Forging a Path Ahead

Growing up in a dying world wasn't easy. It wasn't even the number of suicides every year, or the thousands of innocents who fell prey to the gangs, or the number of people killed by violent capes, or the staggering death toll of each and every Endbringer massacre, it was simply the slowly growing realization in the minds of the public that everything was growing worse. Step by slow step all hope was lost and replaced with the drudgery of crawling corpse looking for its last meal. There were no new businesses, no expansions, no new publicity stunts and projects anymore, only the most hardy or most desperate remained and they did not have the energy to hope anymore. They only desperately fought to keep themselves afloat, all the while ignoring the fact, that the sharks circling their rotten raft where only growing in numbers and strength.

My family wasn't any different, or maybe they were and it just didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore, because only I and my sister remained. And she who had always been diligent to a fault, a first class cog in the machine, a mindless drone in societies grinding wheels had been shatter, left broken by the pressure.

But I should start at the beginning, or at least at where I think my story starts. My name is Ben, short for B. E. N. or Benjamin Eric Nightcastle, of the formally glorious dukedom of Nightcastle, Great Britain, or something. It has been more than 100 years since my forefathers fled to the States. My father and mother were cousins, once removed, but in good old Alabama tradition, they married in a shotgun wedding after discovering my mothers pregnancy. Not that they, their families or I had ever been to Alabama. The following fall out, the forced relocation and the severing of any and all family ties, were the only reason my parents and their daughter Leandra Archie Nightcastle, named thus by her grandmother who had meet J. R. R. Tolkien himself, avoided the fate of being torn apart when the Slaughterhouse 9 made a pit stop at their local dinner.

Having avoided that fate and being flushed with money from all the wills, which had not been updated in time, they went on a major bender, ending with both of them in jail and my sister being forced to grow up in foster care for 6 years. And sometimes in between moaning about their fates in Prison, their constant legal battles to waste their fortune and their very expensive pardon from a retiring governor, they managed to create me. Not that I remember anything of my first 3 years in life, but having grown up most of that time in foster care like my sister, it isn't hard to fathom why my sisters enduring hospital stays are a lot more concerning to me, than the fact that my parents had been killed by some empire thugs.

Their funeral had been a very quick affair and the vultures where circling before the holes closed above their bodies. For a pair of constantly high spindrifts, my parents sure had had a lot of friends, friends who were now excited to "take care" of me and my "insane" sister. I would love to see them being of sound mind after being raped and tortured for 20 hours by thugs or in my case, hearing your sisters screams while being crushed under half a ton of old sandalwood and even older and more expensive books. The asshole interior designer who sold my parents that abomination of a bookshelf, the even bigger asshole of a butler who had let those thugs in and most of all cape thug asshole number 1, who had chosen to go through the wall, when he had been perfectly capable of entering the house trough the front door, toppled the bookshelf and left me there, should root in hell for eternity.

Not that I believed in god, heaven or shit like that, but I would make them endure hell on earth. Or at least I would, had they survived my sister triggering and ripping apart everything. Revenge is a purely selfish motivation, one that required suitable targets, of which there was no lack in this city and I might have been tempted to go out there and kill, but alas what the assholes didn't manage, my sister certainly did. Stuck under that shelf, which had already crushed my legs, probably broken my spine, there had been nothing I could do to avoid the blast wave of my sisters desperation.

While my sister, ironically had a almost perfectly preserved body and a completely shattered mind, I only had a single working eye and 3 fingers remaining. But oh, my mind had stayed sharp, I remember everything.

And so, when the adults schemed how to best rob the remaining fortunes of a cripple and his insane sister, I made my own plans. Plans that relied on the simple fact, that no one notices a cripple. Or maybe they just didn't want to see their own fragility every time they saw me, but the result is the same. While they ignored me in favor of pestering my sibling, I contacted a villain online.

Now some might think that contacting a villain online might be a stupid thing to do, but I knew something those people don't. Most villains are mercenaries, fighting for survival in a world geared to kill them at every opportunity. You only ever hear about those glorious and successful villains in the media, those who have made it big, taken territory or created their own gang. Nobody, not even small news station like our local news, cared about those capes whose powers were only useful to pick pockets or steal cars. Slip was one of those villains, who might as well have been a common car thief, but with the ability to lengthen his fingers to pick locks and slip into pockets unnoticed.

Consequently Slip was very easy to find on PHO, he had his self created thread in which he proclaimed himself to be the best and most fabulous thief in the entire city. The local black cat, if black cat had been a middle aged looser with the figure of a beach ball and way to much spandex. Contacting him had been the easy part, making him belief my story of being a wealthy businessman looking to capture back his kids from his ex, had been harder, but after I had lead him to one of the cash and drug stashes my parents had completely believed I hadn't known about, the dollar signs in his eyes made it harder for him to think straight, or at all.

I almost regretted my choice, after he managed to burn of half his face while creating a distraction in the form of a simple fire in our garden shed, being seen entering the property on all cameras and generally taking the longest time possible to follow even the simplest of orders. But in the end that was a windfall, because my keepers had noticed, and left me by myself to confront him, while acting stupid enough to let the grounds be consumed by the resulting fire. The fire brigade had been nice enough to bring me to the same hospital my sister had been kept at. The bastards who had taken control of our lives had restrained her in the basement, allegedly to contain her violent tendencies and thanks to her power she managed to overhear a discussion about our home burning down.

The resulting supersonic blast had shattered the basement and cracked the parking lot, after which my sweet sister went to rescue me, again. Luckily we literally run into each other in the lobby of the hospital, otherwise there would have been no way for me to inform her of my location. She might not look at me anymore, she might not even look in my direction, but beneath all those broken and bleeding shards she still cared and when I told her to fly us to Brockton Bay, she obeyed unquestioningly. I might never live it down to be princess carried out of that lobby.