Lives Lost in Time Chapter 2
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 2nd: Where there’s smoke…
“I’m tellin’ ya, nothin’! I don’t know nothin’!”
“Then tell me who does” Spyker hissed at the Skull gangbanger. For good measure she bounced his head off the wall once more. The Skull’s feet scrabbled fruitlessly as she held him a couple of inches off the ground. “I can do this all night, you gutterpunk. And I’ll enjoy it right up until your brains splatter out and I have to go find some of your friends by myself.” Her balled fists twisted into the lapels of the cheap leather jacket the punk wore, Spyker shook the skeleton-masked man once more.
“A’right, a’right a’ready!” screeched the punk. “There’s a guy that knows a g… OW!”
“If I wanted fairy tales I’d go to the movies! Last chance.”
“Okay! Jeezus! Ask for Bonebreaker over in the Gish. He moves around a lot. I’m tellin’ ya!” the punk yelled as Spyker shook him once more, “He doesn’t let anyone know where he hangs. Over in the Gish, the Gish I swear!”
Spyker let the power within her begin to seep through the leather wrappings around her forearms. The ebony energy looked like a cross between black flames and dark grey, sooty, smoke. The Skull’s eyes widened as he felt the hungry fingers begin to creep toward his face.
“Wha the! Hey, no! I told ya!” he screamed as the dark cloud covered his head.
Spyker dropped the unconscious punk to the ground. The police band beacon, a “chirper” in the lingo, she set by his feet. The PCPD should arrive long before the Skull and his buddies regained consciousness. Spyker faded back into the shadows, the black tiger-strip camouflage on her dark orange catsuit blending her outline into the night’s cool darkness. She headed slowly toward the park she knew was nearby, staying to the shadows while she thought her way through what she’d learned.
Rumors had been circulating about a new type of villain terrorizing the streets of Paragon City. Not that there was a shortage of evil-minded freaks wandering about after the Rikti invasion. There was also no shortage of new heroes as well thanks to the incredible energies released during the Rikti War. Many had formed teams and even groups, but Spyker had avoided them. Her single-minded mission hadn’t seemed to leave much room for working with other heroes. Yet, she knew other heroes might have information sources she did not. She had been a loner for so long, she wasn’t sure how to approach these other superheroes. For now, she had another goal in mind. Homeless people had been disappearing. It wasn’t as if the city kept accurate records on the homeless, but several of Spyker’s sources had reported friends and acquaintances going missing. Worse than that, she had seen copies of several police and forensic reports where bodies had been found, or rather pieces of bodies had been found. Few of the victims had been identified since DNA-style identification was mostly useless; the homeless rarely had occasion to have DNA typing done. In every case the police had been unable to positively identify the victim. More disturbing than that was the information that hadn’t made the papers: in many cases the body parts found together didn’t belong to just one individual.
The full moon cast a silvery light across the brown, desiccated grass of the park as Spyker crept through the wrought iron gateway. The special contact lenses she wore brought everything into sharp detail as well as disguised her eyes behind a glacial grey façade. She had little fear of anyone recognizing her. The sharply lined, tiger-style makeup she wore made her face look completely different than Elektra Duras’ face. At any rate, since her rich alter ego had a reputation for reclusiveness, there weren’t that many pictures of her circulating in the public eye. After the explosion that had changed her world forever there had been the typical media circus with photographs and news reports on every station and every newspaper in the area of course, but the woman that walked away from the medical institution after recovering from a months-long coma and more months of therapy afterwards bore little resemblance to the one brought in by the EMS unit. She had kept in touch with a few friends on the police force and some of her family’s contacts in other circles, but they only saw the carefully prepared socialite, Elektra Duras.
As Elektra she wore personally tailored clothes that softened the muscular lines of her body. The strange effects of the lab fire had given her above-average strength, which she had worked hard to maximize. She was no match for the super-strength of some other adventurers, but she was significantly stronger than a typical person, particularly starting from her athletic background and earlier police conditioning. Special shoes, black hair dye and careful attention ensured that no one made any connection between her two identities.
Spyker prowled the edges of the park, slipping out the other side to slide beneath the bridge arching overhead. Her specially made boots added even more inches to her 6’6” frame, but she could walk through broken glass and never make a sound. The Skulls had hidden gathering spots throughout the city, but the area known as the Gish seemed to be a magnet for all the different kinds of weirdness scattered through other parts of the city. She knew that eventually she would turn up this “Bonebreaker” and he would tell her what she wanted to know. Everything she wanted to know.
The underground grapevine was rife with rumors on the grisly slayings, but one particular story had drawn Spyker’s practiced eye. The Skulls were reportedly brokering equipment deals for a mysterious figure known as Doctor Vahzilok. The other main outlaw gang in the city, the Hellions, had been engaged in a turf war with the Skulls over supplying this Dr. V, so there was plenty of money flying around. As long as the Skulls and Hellions were taking each other out no one was likely to shed any tears, but lately the battles had taken a darker turn. Even the Skull and Hellion bodies were disappearing now and witnesses had described a new, vicious, combatant the Skulls referred to as Eidolons. These creatures were covered head-to-toe in black leather and chrome-buckled belts. Far more powerful than either the Skulls or Hellions, these monsters had also been seen to throw bolts of dark flames and create smoky, insubstantial, tentacles that nevertheless held fast anyone caught in them. Spyker looked down at her own hands and thought of the inky smoke that she also could manipulate in various ways. She would never forget the voracious black flames that had destroyed her father’s laboratory and ruined her own life. There had to be a connection between the two. She would find it, however they tried to hide.
“Bonebreaker eh” Spyker whispered to herself, casting her senses out into the night. “We’ll just have to see about that.”
Original 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) August 2010