3 The Northern Quarter

While I tried to avoid training my power, training my body was another thing entirely.

When there was no school, so every day of the working week, I'd get up every morning to run, and then every other afternoon I'd do the exact same thing all over again.

In the process of training myself to be fitter and faster, I'd picked up a relatively good understanding of the north side of the community.

Growing up in the walled community of what many people called Old London, my Mum and Dad had always told me to stick to the main quarter, which was the place that the majority of people frequented.

Even when running I had stayed to the main quarter, avoiding the less frequently patrolled areas on the fringes of the community where villainous sorts could do their evil business with less chance of being caught by the PHA guards.

Now, however, it was Saturday night and I was in a costume, breaking all of the rules.

All it had taken was a break of concentration, one time letting my Crafter powers go wild, and now I was all ready to be a hero.

My costume was a simple sort. I wore a pair of innocuous jeans and a jet black hoodie, with a plain domino mask over my eyes. It was the sort of thing anyone could pick up at one of the trader stalls in the main quarter. On my right arm, however, was my newly crafted power gauntlet.

The costume was nowhere near complete, of course. Now that I'd let my power out of the bag I'd had all kinds of ideas about how to upgrade myself so that I'd be safer and more dangerous.

Armour panels would cover my body, heavy and thick, while powered servos covered by a bullet and stabproof mesh layer along the joints would help me to move it. It'd be a basic type of power armour, nowhere near what the PHA sponsored crafters could pull together, but it'd make me a whole lot safer than I was now with only a gauntlet on my arm.

It was just after midnight, and I was doing the unthinkable. Crossing that secret and imaginary border that separated the main quarter from the border of the community. The part of our walled city that was frequented by the gangsters and the drug addicts.

The Main Quarter was where the business of the community took place. It was based around the River Thames, with stalls stretching across the bank of the river on both sides. The bridges from the world before Gold Dawn had crumbled into disrepair, so crafters had built makeshift bridges of their own. They weren't anything too special technologically speaking, though they did have the ability to withstand torrential flooding, protecting the community by erecting a grid of powerful forcefields across the surface of the water to keep it down.

If you headed north from the Main Quarter, heading away from the water and into the old city's depths you'd reach the old cultural centre of what London would have been before Gold Dawn. Dominated by the ruins of the National Gallery and hollow shells of theatres that hadn't seen any plays for decades, it was the perfect breeding ground for supervillains and gangsters.

With the lack of any work or resources in the immediate years after Gold Dawn, a lot of people turned to the villains for henchman work. At the start of the new era, the Northern Quarter was the place to be for all villainous goings-on, whether that be drug-related, the numerous death-fight clubs that had used to exist or any number of other illegal activity.

It took a while for the Pro Hero presence to rise up and establish itself, but eventually, it did and now there was more of an equilibrium in the city. That didn't change the fact that the Northern Quarter really wasn't the sort of place that you wanted to be. Yet, here I was.

Sneaking across from one street to the next, it was clear where the built-up area of the Main Quarter ended and the Northern Quarter began. As I passed through into the area, it was as if I'd walked into a shantytown from the old world. There were enough ruins for anyone to find shelter if need be, but the built-up houses and apartment blocks from the main quarter were all but gone.

The only people on the streets were the unconscious drunks who had staggered home after a day in the boozers, women looking to give men a good time for a bit of scrip, and gang members leering out of windows to make sure those unconscious drunks didn't make off with those women.

As I walked, I was using my gauntlet to project a kind of stealth field around myself. The central unit of the gauntlet drew photons into itself, causing the area around me to seem darker and gloomier than usual.

Anyone who was paying attention might find it odd that there was a patch of concentrated darkness moving through the streets of the Northern Quarter, but most of the people who lived in the area had more than enough problems to be thinking about without getting involved with me, especially considering the lack of power to the area made everything look dark and gloomy already.

It was the gloom and lack of light that made me stop and huddle back into a corner when I saw a spot of pale yellow luminescence ahead of me.

The light came from a torch, and I was just about able to make out several people standing around it. They all looked skinny and haggard, with gaunt faces and patchy hair. Some were wearing hoodies, others long-sleeved shirts or bandana's across their mouths.

While they wore an assortment of colours, there was one thing that bound the group of five men together, and that was the colours of their clothes. Black and yellow.

The colours of the Coventry Mob.