Wow. I'm speechless. I haven't read anything so intriguing in years, concerning City of X fan-written stuff. 
Kudos, I am really at a loss of words. Great work!!
@MidnightGuard - on Union you may know me as:
Mr. Vile - Electroman X - Zenodorus - Battler
Naga Knight - Stinkspitter
Love it!
Well written, Very intriguing. all round a good read
Hope to see more of your work
A small piece that came out of ruminations on how many superpowers would be much more useful to society if the heroes used them in other pursuits than fighting crime. It needs rather a bit more polish, but as my current subscription lapses tomorrow this was the last chance to post it.
Regular Joe's
Back in the eighties, Joe's was a watering hole for the broadsheet brigade: journalists, news photographers, editors, stringers and reporters. Today, two decades and three owners later, the muckcrackers have found other watering holes and the broadsheets have all gone tabloid. Newspapers are all on-line these days, anyway.
Joe's still around, though, much the same as it was back then. There's been a repaint or two and hey redid the upholstery in the booths sometimes in the nineties and got new bar stools for the new millennium. Other than that it's much the same except they don't have ashtrays on the tables any more.
It's got a new crowd too, of course. These days, Joe's the home away from home for exceptionals: people with unconventional abilities, powers beyond ken, skills that go beyond mere human. You know, super-powers.
You won't see any masks or spandex tights in Joe's, though, and the closest to a secret identity here is pulling in your gut when chatting up a girl at the bar. This isn't a capes and cowls bar and if a hero, or for that matter, a villain, were to walk in, they would meet unfriendly looks and mute disapproval. This isn't their place. Joe's is home to the other exceptionals: the ones you won't see shaky videos of on You-Tube and that you don't read about in the papers.
They're real people at Joe's, not idols or merchandising templates. Extraordinary people with powers most men don't have, yes, but they use their powers like you or I would use them: not to beat up drug dealers or break into bank vaults, but for real, honest work. Perhaps it's not as flashy as flying around the city in your underwear or as spectacular as throwing cars at giant robots, but it's a great deal more useful.
To start with the obvious, take Shawn Wilson, a powerful, red-haired man in a dirty flannel shirt and a sooth stained Yankees cap. He's forty three, got a Buick that's mostly paid down, an ex-wife that's not and two teenage daughters he sees on alternate weekends and adores above everything. He's also a pyrokinetic, and when he is not unwinding at Joe's chances are you'll find him dressed head to toes in asbestos and wielding a Halligan bar. No surprise, Shawn's a firefighter and have spent the last twenty-four years playing king Canute against oceans of flame.
Now take the ragged-looking young guy Shawn is talking to. K'Lars Guver, a time-traveller from the "Third League of Nations", whenever that is. He's a teleporter, and he works for the ambulance service. When there's an accident or a stabbing or a fire or a heart attack, K'Lars port out, performs triage, picks up a patient and ports with them back to the ER. Then he ports back out for the next patient, and the next. On the really bad days, blood soaks all the way through his clothes and start to pool in his shoes.
Let us stay in the medical field. The tall, blue-skinned woman with the desperate eyes and too shrill laugh? Her name is Sor and she's an extraterrestrial. She can emit x-rays from her fingertips and she sees radiations we don't even have names for. She works at City Hospital, performing radiotherapy on cancer patients.
Sor has got twice the resolution and ten times the precision of the best IMRT machines money can buy. That is why she gets the hardest cases, the last ditch attempts, the dying patients running empty on hope and morphine. She manages to save one out of five. The doctors she works with call her a miracle worker. She doesn't feel like one.
Don't misunderstand. The crowd as Joe is not limited to emergency and health workers. Take Timothy, for instance. He has requested that we don't give his last name. Easily recognised by the Armani suit and the white cotton gloves, Timothy is what the scholars call adamotactile. In layman's terms that means that when he touches you, you feel good. Really good. According to his business card, Timothy works as an "holistic therapist." He admits that a more accurate term would be "gigolo," but that's not something you can put on a business card.
On the west side and in the suburbs Timothy charges a sizable fee for his services, but here at Joe's he works strictly pro bono. Partly because this is Joe's and they are friends, partly because here he can: that his touch is literally irresistible doesn't unbalance a relationship so badly when his partner can fry his mind with epsilon waves or turn his bone marrow into cesium.
There is also the sense of community: you don't charge one of your own, although there's an exception for Joe himself. This isn't Callahan's Crosstime Saloon after all although time-travellers have to pay in cash here at Joe's as well.
Joe isn't actually Joe, mind. He is actually Patrick Coughlin. The name "Joe" just came with the bar. While the regulars all know that isn't his real name, few remember what his real name is and nobody uses it.
In addition to being the owner and the bartender on six nights out of seven, Joe is a minor telepath, barely squeezing in above "intuitive" on the Zener-Ganzfeld scale. That means that while he isn't able to rummage through your memories or steal your idea for a better mousetrap, he has a pretty good idea what your favorite drink is and if he needs to card you.
The latter ability is the reason why T'kiv Moisseiff prefers Joe's. The result of an interstellar romance, T'kiv has the ability to levitate, a severe allergy to camphor and a body that ages much slower than a full-blooded human's: at thirty-four he still looks like a boy of ten and he has a good chance of reaching his retirement age before he is out of puberty.
T'kiv doesn't like Joe's just because here he doesn't have to show his birth certificate, two picture ids and his special medical exemption signed and stamped by the governor's office, but also because here he finds people who understand him. Among the regulars there are two immortals, a twelve year old reincarnation of a Teutonic knight (who has to stick to root beers and Shirley Temples, but is allowed to keep his sword), the last two members of an all but extinct alien race, a K'nnn drone collective and an Aztec princess who reverts to a child of four every time Haley's Comet appears.
That diversity of exceptionals isn't what makes Joe's unique. There are other places with equally eclectic patrons. There are the nightclubs popular with the young and heroic, the exclusive gentleman's clubs of the villainous elite or the Venus Space spaceport lounge at the Cape Carnival, to name just a few.
What makes Joe's different is that it's a place for real people, not acts. They are people with real jobs and real worries who do real work. They are spectacular, yes, but they are not spectacles and they refuse to be made into such.
Heroes and villains might be more entertaining and more colourful than the crowd at Joe's, but that does not make them more important. If anything, quite the contrary. The people at Joe's might not make headlines and don't talk about changing the world -- but at least they are part of it. Can we really say the same about the Mister Whatsises and Captain Whatevers?
So, the next time you're caught in a gravitonic blast and gains the power of a hundred men, give a thought to Joe's. I'm not saying you shouldn't go fight crime or that red spandex will just make you look fat (although the chances are good.) Just remember that you don't have to. The world do need heroes, but it needs people to do the heavy lifting too.