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.
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.
Very nice monologue--lots of interesting turns and well placed in the mythos of COX.
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.