Kelly straightened and shooed Blue Steel off. The former policeman grinned and shouldered his shovel, walking off to join some other men digging a neat rectangle. Glance looked around. She couldn't see Max at the moment, but he said he'd be here today, so he would be around somewhere. Kelly looked Glance up and down.
"Peacebringer, huh? Think you'd like a shovel or somethin' with a little more bite?" she asked. Glance grinned easily.
"Shovel will be fine. Seems too nice a day to drive big noisy diggers around."
"Heh, you'll fit right in here. So everyone call you Glance? Midnight? What?" Kelly led Glance over to a small shed tucked away around the corner by an ornate little house. She opened the door and took out a shovel, handing it to Glance.
"Glance'll do just fine." The peacebringer shouldered her shovel the way she'd seen Blue Steel do.
"Alright. We'm mostly a friendly bunch. Don't stand on formality. Hard to, see, when you're all covered with the same dirt." Kelly closed the shed door behind her and started leading Glance off to where the others were.
"Are you all regulars?" Glance asked. Kelly nodded.
"I've bin doin' this job for seven years now. Ever since I came to Paragon."
Glance looked at the woman. She squinted a little.
"Are you Topaz Sunrise?"
Kelly laughed.
"I ain't been Topaz Sunrise since the war. It's just Kelly now," she said, smiling warmly. Glance found herself smiling back, even though mention of the war could bring back shadowed memories.
"Mornin's we stake out the plots, you dig in the ropes. Make the edges sharp as you can. Usually go to six feet, if y'ain't comfortable jumping in to check the height, just call someone to do it for you," Kelly told her as they walked over to where several plots were marked out with blue ropes, held down with stakes.
It was not until she was leaning back against a headstone, drinking from the flask a young man called Derwent offered her that Glance saw Max. He was walking at the back of a column of men and women wheeling gurneys. It was a slightly chilling sight, even on the warm day. On each gurney lay a body, wrapped up so well in white cloth that its shape was barely recognisable as human.
Kelly drew closer to Glance, driving her spade into the ground beside her so she could lean on it.
"Tends to be a bit shocking the first time you see them," she said softly. Glance handed Derwent back his flask. He took a deep drink himself and wiped his forehead, leaving a smear of dirt on it.
"Why aren't they in coffins?" she asked. Derwent smiled, his expression dry.
"City office doesn't stretch to the cost of coffins. Still pooling its money for rebuilding. Cloth's what we get. Still, the mages say cloth's easier to work with." He nodded to the men and women who were going about settling the bodies into the graves. Glance watched them thoughtfully. Max looked over at them, he seemed surprised to see her there. Kelly grinned as he started walking over.
"Well hey there, Max. You've been inside a while." She reached out a hand to him when he came close enough. Glance expected them to shake hands, but instead Max hugged Kelly tightly. The older woman ruffled his hair and kissed the top of his head.
"Several came in last night. They needed the extra hands. Hey G, you came!" Max let go of Kelly after a while and smiled at Glance. She couldn't help but grin back a little.
"I'm responsible for those extra few, least I could do."
"Oh, you know each other?" Derwent asked. Glance nodded.
"Max told me where to come. We're in the same group. What were you doing that took so long?" She gave the young tank a fond smile. Max rubbed his hands together.
"Writing down the spells and wards that'll stop them being reanimated again. On the cloth, y'know?"
"Magical wards in coffins and graves used to be seen as a quirk of the rich until about ten years back. A law was passed making it mandatory that all resting places of the dead had to be warded against reanimation. That's why there are no fresh zombies." Kelly folded her arms on the butt of her spade, watching the bodies being lowered down. Derwent grinned a little.
"Our mages provide the same service for any of the reanimated coming back. You can't go digging people up to do it you know. Nobody wants an exhumation for any reason."
They went quiet, just watching the bodies being lowered in. A priest in black robes said a few words at the foot of each grave before he and the mages withdrew. Max took Kelly's spade.
"I bet you've been here since dawn." He walked over to the graves where the other diggers were converging. Glance watched for a moment as they started tackling the large mounds of earth beside the graves, filling them back in. She jumped a little when Kelly put her hand on her arm, drawing her back to the here and now.
"Go on. You did real well. Most newbies can't take the sight."
Glance looked at her.
"I'm a peacebringer, I've lived a good long time. It's not the first time I've seen death."
"True, but reburying those that should be at rest … it's always harder. We'll be heading for the bar after this, you're welcome to join us," said Derwent, shouldering his spade and heading for the graves. Kelly grinned.
"And when he invites you, you know you passed the test. Der's not exactly 'friendly' with newcomers. 'Course, it could just be those hotpants you're wearing." She winked at Glance, who laughed, pulling the head of her spade free from the ground.
"Hotpants are brilliant icebreakers." With that she joined the others.

Author's note: I started writing this yonks ago, before NaNo, and I've only just gotten back to it, so it's very shaky writing in places, and in others downright MANGLED. Still, I hope the premise of a tale culminating in an intergalactic roadtrip will please the gentlemen of the board. For your entertainment and the obligatory teeth-clenching angst (seriously, have you ever read fanfiction without any?) that I have attempted to keep to a minimum, I present to you: Revelations. Time to discover some not-all-that-shocking truths about what it is to be a hero and when space piracy is acceptable in this modern generation.

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REVELATIONS

"Andreas Lightsky! You are under arrest! Come quietly or be shot!"
Andreas Lightsky crouched down on his hands and feet, balanced easily on an exposed metal pipe. Below him, cargo was being moved around the huge warehouse by loading droids. Three Enforcers stood on the nearest catwalk, their stun sticks unholstered and one of them was testing the pipe gingerly with his foot. When it creaked ominously, he withdrew his foot hastily.
Andy grinned and his long, bushy tail swung back and forth lazily.
"Shoot me? In a space dock?" he chuckled. With a whirl, he spun and bounded off down the pipe, using his hands and feet nimbly to keep his balance.
"Bloody chi-chi … " Whatever else the Enforcer said was lost to Andy as he jumped off the pipe. He spread his hands and legs instinctively before a flush of white energy sparked down his body and his angle shallowed. He zipped into knife-edge straight corridors formed by the cargo crates.
He could hear the clang of armoured boots on metal grids. The Enforcers had called another squad out to help them find little old him. He chuckled wickedly and reversed onto his back, putting his hands behind his head and hooking one leg over the other as though he were having a snooze. Apparently this annoyed them, as a thrown stun-stick hit the back of his head. The shock was enough to make him drop a foot before he regained his composure. He flipped over and shook his fist at the Enforcer below him.
"Why'd you throw your stick at me?! You're supposed to take care of Confederation property! Vandal!" He had to dodge an armoured helmet, "What are you, a stripper?!"
"Captain Lightsky, surrender!"
Andy hovered in midair for a second as he stroked his tufted chin, fingers silking the soft blue fur.
"Hmm … no. Tomorrow maybe, if I'm in the mood."
The band on his wrist blipped and he looked at it. A name appeared on the screen and some text scrolled after it. Andy grinned. His ship had finished fuelling and he didn't have to be a diversion any more. He waved to the Enforcers.
"Been swell guys, stay beautiful." With that, he rolled over himself in the air, putting his feet to the crate now behind him and kicked off hard. He shot over their heads, hearing their cries of dismay and loud cursing over the prohibition on projectile weapons in space docks. Andy rolled right and darted up through an open ventilation shaft. Once he was in the pokey tunnel, he started crawling industriously in the direction of the dock his ship was cradled. He took a device out of his pocket and clipped it back over his ear, a little arm extending along his cheek. He tapped a series of buttons on his neck band.
"Oshen, what the hell took so long? They were throwing helmets at me, man!"
"Sorry Captain, this new crew couldn't find their own plumbing with a chart and a compass." Oshen sounded sour, insofar as he sounded like he had any emotions at all. Oshen was one of the reptilian Gaskri, a largely aquatic race who typically resented the dryness of most common spaceports.
"It's just a temporary thing until we find some decent recruits." Andy had to stop as two other people headed for him in the narrow tunnel.
"Enforcers?" he asked.
"Yeah, don't suppose this is the way to the loading bay?" The leader asked, pointing the way Andy had come. Andy nodded.
"Yeah, but hang quiet for a bit, there was a squad in there looking for me."
"Aye, thanks."
Andy had to push himself flat against the curved wall so the other two could squeeze past him. Once they were gone, he carried on his way, realising Oshen had been talking and he'd been ignoring.
"What was that? I missed it."
"I will come for you. I know exactly where you are."
"Oshen? What the hell, you can't bring a ship into the air condition, that's just plain crazy."
"There is no escape, you belong to me."
Andy was about to ask what exactly his first mate was thinking when he saw motion ahead in the tunnel again. Something was melting up through the floor of it like a welling leak. Black purple vapour hissed through the air, two eyes - pits of energy so black they shone in the darkness- in the suggestion of a head turned to look at him. Where the creature's shoulders would be, a waving mass of tentacles curved and groped along the tunnel walls.
"I know where you are. I will come for you soon."

Andy screamed and thrashed himself upright in bed, the covers were soaked with sweat. A hand pressed to his bare chest and an arm ringed around his shoulders.
"It was just a dream, just a bad dream. You're alright, you're safe." His partner whispered. Clearly Sapphire Serenity had been unable to sleep through Andy's nightmare. The chi-chi let out a shuddering sigh, his hands braced on the mattress as he panted. After a moment, he lifted his hand and looked at it in the darkness. He worked his fingers together. How'd he always manage to sweat so much?
"Do you want a cup of that tea Delphine mixed for you?"
"Yeah … thanks." Andy's voice felt rough when he spoke and sounded hoarse. He got up a moment after Sapphire and started stripping down the bed so he could put clean, dry sheets on. When that was done, he wandered into the kitchen, his tail between his legs. He felt like an idiot child, throwing such a tantrum in his sleep that he soaked the sheets and flailed at his lover. He watched Sapphire boil the kettle and take out a little muslin bag of aromatic tea leaves from a lacquered box.
"I'm really sorry, Saph," he said, rubbing his arm. The human turned his head to watch him over his shoulder then smiled. While the kettle went about its business of boiling the water, he turned around and wrapped the smaller male up in his arms.
"Don't be, it's not your fault at all. Do you remember what it was about?"
'I know where you are. I will come for you soon.'
Andy shook his head, letting himself take comfort from the strength of Sapphire's arms and the solid tone of his body.
"Not a thing."

Andreas 'Smith', just Andy to his friends, kicked open the door to his flat, holding up the white plastic bags in triumph.
"Fear not, fair maiden, I bring plunder!" he yelled happily. He could smell a mild incense coming from Delphine's room and the smell of bath sundries lingering in the air between the bathroom and her door.
"I'll be out in a minute, I'm just doing my hair."
"I got some Chinese take out!" Andy made his way into the kitchenette and put the bags on the sides, snagging bowls and plates out of the cupboard.
"Did you make sure to tell them that you can't have ginger? It's a common ingredient in Mandarin cuisine." Delphine's call from her room made Andy look around curiously.
"Yeah. How come you know so much about Earth culture already … you arrived here after I did and I don't know that."
"You also don't know that the Paladins are a baseball team and that they lost their last three games. You just have to keep your ears open." She had a point, Andy turned back to the foil cases and peeled off the lids, tipping the contents into bowls and setting the wrapped chopsticks on the plates. He popped a spring roll into his mouth and chewed it as he took the meals into the living room and set them down on the table. They had a low one that they'd gotten cheap from a skip. It had originally been a normal height, but one leg was broken and Delphine had suggested this solution. It wasn't bad, and sitting cross-legged for meals was exotic. Andy's fluffy tipped tail flicked from side to side and knocked a book off the sofa. He scrambled to catch it and his foot stood on his trailing lace end and he lurched, falling on his face. Delphine chose that moment to enter, wearing a red silk kimono and her customary face veil. Andy grinned at her from his position, sprawled out on the floor.
"That's a pretty dress you have on."
"It's a kimono, but close." Delphine settled fluidly at the table, tucking her legs under her and then tucking the kimono under them. Andy sat up and tied his laces.
"Okay, I'll remember that. So, you have a good evening?"
Delphine reached her hand up under her veil and covered her mouth when she sneezed. It was a tiny sound, a bare squeak. It charmed Andy.
"Muse came by earlier with some cold medicine and advised plenty of bed rest to let my body recover," she said softly, having wiped her nose and discarded the soiled cloth in the bin. Andy nodded, pulling his chopsticks apart and flicking himself in the cheek in the process.
"I was talking to another peacebringer today," he said. Delphine regarded him over her veil as she picked up a spring roll with her chopsticks neatly.
"Oh?"
"Apparently I'm weird because I don't have my Kheldian memories." He tried not to look morose. He hadn't even known he'd been a peacebringer until some guy called Sunstorm told him he was. It had been a huge surprise to see other people who could project blinding white energy from their hands and summon the same energy to protect their bodies. Delphine reached over and touched his hand gently.
"Well, not everyone is the same. You're a different species to the peacebringers most commonly found here."
Andy knew she was just trying to cheer him up and he smiled. Being around Dell was so calming, like she was an oasis of tranquillity in a city of hustling emotions. He tucked into his meal, which was thankfully free of ginger.
"So you're feeling better then?" he asked. Delphine nodded.
"The antidote for the Vahzilok disease was very potent."
The chi-chi regarded the elf for a while, he was picking up a ripple of amusement from her, deep and half hidden under the mask that covered her emotions at all times. He tucked the observation away to discuss with Gaze when he saw her tonight. Empathy was not very common in humans, which would explain a few things about them. Andy's entire race were empaths. He felt an acute pang of longing that was all his own.
As if she was an empath herself, Delphine glanced up at him.
"You are going to see Gaze this evening?"
Andy nodded.
"We've been trying to find time to do a medical for me," he said, chasing a baby corn around his bowl for a moment. Delphine nodded.
"Say hello to her for me. And to Saph, if you stay the night at his again." She smiled as she spoke, just visible behind her veil. Andy grinned.
"Sure thing!"

Courage
"I'm not the biggest guy or the strongest guy around, when I get cut up it hurts like hell. I don't have invulnerable skin or telekinesis or accelerated healing. I'm just me, but I've got your back, I'm by your side, I'm way out in front. Fear can't hold me back from doing what I know to be right."

I'm just messing around with styles at the moment.

Mercy
"I don't want to fight. I'm not here because I think violence solves anything. I'm here because if I'm not, someone's going to get hurt. It might be you, it might not be. But don't worry, I'm here and I'm not going to let any harm come to anyone. If I have to stand between you and a bullet then you know where to find me."
My ice tank, Max, aka the North Face.