Bludhaven
August 30, 6:30 EST
It was early morning in Bludhaven, with September, and by extension the end of Summer Vacation, right around the corner. Most families would be scrambling for the end-of-summer sales to stock up on supplies for the upcoming academic year about a week into September. Most teenagers would be arming their war chests, from the newest handheld electronic device, the perfect first-day-of-school outfit that would make them one of the "in-crowd", a bit of spending money to flaunt, down to the perfectly-messy hair right in the meridian of a complete slob and a prim-and-proper douche. Others would be scrambling to squeeze in one last adventure before the new year started, in some cases get laid so they wouldn't be the only one who didn't "get some".
Virgil was none of that. His family was gone, his hometown destroyed, his peers murdered by his own hand. They totally had it coming, but it didn't change the fact that if his mid-summer adventure ever saw the light of day, he'd be labeled a serial killer. What most would be ripping their hair out panicking over, Virgil no longer cared about. Mind-numbing TV had lost the novelty it once had, the "big man on campus" wasn't intimidating any longer, the newest electronic device with unnecessary features out the ass held no appeal, and school… For obvious reasons he could never go back.
After work one day he'd gone by the local public school, just to get a feel of the place on the off-chance Moxxi decided to put him through school too. The place was walled off, looming an ominous four stories upward (the school, not the walls), and gave off the vibe of a juvenile detention facility. While once it was co-ed, it'd changed to a boys-only establishment after a number of unresolved serial-rapings had prompted the city to build a girls-only school down the road. The place was locked up tight, theft of school property apparently warranting chains, a padlock, and barbed wire of all things, so while he couldn't enter the school itself, looking from a distance had been enough to give him flashbacks.
Hindsight was always 20/20 perfect, and looking back he could remember their faces, what they were wearing, what weapons they used, the noises they made on their death throes. When he'd disarmed one, the guy had begged for mercy, and Virgil let him run. A bullet almost clipping his ear had been all he'd needed to justify giving the rest no quarter; the guy who tried shooting him in the back got the favor returned three-fold, and he didn't miss. No matter how much they'd begged, or cried, or pleaded for their lives, he'd killed them without mercy. In the end it was either him, or them, and when it came time to choose between dirtying his hands and live, or letting himself be killed and keeping those very same hands clean of blood, he'd chosen the darker path.
The path of the fittest. The path of survival.
And then there was the… other thing, he tried not to remember. The deaths he did feel bad about. His peers had attacked him in the defense of others, but their motivations were far from chivalrous. As far from chivalrous as a person could get. After he'd let the hallway floors run red with blood, and he'd come down from his adrenaline high, he'd kicked down the door of the room they'd come out of, wondering what they were protecting so desperately they'd attack him unprovoked. What he had seen, had utterly disgusted him, and he'd regretted the quick deaths he'd given those out in the hall. Leaving them out to be ripped apart by the Infected, a fate he normally would've never have wished on anyone, would've been exactly what they'd deserved for what they had done in that very room.
The minute he'd stepped through that door frame, the smell of sweat, and musk, had almost overwhelmed him. The room was dark, a paltry few candles providing small globes of light to cast the shadows away, and it was only when his eyes had adjusted to the darkness within that once-ordinary space, that they had been opened to the true darkness. That which laid within all people's hearts, an evil that had eclipsed everything he had just done ten, no… a hundredfold. He could still remember what he'd seen, clear as day, an image that would haunt him to his dying days.
There, huddled in the corner, were four of his peers, all of whom were of the female persuasion. Their hair was a mess, heavy bags under their eyes, and they looked severely dehydrated. Their state of dress, or rather undress to be more accurate, was eclipsed by the condition they had been left in. They had bruising over most of their bodies, their lips busted in one or two places, and by the very ugly purple bruises lining their legs which were splayed out at awkward angles, it was obvious that they'd been broken. In addition to the sweat and filth coating their bodies, they were also covered in a dried white-colored gunk, concentrated mostly in their laps, chests, mouths, and hair.
The moment Virgil's mind had connected all the facts together, from his peers' actions to what they were so willing to kill others for, what little food he had eaten beforehand threatened to rise out of his throat, forcing him to flee the room before emptying the contents of his stomach. A hatred for his fellow man that he didn't know he possessed surged through his entire body once he'd stopped retching, and he'd proceeded to repeatedly kick a nearby corpse until he'd gotten tired of listening to the bones not in his foot creak and break.
"Of course something like this would've happened. There's no adults around, and it's the 'end of days'. What the fuck else are these assholes going to do in their final hours?" he'd spat angrily, giving the now-mangled corpse another kick for good measure. Since nut-stomping a dead person wouldn't provide any sense of satisfaction, he decided that kicking their face in would be a good substitute.
It was blatantly obvious what had happened to those poor girls. Desperate young women seeking shelter. A group of men who had what was supposed to be a safe haven offering sanctuary. The weight of the world bearing down on them causing a mental breakdown. The men demanding "compensation" for protection. The women refusing and attempting to leave. The men deciding they were "entitled" to what they wanted, and proceeding to take what they wanted. Repeatedly if the filth covering their bodies was any indicator. The bruises had been from when the women resisted, their legs brutally broken so they couldn't run, or close them. Used as toys until they'd been fucked stupid if the vacant expressions in their faces had anything to say about it.
"I want to die… Please… I want to die…"
Those words spoken in a raspy whisper, barely audible after their physical abuse, had reached Virgil's ears loud and clear amidst the silence. Their pleading, desperate tone forever etched into the dark recesses of his mind. Even if they were "damaged", a part of Virgil wanted to save them, to take them away from that den of debauchery and move them to someplace safe. But the cold truth of the matter was that he could not, and deep down he knew it. He wasn't a doctor, but he could tell a broken leg when he saw one, and those assholes had been determined to have those girls stay exactly where they were, well within arms' reach for when they wanted to satisfy their urges. Even if he could move them, he'd be forced to do so one at a time, and without him at their side they'd be completely helpless. On top of that, and how little a fight his peers had actually put up, it was blatantly obvious that they were running low on food and clean drinking water, and feeding five mouths in those conditions would've been impossible.
But above all else… they wanted to die. The hopeless… absolute despair he'd heard in their voices was like a knife to his heart, because no matter how much he wanted to, he knew he couldn't save them. Couldn't make the pain go away, or even repair the emotional damage that had been done to them. There was a special place in Hell for rapists, and Virgil had been all too happy to send them there, but any satisfaction he'd felt was dwarfed by the weight of what he had been asked to do. What he had to do. He couldn't leave them there to suffer any more than they already had, but neither would he make them suffer.
The nurse's office had been picked clean, the cabinets themselves ripped from the walls and any hidden contents shaken out onto the floor. That left only the chemistry lab, and because he'd helped the teacher out a couple times in the past, he knew where the hidden key was to get past the ballistic glass. After seeing what he had on hand, he took what would do the best job, and returned to where his "quest" had started.
He placed the bottles on the floor in front of them within arm's reach, putting their fate in their own hands, and then left.
*slap*slap*
"Get a grip, Virgil," the brunette huffed to himself as he slapped his cheeks, pulling his mind back to the present. "There wasn't anything you could've done. What's done is done, and fixating on it won't change a damn thing," he said with a sigh as he brought his mind back to the present. Those memories would haunt him to his dying breath, but he would push them to the back of his mind, and let sleeping ghosts rest. "I'd better hit the showers before the others wake up, or I'll never see hot water," he said jokingly to ease the tension out of his system.
When it came down to it, in the end he hadn't even known any of them, so that was part of why he was able to let them go so easily.
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
"Clean shirt… new shoes… And I don't know where I am goin' tooo~" Virgil sung to himself as he shed the night's clothing, turning the hot water just right with practiced motions as he stepped into the shower. "Silk suit… black tie… I don't need a reason why-y-y-y~" His tastes in music weren't limited to a single genre, or even a specific artist, he mainly listened to songs that "sounded good" and stuck with him; Sharp Dressed Man by ZZ Top was one of them. "They come runnin' just as fast as they can… Cause every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man~"
Speaking of sharp-dressed men, Virgil had been very busy the past couple of weeks during his stay in Bludhaven. Outside working at Marcus Munitions for seven dollars an hour, eight hours a day Monday through Friday, he'd taken to wearing the Nanosuit more frequently and doing a little vigilante work after the sun had set. He never planned to become a vigilante, and he definitely wasn't a "Hero" by convention, but one night he'd found it impossible to sleep, an anxiousness he didn't know filling him and compelling affirmative action. Grabbing a tarp from the supply closet and affixing it around his frame like a cloak, he took to the rooftops.
In the Red Zone, learning parkour had been a necessity, a survival mechanism, because if you couldn't get off the beaten path, you'd wind up on the menu as soon as you stepped out into the open. Now that he was in Bludhaven, where the distance between the buildings was greater, and he didn't have the luxury of diving through whatever windows were within jumping distance, he'd had to completely re-learn his limits. Shaula had been kind enough to lead him to a training ground of sorts over the adjacent rooftops, but because she had her own jobs to do she couldn't instruct him for long. He'd been given a new set of basic maneuvers to train in, but what he'd been given was enough to put him on the right path.
The fact that all the traversible parts of the terrain were all painted bright red may've also helped.
The near-entirety of his body weight converted from fat to muscle, he could move like few others could, and he often speculated that heroes like Batman and his kin, whose anatomy did not offer them superhuman ability, had undergone similar transformations before becoming "Heroes". The reason he trained so diligently when he had the Nanosuit to move for him, was because he had a theory about how the Nanosuit worked. You take the super-science out of it, and it pumped a form of super-steroid into his body that pushed him beyond his limits, yet had no negative side-effects if the bloodwork Athena ran was anything to go by; knowing Dr. Zed he would've gotten stuck with a used needle and contracted chlamydia or something. By that logic, if he trained his body out-of-suit, it stood to reason that his parameters in-suit would be bolstered even further.
However movement through the environment was only half the equation. While it was well within his power to kill men with his bare hands, he didn't want to leave a trail of corpses behind, as that would draw unnecessary attention to himself. If a mugger or a rapist gets beaten to a bloody pulp, then you've got a "vigilante" on your hands at worst, "good Samaritan" at best, and it can afford to be overlooked in lieu of other more-pressing matters. If said muggers or rapists are killed and left dead in the middle of the street, you would have a "killer" on your hands, and the police would have to more-actively seek them out for the public's safety. While before, his methods were necessary to facilitate survival, now, the tools he had developed were crude and ineffective for his new environment.
Like trying to peel an onion with a chainsaw.
To that end, he sought out instruction on how to fight other than wild punches and "Sparta Kicks". Strangely enough, Hotel Moscow, the organization he was sub-contracted to, had its own exclusive gym in the lower quarter. The members consisted exclusively of Hotel Moscow members and their kids, who would grow up to work in the same lines of work as their parents, so for a time he was an outsider. For whatever reason, Balalaika saw a great deal of potential in him, going as far as to have her former lieutenant, a scar-faced broad-shouldered man by the name of Borris, act as his personal trainer. However, just because he was being given special accommodations, did not mean he was getting special treatment. That much showed in how he trained, and what he was trained in.
Said training was in the Russian martial art Systema, literally meaning "The System", a Russian martial art that included, but was not limited to, hand-to-hand combat, grappling, knife fighting, and firearms training. As a discipline it was becoming more popular among police and security forces across the globe, including the US Secret Service, and his instruction in Bludhaven was one of the few places on the east coast where he could learn the military-grade stuff. Just how military-grade it was showed at the end of each day of training. Because Systema focused on using an opponent's momentum against them and controlling the six body levers (elbows, neck, knees, waist, ankles, and shoulders) through pressure point application, after each day of training he'd felt like he'd been twisted into a pretzel and wailed on with a meat tenderizer before being thrown under a moving bus.
Suffice it to say, every fiber of his being ached and burned with pain, even the parts he didn't know that could ache and burn. Still, despite the grueling training and how many times he was thrown to the floor after being tied in knots by a guy who was well above two times his size, the training wasn't only helping him physically, but also did so mentally. Before training each day, he was instructed to stretch until his body was free of all tensions, and after being coiled like a wound-up watch spring in the Red Zone for a month, it was ridiculous how much better he had felt afterward. His endurance went well above what he thought was possible for someone with his thin build, he had become more flexible, his movements practically effortless, and every strike was explosive. While nowhere near the level of his peers just yet, he was certainly in better shape than he'd been before, where he was pretty much swimming in adrenaline 24/7.
Adrenaline junkies sought it out because it was fun. He sought out an adrenaline rush as a survival mechanism.
On the mental side of it was that he had to be calm, free of anger, irritation, fear, self-pity, delusion, and pride, breathing exercises and relaxation being a big part of getting his head into that mindset and finding his "happy place". For obvious reasons, it was hard for him to be "free of anger", given what Mercer, Blackwatch, his peers, etc. had all done to him, but it occurred to him that if he never let that anger go, it would rule him for the rest of his life and he'd never be able to move on. It was after much meditation that he was able to let that anger go, even if only a little bit. With how swimmingly things went in Foster Care after his parents died, while initially he'd be irritated by even the smallest things, as it turns out, doing yoga on the Miami beachfront did great things for your stress levels. Okay, so it wasn't all yoga, the fit and shapely women might've had something to do with it as well. But still, anything that did manage to irritate him wouldn't do so for long, so he could tune most things out. When it came to "fear"… he'd been scared out of his wits in the Red Zone, and the adrenaline in his system was the only thing that kept him from freezing up on the spot like a deer in the headlights. However, he understood that being afraid was healthy, that fear was your body telling you that you were in danger, you just had to avoid letting it rule your life completely. "Self-pity", he'd burned almost entirely out of his system already, as at the time he had more important things to do than mope around in a pit of despair. "Delusion" was a tricky one, but eventually he got the point in that bit of soul-searching. You see a magic trick in front of you, and that's an illusion. If you know how the trick works and you believe it's magic anyway, that's delusion. Call him a glass-half-empty kinda guy, but he didn't let delusion get in the way of reality. "Pride" was something he'd had to cast away pretty quickly when things went to shit. Call digging through a dumpster for food or even sleeping in one "disgusting" all you want, but as soon as you decide to go hungry for the night without a place to sleep and be happy with it, and you can ride that high horse all day long.
Of course, physical and emotional improvements aside, he still got his ass whooped after work every day by a burly Russian. When he got home, all he wanted to do was crash on the couch and not move an inch until dinner, stock up on fuel, and then lay in bed until the next morning to sleep off the aches and burning. However, fate had different plans in mind in the form of the restlessness that plagued his sleep, compelling him to act. While he'd spend a couple hours each night stopping would-be muggers, rapists, and other such unscrupulous individuals from carrying out their insidious deeds, something that under normal circumstances would only exacerbate his weary frame even further, strangely enough once he peeled the suit off, he actually felt better than he had before putting it on. Not only that, but his sleep was more restful as a result. Whether it was due to the sense of fulfillment or the recovery of his body, he wasn't really sure.
For all intents and purposes, Athena, the residential tech-specialist, was the only leading authority on the Nanosuit that he could talk to this about. While she would need more-specialized equipment to analyze the suit's deeper inner-workings, equipment she simply had no way of legally acquiring, what she could glean from preliminary analysis was that the Nanosuit was seemingly repairing the damage caused by his training at an accelerated rate. When you work out, you tear apart the muscle fibers within your body, hence the expression "feel the burn". However, it's in the recovery of that muscular tissue that you become stronger, and gain the capacity to do more work as a result. Athena estimated that while wearing the suit, Virgil possessed an accelerated healing factor, albeit minor, of about a 12:1 ratio. In layman's terms, physical damage that would normally take a week to heal, would be repaired in about 14 hours. Though theoretical in nature, there were rumors of those possessing healing factors in the ballpark of a 43,200:1 ratio, or a month-in-a-minute, capable of replacing entire organs as they were destroyed.
While something like that could be the Nobel Prize-winning Holy Grail of the medical field and advance research in the field by about a century, maybe two, the world as-was simply wasn't ready for people capable of living in excess to 300 years. Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth was around 70 years, with a small percentile living to and even pushing past a full century, and that was mainly due to the advances in modern medicine and that doctors would actually wash their fucking hands. One of Virgil's largest pet peeves, above all others, was seeing people leave the bathroom stall and walk right out of the bathroom without washing their nasty dickhands.
Of course now we're getting entirely off-topic, so I'll return us to this chapter's true narrative.
"Cause every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man~" Virgil sung the song's final verse, turning off the water and toweling off a bit before stepping out. 'Kinda weird how much that song stuck with me,' he thought to himself, stretching his muscles once more before brushing his teeth in front of the mirror. At the start of the summer he'd been your average 5'6", but over the course of the summer he'd managed to grow a full inch in height, on top of the extra muscle he'd put on from his legwork, training, and "moonlighting". If any of his peers were still alive, they'd be hard-pressed to recognize him.
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
"That… That was a nice song…"
"Gah!" Virgil shrieked in a very non-girlish manner. "Athena! Don't scare me like that, I almost had a heart attack!"
"Ah, s-sorry," Athena stammered, her cheeks tinged red as she fidgeted bashfully. One of the few people able to slip completely under Virgil's radar, he wouldn't know her eyes were on him, or that she was right behind him, until she made her own presence known. "Though really… I didn't know you could sing."
"Eh, it's just something I do in the morning so I don't take too long," Virgil replied nervously before looking back at her. "Athena… Athena!" he repeated more assertively. "Eyes up here!" Words he never thought he would be saying.
"Ah, s-sorry," Athena apologized. Since Virgil was only wearing a towel at that point in time, she had an unopposed view of his upper body, tiny droplets of water dripping off his hair and trickling down his frame. "I just wanted to let you know, I finished something that should help with your… extracurricular activities."
"Really? Like what?"
"Well, I mean I still have to do a little fine-tuning before you take it out to the field, but you letting me analyze the suit really helped. If you bring it by the room, I can do some last-minute adjustments before you go out tonight."
"Oh, well, alright then," Virgil replied as he turned back towards his room, Athena heading down the stairs to her own. 'Huh… I wonder what it was she made. Maybe a grappling-gun like Batman uses?' he questioned as he drew the blinds shut before pulling the Nanosuit out from under the bed. Because the suit tightening around his frame would often press his clothes into his skin and leave irritating marks, he'd taken to wearing nothing but his underwear and a jock strap before putting it on. As a consequence, after a couple nights it started to get a little rank, and just a bit gross to wear. Thankfully, the inside of the suit appeared to be designed similarly to self-cleaning windows, a good soak in a warm bath being enough to clean the grime and sweat he'd leave inside every night.
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
Stepping down to the second floor, Virgil was greeted to the sight of Shaula, Rina, and Tina all lounging on the living room couch and watching TV. Since using Cloak while having his helmet off made him look like a floating head, in order to be stealthy he had to pull the whole ensemble over his skull in order to be stealthy. The floors didn't creak too badly, and his leg and ankle muscles had been strengthened from sneaking around the Red Zone where even the sound of a pin dropping could drive the Infected into a raving-mad frenzy, but a few steps out into the open and all threes' eyes landed solely on him.
" . . . "
"We can totally see you," Shaula said plainly, giving him a sideways glance before flipping through the channels some more.
"How? Cloak is supposed to make me invisible."
"Whatever that technology is, it's far from perfect. I can totally see your outline," Rina added tossing a piece of popcorn into her open mouth.
"Yeah, I figured as much," Virgil sighed as he went on his way, remaining hidden until he ducked back into the hallway that led into the other rooms, where he wasn't visible through the windows. Cloak was a fascinating application to the Nanosuit, though the comparatively-high energy cost of using it kept it from being "OP". While from a distance and in the shadows he was nearly invisible, more than once even while he was being completely silent, the moment a bad guy turned towards him, their eyes would widen in recognition, evidence that he'd been seen, even while cloaked. The purpose of the tarp he wore was to be a cheap identity-concealant, keeping the bulk of the Nanosuit out of sight, but because Cloak did not extend to the layer of plastic in the same way it did the gun in his hand back in the Red Zone, he'd simply set it aside and go forward without it, before reclaiming it later. 'It isn't like I should expect it to be perfect or anything. Super-science or not, it is still just a prototype. Man, why does that word set me off for some reason?' he asked himself as he stepped around the corner, Cloak dropping and returning him to sight right as he reached Athena's door. "Athena?" *knock*knock* "You in?"
"Come in. It's unlocked," Athena's muffled voice replied. Opening the door, Virgil stepped into Athena's dimmed room, the windows at the opposite side from the door perpetually drawn closed. In addition to the iron bars on the other side preventing break-in, the inside of the windows had been covered in a reflective silver paint, deflecting the heat from outside, as well as bouncing back any monitoring equipment that may try to reap the fruits of Athena's labor. Once or twice, one of Moxxi's guests was in actuality a worker from a tech firm, trying to follow up on rumors about a girl who could pump out tech rivaling Wayne and LexCorp, so to protect her work Athena had made the room a veritable blind spot to outside eyes. Infared would see a blind spot, radio signals would stop short at the Faraday Cage placed against the walls, and it was pretty much impossible to try anything funny from the room below. The price of genius, is that there would always be others who want to claim your work as their own. Virgil had questioned Athena on why she didn't simply join the science division of Wayne Corp or Queen Consolidated, and she simply answered that after the hell that was public schooling, she was slow to trust new people, let alone a whole department of them.
'I guess I can understand the need for secrecy. I'd be hard-pressed to trust anyone too if I could shell out Men in Black gear,' Virgil thought as he looked to the work bench on his right. Among the mess of odds and ends was something that looked suspiciously like the Noisy Cricket from the first MIB movie. For all he knew he could've been staring at a Pocket Deathstar.
"Thank you for coming on such short notice," Athena said turning to him from her desk. With the overhead lights on, he was able to see something in her lap folded up like a blanket, colored silver. "If you could put this on, I can run the final tuning," she said standing on her feet and unfurling what she had in her hands.
"A cloak?" Virgil asked looking at what he was being handed. It was a hooded cloak much like the Rogue archetype would be seen wearing in video games, fastened at neck-level with a rectangular silver buckle. Throwing it over his shoulders, he found that it came down to just around knee level, while the addition of a "beak" to the hood further obscured his head from sight. Seeing that little dip in the cowl above his head made him think of something from Assassins Creed. It was a good game, one of his favorites and what many considered a "Sacred Cow" of the modern gaming era, the kind of game that, being so iconic, was considered above reproach and criticism. However, neck-stabbing got kinda old after a while and he simply grew out of it after the second installment.
The days where the most-challenging thing on the agenda was a particularly hard level in a stealth-oriented video game felt like forever ago. A time in his life that he could never get back, even if he tried. Sure, he could play video games again, but he wouldn't get the same joy out of his virtual accomplishments when what he'd lived through was so much more exciting, and frightening, in comparison.
"Yes," Athena said adjusting her glasses, the awkwardness from a few minutes ago having bled completely out of her expression. "While your suit's cloaking suite is impressive, capable of hiding from microwave and infared detection, it still doesn't change the fact that the lensing effect it creates makes you slightly visible, even while cloaked. What you're wearing is an electro-reactive textile I designed after examining the Nanosuit's dermal layer, and the electromagnetic field it generated around objects of metallic composition when they too were rendered invisible."
"In English?" Though he was confused by her words, he got some of it. While the gun and knife in his hands had been made invisible while he used Cloak in the Red Zone, the plastic tarp he covered himself up with did not, so he figured it was down to composition or size.
"It will turn invisible as you do, and because it helps break up your shape, you're less-likely to be detected. However, because it lacks the sufficient mass, it will not be able to use Armor Mode, so try to keep it out of the line of fire," she replied as she went over to an apparatus to her side, before drawing out a pair of suction cups on the ends of long wires. "If you'll give me a minute, I can do the fine-tuning to better-synchronize the rate of cloaking between the suit and the cloak itself," she said as she affixed one cup to the cloak, the other to the suit itself, before moving back to her computer and typing at a pace so dizzying, it looked like she'd grown extra arms and become an Asura.
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
"That girl is so smart, it's terrifying," Virgil admitted to himself, back in his own room after Athena had finished calibrating what she had decided to call the "Hunter Cloak" to his Nanosuit's stealth suite. Looking at himself in a mirror while using Cloak, it was pretty obvious he was standing right there, due to the slight "lensing" effect his body created. It wasn't transparent in the same way a window was, when the Nanosuit used Cloak, the light was refracted around it, hence why he could still be seen. With the Hunter Cloak on, because the shape that was being cloaked was less-defined and more-amorphous, it was easy to understand how something like that could be more-easily overlooked.
*Knock*knock* "Hey Virg', you gonna be sticking around for dinner tonight, or are you going to be doing the whole Dark Knight thing again?" Rina asked from the other side of his door. While the Moxxi Family had keys to all the guest rooms, they were still kind enough to respect everyone's privacy, which Virgil was thankful for
"I'll be staying in tonight, don't worry," Virgil replied. "And please don't compare me to that spandex-wearing fruitcake with the little-boy sidekick! You know how I feel about those guys," he added, thankful that tonight he had no such plans. The more nights in a row he did his extracurriculars, the greater the chance there was for him being cornered into an unfavorable position. That's why he took Sundays off. So that way there'd be one night a week where he would not appear under any circumstance, giving people reason to doubt the existence of "The Hunter" for as long as possible. Batman had been considered "myth" for a number of years, sounding like something from the night terrors of the local drug fiend, until his existence was eventually substantiated as "fact" when enough sightings by credible individuals took place.
"The Hunter" wasn't a moniker he chose for himself, not like the last one anyway. It was merely one that the people in the lower quarter had given to the enigmatic figure that stalked the streets in the dead of night, "punishing the wicked" or some nonsense bullshit like that. Part of it was "to do the right thing", which for him involved beating the snot out of criminals, taking the contents of their wallets, and leaving them facedown in the nearest back alley dumpster or trash can. Another was to tire himself out before bed and remove the sense of restlessness from himself. The final part, was because a small part of himself wanted to just lash out at everything around him for what was taken from him, and what better whipping boy than the criminal community? He and most everyone else gets to sleep easier at night, and the bad guys get the stuffing kicked out of them. Everyone wins.
"Sorry man. Kinda forgot you had issues with the underwear-on-the-outside club," Rina apologized. She'd been one of the first people he'd opened up to about that, the topic coming up when she had caught him watching G. Gordon Godfrey and agreeing with at least some of what the news pundit was saying. Some of it may've been a tad extreme, bordering on complete ignorance and praying on the incompetent and uninformed, but the stuff about Wonder Woman's outfit "devaluing" women because it looked like something one of Captain America's showgirls would wear had at least some truth to it.
"It's fine, it's fine. I won't rage quit on you if that's what your worried about," Virgil returned.
"Yeah, you're right about that," she chuckled. "Oh, by the way, heard you put on a little show for sis this morning. Way to go big guy." You could practically hear the smile in her voice.
"Th-That was unintentional!" Virgil cried, red in the face. His history with the opposite sex was… less than exemplary, maybe due to the fact that before Manhattan he'd never been in one place long enough to form any meaningful bonds with them. The foster mothers were one thing, but associating with a girl who was completely unaffiliated with your home life was quite another. Moxxi was like the mother hen, Balalaika was the female boss who put the fear of God in him, Shaula was indifferent, Rina and Tina were the little-sister-types, but his relationship with Athena was the most… awkward.
"With how much she was blushing this morning, you must've been working out. Anyway, I'll see you at dinner," she added, before the sound of her footsteps echoed down the hall and disappeared entirely.
" . . . With the atmosphere around this place," Virgil thought to himself as he looked around the room, "it's really starting to feel like home." That very word struck a chord deep inside of him. "Home…" he repeated, grasping at his shirt above his heart. The heart was closer to the center of the body than most were aware, most thinking it was in the center of the left pectoral, but we're deviating from the narrative. "I never thought I'd get this feeling again," he said walking over to the window, pressing his forehead to the glass and looking down at the streets.
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
Crysis 2 Soundtrack: Epilogue "Main Theme" – Hans Zimmr
Bludhaven
August 22, 22:35 EST
'This is the fifth person I've found in this state,' Virgil thought to himself as he looked down at the body at his feet. Said body was closer to a corpse, still warm if only barely to the touch. But totally not his fault, he found it that way when he got there! The body was that of a young man barely out of high school, sprawled out over a couple bags of trash and unceremoniously dumped as though he too were garbage to be disposed of. His expression was vacant, eyes fogging over, head lolled to the side.
What made him similar to the past four bodies, those being just the ones he'd found, were the two pinpricks at his neck, as though someone had taken a pair of syringes and injected something into his artery; word on the street was vampires were involved, but that was probably a crock-a-shit. This wasn't a simple overdose either, most drug addicts don't do drugs in a back alley atop bags of trash… Okay maybe they still do them in back alleys, but never on top of trash... probably. During the summer, a number of bodies like this had been turning up, and while it wasn't uncommon to find John and Jane Does left in back alleys after they expired by various circumstances, there were two additional consistencies with the people that were found with vampire-esque markings on their necks. Autopsy reports indicated that their hearts had been violently brought to a stop, and their thalamus, the part of the brain where the information from pain receivers was collected, had completely burned out.
'Something's going on, but because this hasn't reached the upper quarter, no one's doing anything. Yet,' Virgil thought to himself as he looked at the body. It wasn't that he really blamed the cops for their negligence either, because no matter how effective a law-enforcement agency was, there were always things that would slip between the cracks, or things that held greater priority. 'Wait, something's different,' he said as his eyes were drawn towards the figure's lips; no homo. There was a trickle of blood escaping the corner of his mouth, and by some strange compulsion, taking two fingers, he wiped the blood away, before running it between his fingertips and thumb. A moment later to his shock, the rubber-like pads on the ends of his fingers seemingly drank the blood.
Analyzing… Isolating human vectors… the Nanosuit's on-board AI spoke into his mind, a myriad of chemical formulas appearing before his line of sight. Those same formulas were broken apart, pieces of it thrown away while others were analyzed in greater detail. However, because he wasn't a chemist, nor did he know what kind of software the Nanosuit was running on, he had no way of deciphering what the suit was "seeing" or even trying to tell him.
'Hnn… I have no way of reading this data while it's in this format,' Virgil growled to himself. 'Some of those elements I know are not supposed to be in a human body,' he thought in reference to the hexagons containing certain atomic symbols, 'but until I can learn more I'm just wasting my time.'
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
Present
'That feeling in the pit of my gut is acting up again, and I'm painfully aware of what happened last time that happened,' Virgil thought to himself as he turned from the window and threw himself onto his bed. 'School is just around the corner. Students are going to get bored, want an escape from the real world, and they're going to turn to cigarettes or sex or drugs to get it. If whatever is leaving people heart-stopped and burned-out in the head is some new kind of drug, we could very well have another Venom Explosion on our hands.'
Venom was the street name for a form of super-steroid that originated from Santa Prisca, but the uninformed only knew that it was the power source for the muscle-bound supervillain Bane. When it first reached the mainland, like any form of steroid, it was marketed as a performance-enhancer for backroom deals. As expected of athletes who were looking for a free ride to college on athletic merit, but didn't necessarily want to put in all the work that came with it, when the college scouts came around, they wanted to make an extra "splash" by any means necessary. Because Venom had yet to explode into popularity at the time, there wasn't any fool-proof means of testing for its presence, so for a time those that used it were able to get away with it. However, Venom was highly addictive, and without a special apparatus to apply it constantly, it only worked for a few minutes after initial injection. You give drug addicts with roid rage, numbering in the dozens and looking for their next high super-strength and the muscular density of concrete, then you've got a very big problem on your hands.
'Then again it could just be your generic narcotic offering a new kind of buzz, and not grant any form of enhanced condition whatsoever,' the brunette lamented. 'Still, I should keep an eye open and an ear to the ground. Tina might not go to public school, but Rina still does, so if this thing gets out of hand, it could very well catch her in the crossfire too.'
*SHARP DRESSED MAN*
NeoNazo356: The segment at the beginning about Virgil finding rape victims after that giant mess in the hallway wasn't planned to be put in this chapter, but it was implied to have taken place. It was the closest thing any of them (the students Virgil killed) had seen to the apocalypse, so of course they're going to try and have sex in their final hours, consented or not.
Spaceman: Disasters can bring out the best and worst in people. Sometimes people have hope and they work together to rebuilt what they lost, sometimes people have no hope and fall into a despair that drains them of their humanity. Hope can determine if a neighbor will offer help or drive people away with a shotgun. Hope can determine if an apocalypse is truly the end. In a zombie apocalypse or any survival situation in which there is no hope but surviving hell another day, it's possible that young men not adapting to change could lose themselves and what morals they possess. I've scene this in several series and while I detest the Rape is Drama trope, I can understand the reasoning something like this could happen.
NeoNazo356: As for the in-depth description about Virgil's vigilante work and training, this was more character elaboration. It also touches up on "the clothes make the man", but also that the man makes the clothes WORTH something. You can "put an outfit on" as many times as you want, but if you can't "wear it", you may as well be wearing rags. For example, you could put the same tuxedo on two different guys, but for the one that doesn't have the confidence to "walk the walk", the tuxedo might as well not even BE a tuxedo.
Spaceman: There is a difference between a person in clothing and person who truly wears the clothing. It is the person that wears a suit that brings out the full capacities of the suit. The person inside determines success or failure in hopeless situations. In Marvel Comics, there are many people who could wear the Iron Man Suits built by Tony Stark and many who have worn those suits, but only Tony Stark can be the Invincible Iron Man. In the Kill la Kill anime, Ryuko first wore the sentient clothing (Kamui) Senketsu and only gained a little power for her spilled blood. It was when she truly wore him, resonated with him, that their power was fully released.
NeoNazo356: As for the "Hunter Cloak", while initially I planned to debut it much later in the story, I found an opportunity to develop the character-to-character relationship between Virgil and Athena, showing off the dynamic by which they operated under, both under formal and informal circumsatnces.
Spaceman: Original Characters lack the detailed history of previously-established characters like Harry James Potter, Naruto Uzumaki, and countless others, whose personalities are clearly-defined and easy to remember through association. Original Characters are blank canvases whose existence is realized in the words of the writers, and they need to define themselves amongst the characters they meet, as well as their likes, dislikes, hopes, aspirations, etc.