[i]So many lives. So many people, we have to protect. So many ways to fail them.[/i] The man the world knew as Pariah hid his thoughts behind a mask, but every day those demons haunt him. Demons far more elusive than those he had been fighting for almost three years. Shades, memories, fractured hopes, lost dreams, the faces of all the men and women who died for him to be here today. All the people he failed. Polaris. Destiny. Zephyr. Olympia. And so many more. Men and women who had been among the only ones he could trust. Once there had been hundreds of them. Smart, determined, trained, loyal. Working together to defend civilization from the monsters and men who would destroy it. Now all that was left was a husk. Fresh-faced recruits, scarred veterans, shadowy former enemies. It wasn't a team any more. It was a collection of different individuals and groups that decided the monsters on their door were a more pressing threat than each other. And yet he needed them. If they failed, everyone would fall. And he would fail them again. He couldn't let that happen. He wouldn't let that happen. Even if it meant giving up his life. He made a promise. And he wouldn't break any more. Pariah slipped on his mask, or perhaps it was his real face for it was the only one the world ever saw. It stared back at him blankly, the dull red eyes framed by a black face. Scars covered his muscled body, he had almost as much scarred tissue as normal skin. It all vanished under the skin-tight black suit. Then came the weapons. Two pistols riding low on his thighs. Another pair under his shoulders. Two collapsible batons at his belt. And an extreme amount of blades, most of them hidden. There was hardly a place on his body where he couldn't easily reach a weapon. And if he couldn't his boots were steel toed and the knuckles on his gloves had steel inlays. Between these weapons and the other equipment he kept on him, Pariah was hardly ever caught defenseless. Never in fact. He exited the small private room he kept in his office. It was the security floor right underneath the penthouse and Pariah's residence and operations center. From this room he had a commanding view of the entire settlement and cameras and other equipment that let him keep track of everything else. Hardly anything happened here without him knowing. Almost nothing in fact. He left the monitors on and strode to the elevator as Cassandra's cultured voice filtered over the speakers they had all over the Citadel, "All Council Associates to the Assembly Room. Operations conference to begin in ten minutes." --- The Citadel was just over a square mile of space, ringed by high concrete walls and an outer chain-link and razor wire fence. He got a good glimpse every time he descended the elevator. The facility, all modern buildings with large windows and gentle curving architecture, had just finished completion when the Apocalypse began. Cassandra had turned it into her fortress, filling the empty space with supplies, equipment, and any of her personnel she could get her hands on. If it hadn't been for her thousands would have died. Pariah and his hastily assembled team of vigilantes, do-gooders, military men, thieves, murderers, and specialists had turned it into a city. One of the last in the world. Every free inch of space was converted into either farms or homes. Everything else was retrofitted into whatever they would need. The library held every salvaged printed or digital media they could find and every artifact of the old world worth preserving. It also served as a memorial for every super who died in the fighting, and for every citizen who had made the ultimate sacrifice to keep the Citadel safe. From there the past would be preserved for the future. It was also where the surviving sorcerers, alchemists, mediums, exorcists, and sundry supernatural practitioners studied the magical arts and deciphered more of the mysteries of the arcane. There was an enterprising survivor who had managed to open the never-used cafe and stocked it with homemade coffee mixes made from the coffee plants the survivor grew in his home. A technopath known as Binary had managed to create their own intranet and the monitors found use daily. It was also where the four-man Citadel newspaper team digitally launched daily broadcasts of the goings on in the Colony. It was also where the scavengers kept their maps and kept track of their expeditions into the city. Near it was the greenhouse. Cassandra had combined a garden and a park into one. A place where her future employees could take a stroll and the buildings would get their own organic produce to use in the mess hall. There was a reason her company had been near the top of the Fortune 500. There wasn't much space for a stroll now however. It was nearly overgrown by Orchid's enhanced crops which she had created before her death. It was christened the Orchid Memorial Garden and served as the primary farm in the Citadel, the bulk of the colony's fresh vegetables, fruits, and grain was farmed there. It was the primary reason the ten thousand plus souls within the Citadel's walls had three square meals or how the hospital managed to gain study herbal supplies. Guard posts on all four corners and rolling patrols made sure nobody thought to plunder or loot the critical supplies. The hospital was another innovation. It was nowhere near the size of municipal facilities but was destined to be staffed and filled by the best personnel and equipment money could buy. It would be up to the task of caring for the workers as well as any ambulances that desperately needed to off-load patients. All optimized for maximum savings and profits. Now it was one of the most critical buildings in the Citadel. Unfortunately there were very few trained doctors or magical healers who survived the Apocalypse but one psychic surgeon and a few alchemist apothecaries had managed to find the Citadel. They scrapped together all the medical students, nurses, and even veterinarians they could and they had a working hospital with as much equipment as Cassandra could ship or what the teams could salvage. If Seraph was alive they could have had all wounds healed instantly. As it was the Seraph Memorial Hospital serviced every injury, mundane or supernatural in the colony. It was where they treated sickness, gunshots, and werewolf bites all together. It was also heavily guarded, every staff member carried a sidearm and it was patrolled by a half-dozen squads of Cassandra's security forces. There were four twenty story buildings surrounding the large rectangular fountain that had been converted into a fishfarm, two on each side. They had been devised as tenements for all the maintenance personnel, support staff, and their families. Low rent, and right next to work. What Cassandra had envisioned was basically a company town and Pariah had no doubt she would have made profit off of it. And even if she didn't she had been insanely rich anyway. Tents covered every roof and the interior walls had all been knocked down inside and replaced by curtains to convert as much living space as possible. Between every building were wooden huts and large canvas tents that was the shanty town around the tenement buildings. This was the largest population center in the Citadel itself, over a fifth of the population was housed here. The rest were sequestered in basically every other corporate building and collection of shacks throughout the Citadel or underneath in the bunkers below, though few lived down in the dark reinforced lower levels which was were the jail was and most of the emergency supplies. Most of the supers lived in the Tower, which overlooked it all from a stately distance. Around the Sprawl, as the large neighborhood was known, there was a bazaar ringing the fountain where citizens would barter their homemade and homegrown goods. Us dollars were still accepted but most people traded in commodities or services. Pariah had no doubt that Cassandra and others had their fingers in pies. It was also a heavily patrolled area, pairs of guards walking down the market aisles and around the tenement buildings. Nearby was the power plant. Megavolt sat in the squat building most of the day, the former electrokinetic bank-robber used his talents to provide power to the settlement. There was a permanent guard on the building. Even though there were solar panels, if Megavolt was lost they'd lost most of their power source. Pariah could see the Wall itself. More than twenty feet high and constantly patrolled and manned by the wall guards. Guard towers dotted the wall at regular intervals and Pariah knew one of them was Deadeye where he watched with a fifty caliber rifle. The main gate was where Sentinel usually stood vigil, ready to defend against any intruders. Nearby was the Forge, a retrofitted machine shop turned garage where the mechanics worked on the Citadels salvage trucks as well as where an enterprising man named Cutter and his assistants had plans to begin turning salvaged metal into weapons. If anything mechanical or metal needed to be fixed, modified, or made in the Citadel chances were it was there. The nearby warehouse was where the majority of the colony's salvaged weapons, ammunition, and gear was kept. The entire area was a constant patrol zone. There were many other buildings. Converted office space or newly erected shacks were survivors made their homes, their places of congregation, and other things they might need. An entire building had voted to convert their living space into a place of worship of every faith with different sections for a synagogue, a mosque, a church, and many others. Another had been turned into a school for all of the Citadel's children, as well as an orphanage for the depressingly large number of parent less children. It was known as the Temple and it saw a lot of use these days. Pariah and Cassandra left the administration of these population centers up to the elected district leaders. But Pariah knew some shanty towns had brothels, drug labs, gambling dens, bars, and other black market areas. The drinking, gambling, and whoring was mostly a non-issue. It had been decided people could do what they wish as long as their work was done and nobody was hurt. But it was a constant battle by the Sheriff and their deputies to stop the crack labs and sex slavers, the ones who exploited the citizenry and made life miserable. Anyone they caught was punished harshly. And for the most part they succeed, but somehow a new one always propped up somewhere. Pariah had his own suspicions. The Supers ruled with an iron fist but as long as humans were around there would always be a few islands of crime. A small collection of buildings near the wall was known as Dark Town. It was where the few hundred or so nonhumans lived. Very few humans went there. --- Finally he made his way to the meeting room. It was a large space, where Cassandra had planned to address hundreds of workers at a time in a theater like setting. Only a fraction of the space was used now, all filled up by the heroes and villains that made up the alliance of supers who ran the Citadel. Everyone was in attendance save the Dark Town magic users. But then they almost never showed up. The seats filled up as everyone from Megavolt to Sentinel filed in. Pariah had used the private elevator and arrived at the head of the room where a conference table sat and where every high-ranking associate was. Cassandra was dressed in the Athena armor. It stood at seven feet tall and was head-to-toe metal plating with her own personal owl logo on the chest. The suit gave no indication the wearer was a woman. Cassandra silently regarded him as he took his place next to her at the podium in front of the table. Cassandra turned up the speakers on her suit, "Thank you all for coming on such short notice. We have some important business to get through and then we will return to our daily duties of saving the world." A light chuckle made it's way through the room. Pariah abstained. Cassandra continued, "Our emergency stores are full and all production capacity is proceeding nominally. However it has become clear that we can no longer rely solely on Megavolt for our power. No offense to the human lightning bolt of course." A scrawny black man in the middle of the seats chuckled, "None taken." Pariah remembered how Megavolt and Cassandra used to fight in the streets back in the day. It had all been business of course but he wasn't sure if he liked their friendly tone now. "Regardless of his hard work, there are simply too many people that need power. We need more renewable energy sources, mainly solar panels. We have the alchemists working on green alternatives to power our generators but it will take time and it still won't solve everything." Pariah spoke up, "Scavenger patrols have been hit with increasing regularity. It isn't just elves or ogres either. People. Heavily armed, in possession of vehicles, hostile, and tricky. They've been setting up ambushes and traps all over town. We've lost half a dozen men just this past month. Not to mention more and more raiders probing our perimeter. We'll need to decrease the amount of patrols but increase each individual team's complement. No less than three supers on every run now. And any intel we can gather on this group is essential. It may come to a war." A low murmur worked its way over the room, though there were more than a few who seemed to relish the idea of a fight. "We will send a recon team at a later date to take an account of this colony. We will try the diplomatic approach but I'm having the wall guard doubled. And any new citizens will be heavier scrutinized. Sphinx, I'm relying on you to process a few dozen new survivors who have made their way here in the past month and are in temporary housing. Take a few men to assist. Destiny's wards remain in place but I want everyone to be vigilant for any signs of possession or curses." Cassandra recited a list of those who were tasked to wall duty and their shifts. Volunteers could sign up at any time. She then said, "Today's scavenging run will be made to a high-rent condominium building about forty minutes from here. Scout reports say several solar panels still line the roof and it seems mostly untouched by looters. It is a large building however and we're sending two trucks. I'm tasking Comet to lead the convoy. He'll pick around twenty gun-hands to man Big Blue and Red Rover. DaVinci and Flare will assist. Stay on the lookout. Mythics or raiders could appear at anytime. Bring all the panels and supplies you can as fast as you can as safe as you can. Anyone else who wants to ride with them feel free to do so." "That's all the important business today. Anyone who doesn't have active duty may join us for a preliminary session which will begin in a moment. Attendance is optional but we will discuss the moral issues in the colony. Everyone else is dismissed." Men and women in costume, it was general practice that meetings be attended in costume, filed out while an unassuming guard came to Sphinx to lead him to the temporary housing. DaVinci, Flare, and whoever else wanted to join them made their way to the garage. Eventually everyone who stayed for the meeting sat down at the table or in the first few rows. Cassandra began, "The civilian population is beginning to become restless. The small attacks, presence of the mythics in our walls, and the continued lack of elections are among their biggest gripes. As you all know we have a five-year plan to return control to a democratically elected mayor but certain district leaders are rousing small numbers of the populace," Pariah stepped in, "The situation isn't serious but if they become any more disgruntled there may be demonstrations. Riots if they become violent. This cannot be allowed to disrupt the daily production of supplies. Does anyone have any suggestions?" --- Meanwhile DaVinci, Flare, and whoever joined them met Comet and Sentinel at the main gate. Overhead in the guard tower, Deadeye sat in his perch and looked through his scope. Sentinel stood in full plate armor with shield and spear while Comet stood in her leather jacket. Sentinel nodded his head in their direction and Comet turned to greet them. The petite blonde woman smiled and said, "We're loading up now. Big Blue and Red Rover will be good to go in no time. I'll be riding up front in Red Rover, you two mind Big Blue in the rear." Each truck could fit four in the cab. A dozen or so more would be in the modified bed. The trucks had square shaped holes cut in the side of their containers, six on a side, for the riders to look and shoot out of. The doors had a large opening on the back and a gate that closed or open like a civilian truck. "This might be a heavy run, we're going right in the middle of mythic territory. Keep your eyes open and get loaded for bear. We ride in five." Soon enough our heroes were ready to scavenge. Both semi trucks were filled with scavengers and a smattering of salvaged national guard humvees or armored SUVs accompanied the trucks, a few in front and a few behind. Sentinel stood in front of the gate with weapons raised while Deadeye raised his rifle. The convoy filtered out and the gates closed behind them. They didn't know what they were in for. Meanwhile, Sphinx found the processing center. It was in the middle of a shanty, and the guards led him to where they housed new survivors until more permanent accommodations were found. And where they made sure nobody was possessed or otherwise a threat to the Citadel. Deputies patrolled and guarded the building and a smiling woman at the front desk said, "Howdy Sphinx. We've got a few dozen people here right now. Pariah rang to tall me that he needed a full sweep. These fine gentlemen will be helping you. Any emergencies they'll take care of it. Pariah just wants you to make sure everyone in here is clean. Anything else you need before we get started? Here's a list of names, pictures, of the tenants." She slid over the list and smiled.