Professor Marcos
120 Morgans Ridge Road
St. Charles, MA
Professor,
This city is all that I could have asked for in a place to stay. None question my appearance, no one suggests my unnatural skin tone nor my abilities might indicate demonic or mystical origins. In fact, I am registered with the office of M.A.G.I. without question or prejudice.
I have found that if I do some small things to preserve the lawful order of the city I am allowed not only to roam at will on the streets, but also I can receive food and some medical help should I need it. Housing is somewhat out of my financial range at present, but I am comfortable on the grass of Atlas Park. As you know my dietary needs are somewhat bizarre to most normal people. I am fortunate that the park has such a large population of squirrels. These tiny and timid creatures provide ample sustenance for my needs.
But it is in the execution of the small things required of me to police this city that I find Paragon a most puzzling and worrying place. You told me that there are truly wicked people in the world and that my own past could not be as horrific. I must admit I did not truly believe you. But here on the streets of Paragon city I have found predators that seek out the innocent for nothing more than sport! Imagine young men scarcely ten years my senior, banding together to mug, rob, and terrorize innocent citizens for the entertainment value! They call themselves Hellions. I now call them enemy.
I had been asked by the lovely young woman in the M.A.G.I. office to investigate and apprehend some of these Hellions. But in the minutes it took to find the warehouse where they were hidden, I found no less than TWENTY places where these wanton and vicious thugs were actively assaulting citizens on the street!
No doubt you have seen the postcards the Paragon City tourists buy, showing hundreds of brightly clad super-beings standing heroically together beneath the statue of Atlas. Those photos do not do the number of heroes justice, nor do they indicate the low level of effect such a crowd of highly powered individuals has on the resident population of criminals! Stride one block away form the statue and you will find no spandex clad enemy of crime stopping the thugs from mugging a woman. No, those brightly garbed wonders fly off to some distant location to do whatever superior beings do when they are not posing for cameras.
I could not help it. I became involved in every crime I found along the way. I used those abilities I told you shamed me without compunction. And in some measure I found I enjoyed the adoration of those I rescued. I began to randomly patrol after that first mission for M.A.G.I. And I found to my dismay that I had come to enjoy the hunt even more than the adoration of others.
Professor, my duties in the Carnival du Sinn were created on the skills that I had. My innate ability to twist the mind of another, like the minds of all of your fellow researchers, as well as the skills I possess in creating physical pain through psychological intervention made me a prize that the owners of that disgusting side-show could not pass up. There were plenty of available bodies for more mundane attractions. My unusual appearance and tender young age made me highly sought after in some of the darker more twisted delights they offered.
But these abilities also allowed me a certain amount of safety and superiority to the common street trash I hunted. Turning them against each other, wounding them from afar, tormenting them as they tried to kill one another. I found a sort of dark pleasure in this. And the voice inside my head, the one I told you had always been there, the one that taught me at a very young age, and counseled me in all my actions, that voice reveled in the chaos I wrought on these vermin.
I was careless in my pursuit. I charged a group of three on one street, only to find two more behind me. I had found one to be no challenge, two to be only slightly difficult, and three a refreshing workout. Five were more than enough to best me. I staggered beneath sledgehammer blows and tearing gunshot wounds. As I blacked out I realized here I would die, an unnoticed footnote in history. Passing without a mark on the world. It would at least be a respite from the past and a cessation of the voice that directs me.
But I am not passed on, as you may have noticed by my writing. I awoke in a local hospital. It seems that along with the registration and required shots and vaccines to enter the city, I was implanted with a chip that locates and monitors my health, and directs transportation to the hospital the instant I become unconscious. What I had originally perceived as a haven is in fact a sort of purgatory. It is fitting that I should have to do penance by repeating acts of justice to atone for my acts of infamy.
But what of the voice inside me? How many more years of atonement will I face for the bloodlust it howls in my inner ear each time I drop another of these Hellions? I will write you again soon. At present, I shall pursue my war against this gang for at least another week.
Until then I remain:
Stripling
Professor Marcos
120 Morgans Ridge Road
St. Charles, MA
Professor:
My war on the street gangs is now entering its fourth week, and in all honesty, I do not think you would recognize me. I have not physically changed; at least I do not think I have from the brief glimpses I allow myself in the mirror these days. I fear each time I look the face behind my inner voice will replace mine. Perhaps you are right. I am too well read to be a child. The voice inside me is old.
In order to continue my tenuous existence in this city I have had to work farther and farther afield. At present I am sleeping in an abandoned building in Kings Row, It bears little resemblance to its lofty title. The streets are littered with trash and abandoned cars. The gangs here, mostly Skulls, as they call themselves, have virtual rights to the streets. Cannibal necromancers calling themselves Vahzilok prowl the streets taking human flesh and animating foul creatures from the dead and dying. Small, but deadly robotic Clockworks steal metal and technological parts to some unknown and unperceivable end. There is no end to the iniquities of this place.
Did I once compare this city to purgatory? I was too kind. This is no extended place of punishment; instead it is that final condemnation we all dread. At least it must seem that way to the poor citizens of this Paragon City.
I was assigned to the Police department. That in it's self is a mark of the irony inherent in this place. The concept of lightly armed police in a city that boasts such horrors would have to be the invention of a truly deranged mind! I had not finished one assignment from the police, when another, a kidnapping, was reported to me. It was this event that changed my life to what it is now, so I feel I should explain it fully.
Have you ever smelled refuse? I do not mean that semi-sterile wire basket that resides beside your desk. I mean the horrifying, disgusting smell of tons and tons of raw sewage pouring down from a million apartments and swirling in pools before you. The stench is foul beyond imagining, and the touch of the air seems to coat you with the slime and disease of every rank pit of this decaying metropolis. This is where I was directed. All clues pointed to this location.
And the assumed perpetrators of this crime: Vahzilok!
I charged down the sewer line, knee deep in the stinking refuse only to come face to face with one of the shambling dead things and a reaper who animated it. Fool that I am I thought I could turn the corpse on its creator and defeat him with the aid of that shambling, vomiting horror. Instead I was shot with poisoned darts, covered in toxic refuse from the zombie construct and forced to retreat up the pipe to recover.
My second attempt used a subtler approach. From a distance I possessed the reaper, making him destroy the corpse while I decimated him with psychological wounds and illusionary pain. I had found my way of reaching the kidnapped girl. This seemed to work well even on the mass of corpses I found further in.
But the last chamber held a very nasty surprise: they had armed some of their zombie creations with explosives! Between the horrors blowing up on the distance and me they could project their vile sputum I was hard pressed to continue. I feared for the kidnapped girls life. I fought using all of my skills including those I felt were unsuited to such disgusting things. I was forced by the situation to use fisticuffs. The stench of the place and the foul reek of the dead, coupled with the infestation of carrion insects sickened me beyond belief.
Among them was an impossible figure; dressed in black and white, and moving in an almost yet not quite human way was an Eidolon. One of the most horrifying of these constructs. It could speak, move, and even seemed to be self-controlled. It also seemed to have powers in advance of my own. I felt sure I would die in this place, confronted with such a challenge.
Still, I persevered. I used every skill I had, including the poor substitutes of fisticuffs and acrobatic kicks to drop this titan. And when I reached her, the victim told me she had been interested in the ideas they had given her!
How many innocents on the surface had been harmed while I risked myself to save her? How many crimes might I have prevented? I wonder if I waste my time serving this city. Would they not be better off with a more powerful, more skilled protector?
I sign myself, your friend;
Stripling
The following is a RPG exercise in the form of a document. Nothing about the real author is implied or assumed.
Professor Marcos
120 Morgans Ridge Road
St. Charles, MA
Professor:
As you suggested, I am not writing to your office at the Institute. And I have remembered the address you gave me without writing it down and connecting myself to you in any way. I am sure that you will destroy this letter after you have read it. As you can see I have not included a return address, nor shall I ever give you one. For your safety I feel it is best that no one ever know that we are in any sort of communication, albeit a decidedly one sided one.
I have arrived at Paragon City. For the last week I have been living and hunting on these streets just as you feared I would, though not in exactly the way you pictured it. I have not developed the appetites you suggested would arise. I am not turning to a life of crime or preying on the innocent. I retain that much control over the voice inside me.
I realize the chaos and disorder I left behind me at the Institute. On occasion I find the conflicting reports of the events there published in the more professional magazines found in the city. I did not do this out of spite. I told you that of all the people in that building, you were the only one I trusted. Your mind I left clear and untouched. Consider that while you read my ramblings and remember why I told you I trusted you.
Of all the so-called intelligent scholars in that place, only you shared the same hunger for reading that I do. You have the most widely read and refined mind I have come across in my short life. Yes, I am still a boy in the eyes of most people, but you treated me as a peer. That respect must be honored.
You often asked me about my past. I was loath to tell you just how degraded and horrible it was, but in this form I think I can at last let you see just a little bit into my shame. You have heard of the Carnival du Sinn, I am sure. Most conversations about it and the dubious pleasures found within it are rarely spoken of aloud or in public places, and fewer still are mentioned in print. I was part of an attraction in that dismal show. One of the many horrific requests that the understandably small and needful wealthy patrons could choose to enjoy vicariously or in a more personal way. My young age and outré appearance made my services most profitable for the company. There was also the added bonus that the Carnival traveled constantly. It was there I found a home for a while among the depraved and the wanton who would not judge and did not care if your past were a small farm in Kansas or a dank sewer in New Chicago. There I went unnoticed. You have seen the costume I was given at the Carnival. It is that same outfit I wear today on the streets of Paragon City. You wondered why I had so small a bundle with me the night I left. To be honest, I feel more at home in this stained and degrading outerwear than in any of the clean and social clothing you had provided for me.
The master of ceremonies of the Carnival, one self-titled Dr. Dark, gave me the name I use here. It was suspiciously accurate in that wicked show, and has even more meaning in Paragon City. I know that you will be looking for evidence of my existence and following the more fantastically minded newspapers to find some mention of me. This name should be the one you look for.
I shall write you again soon to let you know how I fare in this unusual place. Do not expect me to sign the innocent, but obviously unsuitable name you called me in the Institute. That name is more appropriate for a purer, more wholesome individual. I do not deserve such a title.
Instead, I shall remain;
Stripling