graeshadow

I have a love/hate relationship with my favorite classes depending on whether I'm teaming or not. Teaming, I love to tank. Love it. I go to a zen-like happy place tanking. I love keeping people alive by taking all the punches. Tanking makes me happy. Also blasters and corruptors in the group setting (especially corruptors). I love picking off targets, and I love the combination of damage and support a good corruptor combination of powersets brings.

But if I try to solo my tankers/blasters/corruptors I want to cry.

Vice versa, I love brutes and MMs for solo. Love 'em. Brutes just make me happy. MMs I just adore, but brutes (if I'm not the "tanking" brute) drive me nuts because I get overwhelmed trying to pick up targets in large group setting, and with my MMs I I live in fear one of the children will run off and aggro a whole group of baddies... though if I'm a healing MM I have an easier time. I have a lot of scrappers, but I always liked brutes better than scrappers.

There's a class on each side I've never got past 20 though--defenders and stalkers. Defenders I can't explain, and I feel like I should some day go back and try another one just to see where I went wrong. Stalkers I've tried, so hard, to enjoy, but they always just give me anxiety.

Khelds annoy the heck out of me. I get confused by how to slot them. Drives me crazy.

Weirdly, my two absolute favorite RP characters are both controllers, both of whom I leveled to 32 solo with only occasional grouping. Torture, absolute effing torture, but they're the two characters I'm most proud of even if neither has made it to 50 yet. I play them when I want a challenge.

But if I want to relax, it's brute or MM redside, scrapper blueside. Or I bring out my tankers and REALLY enjoy myself.

I'm usually just a lurker in the art forums checking out the great work folks post, but as someone who designs tattoos for money on a regular basis (I don't tattoo, I draw up the initial image that the artist will eventually tweak) I thought I'd just throw in that perspective...

I'd be cautious leaving things out on the web for public consumption if you're against having them tattooed on someone, only because I know hundreds of people who scour the internet for "something cool" to ink on their bodies that they'd a) never consider asking permission for and b) might not even know what the heck the image really means. I used to keep my before and after shots (on paper/on skin) up on the web as "free advertising" until someone told me she spotted one of my designs on someone at the mall. Turned out to be the original guy I created the design for (misunderstanding), but paranoia had me lock up the site after that.

This being said, I consider having my artwork on someone's body one of the highest honors they can give (if the tattoo artist is talented enough to do it well)... IF I know about it. I'd rather someone see my art and say, "hey, draw me something" than see a dude at the beach with one of my designs on him, but everything I do is individualized. (For the record, I'm an in-between inked person myself--enough that my parents are aghast, not enough to impress a Suicide Girl.)

Most big league artists, particularly comics artists, know people are inking their stuff on their skin on a regular basis (Terry Moore of "Strangers in Paradise" collected photos of SoP tats into some sort of collection a few years back, I believe). I bet all the Big Name Guys have had people walk up to them at conventions and hike up their shirts (or drop trou) to show off body art based on their work.

Anyway, there my two cents (or nickel and a half), from someone who voluntarily has his artwork etched into other peoples' bodies...

"Do you know the percentage of men who have committed an act of violence on another living creature?" the old woman asks. She has her iron-gray hair in a bun, the same color as her colorless clothing, an apparition in neutral tones. She smokes a clove cigarette, the paper black as half-forgotten sins.

"I thought you said you were a witch," I said. I am hunched in a corner, like the animal I am; my legs, with their inhuman angles, with the massive paws I now call feet, no longer let me sit comfortably like a civilized man, and the slavering jaws I call a mouth still cause me shame.

Most werewolves have the good fortune of turning human sometimes. It has been three years since the night the Woman in Red took my hand in the bar the night I had my finest performance, my Iago on a London stage; since she took my hand and took me to her apartment high above London town. It's a story I've heard repeated fifty times since I began my investigation (investigation, as if I am looking for truth--the truth is I am simply looking for someone to say, "I can turn you back"). There are hundreds of us running across the globe, half-man and half-beast. And if I've found one thing for certain, it is this--there is no single curse for werewolves. It feels to me like cancer, or like some powerful virus, in that there are variations, in its virulence, in what it does to the human body. Some men change for three nights a lunar cycle. Some change at will. Some change in times of anger, or stress.

And some, like me, simply cease to be human.

"I am a witch," she said, sipping her black tea.

"You sound like a psychologist," I said, instead.

"You might say all witches and shaman are psychologists too," she said.

I consider eating her, but only for a moment. She was far too bony.

I killed and ate a Longbow agent. The phrase haunts me. It follows me. When I first changed, when I was first cursed, or infected, or whatever it is that has happened to me, I was not myself. I was not in control. I came to America stowed away on a massive cargo ship, on which I fed on rats and migrant workers, who would not be missed when we docked. I went first to the Rogue Isles, where I had only flashes of sanity and clarity. I killed many men. I tested my newfound strength wrestling on cavern floors with snakes shaped like men. And I was hunted, by the Red and the White. One I tortured, by accident. I say by accident because our battle happened during a moment of flashing lucidity for me--when the Beast wanted him dead and the Man wanted him saved, and the two went to war together inside of me, and that battle cost the Longbow agent a clean death.

In the end, I tore his throat out, while apologizing to him. I did this because I wanted him dead before the Beast regained control. I wanted to give him a cleaner death than he would have received otherwise.

"Do you know how many men," the witch said again, "commit acts of violence against other people?"

"I would say most," I said.

The old woman smiled.

"All men are monsters, in their hearts," she said. "All men are beasts of fang and claw. All men are terrible creatures, until they learn compassion."

It was Bottom who brought me back, for good. While I was under--while the Beast was in control--I would become lost in old roles. In whatever small, safe place I was locked away within my own brain, Shakespeare's worlds were alive and well, and I would play out the characters I had once played on stage. Mercutio and Macduff, Caliban and Coriolanus and Edmund and Laertes. But it was Bottom who brought me back to the surface, the only true Comedic role I ever played well. Ironic, of course, that the beast-headed man, the gentle actor in the sheets of a fairy queen, would provide me the strength to take control of the Beast, to put him under my thumb.

I climbed aboard another freighter, and went to Paragon City, whole in mind, if not in body.

"You have committed many acts of violence in your time," the old woman said. "And they began long before you began wearing the mask you now possess."

"This is no mask," I said.

"All faces are masks," she said. "All faces hide things."

I growled. She was not intimidated.

"You ask me to change you back. You ask me to make you the man you once were," she said.

"I do."

"And I tell you, my son, that you do not want to be the man you were."

I stared at her, waiting.

"You were a monster long before your mysterious woman made you one in the flesh. You may not have been a murderer, but you were a monster, in your own way."

"I was."

"And now?"

"What do you mean."

"Are you a monster now?"

"Look at me," I said.

"Look at yourself," she said. "What do you do with your days, my son?"

"I hunt. I talk to side-speaking lunatics like yourself hoping one of you charlatans can turn. Me. Back."

She shook her head.

"What do you do with your days, Titus."

"I... I hunt bad men."

"Why?"

"I... Because I can."

"Because you should," she offered instead.

I shook my head.

"No, because I can."

The old woman stood up, then, went to her window; outside the trees were swaying. A storm was coming. I could smell it. These are the little things they do not warn you about, when you become an animal; that you can smell clouds on the horizon, and they will wake primal fears in you that you never knew existed.

"Titus, you want your pretty face back. This is an understandable desire," she said. "I do not know if this is possible. I feel that it will happen, in due time. But understand, my son. You have already found your way back."

I snorted, an animal sound, deep in my throat. Anger rose in my gullet; but I choked it down. The Beast is collared by my hand now. He is only allowed to snap when I want him to. This happens less and less, now.

"If I wanted a psychology lesson, I would have gone to the university."

"You don't need a psychology lesson," she said. "You just need to listen."

With that I bounded off, on all fours, my claws scrabbling and grasping at her hardwood floors. I ran, towards the rain, and towards the frightened prey who would be fleeing it.

((Thanks, guys. I actually decided to go willpower with a character that was intended from the start to be a former ballerina based in part on a conversation I was having with this ex-ballerina I've been seeing--I'm an ex-boxer and she's an ex-dancer and we have a lot of discussions about grace versus brawn and strength versus plain old toughness. I realized that some of the toughest people I know, unexpectedly, are dancers, who have worked through some of the nastiest injuries I've ever seen. My people in the boxing ring, we just get hit and our faces and hands get mangled. Dancers, their bodies splinter and sunder when they get hurt, and yet they keep getting back up and doing it again.

Funny part of the conversation that started this was that she told me some of the more graceful people she knows are boxers. "You all want to be dancers, don't you," she says. Granted I was always a graceless, in-close body-shot fighter myself, not an ounce of grace in me, and that's why I can't fight anymore. Her, she just broke too many of her leg bones and had to take herself off the stage forever.

Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee, obviously. ))

Age 7. She is known as Kathy Miller. She glides across the studio floor in perfect form, a tiny dancer on pencil-thin legs, her frail frame pale and hard.

She spins and spins. Her teacher looks on, impassive, arms folded across her chest. Suddenly, Katie turns an ankle. She falls to the floor, uttering a small cry.

"Ballet is perfection," the instructor says, her accent thick and from some far away place. "You must be better."

"I am better than this," the little girl, the dancer, says. She rises to her feet, and begins to dance again.

***

Age 13. She is now known as Katie Miller. Her parents look on from the audience as she performs, partnered with a young boy of surprising grace and strength. During the performance there are flaws--she can sense them, as all dancers can, as they happen, tiny imperfections her parents would not see, but her teachers would--but she powers through, on sheer will, the old ankle injury aching as it always does. It should seem odd to a 13 year old to have old injuries, that there should be nothing old about her, but in her world, children grow old before their time.

The performance ends. She and her partner thank the audience, in the graceful way ballet dancers do. She is certain she can see her parents. It makes her heart swell.

Back stage, the teacher is upset.

"You will never be accepted to one of the great dance companies unless you are perfect, Miss Miller," she says. "You must do better."

"I am better than this," she says, under her breath.

***

Age 15. She calls herself Katherine Miller. She believes this makes her sound older. Her parents are driving her back from an audition for a school in Manhattan. They have high hopes. The instructor she auditioned with took her aside at the end of the audition.

"You have a lot of potential," she said.

"I am better than this," Katherine said, in return.

The car pauses at a red light in Atlas Park. One moment, the street is dark and empty in front of them; in another, bone-chillingly, it is filled with men in masks like skulls. Three, five, it is difficult to tell in the shadows. They have guns.

"Step out of the car," the leader says. He has a hard blond flat top. His voice is muffled by his mask.

Katherine's father looks to his wife, then looks to his daughter.

"Duck," he says.

Katherine's father slams on the gas, plowing through them. Bodies of men hammer out of control against the cheap metal walls of the car. Arterial blood sprays across the wind shield. There is gunfire; Katherine covers her head, crawls down to the floor to hide. She looks up once, just once, the very moment a bullet pierces her father's head. She will never forget the sight of his brain landing wetly on the window.

The car stops violently. A moment later, so too do Katherine, and her mother.

***

Age 16. Days from her seventeenth birthday. She calls herself Kate now. She doesn't have the time for extra syllables. She spends her days in rehab, regaining control of her body. The crash broke her like a vase thrown against a wall; but she lived, and her mother did not, and Kate often wonders which was the better fate.

She tires. The physical therapist tells her she can rest.

"You did good today," she says.

"I am better than this," Kate says, and picks herself up to walk again.

***

Age 20. She no longer cares what anyone calls her. Her scars have healed well, both because of what doctors call an unconquerable desire to get better, and because her parents left her with their fortune, their sole heir, and there was money enough for plastic surgery to hide the ugliness the accident left on her skin.

She is in a studio. It is for a different kind of dance these days. She still attempts ballet, in rare moments of peace, but her efforts are far more focused on mixed martial arts. She has thrown herself into combat with an animal ferocity. Her teachers are proud of her, though they tell her she must temper her anger.

"Nobody has ever won a fight in a rage," one tells her, an aging instructor who teaches her muay thai. "You've come a long way."

"I'm better than this," she tells him, and launches herself, again, at the red heavy bag.

***

Today. The girl born Katherine Miller now calls herself Shadowdanser. She rests rarely; at night, she takes to the streets, behind a mask. She claims to be fighting crime, but in truth, she is chasing ghosts.

Tonight she faces down a pack of Skulls, in a warehouse in Atlas Park. The battered bodies of her adversaries lay splayed on the floor behind her, bones broken, eyes closed. Before her stands a man who calls himself a Bone Daddy. He smiles.

"So, you've beat up a bunch of little boys with guns," he says. His hands drip with black, viscous material. Otherworldly. "But you'll need to do better to beat me."

"I am better than this," she says. She feels the small, delicate bones in his neck crack as she lands a kick to the side of his head. The black material fades away into nothing. She stares at his body, watches the small trickle of blood drip from his mouth to the filthy warehouse floor.

She pauses, just a moment, confused that there is no satisfaction in this. She expected something more. She expected to feel finished. Instead, she feels empty.

"I am better than this," Shadowdanser says. And she turns to leave, and become part of the night again.

The ocean air is heavy with the thick stench of machinery and burning fossil fuels as I sit, invisible and drinking coffee outside the Mermaid Tavern. If you turn your head the right way, from that spot, you can get a whiff of whatever it is that comes rumbling out of the Bog and into town.

Town. City. Neighborhood. It's a damned warzone is what it is. Battalions of Council soldiers stomping by in their big old spitshined goose-steppers. The others I can understand--Port Noble is the sort of place beasts like the Family will take hold of, with their low-tech, old school ways, and the Warriors, well, every run down and rain-stained neighborhood has its local deviant society. But the Council have turned this place into a warzone, and I had stopped to wonder why, until I realized, sometimes, it's just easier to cruise your contraband in by sea, through the hands of crooked and corrupt officials, than it is to teleport or fly it in where all the capes can see you coming.

Port Noble makes King's Row look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

I couldn't walk ten feet in this place if I didn't know how to bend light around me and make myself unseen. Even still I need to watch my step, standing carefully aside as Family and Council press gangs stomp by, as stormtroopers swarm the streets. The buildings here don't feel as empty as they should; I wonder how many old timers have become shut-ins, who pray they won't die in their sleep, caught in the stray bullets of this ongoing battle.

In private, dark corners of this place, behind massive, unmarked shipping crates, young men are pressed into service for a fight they want nothing to do with. This is no place to raise a child. This is no place to be a human being. It would be an easy thing to give up on the whole island, to let the monsters have it, evacuate and run. Then again they could say the same thing about the Hollows, or about Perez Park, or any of a dozen places where the monsters are breeding their shadows uncontrolled.

I toss my coffee cup into a dumpster that looks like it hasn't been emptied since the Truman administration and turn up the collar of my jacket. I came back to Paragon City to stop bad people from playing with bad magic. That was my reason for returning. That was the only reason I came home.

But places like this, it's not the magic that is the problem. Men are capable of being monsters without the aid of cantrips and spellcraft. Sometimes, bad men are simply bad men. And this place reminds me too much of home to walk away and leave it and all its many problems to someone else.

A tiny spell unlocks the door to the nearest warehouse, where the old woman has told me bad men lay in wait. Vermin and parasites in a once-noble place. I turn, looking back at the massive transport ships in the distance, and wonder what this place looked like in my father's day, in my grandfather's.

Those days are long gone, I think, as I enter the warehouse, to run out the vermin, one rat hole at a time.

I was born to be a prince on a faraway world, you know.

My people walk in small bands beneath a star filled sky, the hot sands beneath our feet as we hunt. The desert is our kingdom, the rippling sands of my homeworld, where even the great predators give us wide berth.

That is our way, we desert kings, we apex predators. And that is why we are taken, for our prowess, for our flame-magic, for our ferociousness, for our courage. We are taken to fight in arenas in the sky, for the pleasure, at the pleasure, of others. Of weak, fearful men with money-hands, who have never raised a blade and felt the hot spray of blood on their faces. Cowards all, who bet on the lives and deaths of others. The come to our world, my world, in their sleek silver ships, and they take us by force, they shave our manes, they tattoo our backs and send us to kill or die for sport.

I was taken. But in the pits, I became a prince as well. They threw me the most beautiful women their worlds have to offer in the evenings, for I opened the throats of men and beasts alike under their false, electronic lights in the day. The pits became my desert, my opponents my prey. I was a god among these aliens, these bloodthirsty fools, screaming for more. I gave it to them. With my blades I killed Magmarian tribesmen who bled lava from their veins, and hackspiders with their fangs like scythes, dripping yellow-green poison; I murdered bountyhunters with swords of hot light and cyborgs with skin of unbreakable metal. It was I who defeated Caralador the Phaseshifter, taking his head cleanly from his shoulders. I called the flames of my desert to shield me and heal me. And after every fight, I added more ink to my skin, to hide the scars.

I ruled my arena, dressed in the armor of fallen foes. Until, of course, I grew too proud. It is a flaw of my people; it is a flaw of my own. I grew too proud and shamed the wrong man, the wrong soft-handed degenerate, and rather than grant me the honor of death, in the ring or out, that vile creature had me banished here, to this awful place, this terrible, terrible world. Left here to rot with nothing but my armor and my blades and my life.

But I see so many foes here. I see so many challenges. I will have my honor again...

((Sebastios Pride, Virtue server))

You never forget the first time you see a real monster.

When you start out in this business--either business, heroics or private investigations--you start out on the pavement. You stop liquor store robberies. You prevent assaults. It's like a game. Look at me, watch me overpower these terrible people, ta-da, abracadabra. But one thing leads to another and next you're up against folks who really want to hurt people. Who know how to hurt people. You run into bad men who aren't afraid of you and your shiny costume and flashy powers. Maybe they have some powers of their own. Or maybe, instead, they just don't care, and those are the truly frightening ones, the ones who aren't afraid of anything at all, and have no reason or basis for that courage.

I know a few heroes who have that look in their eyes too, and it isn't pretty, regardless of what side of the coin you spin on.

But these aren't the monsters I'm thinking of. I mean monsters, in the literal sense. The day you realize that there is something under your bed and it will try to eat you, when you actually bump into the thing that goes bump in the night.

Back in the old days when I was running around Paragon City I never saw those monsters. I saw some bad men, yes, but they were men like me. Some of them where the generic beasts displaying the worst the human mind has to offer. Some of them wielded black magic, and these held a special place in my heart, not because they were more awful than anyone else, but because I considered myself a magician as well, and I wanted to prove I was better than they were. I loved breaking up Circle of Thorns rituals on rooftops. It was a hobby. It was a sport.

Then I went on walkabout and met a few real monsters. I didn't challenge them. I didn't fight them. I would not be standing here right now if I had. But I saw them, shuffling off, as Yeats might say, to be born. Monsters are real.

My first case back in Paragon City took me into the sewers. Isn't that always the way? I left Paragon because I was sick of sewers, sick to death of them, sewers and those blue-black caves that run like honeycomb beneath our streets. I should have known I'd be back in the sewers an hour after returning to town.

Only this time, it wasn't men who greeted me as I stepped into the darkness. Some winged thing, all teeth and limbs with too many bones, drifting on non-existent winds as it floated above the human waste that ran green and black at our feet.

This monster, though, this monster I could fight. And we did, and I sent him shuffling back to where he came from. Him and others like him, one after another.

But of course, where there are monsters there are always men. The Circle of Thorns still hold a special place in my heart. I no longer take pleasure in beating them at their own game. In part because their game is not mine anymore--they truck in much darker materials than I ever will again--but because they are willfully working towards some dark purpose I don't fully comprehend, but know must be put down at every opportunity.

Which is why, at the end of the tunnel, when I see a man--a man like you or I, flesh and blood and will and intent--dressed in green and gold, swelling like a fattened pig with power he should not possess, I know there will be no arrest tonight. We fight. It is an easier battle than I expected it would be. He falls easily, too confident in his own power, and too reliant on the monsters I have put down one at a time on my way to find him.

There is a moment when he could be subdued, or he could be ended, and the choice is easier than it sounds. The act is not as simple as the choice though, and I can still hear the wet thump his skull makes when he crashes to the concrete ten feet below us.

I check his pockets, like a graverobber. Several items I destroy on the spot, trinkets that would be dangerous in the wrong hands; one I pocket for myself, which will be useful against more of his kind in the future; and one I take to bring to someone more powerful than I to hide or destroy. It's not something I want in my hands. I might be tempted to use it myself some day.

It is dawn when I step out of the sewers and into an alley in King's Row. I take flight not because it is something a superhero would do, but because I stink of refuse and sewer water and I don't want to offend anyone I might walk past on my way home. And as I take flight, I wonder, not for the first time, how many more monsters wait below us, every moment of every day.

I step off the train in King's Row to that old familiar smell. Grease and poverty, wet brick and decaying concrete, the smell of pending violence. King's Row left its prime years ago, began to rot from the inside like a sick old man, beyond all medical treatment.

I was born here, you know.

As I head out of the station I adjust my shades and bow my head. The eyes are never going to be the same, daylight will always cause me pain, but at least I have no one to blame but myself. This is what happens when fools play with magic. I'm lucky all I ended up with was blue hair and a sensitivity to light. I should've lost my entire head.

It feels strange to be in the old neighborhood without my old costume. But the rune-covered skater pants are gone, replaced with plain blue jeans, and the spiked gloves with fingerless leather, for warmth; I got a haircut and replaced that jazz musician's soul patch with a neatly trimmed goatee. Traded in some Chuck Taylors for sturdy work boots. The blood colored spandex I wore, the unitard with symbols to ward off demons and dark magic, those were gone too. Just a tee shirt with a logo from a magic shop in New Orleans now.

I still have the black trenchcoat, though. You need something to remind you of your old stupidity. But I'd had the pink silk liner torn out. I'm just a regular guy now. The melodramatic goth kid playing superhero, I left him on the side of the road somewhere, smoking cloves and talking tough. I left Paragon City to find myself, and instead I saw how real magic works, and real magic is no place for silly little goth kids in skater clothes.

I know this because of the shadow that followed me home. The shadow, who flies behind me on red wings, he has a voice, and he tells me, quite often, that if I hadn't grown up, and fast, the magic would've killed me. He says he would have done the job myself.

I head down to the police station and walk inside. I know the desk sergeant from my old beat and half-expected him to know me, but he gave me the long, neutral glance cops give to non-threatening strangers.

"I help you?"

"You don't recognize me?"

"Nope. Should I?"

"Used to go by the name Doc Silence."

The cop chuckles.

"The Doc Silence I knew was some long-haired beat poet vampire wannabe."

"I know."

"Have you got a tan, Doc?"

"I do. And a haircut."

"Lookit you. You could almost pass in normal society. Eyes still bothering you?"

"Always," I say.

"Well," he says. "You been out of town a while. Here to update your paperwork? Planning on doing any cape type stuff?"

"I wasn't planning on it," I say. "But you know how things are. Once a cape, always a cape. Figure you guys should know I'm in town just in case something comes up."

"Good man," He says. "You look good, Doc. Don't look like a ghost anymore."

"Thanks," I say. "I should update my private eye's license as well, just in case."

"Man's gotta make a living, I suppose."

"Yeah."

So I fill out my paperwork and ask the sergeant if he's got a copy of the classifieds so I can start looking for an apartment. He asks if I'd rather look in Steel Canyon or Atlas Park. I say I'm a King's Row boy and always will be. Home is home.

On my way out the door, a detective I worked with on a few cases walks up to me, grabs my arm.

"Hey Doc," he says. "Welcome home."

I tell him a little bit about New Orleans. I leave out the trip to London. Nobody really needs to know what happened there. Stupid scam artist of a superhero, that's what I was. That's what I am. Illusions have no place side by side with real magic.

"So Doc, there's something I was wondering if you'd look into," he says. "You know we're always short staffed."

I nod. He tells me about a series of disappearances. Local kids. King's Row kids. They think the Circle might be involved. Who knows. Plenty of people playing with blood magic these days. Plenty of people stealing children from their beds. It's a nasty world out there, and getting worse every day.

I fix my glasses, pull up the collar on my coat, and say I'll look into it. Of course I will.

Once and always. Even stupid scam artist superheroes know when it's the right thing to do.

Doc Silence, the third of October

I could smell the bad magic long before I entered the old warehouse.

Magic gone bad has a psychic stench all its own. I got a big whiff of it standing next to the patrolman who called me in, the kid whose partner went inside and never came back out. Sighing, I took a scalpel from my belt of parlor tricks and rolled up one sleeve.

"I need to find a bodyguard," I said. "I had a bodyguard, I wouldn't need to do this."

I started carving protective sigils into my arm with the scalpel, shallow wounds. They wouldn't do much against really nasty juju; but if some minor demon decided to lay a warm wet paw on me inside he'd find I'm not that appetizing.

The sight of my own skin gifted me with a sinking feeling in my belly. I hated the fading white scars on my skin, cheap tricks and rush jobs from old magic that dotted my flesh like morse code. Not for the first time, I wish I'd become a dentist instead.

"Wait here," I told the patrolman. He didn't argue.

Greasy soot lined the walls. Fingertips had traced out crude, ugly symbols in the black grime. Crumbled plaster ground to powder beneath my boots.

I found the first corpse pinned to a wall. Whoever had killed him had done a good job; talented use of nails and chains helped provide a fine exhibit on the inner workings of the human chest cavity. There were others, flayed and broken, drifting like grotesque art all around.

The butcher had not used any of his skill on his own murder. His body, clumsily shredded, lay sprawled on the floor near a flight of stairs.

And then I saw the patrolman's partner.

The state of magic-induced madness is terrifying. He had torn clumps of his hair from his head, and strands of it remained pasted to his fingers with blood. He had shredded his own eyelids with his fingernails, and lost eyelashes were scattered across the ragged remains of his face like wasted wishes.

He lumbered towards me and I lashed out at him with a quick telekinetic push. He climbed quickly to his feet, his ruined hands scrabbling across the concrete floor.

I won't lie to you. If there had been more of his mind left for me to work with I would have tricked him into believing he was bleeding to death and let phantom wounds stop his heart. I would have called it a mercy killing. He earned it. But illusions don't work on men whose minds have been obliterated. My next kinetic blast shoved him through a nearby plaster wall. He stopped moving, but I knew he wasn't dead. Poor man.

I righted my glasses on my face and walked down the stairs until I found what he had seen. I could feel the tendrils of madness reaching out from it, a small statuette with too many corners. Too many faces. It made my hair stand on end, just standing so close.

I should have destroyed it on the spot. I would have, if I'd had a sledgehammer or a baseball bat handy. Instead I throw a soot-stained tablecloth over it, and scooped up the statuette, bringing it with me into the daylight. I could hear it crying in the darkness, though. Crying like a child.

There were more police waiting for me when I stepped outside, including a lieutenant I'd dealt with in the past. Our eyes met, and I could feel him trying to bore through my blood-colored glasses to see my real eyes. I can't really show my real eyes anymore. They frighten people, and they are sensitive to light.

"You've got a man down inside," I said. "Be very careful who you send. It's safe now, but you should send the ones who can deal with the worst of it."

"Thanks, Doc," the lieutenant said, nodding. I grabbed his arm gently.

"If there's an opportunity to let him go in peace, do it," I said. "There's nothing left for him in this world anymore."

I threw the makeshift knapsack over my shoulder. And as I walked away, I could hear the statuette screaming, screaming like a calf being dragged to the slaughter.