Sparkly Soldier

* * *

"This is Field Agent Keith Nance," Shadowstar gestured toward the trenchcoat-clad man in sunglasses sitting on the other side of the conference table, her voice dripping with polite, subtly condescending irritation at the newcomer's presence, "he's been sent by S.A.M., Superpowered Activities Monitoring, to assist us in reviewing the events over the past day."

"Actually, she's assisting us," he briskly interrupted, and quickly began to talk over the young woman's attempt to correct him , "we have an interesting situation here. On the one hand, you saved the city from a Nictus attack yesterday. On the other hand, you're the Nictus who attacked it in the first place. You can see the conundrum this puts my superiors in."

"I've already explained to Agent Nance," Shadowstar jumped into the conversation as soon as the field agent took a breath, "that a Nictus possession and a Kheldian bond are entirely different things. Hopefully we can clear that up for him with a few questions."

"Of course," their subject nodded, gazing distractedly at his right hand as he flexed his fingers and then shaking his head a little and focusing on the interview. Beams of morning sunlight streamed through the windows of the upstairs conference room, dancing across a large polished oak table set against the beige walls and carpet. He stared into the dust motes swirling through the slanted beams for a moment, imagining infinitesimal worlds drifting through the cosmic gulfs spanning the length of the table, and then looked back up at the pair.

"First off, let's get the formalities out of the way," Agent Nance said as he briskly shuffled through his files and searched his pockets for a pen, "can you tell us your name?"

"Hibernal Dusk doesn't exactly roll off the tongue," the younger man quipped, "so..."

His words died away as his gaze gradually shifted past the humorless agent to stare through the conference room wall, lost for a moment in silent thought. Then he suddenly snapped himself to attention with a quick shake of his head and continued where he left off.

"Eric is fine," he said in a smaller, faraway voice.

"We have SERAPH's assurance that your brain scans show a Kheldian bond," the federal agent studied the young man intently through his shades, "but that doesn't tell us anything about your loyalties. So, Eric, let's get to the point: where exactly do your loyalties lie?"

"Well, with this city," Eric shrugged with a soft smile, "with everyone in it, with this country and the rest of the world. I share your loyalties, Agent Nance... conditionally."

"On what condition," Agent Nance asked as he scowled harder at the DATA technician.

"So long as the world's worth it," he quietly answered.

"I see," Shadowstar jumped in diplomatically, cutting off the outraged retort rising to the special agent's lips, "how much do you remember about what happened yesterday?"

"Not much," he shook his head and frowned apologetically, "I was working in the DATA lab yesterday afternoon, and then something changed. There was a presence... and then I woke up in a hospital early this morning and you told me about the rest of what happened."

"That's actually normal," she reassured him, with a sideways glance at the S.A.M. agent to make sure she also had his attention, "that's when your human and Nictus memories started to overlap, and right now the two perspectives are canceling each other out. Tell us about the rest of your memories, though. How much do you remember about Eric's life?"

"I remember most of it," he murmured distractedly, and then flashed a wry smile, "at least, if there's anything I don't remember, then I don't remember remembering it. All of it fits together, but it feels like... like I've read about someone else's life, like it's an autobiography I've read so many times that I can imagine the details. It doesn't really feel like I was there."

"How about your Nictus memories," Shadowstar gently asked him.

"They're sort of a mess," he answered with a small laugh, shaking his head and trying to make sense of the sudden barrage of visions, voices and feelings the question evoked, "there are moments I can remember clearly, but they don't seem to fit together into any order. And there's this sense of eternity, that they stretch back further than I could ever trace them."

"Your human half is having trouble conceptualizing the Kheldian lifespan," she explained, "that's also normal, and the confusion and disconnect will pass to some extent."

"To some extent," Eric asked her with a worried tilt of his head.

"You won't feel as deeply connected to either set of memories because neither Eric Grayson nor Hibernal Dusk is entirely you anymore. You're much more than just the sum of your human and Kheldian parts. When Agent Nance asked for your name, you hesitated. You said it was Eric, but tell me - what really came to mind when he asked that?"

"Shadow Ecliptic," he quietly admitted with a downward glance at the table.

"A shadow chasing the Sun," she smiled a little, "it's appropriate."

"Yes, well," Agent Nance muttered brusquely and then he spoke louder, "more to the point, what do you want to do now that you have these Kheldian powers?"

"I'd like to register with SERAPH. I'm a better fit for them than DATA now, and I'm sure I can be of more help to people as an FBSA-registered hero than a mechanic."

"We'll sort that out tomorrow," Shadowstar said as the field agent silently scribbled down a few more notes, and then she rose from her chair, her gloved fingers lightly brushing the polished edge of the table, "you'll have to be kept under medical observation and armed guard tonight, but we can at least have you moved to a private room. I'll stop by later too."

"I understand," he nodded cordially to the Warshade and federal agent, and had begun to turn toward the pair of PPD officers waiting by the door when she called to him again.

"One last question," she asked, "what's your opinion of me?"

"I think you're a traitor to the Nictus," he answered with a backward glance over his shoulder into the wispy gray smoke of her eyes, and then his icy voice gave way to a quieter humility, "but I also think you had reasons I'm only beginning to understand."

"Fair enough," she nodded, and he turned back toward the policemen and slipped out the conference room door, their clicking footsteps gradually fading away into silence.

"He said he thinks you're a traitor," Nance asked the Warshade as those footsteps receded down the hall, "that doesn't do much to make me think he's on our side."

"I am a traitor," she calmly replied, "and I've been a symbol of treachery to the Nictus since your civilization was young. I'd be more suspicious if he'd tried to compliment me."

"I still don't like it," the chisel-jawed field agent grumbled after a moment, "what was all that nonsense about 'conditional' loyalty and whether or not our world's 'worth it'?"

"It was tactlessly phrased," Shadowstar answered as she paced slowly along the windows and gazed out at the crowded city streets below, "but is it any different than what you or I do each morning when we wake up? We all choose our loyalties based on our own values. You've also heard the audio recording from the SERAPH lab last night. We could only capture half the conversation, of course, but what we did hear sounded very encouraging."

"Maybe it was tricking him," Agent Nance adjusted his shades and rose up from his chair as well, leaning both his palms against the table to look across the room at her, "maybe it made him think they'd have a willing bond, only to take over at the last minute."

"A Kheldian bond doesn't allow any room for deception," she glanced back at the field agent with a slight shake of her head, "nor does it allow conflict. Shadow Ecliptic is everything Eric Grayson and Hibernal Dusk want him to be, each of their own free will."

She smiled softly to herself, shaking her head again in wonder before continuing.

"Despite all the odds against it," she continued, "they managed to find a common thread, something they both cared deeply about. And they wove that into their bond."

"Sounds like self-help mumbo jumbo to me," Agent Nance muttered to himself, and then he closed his notes and began to push his chair back under the table, "I know I'm going to end up regretting this, but we'll leave this matter to your discretion. If you think he'd be an asset for the FBSA then I'll see to it that S.A.M. drops all charges against the Nictus."

"I'm just an adviser with SERAPH," she replied as she turned away from the window and moved toward the door, "but my judgment on Kheldian issues is highly regarded. I'll review the data once more and interview him again before my final report this afternoon."

"One more thing," he called out as she opened the door, and he hesitated a moment before continuing, "all that stuff last night, the fighting, the crazy conversations with himself, the seizure. Is that what it's like when a Nictus turns? Is that how it was for you?"

"No, these were unusual circumstances. Mine were very different," and then she paused, "but emotionally, I suspect it was quite similar. Good day, Agent Nance."

* * *

Eric Grayson hadn't had many hangovers in his life, but he'd had enough to know that this was worse. His head lolled from one shoulder to the other like a medicine ball as he propped himself upright against the examination bed, as he felt for his dangling legs and then carefully braced his feet against the tiled floor before trusting them with his weight. He still nearly toppled over again, just barely catching himself on the edge of the bed and lifting upright.

...shadows in the starwind the universe races faster than the clock in formless black...

He groaned aloud at the dizzying blur of thoughts, the world spinning around him as he almost lost his balance again. He managed to grab onto a counter a few feet away, more by blindly throwing himself at it than by walking or even stumbling his way to it, and he leaned back against the empty shelf as he looked around at the sterile white room. It could have been an operating room, except a little smaller, surrounded on three sides by windows covered on the outside with rows of lime-green curtains and the fourth leading into a short hallway and a pair of electronically sealed doors. He guessed this must be the SERAPH lab, and began to open each of the cabinets lining the room, dragging himself from one handle to the other as the feeling gradually returned to his legs. Empty, save for a few snacks in one of the drawers.

He glanced down that side hall, wondering if he dared stumble his way down its length to test the doors. They must be locked, though - and if they weren't, would he want out?

...energy ebbs and flows like rivers cresting their banks across the midnight sphere...

Eric grabbed his head between his hands, balancing himself atop his quivering knees as he fought to block out the maddening babble, and then sighed as he looked around at the darkened examination room again. Silence filled the building and for a moment he imagined that he'd been left alone in here, locked away and forgotten. Of course not, he shook his head to himself, the windows are just soundproof. He could probably get someone's attention by banging on the door, maybe even talk to Shadowstar herself. He didn't feel inclined to test that theory, though, and stumbled his way back to the examination bed to sit down.

...time blossoming outward through endless tributaries hearmecanyouhearmecanyou...

The DATA technician blinked at the thought that crossed his mind, listening for a moment to the ringing silence and then closing his eyes. He'd almost heard a voice speaking to him, a voice like a young woman, calm and measured despite her youthful timbre.

"Can you hear me?"

It could almost have been Shadowstar's voice. Maybe it actually was her, and she was trying to reach him. Maybe this was part of some plan to free him from the Nictus, something that meant her mind joining with his so they could battle the creature side by side.

"Yes, I can hear you."

"Will you stop talking out loud," that voice suddenly hissed through his mind, "the crazier they think you are, the less likely it is that they'll let either of us out of here!"

"Oh," he sighed and then muttered dejectedly, "it's you. Well in that case, I'll just talk even louder, to make absolutely sure they don't let you go anywhere."

"Idiot," she snapped back, and then went silent.

"You sound like a girl," he finally said aloud, mostly to distract himself from actually thinking about the parasitic thing inside him, "I didn't know your kind had genders."

"I don't have a gender," the Nictus's voice glowered through his thoughts, "your damaged hypothalamus is releasing oxytocin in response to the merger. Your brain's mistaking that reaction for a pair bonding experience, and it's interpreting my voice accordingly."

Eric couldn't help but suddenly give a sharp, hollow laugh.

"So you think if you sound like a woman, I'll be more willing to bond with you?"

"I don't want you to bond with me," she snarled back, "you're the one who tethered me in this body, and it's your brain that's giving me this voice! This is all your fault!"

"My fault? MY fault?! You possessed me and you tried to use me to overload the portal generator beneath City Hall! How can you call any of that my fault?!"

"You weren't in any danger," she muttered petulantly, "I would have saved you. We were almost out the door before you took over and dragged us back downstairs."

"You think," he shook his head with bewilderment and leaned back against his arms across the examination bed, "you think I did that to save myself?"

"Then who," that voice in his head asked after a moment's pause, "the Peacebringers? You don't owe them anything. They don't even belong on your world."

"Technically, neither do you," Eric mumbled to himself, and then he spoke more firmly to the Nictus, "besides, if it'd gone critical, that generator would have killed a lot more than whatever Peacebringers happened to be in City Hall. The event horizon alone would have wiped out most of Atlas Park. You would have killed thousands of people if I hadn't stopped you."

Silence answered him, a ringing, empty stillness that lasted so long he began to wonder if the bizarre conversation had ended. And then the Nictus spoke into his thoughts again.

"It couldn't be helped," she said softly, and her bodiless voice gradually rose into a steadier, more defiant tone, "we're at war. There have to be casualties."

"We humans aren't at war with you," he leapt back to his feet as he snapped at her, "at least not yet - and maybe if you weren't trying to blow us up, it could stay that way!"

Silence filled his thoughts again, and this time it didn't give way to an answer. He stared down at his khaki pants and gray work shoes in a seething haze, his fists tightly gripping the metal railings of the bed behind him. And he sighed to himself and finally spoke again.

"So what's your name?"

"Beyond your human comprehension," came a surly reply.

"You're a bundle of joy," Eric rolled his eyes, running his fingers back through his hair and then glancing over at the cabinet full of snacks as his stomach rumbled slightly, "well, since I skipped dinner on account of being possessed by you, I think I'll grab some food."

"Oh really," her voice asked him with a sudden, malevolent lilt, "perhaps I'm not hungry. And maybe I won't start feeling hungry until you start doing what I say. I can't keep control of you, but I can keep you in stalemate until you either starve or start taking directions."

"You're going to make me go without dinner," he answered her with a dismissive snort, "what are you, my mother? Besides, what's the point? You'd just starve too."

"Then maybe I could jump away afterward."

"I can't help but notice the word maybe," he countered, "and besides, it's not like we're really alone in here. You think SERAPH's going to let your little hunger strike last? They'd probably just gas this room, strap us down and hook up an IV drip."

She didn't answer him, but he didn't have any trouble walking across the examination room, sliding the snack drawer open and picking out a granola bar. He'd already unwrapped it and taken a bite when the Nictus's sulking voice rang through his thoughts again.

"Fine," she muttered, "you can eat."

"You're too kind," he mumbled through a mouthful of food, and took another bite.

"You'd make a good Nictus."

This brought such a sudden laugh to his throat that Eric had to cover his mouth and swallow hard to keep from spraying the counter with half-chewed granola.

"Flattery will get you nowhere."

"I'm serious," she said quietly, "the way you used my powers to absorb the generator's energy so it wouldn't overload? I didn't even know that was possible. You're strong-willed, creative and you clearly have an affinity for our powers. Why not give it a try?"

"Is this the part where you say we could rule the galaxy together," he quipped with one last gulp of the granola bar, and then he shook his head, "look, I appreciate the thought, but I'm not about to 'try' being a mass murderer. Wouldn't it be easier for you to try our way?"

She didn't answer, and after waiting a moment he crumpled the foil wrapper and tossed it into a wastebasket across the room. He'd begun pacing along the hall, wondering if he should knock on the door and ask how things are going outside, when she spoke again.

"Hibernal Dusk," her voice soft, almost confessional.

"Huh?"

"The image that phrase creates in your mind," she spoke again, "and the emotions it makes you feel, that's your brain's analogue to my name. Hibernal Dusk."

He nodded wordlessly and closed his eyes, letting the words paint their own picture. Hibernal dusk, snowflakes twirling and fluttering against a star-filled sky still tinged orange by the setting sun, a trail of soft white snow winding its way through a crystal forest, dipping low between the gently sloping hills and up toward the mists and the cool gray darkness of the eastern sky, into a winter untouched by sleds and crunching boots. An endless fairy tale winter...

"It's beautiful," he said as he finally opened his eyes again.

"Hm," her voice hummed a little, as though lost in its own thoughts.

"Well, my name's Eric," he smiled sheepishly as he introduced himself, faintly wondering if he should be offering his hand to the empty air to shake, "Eric Grayson."

"I already know your name," she muttered curtly.

"Yeah, I guess you do," he grunted under his breath, the moment broken, "well, I don't know if you Nictus need sleep, but it's late, and since there's not a whole lot for me to do except keep enjoying your pleasant company, I'd rather turn in for the night."

Eric actually felt a little grateful for the sullen silence that followed as he rolled onto his side across the thin mattress of the hospital bed. He draped his jacket around his shoulders and, in spite of everything, quickly found himself sinking into an exhausted slumber.

A twisting, dizzying dive through the perpetual storms of a gas giant, lightning flashing behind the swirling clouds like miniature suns igniting and fading into the void as they dipped out of the sunlit expanses of the upper atmosphere. They raced faster through the ebony currents of those lower depths, swimming downward with jellyfish bodies woven from diaphanous strands of hydrocarbons, a body that would billow away like vapor into the relative vacuum of a terrestrial breeze. Yet down here it swam with the sleek feral grace of a shark, plunging into an atmosphere that gradually thickened into an ocean, deeper and deeper until the darkness began to give way to the shimmering, crackling heat of the planet's core, the energy that drew swarms of Hulnanim out of the drifting clouds overhead into a twilight realm the Mefnanim could never know...

And they wandered across another world, the smoothly polished surface of a dead star, a place so alien that its atoms aren't even atoms as humans know them. The sky raced overhead with countless stars swept into streaking white arcs while the northern horizon blazed with a fiery pillar of light streaming from the north pole, a pillar matched by the incandescence glowing faintly beneath the smooth round lip of the southern sky. Here and there cracks twisted along the mirrored ground, each one glowing millions of degrees, searing the cosmic gloom and casting the hulking shapes of the Ruktur into stark relief against the star-streaked sky. The cadence of their thundering footsteps shuddered through the elemental crust, distorted by a gravity so powerful that time itself curves and drags around the tiny sphere of their world...

Then they stepped foot on yet another world, a world far beyond even those imaginings.

She stood by the shores of the Seine, the river glittering as deep and blue as the sky in the morning sunlight as she stepped back into the shadows of a lush green grove and silently watched the crowds gathering in Paris. They'd come to witness the consecration of the High Altar of the Notre Dame de Paris, though she didn't know the meaning of the ceremony or even the name of the building being consecrated. She only knew that these tiny mammals in their funny robes and garments, some of them riding larger and stupider mammals with manes and swishing tails, had defied gravity with nothing but their ropes, scaffolds and stubborn will. They'd spent a generation erecting vast stone arches and spires against the sky, beings of flesh and matter fighting so hard against their own nature to reshape the world around them, their whole lives devoted to the act of transforming it into something still more beautiful.

The year was 1182 and she'd hardly been on this world a week. A few of the boys among that thronging crowd had idly glanced through the linden groves beside the river and noticed the raven-haired peasant girl standing alone and silently watching the ceremony. Had they looked closer and discerned the faint red glow of her eyes, they might have thought her a demon, and they wouldn't have been far from the truth. But as she stared that morning through the crowds at the half-finished cathedral, catching snatches of choir hymns in the spring breeze and listening to the way their voices mingled with the chirping cicadas and the rustling leaves, she fell in love with the world and the wonderful dreams of those strange creatures, and she whispered a breathless promise to herself that she'd never let anyone take her away from this place...


When Eric awoke half an hour later to the dim glow of the fluorescent lights overhead, he had to close his eyes again to remind himself that he had arms and legs, and that he should already know how to move them. He slung himself upright across the side of the bed, kicking his legs a little and scuffing the soles of his shoes against the floor tiles to reassure himself before hopping to his feet again. He stretched his arms over his head, took a shuddering breath and then finally broached the conscious, painfully awkward silence filling the room.

"I think I dreamed about your life."

"I know," the Kheldian answered quietly, and then after a long pause, "the bond's getting stronger. I'm fighting it as hard as I can, but all I can do is slow it down."

"What'll happen once it's finished?"

"I don't know. You don't want to be a Nictus and I can't make you," and then she stopped, the silence hanging between them for so long that he thought she'd given the full answer, only for her voice to continue with a soft, trembling apprehension, "so... I don't know..."

Even without a bond, he instantly understood the quiet fear in her voice.

"I don't want you to die," he said softly, "anymore than I'd want the Peacebringers to die or anyone in Atlas Park dying. There has to be some way to separate us. You've been at war with each other for thousands of years - this sort of thing must have happened before."

"Sometimes," she replied, "but then we'd just kill the host and keep fighting."

"Oh."

"Our hosts aren't usually sentient," her voice continued in a quietly reassuring tone, and then it sank into wistful reflection, "that's what makes your world special."

"We have to stop this," he suddenly exclaimed, running one hand back through his hair and then pacing through with a quick, nervous energy, "if we're fighting it every step of the way, we're going to drive each other crazy. And I don't mean in the old married couple sense, I mean, literally, whatever's left of us afterward is going to be hopelessly insane."

He took a breath and closed his eyes to brace himself for what he had to say next.

"If we go into this willingly," he said, "if we both accept the bond, then it makes sense that we'd come out of it a lot better than if we're resisting it the whole time, right?"

"But it won't work," her voice small and forlorn, "you don't want to be a Nictus."

"I'm not so sure you want to be a Nictus," he replied, and his voice quickened with a torrent of memories and knowledge not fully his own, "I saw how you felt that first week in Paris, when you crossed through the Shadow Cyst the Path of the Dark had planted beneath the city and arrived on Earth. And I'm starting to understand why you were so gung-ho about attacking City Hall. In your mind you were defending your home from invaders. You weren't really thinking about the people who'd die, just the Peacebringer envoys. I don't think you even knew how big the explosion would have been - when I told you, you felt guilty about it."

"This is my home too," she said quietly, "it's been my home for centuries."

"But you don't know anything about it," he snapped back, "you ride people around like horses instead of experiencing the world through their senses. You think you love this world and its people, but all you've done is watch it from a distance. No wonder it's so easy for you to brush us off as casualties. We're like shooting stars to you, here and gone in a flash."

She didn't give a reply, and for a moment he let the heavy silence hang between them.

"Let me make a deal with you," his voice softer now, "when we bond, I'll take you on a backstage tour of the human race. You'll actually see what makes us tick, why we do the things we do, what drives us, who we are, all those things you've wondered about for so long. If those things don't outweigh all the things you believe as a Nictus, if, despite all that, it'd still be better to use us as cattle for your own kind... then I'll accept that, and I won't resist."

"You're telling the truth," she finally murmured, and then her voice rose to fill his thoughts with a worried reproach, "you're taking a big risk, making that kind of promise."

"It's the same risk you're taking. We'll both have to trust each other."

No answer. He looked slowly around the examination room, the curtained windows and empty cabinets, then back down at his nervously trembling hands. He tried to imagine Shadowstar beyond those windows at her computer, running one frustratingly useless simulation after the other, or perhaps some team of heroes arriving and bracing themselves for a fight with whatever monster they assumed might come bursting through the windows. He tried, but instead he could only imagine this room and its ringing silence all alone, hanging in a void.

And then her voice rose into his thoughts again.

"Okay," she answered with a trembling mixture of fear and relief, "I mean... yes."

In that instant, all of it became real again, the world behind those curtains, the Warshade arguing with the FBSA about what to do next, a SERAPH team pouring over his medical data, all of it, and he and she were part of that world again, and about to step out into it. He smiled deeply, a broad silly grin of both profound relief and utter panic, and finally let himself exhale.

"So, what does this bonding thing feel like," he asked aloud with a light, half-joking nervousness, "are we talking booster shot painful or struck by lightning painful?"

"It's different for every bond," she reluctantly answered, "each one's unique."

"I guess we'll just have to find out," he shrugged a little, and took a deep breath.

Then he took another deep breath. And then another.

"Okay," he finally spoke again, "how do we find out?"

"Close your eyes," she said, her voice soft and vulnerable.

Eric nodded and closed his eyes - and the world dropped out beneath him.


"Brain activity just skyrocketed! He's going into a seizure!"

He'd never fallen in love before, at least not so deeply in love that he felt sure of it even after the relationship had given way to memories and regrets. Now he fell in love, and through love, and out the other side and still deeper, into something no poet had ever written a name for, into something he would never be able to put into words or even remember properly. He held her as she held onto him and they plummeted downward, upward... space makes no distinction between the two, and the aerial sea they plunged into together made no distinction between light and shadow. Both are energy, both are life, and it immersed them completely...

"Don't try to restrain him, just get him clear and get that jacket under his head!"

They dissolved together into a million glittering sparks of light, into fireflies dancing in the summer evening, into cherry blossoms fluttering through the moonlight, each one a separate day, a memory, a dream that found its mate in the other, tangling together, losing themselves in each other a million times over, each pair a single chord, a note in a cosmic sonata. And he whispered her name, and she whispered his, and each of them had breathed the same name...

"It's the Nictus! It's trying to kill him!"
"No, I don't think that's it. I think it's more like a rebound effect..."

And they fell away into that endless sea of light and shadow, fading into it, becoming as much one with it as with each other. The whirling stars of all those countless dreams and memories began to gather once more, spinning faster, a universe coalescing into a galaxy, and then the galaxy into the blinding radiance of a quasar. All the infinite possibilities of Creation shimmered for a moment in that light, and then it gradually began to cool into form and substance again, into thought and words and a mind born of two minds surrendered joyously to one another, mother, father and child become one as he opened his eyes for the first time...

"Brain waves are stabilizing, and... the readouts confirm it. They're bonded now."

He glanced weakly up at the SERAPH workers crouched around him, at the pallid Warshade watching over him, and then he drifted to sleep, his eyes gazing up for a moment at the ceiling lights as the night sky beyond them whispered his name like a lullaby.

Part 2

"You," the girl muttered groggily, blinking bright green eyes against the crimson flash of sunlight through the window as she lifted herself up against the hospital bed and looked slowly around at the pair of strangers standing over her, "you're not Cabal, yet you're human..."

"Is your name Virginia Dare," Ashley asked the girl with a slow, calmly reassuring tone, "my name is Ashley. We just need to know if you can understand us."

"You speak my name," Virginia answered with a quick, feral alertness, instantly crouching upright and shooting a suspicious glare at the woman, "as though you know it well."

"Well," Gregor said with a wry smile, "she kind of does. Your name's pretty famous. That's Ashley McKnight, she's with the Midnight Squad. I'm Gregor Richardson, a representative of MAGI. I'm with a government department that... erm, I mean a parliamentary, um, ministerial," and he suddenly shook his head in bewilderment and looked up across the bed.

"She's from the 16th century," he said to Ashley, rubbing the back of his head and casting a resigned glance down at the young woman still darting her eyes back and forth between the two of them, "how can anything we're talking about possibly make sense to her?"

"The Midnighters have a spell for translating languages. It's helping her make the transition to understanding modern English," Ashley quietly answered him, "she's speaking a 16th century Elizabethan dialect right now; the fact that we're not having to decipher every other word is proof that it's working. Just talk naturally and the spell will take care of the rest."

"Okay," Gregor shrugged, and then he turned his brown eyes back down to the wary girl still staring at them, this time with a friendlier smile, "well, the truth is, I've been painting your picture for almost a week now. See, I'm something of an artist, but I've also got this link with the Entities and the wires get crossed sometimes, so right now there's about a dozen portraits of a girl who looks just like you in my studio. And the mystics, hoo boy, they've been going on and on about Virginia Dare this and Roanoke that and Croatoa something or another. When it comes to omens, let's just say your arrival had some big screaming megaphones for..."

"Gregor," Ashley interrupted, "you know how I said talk naturally?"

"Yeah?"

"Maybe not that naturally."

"Oh," Gregor muttered sheepishly, "right."

"You're a seer," the girl in the bed murmured thoughtfully as she began to relax slightly and study the pair more curiously now, "you paint portraits as my grandfather once did, and as a seer you couldn't help but paint visions of my coming ...and you're male."

"Right, that's it exactly," Gregor replied with a sigh of relief, and then gave a sudden, badly-concealed double take at the non sequitur remark, and the awkwardly self-conscious realization that she'd begun staring at him more intently with the same leery, cautious fascination as a child at a zoo studying a caged tiger, "um, yeah, I guess I am..."

"I haven't seen one since I was a child," she answered simply, and Gregor and Ashley both looked up across her bed at each other to exchange puzzled glances.

"Virginia," Ashley finally spoke, "can you tell us how you got here?"

"There was talk of a rift in the sky," she said softly, "the elders asked me to find out what it meant, but when I found it, it lifted me from the ground and... and then..."

Her words died away as she stared at the window, her green eyes reflecting a cloudy twilight sky tinged blue by the sunrise... and in another instant she'd flung the bedsheets away, yanked the heart monitor loose and leapt to her feet in a giddy sprint across the room.

"It's blue! It's just like I dreamed," her voice a quick, happy ramble addressed to nobody in particular as she gazed out the window, "Mary and the rest of the elders said I couldn't possibly have remembered seeing a blue sky, and Katie and the other girls thought it whimsy for me to even speak of a sky the color of periwinkle, but it is blue, just like in my dreams!"

Her happy shrieks and giggles filled the room until she finally turned back around toward the silently watching pair of occultists, her freckled cheeks gleaming with tears.

"This is the New World," she asked breathlessly, "isn't it?"

"Yeah," Gregor answered with a growing smile, "yeah, it is. Welcome back, kid."

"But we have to tell you something," Ashley added reluctantly, "you've been gone for a very long time. The Roanoke colony vanished over four hundred years ago."

"That matters little," Virginia shrugged a little and beamed, "an absence of four hundred days would have left me as new to this world as that of four hundred years," and then her smile gradually began to sink into confusion, "but then how do you know of our village, or my name? We must be long forgotten, if so many centuries have passed in our absence."

"No," Ashley answered quickly, "you were never forgotten. You mentioned a grandfather who painted before... well, he spent his whole life hoping you'd be found someday. And ever since then, everyone's been trying to figure out what happened. Historians, archaeologists, scientists, they've been working all this time trying to find the Lost Colony."

"You kept looking," the freckled girl whispered to herself as she leaned dizzily back against the windowsill, her palms barely catching and bracing herself upright as her gleaming eyes stared down at the floor, and then finally lifted back up to Ashley and Gregor, "we'd long given up the world for lost, but the world kept looking for us anyway. And now..."

Her expression suddenly froze from blushing, tear-streaked exhilaration into a look of cold, wrenching fear, and then her emerald eyes hardened into fatalistic resolve.

"And now you're in danger as well," she said quietly as she looked back up at the pair, "the Red Caps will be coming. They won't countenance our escape."

"Red Caps," Gregor mused aloud, "I think I've heard of them. Creatures from Scottish folklore with red hats and beards, like goblins. Is that who you mean?"

"Such tales make them sound like a trifle," she muttered darkly as she stepped away from the window and back into the shadows of the hospital room, "they are a blight upon Creation, cruelty given form and voice. They are more powerful than you could ever imagine."

"Well, you'd be surprised what we can imagine these days," the Salamanca police chief sighed as he stepped out of the hallway, flipping off his cell phone and lingering uncertainly near the hospital room's open doorway, "I didn't want to interrupt, but we're getting calls from some of the farmhouses up north across the lake about strange creatures coming out of the mists and woods, and some of those creatures sound exactly like what you're talking about."

"Then it's begun," Virginia said, forcing her voice into a grim steadiness.

"I sent some men up there to check it out," the police chief continued, "but I just got off the phone and... well, I guess she's right, because they're not doing so well."

"Don't worry about that," Gregor looked over to the slight young woman with a sternly reassuring tone, "I'll call in MAGI Spec Ops and Ashley can get Montague on the line and have the Midnighters rallying around Salamanca in a matter of minutes. We'll protect you."

"You remind me," Virginia said in a small, thoughtful voice, "of my father."

"Oh," Gregor glanced awkwardly down at himself, "thanks... I guess..."

"The Red Caps killed my father," her voice suddenly low and seething, "steeped their hats with his blood, strung his entrails across the open field and wouldn't even let us bury him. You can not protect me, and you most certainly will not accompany me."

"Then what," Gregor asked after a moment's ringing silence, his own sense of authority eclipsed for a moment by the decisive fury in her words, "should we do?"

"All of you will return whence you came and wait there in safety," she said, her quiet voice contrasting the tightening clench of her fists as she slowly approached the hospital window, "I will do what my sisters and I have done since the day we learned our first spells."

She flung her right hand toward the hospital bed without turning her gaze away from the window, and a flash of golden light sent the blue gown tumbling around her feet to leave her dressed in her stitched black leather tights, her gray tunic and cloak again. Another thrust of her palm toward the window suddenly conjured the ventilated air inside the hospital room to life into a howling, whipping cyclone that battered and finally smashed the glass away, and then, as she flung her arms straight out around her and muttered an incantation under her breath, writhing streaks of azure lightning began to spark and crackle across her dark clothing.

"I will fight."

With that, she took a running leap for the window, thew herself through the broken panes before any of the three could make a move to stop her - and instantly flew above the stone courtyard of the university hospital to vanish into the clouds overhead, the stormswept November sky flashing with aerial bursts of lightning along the wake of her northward flight.

"I think," the police chief said after a long moment of stunned silence, "it's time to wake up Mayor Bower and tell him we've got problems." And without waiting for either Gregor or Ashley to respond, he stepped out into the hall again to start dialing his cell phone.

"Good idea," Ashley muttered distractedly, and then shook her head to clear her thoughts, "I'm going back to the Midnight Squad to tell Montague what we found, and to brief Percy on what to expect. Hopefully we can raise a protection ward around the university and create a refuge for the townspeople. If there's a storm coming, we'd better start battening the hatches."

"I should call MAGI and see how fast we can get a Spec Ops team out here," Gregor replied with a nod as he stared out the broken window a moment longer and then began to fumble with his cell phone, "I can think of a few mystics who might be able to help too."

"Have them contact Buck Salinger when they get here. He's sort of the Midnighter specialist on the Fair Folk. I doubt he'll want their help, but they'll both need it."

"Will do," Gregor nodded with a wave as Ashley slipped out the doorway and back down the hall, and then lifted the ringing cell phone to his ear as he paced back and forth across the glass-littered hospital room, glancing out at the misty dawn now and then as he talked.

"Hi, it's Gregor. Yeah, I'm checking back in from Salamanca. We have confirmation, it's definitely her alright. And believe me, that's not even the half of it...

"How did she get here? Well, actually, she didn't really tell us that part. She can use magic and, wherever she's been, she and the rest of the colonists were being kept there by the Red Caps. We should check the myths on them and see if they give us any clues. Be careful, though, it sounds like there's a lot more going on with them than the stories suggest...

"Did you say sixteen thaumaturgical spikes so far? This is getting bigger by the second. We'll need to call in a MAGI Special Ops team, and the Midnight Squad's bringing in someone named Buck Salinger. Whatever's going on in this town, she's just the start of it...

"...yeah, uh huh...

"...register her with MAGI? I think that's a little optimistic, Azuria, but...

"...well...

"...okay, I guess I can drive up north and see what she says. Can't hurt to ask, right? Keep your fingers crossed. With any luck, we'll see you back at the office."

Well, if the only choice is between salvaging one thing out of a disaster or salvaging absolutely nothing out of it, then the only reasonable answer is that salvaging something is better. That's not heartless or uncaring, it's just arithmetic. But I don't think it would come down to that binary a choice. The game sounds like it has a lot of spaghetti code that'd practically require keeping some of the developers to help make sense of it all and keep things running, and like GG said, the devs have such a presence in the community that they're part of the package. Besides, why spend extra money hiring a whole new staff to draw up new development plans when the staff and plans could come ready-made as part of the deal? If SOE does pick it up and it's the CoH we all know and love (and, best of all, revives Paragon Studios to run it), then I'm definitely in. If we have to start the characters all over again, then it'll just make for new adventures.

Heh, that made me smile.

Thank you, and everyone at Paragon Studios, for all the work you put into this game, and for the insight into daily life at PS that message gave us. It wasn't until this news came out, and I started reluctantly looking around the MMO landscape, that I realized just how incredibly unique this game is in so many ways. What you and the rest of the team built here over the past eight years is really a vibrant, living fictional world with countless ways for players to weave themselves into the story. The Clockwork King, the Shadow Shard, the Rikti War, the Midnighter Club, the FBSA departments and their brilliant meshing of superpowered fantasy and everyday office life, Mot and the Banished Pantheon, the Peacebringers and the Nictus, Ouroboros, the Menders and Silos, Cimerora, Portal Corporation, the Circle of Thorns and the Mu and their lost cities, heck, even the much-maligned Well of the Furies... I could go on and on, but no game is ever going to compare to the tapestry this one wove, and how it encouraged players to create any concept, with powers and costumes that could make almost anything they dreamed of work.

Thank you for creating this sprawling, crazy and immersive little world, and for making it so easy for us become a part of it. I hope everything goes well for you and the rest of the Paragon team, and that we'll get to hear about a new MMO featuring all of you soon.

I downloaded it and tried to recreate some of my CoH characters there, but it was a visual disaster. As much talk as I've heard about CO having better anchor points and graphics, it just doesn't have the costume parts or powers to make them recognizable.

This, so much. Thank you, Zwill, for even worrying about something like this in the midst of everything you're going through. I hope things are working out as well as they can under the circumstances.