Lives Lost In Time: Chapter 1

Please note: As with earlier stories, while the characters in this story are original, they exist within and were created for the City of Heroes/City of Villains MMORPG copyright NCSoft and Cryptic Studios. It’s their world, they just let me play there. Enjoy!

Chapter the 1st: The Time Before

“DAD!” Elektra Duras screamed as she leapt up from her sweat-soaked sheets.

She was halfway to the door before her conscious mind reasserted itself and reality spun away the fibers of her nightmare. She fell to her knees, the terrible images still so real inside her head: the awful smell of the laboratory as the black flames roared hungrily through shattered glass beakers and test tubes. The heat was terrible; she could feel it beating against her, but somehow inside her skin rather than outside. Even now she could still feel the twisting agony echoing within her, just as she had first felt it racing through her father’s office door only to be engulfed in darkness.

Shaking her head to clear it, Elektra stumbled on trembling legs into the bathroom. Luckily, it wasn’t far to go in her studio apartment high above the streets of Paragon City. She snapped on the light and started cold water running in the sink. Cupping both hands in the clean, cold flow she splashed her face with water and ran long fingers through her short-cropped hair.

“Dammit. Just dammit all. I’ll never get back to sleep now. I may as well do something productive.” Her stride lithe and purposeful, Elektra prowled back out to her bedroom and grabbed her working clothes. Dragging the boots and her orange and black coverall over to the edge of her bed, she threw the rumpled sheets aside and started dressing. The white shock of her thick hair took only a second to shake dry as she finished zipping up her uniform. Angrily she wiped tears from her eyes as she sat down at her dressing table and began pulling out her makeup. Her mother had always called it her “war paint”. How appropriate that was now. Her nightmares of the disaster at her father’s police laboratory always brought other family memories to the fore. Her mother, proud as only a proud Greek can be, had taught her many things while Elektra had been growing up. She had learned the legends of her home country, the ways of the world and the ways of this strange country. Elektra had idolized her mother and her father long before she was old enough to understand their brilliance and the driving force of the ideals they both held most dear. They had fled Greece barely ahead of the secret police that so many refused to believe even existed because of their ideals. The belief that all people should be free, that scientific discoveries were meant to be spread out among all the people of the world and not just the select, the rich or the powerful.

Elektra finished the final touches on her makeup before placing everything carefully back in its place. Reaching a long arm over to her bedside table, she flipped on the powerful police-band radio she had kept from her days on the police force. The constant chatter faded into background noise in her mind as she slipped on her black leather boots. Mother would not have approved of these boots, she thought to herself. It had taken her quite some time to get used to them actually. She had always been more comfortable in either tomboy clothes, or volleyball uniform, or gymnast’s leotard. Her mother hadn’t really approved of those either, although she had been fiercely proud of her daughter’s accomplishments. She missed her mother desperately sometimes even after all the years since the automobile accident and a drunken driver had stolen her mother away. That had been a turning point for her life. Elektra had always intended to use her college athletic scholarship as a springboard to the professional volleyball circuit. Her height and long-limbed build had earned her respect across college campuses as well as the nickname “The Tiger Spiker”. It had also made her lonely as many of the men she had met were intimidated by her size and ability. Of the few that remained, most of them had only seen her as another kind of trophy. But when her mother was ripped from her life, Elektra had soured on what seemed an inconsequential life of the sport idol. Against her father’s wishes, she had enrolled in the Paragon City Police Academy. Her father had fatalistically accepted Elektra’s new course, having experience with the implacable resolve of his wife, and so Alexandras Duras offered his considerable scientific expertise to the Paragon City PD as well.

Things had actually worked out quite well for the pair after that. Elektra remembered award after award her father had won as he almost single-handedly brought the scientific equipment used in the police force not only up to the state-of-the-art, but also beyond it in some areas. Elektra’s face hardened into chisel-sharp lines as her recent nightmare played again on the screen inside her mind. Her father had been working in the lab attached to their home on the outskirts of the city on that terrible day. A new type of communications breakthrough he had theorized promised to revolutionize not just the police force, but military units and any other occupation where communication was essential: direct mental contact. Once thought the realm of fantasy and comic books, telepathy promised to bring a desperately needed coordination and instant connection to team members involved in life and death struggles on a daily basis.

Elektra put in the colored contacts and inspected herself in the magnifying mirror before standing up. She snatched up her accessories satchel and stalked over to the full-length version along one wall of her bedroom. For months her father struggled to make a practical apparatus from his esoteric formulae. Months that Elektra had learned first hand of the daily sacrifices and pain of her own teammates on the police force. And then finally the terrible afternoon when the explosion echoed through their house. Elektra clenched her fists tightly. The nightmares never really stopped but she had learned to stop talking about them. She had fought the firemen and rescue workers as they dragged her from the remains of her father’s destroyed laboratory. In her frantic madness she had injured more than one of them as she struggled to go back to find her father. The black flames that seemed to eat the light rather than cast it; the tearing heat that shattered skin and bone without leaving burns; the pulsing psychedelic light that beat against brain in pounding waves; none of it had mattered to her. Only finding her father was important. But she had failed at that as well. She hadn’t been able to save either of her parents.

Finally, the EMS techs had been forced to sedate her and she had slipped into a nightmare-infested coma which lasted for more than 3 months. Her nightmares had been even worse then and much more frequent. She had tried to tell the doctors everything before she realized they had no hope of understanding. She learned to keep her thoughts to herself, putting up a shell of dry humor as a wall around her inner demons. When she had been released, Elektra knew that the police force would never be able to give her what she needed to fill the hole left by her parents’ deaths. She had thrown herself into hard physical training, pushing herself far past the limits of her former physical conditioning. She had discovered new skills and frightful powers within herself and had honed them along with her steel-hard resolve to find her father. His body had never been recovered from the lab. His equipment had been destroyed in the explosion but her father’s patents had more than covered her own medical expenses as well as a new place to live. She couldn’t stay in that house any longer and moved to a high-rise in the city. The joking and wisecracks became second nature to her and let her disguise her true self and her real feelings behind a façade few ever saw through. Her wealth had made her into a society-paper debutante and given her the perfect excuse to become an elusive, reclusive figure.

The open window sent cat’s-paws tickling through her white hair as she looked out on the city below. It was still several hours before dawn. Perfect hunting weather. She would find the people responsible for her father’s disappearance; she would find her father. If not tonight, then another night. She wasn’t going to stop until she had. The back alleys and byways of Paragon City had their own sources of information: a whisper-stream that eddied and rushed through the shadows and hidden corners. The whispers told many things to those with ears to hear. A new name had been dropped in the dark pools there, a new hunter prowling the fringes of daylight: Spyker. A name she meant to make sure reached the ears of her prey. Her black-leather wrapped hands gripped the edges of the window as she launched herself out into the void: a tiger-striped missile homing in with single-minded, relentless intensity.

“I’m coming for you. All of you” she whispered as she hurtled crisp night air. Ebony fire flickered down her arms and pulsed through her fingertips as Spyker reached out into the darkness, hunting.

Characters copyright © 2007 all rights reserved. City of Heroes Copyright © NCSoft and Copyright © Cryptic Studios

Author: D. D. Wolf | Category: City of Heroes / Villains, D. D. Wolf | Comments(0) October 2007