Category: Hero Beat

It began with a surprise visit from Lancer at 11:00 PM one Thursday night, a visit that I’d been hoping for but was betting against happening. I wanted a behind-the-scenes look at the Street Angel Network, an underground system of contacts who helped out vetted superheroes with various degrees of expertise. Only those crime fighters who spent two tours on the street had a shot of being shown behind the curtain, and taught the two golden rules:

• Don’t break their trust.
• Don’t abuse their services.

I was thrilled for a peek at what most heroes would’ve killed to have, and I agreed that I would protect the names of the innocents, some of whom were risking jail time, disbarment, and revoked licenses for helping superheroes under the table.

***

Following my meetings with Raph and Lewit, Lancer introduced me to more codenamed Angels, from Gabriel whose van ferried crimefighters as a kind of Uber for superheroes, to Shofar, an old man who maintained multiple burn phones to both transmit messages between heroes and to act as a kind of 911 switchboard.

It was getting late by this point, near 3:00 AM on a Friday, and I was figuring our tour was winding down for the night. Like the city itself, however, the Street Angel Network apparently never slept and having insomnia was seen as a virtue.

The next stop was codenamed Uriel, and I met the opposite of the evening’s fare of blue collar men and women willing to help the heroes. Uriel came from money and culture, which I could see in the way he met me and how he spoke. His fingernails were clipped and short, his clothing casual without a thread out of place. His lair was a large loft filled with the type of forensics equipment I’d read about in my favorite detective comics.

Uriel was a one-man laboratory, with the hardware to handle forensic work that would make many a small police department green with envy. There was no autopsy equipment; otherwise, I saw an assortment of devices, both new and vintage, separated into the different arms of Forensic science. A central table contained the tools that the different disciplines shared including stereoscopic microscopes, comparative microscopes for trace and ballistics comparison, an electron microscope with X-Ray scanner for things like trace evidence and gunshot residue tests (and before you get the impression that I know the differences between them, I don’t—Urial was more than happy to detail his equipment and uses for me). His main computer was also hooked up to various databases including AFIS for fingerprints, and the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. I didn’t ask how he had access.

The firearms table had scales and balances while the serology table was covered in test tubes, a table-top storage fridge, a centrifuge, and test tubes. A chemistry table contained the most serious hardware with the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer while off to the side was an X-Ray machine near four bookcases stacked with books, studies, and reports. A framed black & white photo of Bernard Spilsbury, one of the fathers of modern forensic pathology, hung next to an earmarked poster for X-Files: The Truth is Out There. When Uriel caught me looking at them, he laughed and said: “Spilsbury and Mulder… they’re both stubborn and driven, like me.”

From an old bronze espresso maker, Uriel brewed a mean expresso for me, helping fight off the fatigue that was seeping in. We chatted over steaming cups, talking more freely than I had with any other angel. Uriel seemed pleased to have the attention, and I understood why. He toiled in privacy and helped capture many a criminal; it wasn’t attention he was looking for… just the opportunity to unburden some of his exploits.

“Not all crime fighters get a Batcave or have the know-how to analyze evidence, so… they come to me.”

When I asked him what the hardest part of the job was, he glanced at Lancer before laughing. I even thought I detected the hint of a smile on Lancer as well.

“This crime-fighter, who shall remain nameless, comes to me with trace evidence that he gathered from a murder—a stabbing of a junkie the cops didn’t care enough about. The evidence all points to one guy… let’s call him John Smith. I’ve got his DNA, his hair, his fingerprints everything. So I tell my crime fighter this, and he stammers out: ‘But I’m John Smith.’” Uriel chuckles. “Cross-contamination, that’s the hardest part. Most crime fighters can’t process a crime scene worth a damn and half of what I get is unusable. I try to teach them, I try to equip them,” says, nodding to the small satchels that I learn are simple evidence-gathering kits, “but most of them don’t bother carrying them around.” He smiles at Lancer. “Too much of a bulge I guess.”

Uriel explains that he probably learns more about the crime fighters themselves sometimes than he does about the crimes they’re investigating.

“Doesn’t that scare off superheroes?” I ask. “The chance you might figure out who they are?”

He nods and then looks over at Lancer. “That’s why I ask Lancer to wipe their identities from my head when I do find out something too personal.”

“You let him erase your memories?” I blurt out.

“Better that than some sociopath torturing me for the information. Besides, it’s what I signed on for.”

Up to this point, I’ve tried not to push for personal information, but the idea of letting someone root in my head terrifies the living hell out of me. It’s like voluntary Alzheimer’s, so I plow the course and ask. “You’ve obviously got money… so… what drives you to do this?”

He pauses a second, thinking about it. Then he tells me, “I was orphaned,” he says. “When I was 9, a mugger shot my mother and father right in front of me as we were leaving the opera.” He bursts out laughing a second later. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I don’t need Hell or tragedy or a crisis of faith to do something with my money and education. And I don’t need powers to do good either.”

Dawn’s approaching by the time we leave and the delivery trucks are already rumbling through New York, delivering the essentials for the morning rush. I’m ready to throw myself across the finish line, but Lancer tells me “one last angel.”

Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleum is the last active cemetery in Manhattan and certainly the last place I expected to find myself. Through the bare trees, I can see the cold Hudson and the flicker of headlights. Lancer steps inside one of the mausoleums, and we stand before an urn crypt, quietly looking at a name… a woman who died a decade ago. When I finally ask “was she a Street Angel?” my whispers echo and I feel like a thief in this place and in the fraternity of heroes I’ll never really be a part of.

“Grandma. She wasn’t the first person to help us, but… she organized them. She started the whole network thing. We kept her secret, tried to keep her safe.”

I did a quick calculation of her age… she lived for a respectable 84 years and yet I didn’t think that was the end of the story. Lancer was making a point, I could feel it, so I asked the question that needed to be asked to continue her tale.

“What happened?”

“We weren’t closing ranks like we should have, and word got around that Grandma was at the center of a network. I guess to the bad guys, she seemed like a chink in our armor… a goldmine of information.”

“Jesus,” was all I managed. I couldn’t imagine hurting an old person, but then he said one name… Vuko. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know the name, but Lancer’s connections with Tango at the War College and with The Honor of The Samaritan Guard meant his knowledge ran to the military as well and there was a long and deep history with metas as government operatives. He continued.

“Vuko was KGB-Alfa. We’re talking Cold War era stuff here going back to the late 60s. Mid-70s, he breaks rank and resurfaces as a soldier of fortune in Angola, Lebanon, that sort of thing.”

When I wondered aloud if he was Akula, the breed of Russian metas working for the Bratva and for Russian millionaires that started appearing around the same time in the 70s, Lancer shrugged.

“Akula, no. He hates the Russians and they hate him back. There’s some bad blood there over what? I can’t say. He’s incredibly gifted with guns and he takes punishment like a prizefighter on PCP.”

Lancer went on to explain how someone must have hired Vuko to find Grandma and interrogate her, and that’s exactly what he did.

“He tortured and murdered two angels before he found her and went to work on her. Only… Grandma wasn’t given up anything. She was a tough bird, a vet, and she held out long enough for a couple of crime fighters to stumble across the other murders and beeline it to her. Vuko got away, but Grandma was badly wounded. She didn’t make it.”

We were both quiet a moment, and I realized Lancer was waiting for me to process the information, to piece it all together. Ever since that time, the crime fighters in the know would become highly protective of their angels, but then—why give me a tour unless…?

“You want to wipe my memory, don’t you?” I asked.

“I think their story needs to be told… we could use more help out there and people have to know the price.”

“But.”

“But, I need to erase some details so you don’t become a target for the authorities or the criminals. I need to erase locations and how to reach them, and I need to plant false intelligence, the kind of details that would lead criminals to me and other crime fighters instead of to the angels. I want criminals to know that if they go after the angels, I’m going to wipe the slate with their heads and mentally regress them to the point they popped out of the womb. And I will keep them in that state.”

It was an effective message, at least to me. Looking at Grandma’s name and remembering the people I met this evening, I understood the terrible risk of being a Street Angel. Was I scared of having Lancer tap into my thoughts and scramble them around a bit? Absolutely. Memories and mental acuity are at the core of how we define ourselves, so to surrender control over that terrified me. What if I wasn’t the same afterward? What if Lancer had inadvertently sabotaged something integral to me like my natural curiosity or my ability to write?

And yet, could I be responsible for someone’s death. I visualized sitting there, writing the obituary of a Street Angel I was responsible for killing one of them because I couldn’t withstand torture or interrogation. How would I even begin to apologize to someone or their loved ones? For the first time since this all started, I considered abandoning the article, partially out of fear of Lancer tooling around in my brain, and partially because I was afraid of that kind of responsibility.

Instead, I said, “Do it,” before I could reconsider.

***

To tell you all the truth, I feel almost nothing about the memories that were taken or altered. I’m not sure how Lancer’s powers work or why I was expecting cardboard cutouts in place of the real memories, but the missing moments of that Thursday night to Friday morning feel more like napping through bits of a movie I was watching. I remained grateful for the experience and I found it impossible to tell which memories had been tweaked or altered. So it’s with that sentiment that I say that my tour of the Street Angels Network is as true as my memory allows. Only the interview quotes themselves, which I wrote down, are from the moment of the moment.

Before Lancer floated away from my apartment window that early morning, however, I did manage to ask him, “Lancer… this Vuko guy you mentioned. Is he still out there?”

“I think so, but the guy’s tough. The last time I heard about him… he’d gone toe-to-toe with Bangarang about, oh, a year ago, and still managed to walk away.”

That was enough to send chills down my back.

When you first become a crime fighter, there’s a lot you don’t know. The first lesson is that it’s not a clubhouse out there; metahumans are either territorial about protecting their opportunities for fame and fortune, or they’re the diehard vets suspicious of your motives. Then there’s the stuff nobody tells you about, be it where to find functional outfits, how to protect your brand against marketing poachers, and how to communicate with the police.

One of the secrets to being a crime-fighter is what’s considered an industry secret shared only with those heroes who operate beyond a tour or two. It’s for metahumans who pursue heroism for selfless means, and not a shot at glory, and it’s passed on by word of mouth, as much an act of trust like learning someone’s secret identity as it is a rite of passage.

The Street Angels Network is the name of an underground system of contacts willing to help heroes under the table. Some are professionals whose jobs prevent them from helping metahumans without permission or for whatever ethical oaths they’ve sworn. Some are doctors and nurses, some still practicing and others striped of their license. Some are lawyers, or cops, or retired metas themselves. Some charge for the sake of supplies but most offer their services for free. The only rules for using the Street Angels Network is:

1. Don’t break their trust.
2. Don’t abuse their services.

My journey into the Street Angels Network began at 11:00 PM one Thursday night, when a rap at my window startled me. My apartment was three stories up. Lancer was hovering outside, arms crossed and a simple question on his mind. “You ready?” was all he said.

I’d been expecting this visit for a while, but I was still trying to crawl back into my own skin after that scare. I’d known Lancer for a while, now, but I had a hard time readingthe man. Throw his mental abilities into the mix, and I was genuinely scared of him. If he’d ever picked up on that in the time I’d known him, however, he never indicated.

I was about to be given a tour of the Street Angels Network; not all of it and even the Street Angels themselves didn’t know the full extent of their own loosely affiliated organization, but the caveat was all the same. I was to use false names, locations, and descriptions to protect the men and women dedicated to helping metahumans.

Lancer used a mental cloak to keep us hidden, and we wandered the streets like ghosts. It wasn’t that people didn’t see us per se, just that a subconscious urge made them ignore us like we were a pair of non-descript faces in the pages of Where’s Waldo. It was thus obfuscated that we arrived at our first stop. It looked like any other building, the apartment door short a coat of paint and the blare from a television set filtering across the floor.

The man who answered the door went by the codename of Raph, short for Raphael, the archangel of healing. I’d consistently see this Judeo-Christian-Islamic theme behind the Angels, for obvious reasons. Inside his apartment, Raph had a variety of triage kits, disinfectants, some pain-killers, puncture proof disposal bags, and a room he’d insulated against sound that could be converted to emergency care with a massage table for an operating table and a cot for recovering patients. It was surprisingly clean. Raph was polite but apprehensive, and it was only after Lancer insisted on him taking a swig from a bottle of liquid courage (which he also used as cheap antiseptic) that he finally warmed up a little to my questions.

“They didn’t let me practice medicine here,” he admitted, “so I had to find another job.”

After I asked him how he got into helping metahumans, he told me about working as a deliveryman when, one night, a customer pulled a knife on him. A metahuman he refused to name saved him, but got cut badly, and Raph treated his wounds and quickly developed a reputation among some crimefighters as a street doctor who would treat your injuries, no questions asked.

The “no questions asked” is the currency of the Street Angels Network; heroes need these contacts because they don’t trust official channels, while the Street Angels themselves have their own lives to protect. Raph himself could be arrested for practicing medicine without a license, but he calls himself “the middleman” between the heroes and the ERs. Although doctors in general protect their patients under Doctor/Patient confidentiality, they’re still required to report stabbings, shootings, and suspected signs of injuries due to power usage. Many heroes don’t want to be arrested on charges of non-cooperation.

“How do you safely dispose of all the medical waste?” I asked. Treating metahumans was a dangerous affair, and if I’d learned anything from interviewing Roadkill Inc., metahuman waste was called problematic residuals for a reason. More than one person had died from touched meta-contaminants.

“One of the street angels has access to a cremation furnace,” Lancer said. “We use it to get rid of various things.”

“Bodies?” I asked.

The room went quiet, but Lancer remained nonplussed. “Never. We don’t make the network an accessory to murder. But we do burn a drug dealer’s stash when we know he might walk, or a dangerous piece of tech that has no right being made or retro-engineered.”

Our next stop wasn’t any less homely… another non-descript apartment that could be found in any lower tax bracket. In these places, though, people proactively minded their own businesses, making it easier for Street Angels to operate. This time, we visited the home of a short woman who spoke in a low voice to avoid waking up someone in the next room. Whether it was her partner, a relative, or her children, I practiced the currency of the agreement and didn’t ask questions.

She called herself Lewit, and I was hard pressed to remember an angel of that name. Instead I asked, “So what do you do?” The woman’s smile was bright and encouraging, and she motioned for me to follow her. Her workroom was hidden and both Lancer and Lewit chuckled at what must have been my shocked expression. This ample woman, someone I would have expected to be a lawyer or bureaucrat by day, was an engineer. There were several worktables covered in various machine shop tools, or with electronic gadgets including hand tools, soldering tools, cables and wires, and circuit boards. The walls were covered in organized shelving units and drawers, and the empty spaces were filled with a high-end 3D printer, a gun drill, a button rifling machine, a reloading press, a pallet of coolant oil, boxes of cartridges, and so much more. I was looking at a goldmine of equipment here and Lewit must have sensed my thoughts because she simply said: “I have patrons.”

“Patrons” is a polite way of saying “junkrats,” a breed that encompasses crimefighters, glory hounds, and straight up collectors, mostly baseline humans who buy high tech devices from inventors strapped for cash or retiring from the life. My attention fixated on a wall display case above the door.

“Are those–?”

“Street Saint’s old power batons. I gave him an upgrade and he said thank you,” she said, nodding to the two weathered batons crossed and on display.

I never learned whether Lewit was a baseline human or metahuman but she helped crime fighters repair their gear. I sensed a military clip to her bearing and to the way she spoke; by the way she handled the equipment, I had no doubt she could shoot a weapon as easily as she could field strip and repair one. Many crime-fighters, especially the Charlie-class ones, often used gadget belts and various tools to help keep the streets safe. Lewit was the go-to saint for building, repairing, and outfitting those gadget-wielding crime fighters. She was a Jane-of-all-Trades when it came to equipment, mechanical and electronic, and she was even known to custom-build devices for her clients when she had the parts and thought the cause was good.

I wanted to spend more time speaking to Lewit, but she had an early morning and Lancer was eager to get moving. There were still more Street Angels to visit that night, and I was not about to waste my one shot to peek behind the curtain.

TO BE CONTINUED: PART II NEXT WEEK

On May 12^th, 2012, Sean Cavendish walked into the Marcoli wake to pay his respects. He kissed Lisa Marcoli, grieving widow of suspected hitman Giovanni Marcoli, shook hands with suspected underbosses, capos, and high ranking soldiers of the Tozzetti Crime Family, and then detonated his suicide bomb vest. At that exact moment, at 4:20 PM, Sean Cavendish also walked into the offices of Benito Tozzetti and shot both the suspected crime boss and his consiglieri and daughter, Emily Tozzetti, before being gunned down by Benito’s bodyguards.

How did Sean Cavendish get close enough to the Tozzetti Crime Family to behead its leaders? He’d been a member of their organization for the last seven years, moving up in the business as a trusted lieutenant and moneyman. How was he in two places at once? Well, until then, Sean Cavendish appeared to be a baseline human. After that, however, everyone discovered he was, in fact, a metahuman with the ability to create clones of himself. Rather than denying the allegations, Sean Cavendish embraced them and adopted the moniker of the “Narcissist,” a fitting name for a man known for his considerable ego.

What followed was a summer of confusion and speculation. The New York District Attorney’s office went after Sean Cavendish, expecting a slam dunk case, but Sean Cavendish’s legal team made short work of what they called “biased and unwarranted attacks against their client by anti-metahuman elements within the government.” Their main defense was that Sean Cavendish created autonomous clones who were responsible for their own actions. And as a result, the two clones who committed the murders were acting of their own accords. The desperate DA tried everything as their case unraveled. They tried to use Sean’s clones to testify against him. They said that Sean Cavendish was ultimately responsible for the actions of his creations since they were effectively him. They said his clones were following Sean’s orders, and then they claimed that Sean should never have created doubles of himself without understanding the full implications of his powers.

It all came down to one question, however. Who was ultimately responsible for murdering all those people? Sean Cavendish’s lawyers filled the jury with enough reasonable doubt that he was acquitted of all charges.

The DA’s office had been given one chance to stop Sean Cavendish from filling the void left behind by the Tozzetti Crime Family, and they failed. Instead, the Narcissist took over the remnants of Tozzetti interests as a one-man army, rebuilding the empire he helped shatter according to sources that have asked to remain anonymous. With his involvement in the finances of the mafia empire, he was rumored to know the location of every offshore account and safe house money drop, and he used that knowledge to fund the rise of his own empire.

In recent months, more rumors and allegations have surfaced that indicate that the Narcissist has created a downright hedonistic regime that makes the extravagances of bacchanalian Rome look tame by comparison. He’s been accused by several heroes including Malleus and Griffe of using his own clones as his private sex slaves and been instrumental in introducing the New York club circuit to a variety of new party drugs.

The Narcissist is a rarity in today’s landscape. If superheroes have a short shelf life on the Tour, then most would-be villains are nothing more than embers that live and die in the moment. It’s hardly surprising when most metas who adopt the cape want public adoration, and while heroes can play the anti-hero, a villain is still bad PR. And then there’s the fact that the world and the various governments have spent the last 70 years learning how to fight metas and the last 20 worrying about the worst possible scenario when a powerful meta adopts an unsanctioned philosophy.

Few villains last long against that kind of experience and training, so when a new threat emerges and stays the course, they are often more than the traditional comic book inspired bank robber or mad scientist. Be they the strange Bangarang whose powers and mysterious aims make him difficult to predict or apprehend, the water-wielding Mitgh who navigates inside non-extradition countries while running her criminal empire, or Khevtuul, the mysterious human trafficker in Southeast Asia known only by his name and shadow abilities.

There are more villains to be sure, but Narcissist is unique among his kind. He operates in plain sight and readily agrees to interviews and public appearances. He has built an empire on smart planning and through legal maneuvering using his clones as fall guys and alibis. If the authorities ever hope to build a case against him capable of hurting his criminal empire, it won’t likely be through any superhero battle, but the RICO Act, the same Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act that hurt the Gambino Crime Family, the Latin Kings street gang, and the Lucchese Crime Family. If there are any plans to bring the Narcissist’s empire down, however, there aren’t any indications it’ll happen anytime soon.

When I first met Gideon March, she looked like any six-year old. She wouldn’t make eye contact, instead looking at her feet like she’d found them for the first time as she kicked them back and forth on the sofa. You knew she was listening, though, by the way she smiled and looked at you out of the corners of her eyes. And sometimes, just sometimes, you’d catch a flicker of her power as her pupils narrowed into cat-like slits. I was told she could see pheromones, much like her mother Storm Tiger, and both friends and family were dreading the day her father’s explosive powers manifested. He isn’t called Volatile without reason.

Not all prodigies take after both parents, but many do. They are also the least understood and the best kept secret among the superhero community, perhaps more so than one’s own secret identity. Many heroes who are parents to prodigies are terrified of the public scrutiny their children might receive, or the threat posed by the metas they’ve arrested. Gideon March is no exception. While Gideon is famous thanks to the paparazzi who captured photos of her and her slitted eyes last year, both Storm Tiger and Volatile want their daughter to have a well-adjusted childhood.

The first official prodigy was Trevor Endicott, son of British WWII hero Hooded Crow and the German-born Gewrum who defected to the Allies in the middle of the war. Trevor inherited his mother’s shapeshifting abilities and reputedly went on to work for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) as a spy. There’s very little information about Trevor’s life except for some pieces in The Times about “the lad with superpowers.” The Times called him “a prodigy” and the name stuck for all powered offspring.

Because an active Crisis Gene (CG-1) is a recessive gene, a single metahuman parent will rarely pass on his or her abilities to their children. Both parents must be metahuman for a prodigy to be born and exhibit powers. At what age that child shows powers is another matter, and seems to range anywhere from five years to the onset of puberty. Beyond that, it’s unlikely the child of two metahumans will generate abilities, and it has happened that a prodigy develops no powers at all.

Unfortunately, there are so few prodigies out there and meta-parents are so protective of their children that there’s no studies to establish any sort of baseline. It also means that prodigies have become a goldmine of inaccuracies and conspiracy theorists. The most popular of the latter, and the most sexist and troubling in my opinion, is the belief that women who trigger are “artificially inseminated by multiple meta donors to act as superbaby factories to create as many metahumans as it takes to eventually replace humanity.” If you think this assertion just comes from the lunatic fringe, then you’d have to include Congressman Wheeler of Oregon and Chief Judge Madison of the Maryland Court of Appeals in that list. Not only have they unabashedly stated their beliefs on the matter, but they’ve gone so far as to suggest that metahumans can’t marry or have children for “the sanctity of the human gene pool.”

Other people worry about metahuman children for a simpler and perhaps more practical reason. The ability to control their powers, especially with the onset of puberty. Although never officially verified, there are stories within the industry of prodigies undergoing power fluxes and even power shifts during the hormonal turbulence of puberty. It’s no secret that some prodigies end up refining on their parent’s powers or pushing them further. Trevor Endicott was said to be able to take on different human appearances, while his mother was restricted to animal forms.

That said, many metahumans home-school their children and a few even use tutors with powers. Despite a wish to “normalize” their children, metahumans are afraid of accidents or their children getting into fights.

“Prodigy or not, they are still children,” Storm Tiger told me once. “They learn by making mistakes.” It’s those mistakes that terrify parents into thinking metahumans should never have children, and that thinking that forces powered parents to home-school their children.

Regardless, current estimates put the number of prodigies at around 45 worldwide and there rumors that some countries encourage metas to marry one another and have multiple children through incentives like stipends, homes, and state support. The world has yet to see, however, what happens when two prodigies marry and have children of their own. Will it be the beginning of superpowered dynasties? Will it distill power into more powerful metahumans? Nobody knows because as it stands now, we barely understand what being a prodigy actually means, much less what happens to their DNA when they’re steeped in powers from nearly the time of their foundation years.

You’ve probably seen their white and yellow vans driving around Manhattan following a metahuman ‘incident.’ That’s the industry’s polite term for when metahumans get involved in something messy. Roadkill Inc. isn’t a name that inspires confidence, Donna Bartlet will be the first to admit with a broad grin, but nobody can deny the fact that her company is at the top of a field she pioneered. If you ask around, however, most people couldn’t give you a straight answer as to who they are, why they’re there, and what they do. So, to answer all those questions, we decided to talk to Donna Bartlet herself and get the lowdown on Roadkill Inc., one of the most unusual and controversial meta-related enterprises out there.

HERO BEAT: Donna, tell us about Roadkill Inc.

BARTLET: Well, we’re a private hazmat team. When metas fight or save lives, you have a lot of what we call ‘residuals’ left behind. Radiation, toxic blood, resistant skin samples, indestructible hair, strange materials, exotic particles… all of that. We clean it up before some trophy seeker picks up something dangerous or someone’s pet eats it.

HERO BEAT: Isn’t that sort of thing supposed to be handled by the Environmental Protection Agency?

BARTLET: It depends on the mess. There’s a lot of inter-Federal handshaking, so the EPA might coordinate with the Department of Energy or the CDC or USAMRIID, but they mostly jump in when it affects a whole town or city or lands on Federal property. The rest of it falls under local government—the municipality or the state. That’s when we come in.

HERO BEAT: With the EPA’s approval?

BARTLET: That’s right. We are a privately owned business, but the EPA vets us, they perform surprise inspections of our equipment, our facilities, you name it. We pass them with flying colors, naturally, but they keep us on our toes. We decontaminate places so that work crews can go in to rebuild damaged property. It might be the city, or insurance companies, or corporations, but we can move faster than any municipal or Federal agency, I’ll tell you.

HERO BEAT: But your company’s come under fire. You’ve been accused of theft of–

BARTLET: Theft’s a really grand word here and I’ve heard it so often, I’ve learned to nip it in the bud fast. We’re the blue collar workers of Genomics [she says, laughing]. We’ll collect all those samples and sure… we send the residuals off to labs and research facilities. There’s a market for anything with meta DNA or properties. Doing what we do safely, though? That costs money, and it doesn’t pay to take shortcuts.

HERO BEAT: Many metahumans consider that a breach of their privacy.

BARTLET: Oh, you bet. Some even get in our faces about it, try to sue us, but the court’s on our side.

HERO BEAT: The 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court determined that DNA couldn’t be patented.

BARTLET: DNA in its natural form, sure, but let’s face it… metas aren’t a natural occurrence. Their mutations can’t be charted or predicted. What they do doesn’t happen in nature. That falls outside of the Supreme Court’s ruling and makes their genes open to research and trademarking.

HERO BEAT: For now.

BARTLET: For now and a long time, hun. Besides, with the samples we provide, it’s barely enough to whet the appetites of biopharma. If they see something interesting with the samples we send them, they’ll contact the metas directly and pay them really well for more genetic samples. It’s a win across the board.

HERO BEAT: Have metahumans taken them up on that offer?

BARTLET: Yes, but I couldn’t say who. And I mean, really. I couldn’t. Lawyers and all that. But… weren’t you here to talk about me?

HERO BEAT: So how did you get the idea to start Roadkill Inc.?

BARTLET: Watching Ghostbusters. No, cross my heart, I’m serious. After that scene in the grand ballroom when they zap Slimmer and the entire place is trashed, I started wondering who handles all the residual left behind. I’m not talking cleaning up the smashed plates or the tables or anything. I mean the supernatural goop and the radiation left from the proton accelerators. Then I started wondering what happened to the cleaning staff? Would they get cancer? Or get sick because they touched all that slime?

HERO BEAT: Who you gonna call?

BARTLET: Us, right? [She laughs] At first, we were in the disposal business with one van, but then we started getting pinged by biopharma and metallurgy companies, asking to buy anything unusual we found.

HERO BEAT: Unusual?

BARTLET: Anything with genetic information, but I mean, look at what metas can do with metals and substances… it’s incredible. The way they rearrange crystalline structures to play with things creates metals with unique properties. Here… take someone like Chain-Spider. We cleaned up after that fight with Atom-Slayer and sent her broken chains to our client. Turns out, they were made from some kind of bone with a micro-weave of metal, but you take normal bone, right? It’s five times stronger than steel at the same weight. Chain-Spider’s chains were still lighter and just as strong if not stronger. If she’d taken up an offer to donate more links, we could have had a lighter, stronger organic metal that could regrow right now. How terrific would that be?

HERO BEAT: She refused your client?

BARTLET: She vanished. After her accident? But that’s my point. Isn’t it a meta’s responsibility to make the world a better place. Well, what if their bone marrow turned out to be a universal donor for Leukemia patients? What if their skin cells could help burn victims? But no… they’re more worried about fame or protecting their identity than getting checked out by the labs.

HERO BEAT: So you’re holding metas accountable by selling their genetic material?

BARTLET: You’re saying that, hun, not me. And I’m not selling anything they didn’t leave behind. You don’t want me using your residuals, then clean up your mess. It’s what I tell my son. Clean up the mess you made. It’s that simple. Metas are just miffed they didn’t think of it first, but we’re still generous. There’s a couple of metas out there sitting on millions because we put them on the radar of biopharma.

HERO BEAT: Is there really that kind of cash out there?

BARTLET: Sure, it depends, but yeah, if you’ve got the noggin for it. Take a look at Henrietta Lacks… the poor woman responsible for the HeLa line of immortal cells. Without the cancer cells that killed her, we never would have found a vaccine for Polio or conducted all that AIDS and cancer research, or discovered the effects of radiation. Her cell samples created an entire industry. And she was one of us, human.

HERO BEAT: Most metas would take offense at not being referred to as ‘humans.’

BARTLET: Humans don’t poop things that glow in the dark. Do you know how many times the Department of Sanitation or Department of Environment Protection had called us because they found “something” in the sewers or canals that puts their workers at risk? They have us on speed dial. We already call them “metahuman.” That means beyond human… so why are they upset if I call us humans and them metas? I tell you, people are just too damn sensitive.

HERO BEAT: Have you ever caught flack for Roadkill Inc.?

BARTLET: Oh sure, you bet. ‘You’re being insensitive, showing up someplace where people got hurt with that name’ blah blah blah blah blah! Listen, hun, I’m not in the business of holding anyone’s hand. We’re not in this for grief counseling. We’re not there to put a bandaid on your knee. We’re here to run a business, and I’m sorry for what happened to you, but please–get off your high horses and stop pretending that everyone has to cry for you.

HERO BEAT: Has any metahuman ever come after you for something you collected?

BARTLET: Yessir, they have. We have a couple of metas on staff who can put a stop to that.

HERO BEAT: Like Brownout. She suppresses powers?

BARTLET: Oh, she’s a gem. She can stop any misunderstanding before it starts. And she’s great for neutralizing problematic residuals.

HERO BEAT: But not all the time, right? You lost someone last year to a residual?

BARTLET: Poor Hank, yes we did, but that wasn’t on Brownout. We were helping the NYPD with a patch of this… tar-like droplets that they found at a murder? Well, those droplets got real agitated the minute we tried to scan them, and quick as a bullet, they shot into Hank, who was holding portable spectrograph. It was horrible, the way it dug into him.

HERO BEAT: This was the murder investigation of Nano-Gen’s CTO, correct? Gordon Oliver?

BARTLET: Mm-hmm. It’s still under investigation, but whatever killed dear Hank also killed Gordon Oliver and his assistant. Like I said… it’s a dangerous job already. We’re just the most qualified to handle it, and the city knows it. That’s why we’ll continue to be there whenever metas fight, cleaning up the mess so there’s no further damage or loss of life.

“A Russian superhero is a stillborn, stunted thing,” Head of Interpol Moscow, Oleg Yudin, infamously told reporters at a 2009 press conference. His comment was born out of frustration, and he quickly suffered under the lash of the outcry that followed even though Yudin had made a career of blunt statements. This time, he was speaking on the diaspora of Russian metahumans across the globe and the import of foreign superhumans for hire into Moscow itself. Despite the admiration of the rank-and-file for Yudin, however, Moscow’s Police Commissioner and Interpol Secretary General both agreed that it was time for him to step down.

At the time it was seen as a vindication for the proud Russian people, but since then, it’s a move that’s left many people wondering: Was Oleg Yudin right?

There are parts of the world where being a metahuman is plain dangerous: Somalia, Sudan, and Myanmar where civil war has turned regional supers into petty warlords or into weapons of genocide; Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen where religious unrest have made supers instruments of terrorism or victims of it; and China, North Korea, Syria, and Belarus where metahumans have become tools of the regime. So putting Russia on this map is a tricky, dangerous thing. Not because supers live in fear, and not because the Russians don’t love their supers with the fervor of a European soccer fan rooting for his home team at the World Cup, but because an embarrassment of riches is often laid at a metahuman’s feet. And with so much wealth being thrown their way, it’s hardly surprising that many Russian metas sell their services for profit.

The Cold War had seen its share of state-sponsored heroes posturing in both corners of the ring. It was theater, it was camp with an ultranationalist flair, and it was propaganda. What would become the modern identity of the Russian superhuman was born in the death throes of Communist Russia. The captains of the bureaucracy that held the Soviet administration together, the so-called elite known as the nomenklatura, had already seen the writing on the wall. They, along with ex-KGB and with members of the Russian Mafiya, knew that Communism was dying and that capitalism had already wormed its way into the void for those with connections. It was a money grab for State-resources and crumbling institutions, and in the case of metahumans registered by the Soviet state, a literal power grab for their abilities.

Where supers were once expected to follow and obey the edicts of the Supreme Soviet of Russia by way of special division KGB-Alfa, metas found themselves being courted and wooed by the nomenklatura as bodyguards and by the Mafiya as enforcers. It was a new reality, and whatever old world reservations they might have possessed concerning the “evils of the West” evaporated when the money hit their bank accounts. Not all, but those who did found themselves working with metas who’d evaded government notice and who had been working underground for the Russian Mafiya as so-called akulas or sharks.

The Russian Mafiya, or Bratva, first came to the West in the 1970s and 80s, as détente allowed for the immigration of Russian Jews across the world. Russian mobsters hid among the refugees, gaining a foothold in Brighton Beach as the Odessa Mob, and spreading across North America from there. Akulas, on the other hand, didn’t start appearing until after the fall of Communism, in the 90s when the government also lost track of their key bioweapons scientists and some of their nuclear arsenal. Akulas remained below the public radar, however, until Russian enforcers Zaraza and Ovcharka went after several metahumans for their attacks against the Odessa Mob’s franchise businesses. The pair severely wounded The Ruby Saint and Fearsomebody, but it was the brutal murder of Gallant that pulled The Honor and New York’s Finest into the fight. During the month-long manhunt that saw over two-dozen metahumans pull together to apprehend the pair, Zaraza was captured, but Ovcharka managed to escape North America and vanish back inside Russia.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to know more about the tracksuit-wearing metas who worked for the mob; the public’s fascination with Russian akulas began in earnest and it was impossible to satiate their thirst for news. To the West, akulas represented the ghost of the Cold War come back to haunt the Democratic-loving countries. To the Eastern Bloc, they represented heroes who were unafraid of American bullying and its grandstanding metas. They became the foremost threat to U.S. security according to the FBI, and attendance in the War College surged as supers begged for training to protect them from the ruthless Russian-trained killers.

As more information was made public, it seemed that everyone’s fears were justified. Russia’s supers had either trained under the special division of KGB-Alfa or had honed their skills with the ruthless Bratva. Either way, the akulas were to be feared—the new boogeymen and women with whom nobody wanted to tangle. Quick to rise into public notoriety were the brothers Serp & Molot who were supposed to be the next generation of Soviet worker-heroes before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saadak the psychic archer who fought in Afghanistan, Krasnyy Golub’ the Systema master, and Mitgh the water-controlling meta turned first female Bratva boss.

Everyone wanted them caught, nobody wanted to tangle with them. Any time Interpol or a Federal Task Force came close to corning a high-profile akula, they would vanish back into Russia or one of the former satellite states where friends in high and low places alike protected them. Interpol launched Operation Atlantic to apprehend wanted akulas, centered in the Moscow office under Oleg Yudin, but without the resources or exosuits of units like New York’s Armored Mobile Police or the help of local metahumans, they were doomed to fail, hence Yudin’s gaff at the press conference.

What Yudin faced, and what still goes on is a combination of two already insurmountable factors. The first is the disparity of wealth in Russia and particularly Moscow, where extravagantly wealthy men and women can buy the best and most powerful metahumans; even the lowest Charlie-class hero can find lucrative employment and the kind of yearly salary the average Muscovite may never see in a lifetime of hard work. Throw on top of that the promise of ability boosting through power brokers in India, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates, and the allure of more power and money would be enough to test any superhuman’s resolve.

The second is the unspoken fraternity among the Eastern European community of metahumans, that even if you don’t use your abilities for profit, you do not betray your fellow metahuman. It’s what we in the West would better understand as the Blue Wall of Silence, that unspoken rule that police officers do not betray their fellow officers. In this case, it’s called solidarnost’ or ‘solidarity,’ and it is a frightening wall of silence for any Eastern European metahuman thinking of breaking it. At best, you might find yourself outside the protection of your fellow supers, and at worst, hunted by them. Many experts, however, claim the opposite circumstances are equally worse. Akulas are in the business of getting people (especially unaligned metahumans) to owe them favors by helping out with money or manpower… whatever it takes to get a super indebted to them or their bosses. And once you’re in the family, there is no backing out. You’re in for life because these are debts that can never be repaid.

Solidarnost’ applies to the United States, where Russian mobsters have created a thriving mercenary industry in renting out their akulas on contract for other organizations. That said, the hold of solidarnost’ is not as broad here simply because the Russian Mob is more actively surveilled and hunted by American authorities. It’s created a more tightly knit group of akulas who distrust outsiders and rarely fill their ranks with anyone who isn’t originally Eastern European (and thus vetted by people back home).

Unfortunately, there is no hope of it getting better anytime soon as the Mafiya continues to export Eastern European supers and rich Russians import expat metas. Moscow has consistently ranked as the top billionaire city in the world over the past six years, with over 85 billionaires living in the Russian capital of capitalism. Many of them are billionaires thanks to Russia’s oil boom, and they are young and eager to surround themselves with nothing but the best status symbols regardless the cost: Cars, art, mansions, metas. There is a high demand for superhumans, and moreso for experienced metas. This means a brisk trade in both local talent and among expats who washed out on their two-year tours in Europe and North America. With the average salary of Muscovites at $1,200 a month, it’s not surprising that many Russian metas forego patrolling the streets to fight crime when a salaried position pays for a life of comfort for them and their entire family.

Also adding worry and fear of a bloody future involving akulas is what many organized-crime experts are calling an inevitable war between the Mafiyah and the Cartels. Both organizations rent metahumans out as soldiers, and the drug and human smuggling trade is bringing in Cartel-loyal supers from throughout Central and South America up into the United States. With deep pockets on both sides and territory to secure, it seems likely that a mob war between the two will see the first wide scale conflicts between metahumans. If my contacts are to be believed, both the Russians and Cartels are already planning for the eventual conflict by training their mercenaries and importing more metas into North American strongholds. This alone should worry North America’s superheroes, who should be preparing for the worst.

Shredded Gym is called the Venice Beach of the East Coast, if New York had surf, sun, palm trees, and roller-skates. The analogy is lost on most people until you walk into the glass and steel building and see the hard bodies parading around in tight and skimpy clothing that even the best of us would be too uncomfortable to wear or wear well. It’s almost a competition in who can skirt the laws of public nudity without actually getting arrested and I can’t decide if it’s a lesson in anatomy or a reflection of my own self-esteem. Your abs don’t show that clearly if you’re over 8 to 10% body fat, so to see that level of precision in muscle definition, I have to wonder if the percentages here haven’t dipped into the negatives.

Shredded Gym is not the first meta-inspired gym, but it is the largest and most successful. It was started by a methuman named Super-Flex, a hero more known for his antics than his crime-fighting abilities. Regardless the criticism, he takes it with all the aplomb of an Eighties wrestler challenging all contenders on national television. The news crews and talk shows love him, and he’s equal part charisma and showmanship. Not bad for a Charlie-class meta whose body building career started before his trigger event and took off like a rocket afterward.

Despite his antics, Super-Flex is actually a savvy entrepreneur by the name of Jeremy Pena who has managed to make Shredded Gym as chic as Manhattan’s trendiest nightclubs. What makes it so popular isn’t just its metahuman clientele, but the opportunity to watch them train, to exercise on state-of-the-art equipment like the magnetic resistance plates, and to shop at a proshop whose supplements are so cutting edge in terms of nutrition that even professional athletes shop at Pro-Shred; it comes at a steep price, but nobody can argue with the results.

Shredded Gym has grown from its humble beginnings as a 7,000 square foot gym in Upper Manhattan, to the 80,000 square foot titan it is today in the heart of Midtown. The four-story façade is made from shatterproof glass and showcases the three levels of fitness madness for curious pedestrians. The front desk organizes tours of the facilities, but these are mostly behind plates of glass designed to keep people from patrons from their workouts. It also lends the interior an interesting weight that’s part battleship and part starship with its riveted walls and clean solid plate windows. Add to that a parkour gym with an aerial track for the flighted and agilely gifted, private weight rooms for superstars like Grimsta and Bombshell Betty, a high class fitness bar, and frictionless rooms that bring core exercise to a whole new level, and you can understand the appeal of hitting a gym whose guest pass alone is $250 and whose initiation fee is $5,000. Unless you’re a metahuman, in which case Super-Flex himself is more than willing to lower or waive membership costs so long as you train in front of the general public and put on a show of strength, resistance, dexterity, or what are known as aura effects. After all, Shredded Gym is where people can safely train alongside metahumans and tell the tale at their next social event of the brute doing 5-ton chest presses or the speedster racing in the mega-track ball.

While Super-Flex has been accused by various heroes of promoting the worst in superhuman culture, he’s also volunteered staff and facilities to help train a number of heroes to be street-ready for their tours, as well as offered boot camps, private parkour time for team-training sessions for groups like The Samaritan Guard, and given seminars on exercising and regimes. Publicly, Shredded Gym says they don’t condone vigilante behavior, but they do mirror the War College philosophy that a well-trained superhuman is a lower risk to the public safety.

Super-Flex takes none of the criticism personally, however, and neither does his alter ego, Jeremy Pena. “It’s just business,” he says with a wide grin. “Haters are gonna go after the big players because that’s where the notoriety’s at, and I’ll take their bitching as a compliment. Every time some hero complains about us, we see more visitors.”

What may sound like a cavalier attitude towards the rest of the metahuman community actually masks a deep respect for superheroes in general. Super-Flex donates time and staff to events like Hero Week and to various charities to help disaster victims through drives and personal donations. “Am I making money off the phenomenon? Hell, yeah,” Super-Flex says. “But I never tap the well without putting back, and I’m not biting the hand that feeds me.”

There is no denying that there’s a fortune to be made off being a metahuman, which is a line that divides the superhuman from the superhero. Many heroes refuse to monetize their persona for fear that it would undermine their message, but that is contrary to the reality facing today’s powered elite, some of who have had their brand appropriated by other companies. Super-Flex calls his gym an extension of himself as a brand, and one can’t argue with his success. Grimsta, Bombshell Betty, and Super-Flex are a new generation of socially savvy heroes who have managed to capitalize on the new cultural norms and some pundits in the community argue that it isn’t these entrepreneurs who have sold out their identities, but conventional heroes who may have fallen behind on the times.

Regardless, Shredded Gym has become a shining example in the mainstreaming of metahumans. To some, this is a necessary normalization process to making supers more productive members of society, while others feel that establishments like Shredded Gym are merely creating a new social caste and a new category of superstar.

Continuing our conversation with Jake Simmons, star reporter and blogger for stormchasers.com and his experiences covering the exploits of Storm Chasers: The men and women who dive into natural disasters, hoping to trigger their transformation into metahumans. You can read Part I of the interview (here).

Jake Simmons is flying out from JFK International Airport to Caracas, Venezuela to cover the opening of the first government-sanctioned foray into Danger Tourism at the Maracaibo Resort. The newly built resort is situated in the path of an ongoing storm that hits the region 180 days a year for ten hours at night with violent lightning storms. Jake has agreed to discuss the phenomenon of Storm Chasing with us, a dangerous hobby that kills one in a hundred of its pursuers. In today’s installment, he tells us how it can be even more dangerous, and recounts an episode with one of today’s most frightening villains.

HERO BEAT: What’s your most memorable moment in Storm Chasing?

JAKE: You’re talking positive? It had to be that massive sandstorm that hit Syria and Lebanon last year. I was in the region, putting together a report on the Syrian War and seeing if the conflict created more opportunities for triggers.

HERO BEAT: But you’re usually against promoting war zones for Storm Chasers.

JAKE: Yeah, no, absolutely. This was something I was doing privately for a U.S. firm as one of several experts on trigger events. The Syrian and Yemen Civil Wars were pulling in a lot of Arab metahumans and freelancers, and I was trying to see if it created conditions for more triggers or not.

HERO BEAT: Did you find anything interesting?

JAKE: Nothing I can report on now, but I have exclusive rights to post the findings first, so I’m hoping to share those soon. Anyway, we’d just landed in Rafik Hariri International for some R&R when the sandstorm rolled in. Trigger events from sandstorms were rare, but I’d never been in one, so I figured it’d be a good article for the site. The entire experience was surreal. Once I checked in to my hotel, I wandered around Beirut. It felt like I was the last man standing. The streets were empty and visibility went murky after a few feet. Seriously, I’d seen better visibility on dives. It was like everything was lit through an orange filter. The sun doesn’t go out the way you’d expect during torrential rainfall; sunlight is refracted until it’s almost a nimbus that settles in. There’s an orange glow, sound is muffled—it doesn’t carry.

HERO BEAT: Sounds eerie.

JAKE: That’s not the half of it. I was wandering around Taleet Jounblat when I hear a boom—it’s muffled and it’s somewhere above me. I’m thinking artillery, I’m thinking any second now, I’m going to see debris or a shell come down. But it keeps going, keeps moving, and I’m hearing two sounds now. One’s a ‘boom,’ one’s a ‘fwoosh,’ and they keep pushing the sand away. I start feeling it too, the pressure waves through the sandstorm, and I’m seeing the sand ripple. It was a trip.

HERO BEAT: Metahumans?

JAKE: Yeah, Alnnar Alzzll and al Muhandis it turns out, and I was pissed. I was right there, and I couldn’t see the fight. I could only hear them, flying and blasting each other. I caught a flash now and again, but I didn’t see shit.

HERO BEAT: But both are listed as heroes, right?

JAKE: Alnnar Alzzll is Sunni and al Muhandis is Shiite, so yeah, they’re technically heroes but in opposite sects, so that’d make them villains to each other. The two sects came to blows in Lebanon back in July, so this was an encore, I’m guessing. Nobody saw what happened, but the next day, I find this nice coffee shop and sit there while these old timers told me what they heard. Man, you should hear the way they spun the fight. It sounded like the match of the century. I just wish I could have seen it.

HERO BEAT: But that wasn’t your most dangerous experience?

JAKE: No, not even close. The sandstorm was just surreal and kinda beautiful and all kinds of frustrating. But mostly tourism apocalypse… something I felt safe doing—the worst that happened? My throat was raw at the end. The most dangerous thing that happened to me, though…that was the time I almost retired. I saw people die, I got battered something rough, and it, uh… it was because I’d been kidnapped. We got kidnapped, I mean.

HERO BEAT: Kidnapped? And who’s we?

JAKE: I’m not sure what else to call it? Those of us who got pushed into it don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve never felt so—vulnerable in my life. So violated. I thought I was going to die, and for a while, I wanted to.

At this moment, I realized Jake was having a problem reliving the moment, so I gave him a minute to compose himself. He sipped his cup of coffee, and the nervousness I’d seen earlier had been replaced by introspection. When he spoke again, his voice was cautious, the words careful.

JAKE: It was a few years back, close to 1:00 in the morning. I’d just finished writing an article for stormchasers.com, and I was ready to crash. Then the air changed, like all of a sudden. I could feel it, like someone had flipped the dimmer switch on everything. Then he was standing in the room… Bangarang.

HERO BEAT: You were face-to-face with Bangarang?

JAKE: Yeah, and I swear… never again. The way he looked at me like, I don’t know, a bird checking out a worm, it freaked me out. It was like he wasn’t even human. And then he chirped or something, poked me with his staff, and my apartment disappeared. It’s suddenly daylight, and I’m out by the side of the road. At a bus stop. It’s warmer, but not by much, and there’s no snow. I’m dressed in slacks and a white shirt, and I’m not myself. I know that. I can think clearly and all that, but I’m not me. I am, but I’m in someone else’s skin. There’s all these other people standing around, some looking confused. About maybe a dozen, and they’re all Japanese and we’re all staring at each other.

HERO BEAT: When was this?

JAKE: March 11^th.

HERO BEAT: March 11^th?

JAKE: 2011. The Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami.

He leaves that hanging in the air a moment, and I don’t know what to say, what to ask. The journalist side of me wants to doubt what he’s saying, but I can’t. After a moment, he continues, calmly.

JAKE: So, I say “what’s going on?” in English, but it comes out kinda garbled, like I haven’t spoken English for years. And this old woman answers in English but with this French accent. Other people start talking, and we realize it’s happening to all of us, different people in someone else’s body, and we’re all hyped on adrenaline and some of us looked scrapped up. Like we’d gotten into a fight or something. I can remember mandarins lying in the road, and a grocery bag on the ground. Some cars are parked, the drivers looking dazed and walking over to us. It was surreal. Then we hear the chirp again. Bangarang is there. And he’s looking past us, over our shoulders. We look and I saw it, the way the horizon seemed to be moving, shifting. And there’s this thunder, and the ground’s trembling.

HERO BEAT: How come nobody heard any of this?

JAKE: We kept our mouths shut, are you kidding? We didn’t want him coming back. He knew where we lived and he plucked us from our lives like it was nothing.

HERO BEAT: So… what happened?

JAKE: I was expecting him—Bangarang—to be laughing or something, you know, but by the time we look back, he’s just gone and this thing is growing larger. Panic and adrenaline kick in, but it’s weird. It’s someone else’s panic and adrenaline, and it feels like I just put on someone else’s sweaty socks. But we started running across this open field to these buildings we see in the distance, but man, every time I look back, and I looked back a lot, that line of black water seems miles closer. It was this black smudge, and everything it touches just vanishes, like it never mattered enough to leave an echo or shadow. I saw the fires burning on top of this layer of white. My brain couldn’t process it. I thought it was an oil spill, I thought it was the ocean on fire.

He’s quiet a moment and looks to the side, unwilling to make eye contact with me, like something inside him is ready to break if he looks my way. He shakes his head and finds the strength to continue, but I notice he can’t maintain eye contact for the rest of his experience.

JAKE: This thing’s bearing down on us. And every time I look back, we’ve lost someone. They’ve fallen, or they can’t run, or they’ve split off for some patch of higher ground that’s not high at all. I know there’s nothing high enough for miles… nothing I can see. The buildings in the distance aren’t any closer, and it’s all just, fucking flat terrain. That’s when I spot them… specks in the sky, darting around and swooping down to save people.

HERO BEAT: Metas?

JAKE: Yeah. I screamed at them, begging them to save us. I remember being so fucking angry that they weren’t coming down for us, but there’s no way they could see us. After, I saw the footage. I saw what they were looking at from that high up. I can’t imagine how helpless they felt, watching this thing just crush a countryside. All they could do was pull people from out of its way, knowing that every life they got to higher ground, a hundred more had to die. How do you live with that?

HERO BEAT: But some managed to save more, right?

JAKE: Definitely. Gentle Mountain diverted the tsunami around a couple of villages and Hero Fleet mobilized over a hundred of his drones to save people from drowning. But that was a drop in the bucket, and Japan’s metas suffered from some heavy PTSD after the tsunami.

HERO BEAT: What about you? How did you survive?

JAKE: Survive… that’s, uhm, that’s not what I’d call it. I fell and watched other people run past me, but it was too late for all of us. There was nowhere to go, and I just, kinda gave up. This thing, this surge of black water and debris, and fire and black smoke and thunder… it was like hell had come for me. Then just like that, there he was again, Bangarang. Standing near me, staring up at it. No fear. Just curiosity. And I swear, just as the first surge of water was about to barrel into me, I was home again.

HERO BEAT: Just like that?

JAKE: Just like that, like it never happened. Only it did, and there I was in my kitchen, alone, sweating through my t-shirt, my heart hammering like I’d run a marathon and lost. After, I tried to convince myself it was a bad dream, until I started seeing the news wires pick this thing up.

HERO BEAT: What happened after that?

JAKE: I couldn’t sleep for days. I was terrified and sleeping pills couldn’t even put a dent in me. I even checked myself into a hotel, I couldn’t go back home. I couldn’t stop watching the news. And then I start hearing chatter on some of hardcore storm chaser sites, people I knew and respected, asking if “anything strange” happened to anyone else during the tsunami or if anyone knew if Bangarang could transplant your thoughts into other people’s bodies. Slowly, we reached out and connected with each other. It was such a relief, knowing you weren’t alone, weren’t crazy. There were about two dozen of us… I wasn’t the only one, and I heard a couple of storm chasers even died… strokes during the event.

HERO BEAT: And none of you approached the police?

JAKE: And say what? Some of us tried, and we were laughed out of the stations. Others were scared shitless that Bangarang would come for us, but we couldn’t figure out why he’d done it. Was it a game? Was he making a point?  

HERO BEAT: Not that I’m not grateful for the story, but why talk about it now? And why to me? Isn’t this the kind of thing you’d want to cover in your own blog?

JAKE: My editor doesn’t believe me and she’s worried about offending the Japanese people. She’s afraid we’ll look insensitive or callous. We’ve fought about putting this thing out there. I’ve been through enough therapy that I’m tired of being afraid of talking about it. I’m tired of keeping it in. I’m hoping you can reach more people through Hero Beat, and maybe someone can give us answers.

HERO BEAT: So what would you like to ask my readers?

JAKE: Please, I just want answers. I’ve been doing Google searches, trying to figure out where we were. Who we were in. But, I’ve got nothing. I can provide more details about what I saw, so if anyone out there knows anything, please, contact me. But I guess, the thing I’m really hoping to know is… why? That’s the part I really want to know. Why?

It’s 16:40 at JFK International Airport, and Jake Simmons anxiously sips his coffee three hours before his flight to Caracas, Venezuela. He drums his fingers on the table, hardly the figure I was expecting, but Jake Simmons is a contradiction. He’s a nervous flyer, which is a rather strange admission for one of stormchasers.com’s most daring reporters. If there’s a natural disaster, pending or aftermath, Jake is usually catching the next flight out to cover events on the ground.

Unlike herobeat.com, which focuses on the heroes, stormchasers.com caters to regular people hoping for that big break… that one in a billion lightning strike that triggers their Crisis Gene and imbues them with powers. The irony is, you really do have a better shot at being hit by lightning than getting superpowers, but that doesn’t matter to the thousands of visitors who click on stormchasers.com every week, looking for advice or sharing it. Part of me wonders if interviewing their star reporter is ethical, considering that 1 in every 100 Storm Chasers dies in a reckless stunt trying to get closer to natural disasters. That beats out mountain climbing in Nepal as the world’s most dangerous hobby. Even sky diving gives you better odds for survival at 1 in about 150,000.

Storm Chasers, however, are as much a part of the identity of the hero culture as the metahumans themselves, and every single superhero out there has at least one story that involves saving the life of a power groupie looking to self-trigger. So if I’m going to talk to any staffer, it’ll be Jake Simmons, seen by many within the field as the “The Voice of Reason.”

HERO BEAT: I have to ask… the Voice of Reason?

JAKE: [Laughing] Yeah, I don’t get it either. What they call reason, I just call common sense. Don’t go running out into a lightning storm holding an iron pipe over your head. Don’t walk out naked in the middle of an ice storm. Don’t go walking into certain favelas in Rio. Shit like that. A lot of people don’t get that metahumans are triggered when there’s a large-scale event happening… tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, landslides. Running into danger just because it’s dangerous is the kind of ignorance I’m fighting against.

HERO BEAT: But your critics argue that you, your readers, you still risk life and limb for a one in a million longshot. So why take that kind of chance?

JAKE: For the same reason people play the lottery. Someone’s got to win. For other people, it’s destiny. They feel it in their bones… they were meant to be powered.

HERO BEAT: So, destiny or lottery?

JAKE: For me? Oh… definitely lottery.

HERO BEAT: So where is the lottery taking your tonight?

JAKE: To Venezuela, to Lake Maracaibo where the terrain and weather patterns create massive lightning storms that appear 180 nights a year for ten hours at a shot. It’s a re-occurring natural phenomenon that you can set your watch to.

HERO BEAT: You’ve covered this before, though. In fact, it’s one of your top pick destinations for Storm Chasers looking to trigger their Crisis Gene.

JAKE: It’s definitely insane—over 260 lightning flashes every hour. It’s breathtaking. I’d probably go even if I wasn’t gene-priming. I get together with other Storm Chasers to talk about the latest hotspots, but not this time. This time, I’m covering the Venezuelan Government’s grand opening of danger tourism and the new Maracaibo Resort.

HERO BEAT: Other companies catered to danger tourism and Storm Chasers first though, right?

JAKE: Definitely. You have Sagarmāthā Unlimited in Nepal that takes Storm Chasers up Everest, and there’s Do or Die that offers to take their clients into the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia. But this is the first time that danger tourism is being sanctioned by a government. I’m really curious to see what kind of tourist shop they have set up at Maracaibo Resort.

HERO BEAT: You don’t sound convinced.

JAKE: I’m not sure I buy what it’s saying in the brochure… four people triggered at Maracaibo over the last year? I doubt it, but I’m also a realist, right? Danger Tourism happens in poor countries. There you are, running into mudslides and standing on beaches waiting for a tsunami to come, but this is some poor village’s reality. You’re there as some privileged Westerner hoping to get a superpower, and you see everyone who has to live this poverty and shit on a yearly basis. So I get it when the Venezuelan Government and the locals try cashing in on this. If we’re going to treat their backyard like it’s our playground, they might as well make us pay for the privilege.

HERO BEAT: Is there a fear that this kind of recognition might diminish the adventure or the… authenticity?

JAKE: Purists are always going to bitch about how they were the first ones there, and there’s the very real risk that when a location hits the mainstream, the area gets flooded with amateurs who become a liability to themselves and each other. But even then, most of the hardcore Storm Chasers I know don’t bother with tourist traps like Maracaibo or Everest. They minimize population creep—when too many people ruin your odds—and maximize the danger in places like the Antarctic during winter, or aboard trawlers heading into an Atlantic Storm. Most Storm Chasers want to minimize their personal risk or discomfort, which is self-defeating. The serious ones? They know that powers happen in that potential last second of your life when you’ve got one foot firmly in the grave and no idea where the other foot is. I hate to say it, but the real Storm Chasers we lost were probably the closest to triggering than anyone else.

HERO BEAT: Going back to your readers, they seem to cover a wide-ranging audience.

JAKE: Yeah. I guess that was the one thing I wasn’t expecting. When I first started blogging, I knew I was going to speak to like-minded chasers who were as serious about it as I was. But when our site started getting covered in the Comedy News outlets and Entertainment News, we started attracting curiosity seekers and daredevils.

HERO BEAT: You called it the Vulture Culture meets Jackass in one of your articles.

JAKE: God, yes. People love watching other people fuck up a disaster surfing attempt, and our segment on Storm Chaser Fails is huge. We avoid showing death and significant injury, obviously, but remember when I mentioned common sense? We see a huge lack of it in the videos we get.

HERO BEAT: Are you ever worried that it waters down the legitimacy of your site?

JAKE: Initially, yeah, but the number of readers who stuck around for the more serious articles and discussions was amazing. I was never expecting those kinds of numbers, and now, people come to the site to read me, to read about my experiences as a Storm Chaser. It’s incredible.

HERO BEAT: So here’s the question on everyone’s mind. Has anyone won the lottery yet?

JAKE: On record, no. But off record, I’m friends with two Storm Chasers who put themselves in harm’s way and ended up triggering.

HERO BEAT: Why off the record? You’d think this would validate all the risks they took.

JAKE: I actually asked them that, but in the end, I think it came down to one thing. Survivor’s guilt. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t had a friend or acquaintance die during Storm Chasing. Or seen someone die during a natural disaster. When the Crisis Gene finally triggers, I think the question switches from “Someone’s got to win,” to “why was I lucky enough to win.”

STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK WHEN WE CONTINUE OUR CONVERSATION WITH JAKE SIMMONS AND HIS EXPERIENCES STORM CHASING.

It’s December, and while light snow dusts New York itself, Central Park is another story. Here shoppers ply the Columbus Circle Holiday Market for gifts, and skaters enjoy a spin around Wollman Rink, but only in Central Park do the small specks of ice turn to fat snowflakes, the crystals so large you’d think they were pulled off a postcard and left to float to the ground. Meanwhile, along Broadway from the Columbus Circle all the way up into Harlem, the median trees glow and flicker with ghostly candlelight. And in Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, the children will soon watch in awe as a bow-tied army of stuffed animals parade down the corridors and climb into their arms. This is but one of a dozen events happening in the Big Apple, during the season of miracles.

For the past five years, the work of the Herald Society has been as much a tradition of the New York Holidays as the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center or the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show or the Chanukah Gala or the American Museum of Natural History’s annual Kwanzaa Celebration. They are a loose society of metahumans who volunteer their time and their powers during the holidays to improve the lives of people, and they aren’t just restricted to New York. Los Angeles has a branch, and there’s talk of more chapters in Tokyo, London, and Sidney.

The Herald Society’s ranks are comprised of metahumans who have shied away from the limelight completely and never taken to the streets as superheroes (or those who put a tour behind them before retiring). Of course, you will find your occasional star like Grimsta or Mizz Verse putting in the occasional time as a volunteer, but the Heralds shy away attention, except as a group once a year.

The Heralds were started by Laticia Broyle, a super-genius inventor and the brain behind the tech firm Spanner House. She’s since used her company as a sponsor for the society, and donated toys for New York’s underprivileged children. Her stuffed animals do not walk, but that’s where her partner, Jess Malloy, comes in. Another Charlie-class meta, the pair met at one of the rare social gatherings held for non-costumed superhumans, and they’ve been together since. Laticia’s company lends its money to the purchase of toys and food for the poor, and Jess animates the figures with her powers.

The exact number of Heralds varies year to year, but perennials include Anita James of James’s Construction, Dr. Terrance Chu, Allan Crane, Randy Elks, and Veni Nayar. Without Anita James’s telekinetic abilities, Santa and his reindeers wouldn’t be seen flying across the city. Without Dr. Terrance Chu’s light-based illusions, there wouldn’t be candlelight sprucing up the trees along Broadway or the special lighting of the world’s largest Menorah at Grand Army Plaza. Without Allan Crane’s super speed, there wouldn’t be the guardian angel who races around, saving people from smaller catastrophes on New York’s slippery streets. And without Randy Elks, there wouldn’t be the weather anomalies that allow large snowflakes to fall over Central Park or pollution-clear nights to celebrate the many festivals and parades. It’s these metas who sit before me in the Spanner House boardroom, drinking coffee and nibbling on finger sandwiches.

“We’re not superheroes,” Laticia says. “We live normal lives and use our tax money to fight crime, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to be good neighbors.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by the other Heralds. “I repair public and private sites after metas have torn through an area,” Anita James says. “I use my powers for good. This, though. This is all about uplifting people and repaying the city we love. I’d volunteer whether I had powers or not.”

Dr. Terrance Chu is more practical in his approach to the Holidays and his ability to manufacture light shows. “I like to think I’m a one man war against seasonal depression. The Holidays can be a tough time for many people, so I use my lights to generate positive feelings. Blues and greens to calm in frantic places, red and yellow to warm you in places you might feel isolated; I use warm and cold colors to uplift you, to make you think, to make you calm.”

Allan Crane, however, may be the odd one of the bunch. “Total atheist,” he says, laughing. He’s an admitted adrenaline junkie who runs a one-man courier company who claims his only competition is the internet, “and when the internet can deliver parcels and packages faster than me, then I’ll be worried.” In his spare time, he’s helping people, but rarely getting into fights or engaging other metas. “I don’t feel it, you know?” Allan says. “I just like running, and there’s a dozen ways I can be a good Samaritan every night when I’m out for a stroll.” Come December, Laticia hires Allan on an exclusive contract for the Heralds, and all his outings go toward the city. “I get paid to run,” he says. “How fricken awesome is that?”

The Heralds have been gaining popularity and volunteers steadily, both meta and baseline alike, and this year Laticia is starting new initiatives that include helping stock soup kitchens and helping homeless find a place to sleep. “Sure, some metas see this as a way to raise their visibility, but we sniff limelighters out pretty quickly,” Jess Malloy says as she and Laticia hold hands. “It’s really the powered types who prefer the 9-to-5 over the rooftop patrols that come to us. There’s a lot of pressure to wear a cape when you trigger, and there’s a lot of guilt too… are we doing the right thing?” Everyone in the room nods, familiar with the sentiment. Randy Elks picks up the train of thought, adding, “or are we being selfish going into business for ourselves? Being a Herald is one way us non-spandex metas feel like we’re really contributing.”

Veni Nayar has spent the interview listening. He’s a quiet-spoken man originally from New Delhi, and as a Hindu celebrates none of the December festivals. If his emotion-projection powers frighten some people, imagine how he feels. He’s terrified of imprinting other people with his social anxieties, and has fought to control that part of himself through therapy and medication. It’s been a long fight, but he’s managed to find work with Emergency Services to help during hostage negotiations and to bring jumpers off the ledge. It’s he who speaks up for the first time and he who closes out our interview. “I am told the only way to do good is to fight. Fight crime, fight corruption, fight evil… fight, fight, fight. Fighting scares me, and I hope through this I can show other metas that there are other ways to use their powers, that there are peaceful ways that matter as much. And when better to prove that then during the Holidays when the different faiths intersect and yet none of us really come together?”

When indeed? So whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Milad an-Nabi, or you just want to spend time with friends and family… Happy Holidays to one and all….