Saint Joseph School

Siren's Call Medical Center, 1600 hours. Orange shift.


Chaos. Pure and simple, that's what the ER had become. The effect of a minivan full of C-4 on the fortified hospital was staggering. Down somewhere below gunfire and the distinctive twinging pulse of energy maces echoed through the barrage and the bedlam. The second floor trauma center was a cavern, emergency lighting guttering as more systems vied for the generator's output.

Gabe is sitting at the medweb console, triage rotation. "God dammit!" he shouted, pounding a fist into the command console as the lights dimmed again. "Teleport console 4 is down," he called out to no one in particular, "someone give me some backup power!"

Eldenesh, one of the guards strains against the cables in his hand, pushing raw voltage into the tangle of wiring at his feet, a human backup generator. The console flickers again, lights twinkling out of the darkness. "Bringing someone in on channel three," gabe says, out of habit, and punches the button.

A stray shot from the battle outside ricochetes into the ceiling in a shower of sparks, and the lights dim again. No good, not enough power.

The ward supervisor is assembling a group at the head of the room, guns leveled at the door just in case. A grizzled longbow eagle locks his faceplate down, and thumbs off his safety. "We've lost medweb." the commander is saying, "and we've got to pull them out by hand."

Gabe stands up, stepping back from the useless console. "I'm going." he says, shouldering past one of the guards and up to the platoon commander, "Gabriel Allen Templar, medic grade C, security status thirty-five, out of my way."

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Adrenaline sings in Gabe's chest as he ran out of the hospital and into the sulfer smell of gunpowder and harsh sun. Everything is hyper-real, his instinct-primed senses scanning, classifying and filing all input: the insectiod hum of the security drones behind him; the crunch of glass under his feet; the sweat slicked on his palms; a gentle sea breeze blowing, cool and salty; distant gunfire and the scampering sound of spiderbot drones.

He's running now, towards a fence, vaulting it in one leap and pulsing as he reaches the apex of his jump. His maglev field sets up with a sharp sting of ozone and the scamper of metal debris pushed away by the field.

Gabe is flying, low and fast, nap-of-the-earth without benefit of terrain-following radar, a pair of security drones his wingmen, sliding in weightlessness. A hard pulse and he drift-slides between two buildings. "two hundred meters" his nav is telling him in a soft synthetic voice.

He can see his target, lying flat on his back, jerking spasmodically in a pool of scorched blood, two spiderbots smashed around him, dripping green support fluids into the burnt blood. He stalls himself and the drones nearly overshoot him as he stops in mid air and cuts the field, dropping into the landing zone. His combat boots flatten out with the impact, he gives with his knees and rolls with the impact of the fall, coming to a knee in front of the fallen spec ops.

Energy boils to his hands as he pulls hard, throwing energy into the woman, sweeping her up in a helical pulse of pure life that lifts her to her feet. "Are you-"

And he's cut off by the drone to his left exploding, frozen a moment in shock as it erupts into a bloomind fireball. Then, a sudden sting in his back, and the drone to his right takes a burst of energy and spins around, throwing off bits of shattered plastic.

Gabe feels another cut, and tries to turn, held fast by something stuck into him. As the edges of his vision fade to black, he looks down to see five triangular points of metal protruding through his stomach from behind. Then down, into dark and silent.

((Collaborative with Vinegar Tom of BVA, edited by Vinegar Tom.))

Gabriel, walking, body loose and strange. And somone saying, Further, just a little further, keep your feet moving, just a little further, until he wanted to scream from it, but body breathless, coughing on liquid pennies.

The sound of gunfire in the air, the hazy glow of red and white uniforms barring the way. Something rough under his face and arm, the feeling of blood-clotted hair.

He remembers, or is it happening now? Someone pulling his body out from under the scrapmetal remains of his protector bots. The pain! He's pulling hard at the earth to sustain him, focusing that healing power on his body, but it's like tapping a burnt out wick. There's no ground under him.

A voice he can't identify cursing in a language he doesn't understand.

Gabe whimpers, the arm picking him up, digging into the gaping chasm where his opponent had ripped out his median cubital. Even in his haze, the last thing he thought was purely clinical: Median cubital contused, ventral lung deflated, aorta nicked, low heart rate, low blood pressure, shock. Extremely low Glasgow scale, prognosis: poor. and the world faded to a white streak in brilliant colors, then dimmed to icy black...

...and waking to a gentle darkness, soft, his body still full of remembered pain, but not dying any more.

A shape in the dark, feeling him wake up, moved slightly against the night-sky window.

"I ... where ..." Gabe turned and coughed twice, hard, half-expecting blood. A voice, softly accented, replied, "I will never know what compels some of you to take such risks."

Eyes opening, seeing now, blind like an infant. He'd been expecting a choir of angels, but instead, it's the catboy from Bloodvine Academy, looking haggard and dirty, his beautiful patrol uniform marred by blotches of burnt-out patent leather, dents in the armor plating underneath.

"Drix," he breathes. "Where am I?"

"Be calm," said Drix. "You are on Sharkhead Isle."

Gabe struggled weakly with the blankets, his reaction anything but calm.

"Stop it," said Drix, coming forward, propping the boy gently up, stuffing pillows under his back. "Just because a reclamator makes you well doesn't mean your body has not undergone trauma."

"I'm in the Rogue Isles. Tell me how."

And Drix bent his face down, close to Gabriel's, and in bursts of telepathic images, let him understand.

Gabriel, his patient dying, Drix, seeing the boy on a fluke, knowing him by his wings, by his halo ... picking the other boy up, trying to run him to Paragon's field hospital, the way blocked at every turn ... and finally, in desperation, ripping off his own badge and slapping it on Gabriel ... and running hell for leather himself, to the Flyer that would transport him to the Island.

Signing out for Gabriel, taking the groggy semiconscious boy out of the hospital before anyone could smell a rat ...

Gabriel shook his head. "You risked your life in a warzone to save me?"


"Yes." Drix shrugged it off, unscrewing the cap of a bottled water and handing it to him to drink. "We shall think of some way for you to repay me."

"How long was I out?"

"Four hours in the hospital in Siren's Call. Another two in Blackheart, in Sharkhead. And two hours here, at the Last Resort, where I will keep you until we can smuggle you back to your City of Heroes, which takes such good care of its children." Drix handed him the remote to the television, and closed the blinds carefully. He shucked his damaged clothing with unabashed ease as he moved across the room. Gabe clutched the blanket on top of him nervously.

"Please," said Drix, making a face, voice going to echoes as he entered the bathroom, his jockey shorts flying out like a mardi gras prize. "I don't screw the dead. And you're practically one step away." The pounding shower drowned out all other words, if any.

So Gabe sighed, and picked up the remote, and gazed at the flickering screen. But his mind wasn't on that. It was stirring round and round, still trying to make sense of all this, still wondering, despite the ache in his chest and the deliciousness of the water, if he were somehow dead.

There was Drix's voice, warbling out some horrid pop song at the top of his lungs; that, if anything, was perhaps an indication of tangible reality.

Gabe lay there on the bed, his head still emerging from narcotic fog and anesthetic, his body ached in places he didn't know had nerves, he'd never have thought you could have a sore pancreas.

The TV was saying something, but he wasn't paying attention, no, he was looking out the window. In the distance, smokestacks stool like sentinels, wheezing out oily, yellow smoke that tinted the sky. It was raining fat black drops of phlegm-like ash and acid that streaked down the window, splattering rather than pattering.

"Arachnos officials are warning residents to stay indoors as what promises to be the first tropical storm of the season rolls in. And in other news, a fourteen-car pileup on the Aeon City viaduct close all four lanes...."

Gabe sat up, wincing back a thrumming pain and propped himself on the pillows. He could see the eves of a few houses now, grand gothic style, standing out against the static-color sky. A few red eyes stared out of the darkness, unblinking. "Arbiter Drones" Gabe thought, shaking a little instinctively. They shone out of the grimy skyline like the cherries of brilliant cigarettes, like malevolent fireflies.

Exhausted and wounded, Gabe had nothing to shield his empathy. He felt... oh God did he feel. To his surprise it didn't feel much different than Paragon, well, different than the upscale districts like Peregrine or the Falls, but not unlike King's Row or even Skyway, where he'd grown up. It felt like a patina of quiet desperation, exhaustion, the warm carbon-dioxide smell of sleep and barely-concealed loathing for life. The poor, the desperate, the violent, all here.

There is still nobility in a slum, pinpricks of light shimmering out, but if they existed here in the City of Villains he didn't see them, his range was shortened by his wounds and the lingering effects of morphine and Halothane. Somewhere in the rooms below him a couple made love... they were not in love.

There was no love here, in the City of Suffering, lying in this bed.

2 days later : 2100 hours : The outskirts of Bloody Bay.


The tropical storm had hit the Isles like the world's biggest fire hydrant, bursting directly over the archipelago. Rain came down in curtains of solid water, whipped by gale-force winds into projectiles of water turned hard by velocity. The trees arched back like longbows, the slow snapping of their wood tendons audible even amidst the shrieking winds.

Gabe was crouched low by fence partitioning the warzone from the rest of the Isles, his head buried in his arms, as rain lashed across him like a sandblaster of warm, solid rain. He was alone, now, in the safety of the chaos of the storm. The Arbiter drones and fliers had been grounded, and the rain was bound to be taking down the infrared sensors and keeping the patrols safely indoors. It was now or never.

Gabe pulsed, kicking on his suspension field, rain bent around him, negatively charged from the stormclouds the raindrops bent their trajectory around him as he started to float. He went up and over the wall with a smooth flip, like a highjumper, and kicked it hard, sending himself into a headlong dash over the slicked streets.

Arms outstretched in front of him, he was barely two feet off the ground. The water running across the street pooling to ripple along with him, pulled into his private eye-of-the-storm by his magnetic field. He was cocooned in it, a sleek and rippling sheath of water that was arcing itself around him, trailing a streamer of negatively-charged water.

The streets were empty, Gabe could see dim building rippling past through a lens of water, distorted and surreal, like speeding down the freeway through a Piccaso painting. Bending himself through pools of sickly amber light cast from the few flickering streetlights that remained operational with slight changes of his field.

He didn't even see the anti-radiation missile launcher tracking him from a grounded flier, sitting powered-down in a field where it had been forced to land. Anti-radiation was somewhat of a misnomer. Built to take down radio towers, and good for taking pot-shots at longbow turrets, they were made to home in on electromagnetic radiation: radio signals, power transmissions, and millimetric targeting RADAR. Signals like the one that Gabe was now enveloped in.

The supersonic missile caught up to him in seconds, even in the rain, and Gabe first became aware of it as he bend around a corner, and it followed in a wide arc; it's engines flaring blue in the dark alley as it tracked around. He was close enough to hear the click-click-click of the missile's fins correcting course. He pulsed his signal, his outstretched hands firing a bolt out of his field, the positive arc disrupting his flight field and sending him tumbling out onto the pavement. The missile overshot by a few meters before it slammed ground. And the entire world was white. As fear first began to register Gabe tried to shield his face, and the entire world was now roaring air and a dull shockwave that threw him backwards. into a garbage dumpster and left him breathless.

Gabe was tossing every profanity he knew as he tried to roll over. He was actually surprised that his legs worked. The alley was now a crater, and without his field the rain scourged in on him, slashing at his face as it swept up the alley. Gabe grit his teeth and started to run, trying to ignore the dull ache in his side. He could see beach now, swallowed in massive waves. Time to move now He pulled his magnetic fields back around himself and dove headfirst at the beach, firing himself like the slug of a railgun with every ounce of power he could muster.

"Hermes, Joule" he called out to the open sky, "here, NOW!" and he felt his connection open, his link to the entities that Serafina had crafted for him flared like the nozzles of a jet engine, dumping raw power. He felt the gutteral kick of acceleration as he hit the beach, close enough to touch the waves he kicked it for home like he was earnestly trying to break the world-human airspeed record.

He could barely see the distant towers of the Longbow base as hazy forms on the horizon when his comm crackled to life. "Un... this... Longbow air control.... Identify." the weather and his magnetics were causing terrible static, but even so his face lit up.

"Longbow, This is Gabriel James Templar, ID number nine-nine-zero-six-zero-zero-four-two-zero-six-zero, requesting permission to enter."

The silence was interminable, as he could now see the distant longbow turrets track him, rows upon rows of incendiary missiles and machineguns moving in unison.

"*crack* that... Templar... clear for entry on present vector... no escort.... at will"

And for the first time in nearly a week, gabe smiled widely, as he pulled up off the ocean surface, entering friendly airspace.

Epilogue: Nothing you could ever say and nothing you could ever do.
((with thanks to Vinegar Tom for editing))


"I promise you my judge and jurors," the CD player sang out, "my intentions couldn't have been purer."

Gabe had had that same damnable CD on repeat for three hours now, his quad-mates were probably considering whether or not it would be justifiable homicide at this point.

It was a shocking thing, after all, for an empath to realize he's been lied to.

He'd never received an explanation from Drix, the night he had saved his life out on the forsaken warzone streets. Empathy told him there was something there, as he slowly came back to life on a stained matress in a motel in Sharkhead Isle. Drix had felt relief, pity, shame, anxiety, a delicate cocktail that had told Gabe he might have even cared.


Now look at them, after the dance was over, after any friendship played out... Drix in his Arachnos best, gloating over his longbow victories. Drix... Arachnos. It felt like betrayal, he was the enemy now, and Gabe fought to care about sides anymore.

Gabe rolled over, hitting the CD changer, and grabbed another kleenex, dabbing it at his eyes.

Good god why did this hurt? And the CD started up, skipping until gabe gave it a palm across the top, hard.

"l...l...let m...me t.t.t.t. your hand" it shuttered out as the head spun back up, "I'm... l.. k.k.k milk."

Gabe flicked it off with disgust, everything disgusted him, the ice cream lying on the floor melting into its tub, the CD player, Drix, himself.

To think a villain could ever even care, he should have taken his own advice, he'd said "He doesn't know how to care about anyone but himself" he said, "he'll never be anything" Gabe said. And he didn't even pay attention to the words he was saying.

Was it irony? or arrogance? did it matter?

He sat up, looking out the window, and catching himself actually wondering what the sky was like over the Isles.

And he wondered if he was ever even a friend? Ever even an ally? Even anything but a tool.

"Of course you were," he said, out loud to the sky over the port, which was a static grey, "You were a tool. You weren't dumped. You were simply replaced."