But I already had, like three thousand words on the Dragoon thing. ^^ We're the Dragoonslayers!

[hider=Dragoon][b]All things considered, we did well and impressed an established hero. Who was it? [/b] [i]Felitrix[/I]. 
Yeah, that day… I don’t talk about it much. I mean, I’m over it and it’s cool, but it was pretty nuts. Me and Andrea got an alert about some kind of disturbance, big time stuff, over Felitrix’s dark app. The Guardians responded, but all of them were twenty minutes out, and it was Class A, lots of civvies were in danger. We were a few minutes out, tops, and I beeped in. Normally they’d have shot down my request, I’d have gone anyway knowing how far out they were, but this time they didn’t. I knew it was big shit when they accepted and sent over an asap order. I threw on my costume, and we flew over. Dragoon is major league, like we shouldn’t be fighting this kind of villain, but that’s how the job goes sometimes. There are these three costumes just going at it with Dragoon, Andrea knew at least one of them from a previous job, but just from looking at them I knew that they were kids, and not the legacy types like us. I don’t know how they heard about the situation, too fast for it to have been on any of the big news channels, probably facebook or twitter, “Er mah gerd, super villainy at fourth and main! It’s Dragoon!! E’erybuduh Run!!1! #catsignal,” or something. Bugs f#$%ing everywhere, the literal animal kind, and I really don’t like bugs. Dragoon’s just smacking these kids around. She’s one of those former supers turned baddie, I hear it isn’t her fault, some kind of mind f#$% courtesy of our old friend Doctor Zondervan, yeah, [b][u]the[/u][/b] Doctor Zondervan, but it doesn’t really matter. 

She was a danger, and we had to do something about it. Dragoon is a professional, usually wouldn’t have set off any kind of alarm, we’d only have heard about it after she was gone and everything was said and done. It was some kind of fancy lab, one of the ones with Grade A Scarborough Enterprises security systems, and she must have done something off script because she wound up getting boxed and having to fight her way out through robot security drones, made a lot of noise in the process. Anyway, Andrea’s throwing everything she’s got at her, and I take advantage of the distraction to just light her, Dragoon, up, laser beams and then a flying broadside punch, me and Andrea’s regular approach, but this is no ordinary supervillain. She dodges Andrea’s stuff, my lasers, and then swats me off like I’m a fly when I went in for the physical stuff, and I wind up right next to this monster lookin’ guy. Like, seriously monster looking, horns and everything, this blue fire that you just know isn’t normal in the physics kinda way dancing and arcing off him, all big and badass looking. He’s firing some beam at Dragoon, and the street is just melting away, nasty stuff that fire, and I’m getting to my feet. Dragoon dodges, I mean even with her armor no one wants to take something like that straight on, and this horned devil is just honing in on her, real focused you know? Tunnel vision must’ve set in, happens to all of us, because he clearly wasn’t paying attention to where we were in relation to each other. 

I learned later that some of that fire, which as I had assumed at the time was no ordinary flame, was arcing off of him and went a little too far to his left. At the time I just remember looking at Dragoon and seeing an opportunity, then there’s this burning like nothing I’ve ever felt, I mean not like, “ow, hot!” more like my skin is covered in boiling cheese and is just bubbling up, like I’m seriously melting, and everything the bubbling guck touched on me was just instantly changed into the same awful crap. I guess it didn’t stop me, because the next thing I know I’m in midair, I have Dragoon’s helmet off somehow and I’m just dragging the back of her head along the street, at speed, crushing her head in with my left hand. I’m right handed, and I remember thinking it seemed wrong that I was using my left, but it didn’t matter enough for me to stop and consider the thought for any length of time, I was kinda busy after all. So I drag her like fifty feet, felt like fifty miles, and I just kinda fall. Not like collapsed to the ground, but I wasn’t flying anymore, just standing there crushing this chick’s face in. Her head looked like someone took a bat to it. I remember looking down and realizing that thick, dark, goopy blood was all over her face, her neck, her chest, and knowing that it shouldn’t be, wrong angle, like it was just falling down onto her from somewhere while she looked up at me, her eyes all big and wide and unseeing. 

Next thing I know I’m floating, like literally floating, horizontal to the ground looking up at the sky. I tried to reach up and cover my eyes with my hand, right? Because of the sun and all, but it just wasn’t moving. So I look down, and my hand is just [i]wrong[/i] somehow. I think it took me three whole seconds to realize that half of it was missing, in a semicircular cut from the bottom right side of my wrist to the tip of the index finger, including my pinky and ring fingers, and everything but the left half of the bottom section of my middle finger. I mean, you’d think it would have been some instantaneous understanding kind of thing, but I really had to puzzle out what was different about it, like seeing someone who you think changed something about their hair but have to make sure before you ask. I guess I mumbled something about it, like, “where’s my hand,” or whatever, but I mostly just remember feeling abject terror, and then Andrea was talking to me, telling me everything would be alright or whatever. I wasn’t paying attention to her, at least not enough to remember what she said, I was just looking at what was left of my hand, didn’t even occur to me to ask why the rest of it was missing in the first place. Never even realized that my costume was half burnt off, or that my hair was half burnt off, or the small factor that most of my ribs, along with some organ and intestinal tissue, were showing through the big ass rend in my chest. 

I next woke up in what easily takes the place of the worst pain I have ever felt, and I’ve been nearly cut in half by, what it turns out to be, is known as hellfyre. I learned later that Andrea had gotten me to some Guardian safe house, and then they took me to some kind of hospital that they operate for dealing with the weirder kinds of injuries you might happen to receive in this line of work. Normally the hellfyre would have spread decay through my system, the flesh would have turned necrotic, I’d develop sepsis and die. Better to cut off anything touched by the stuff, but you can’t just cut off a deep chest wound. Anyway, they had some old connections to some interesting people, and got some monk or something to show up with some kind of hoodoo potion, boiling wine, herbs, supposedly, “holy,” holy water, though I doubt whatever that thing was happened to be a Catholic priest, what with the tree bark for a face and antlers sticking out of its head, the blood of a dove, eye of newt, f#$%, the shit was probably Drano for all I know. What I do know is that when you boil it and pour it into an open chest wound, and maybe this is true of any boiling liquid poured directly onto muscle and organ literally inside of your body, it is easily worse living through than losing your hand. The pain is actually necessary, too, like at least according to Tree Face I couldn’t be on a pain med drip or anesthetized until after going through it, cleanses the soul. 

I don’t know if I felt any holier afterwards for being conscious through the process, and I kinda think in retrospect Tree Face was probably just pissy about being made out of wood and wanted to watch me squirm, but I lived, the flesh didn’t turn necrotic, and after I went through having the shit poured on what was left of my hand, including the missing parts which creepily I could swear I felt just as plainly as if they were still attached, and then I was just out, some kind of gas from one of those hospital nose tube things they’d put me on. I woke up, Andrea was there holding my hand, mom was yelling at Gravitron how she was going to castrate that mongrel pestilence before he could spawn any more of his ilk, to which he kept saying that he was just a kid and probably wasn’t evil, Felitrix was sitting on a chair in the corner typing something into a tablet, and I remember thinking to myself, “wait a sec, Andrea’s holding my hand. That’s new,” I don’t mean she’s never held my hand or whatever, I mean the hand was literally new. Or at least it was as good as new. I could feel her skin on mine, even in the pinky and ring finger that were completely cut off, and I squeezed her hand just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, not so hard that it would hurt her, of course, even drugged on that bed I remembered what I could do if I wasn’t careful, but it was enough to get her attention and satisfy my new hand curiosity. 

I asked her why they cut my chest open; in my blood loss and drug induced delirium I guess I thought they had to start my heart with boiling oil or something, and forgot all about what side of the body the heart is on, and that people don’t start hearts with boiling liquid. She just told me that the wound came from the same place as the other one had, and called the adults over. So they showered me with affection for, like, five minutes, and then berated me for another ten. It was really f#$%ing weird too, like I just kept looking over at Felitrix and occasionally squeezing Andrea’s hand while Gravitron and my mother acted like a couple parents going back and forth between loving and scolding after their idiot kid got herself hurt. She didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong with this picture, though, just kept playing with her tablet, hardly even looked up when Andrea told everyone I was awake, and I guess I was just letting my own internal knowledge get outwardly expressed in my head onto her. So, being as everyone else really had to get back to their real world duties, they all started leaving, followed protocol. I mean it’s one thing for Lodestar, Polaris, Doktor Faust, Felitrix and Gravitron to be missing all at the same time, but for Lodestar, Polaris, Doktor Faust, Felitrix, Gravitron, Savannah Newman, Alex Hathaway, Andrea Faust, Anne Scarborough, and Jan Poole to all be missing, for what turned out to have been nearly eighteen hours, right after a very big, very public battle like that? Way too risky to everyone’s secret identities. 

Andrea and Felitrix stuck around the longest though. After mom left, Felitrix pulled her chair up next to my hospital bed, one of the rolley ones that adjusts up and down and sideways, and lifted my torso up with the push button controls before sticking her tablet in my face. I took it, in my left hand, I didn’t want to move my right one from Andrea’s considering, and I read the article headline. “DRAGOON APREHENDED AFTER DECADE LONG MANHUNT, BUT NOT WITHOUT CASUALTIES,” and right below that is this big honkin’ picture of me bent over dragoon, on fire, bleeding like a stuck pig from my side, tit flopping out of where my costume used to be. They didn’t even have the decency to give me one of those censored bars, just one of those microscopic little blurred out star things over my nipple, --, f#$%ing bastard news media reporters. The first line of the actual written part went, “Bold new super hero team in Halcyon City?” and it goes on to talk about the five of us, speculations on who we are and what our super hero names might be, old articles about me and Andrea, Polaris and Doktor Faust I mean, something about some girl in a costume who was seen fleeing the scene of a crime after bodily interrupting a police investigation who they thought was the same person as the bug controlling hero of the day, pondering on whether the six and a half foot tall demon looked like that regularly, if it was some kind of prosthetics used as part of his elaborate costume, or some kind of activated transformation. 

They wished me the best in my recovery, of course, all the while capitalizing on my injuries, vulnerability, and nudity, simultaneously hoping that I had died from my injuries so that they could cover the death of Lodestar’s daughter for some extra publicity, [b][u]f#$%ing assholes[/u][/b]. Of course they speculated whether or not Dragoon would survive her injuries which gave me some intense feelings up and down the spectrum. I mean, I hadn’t thought about her or what had become of her up until that point. Last time I saw her she looked pretty f#$%ing dead, and it was at my hands. Guess I’d just forgotten, what with the whole nuttiness of the ensuing eighteen hours. On the other hand, I didn’t know if I was glad she was alive, but I certainly didn’t want to have been responsible for killing another person, either. Squeezed Andrea’s hand hard enough to hurt her while looking at the picture and reading the article, hadn’t realized until she subconsciously squeaked out a protest. Guess she was just looking out for me and didn’t want to say anything, Andrea’s good to me like that, but I loosened my grip and muttered out an apology anyway. Down at the bottom, with like a hundred thousand likes, was a comment from Felitrix’s official account, the one used for correspondence between her and the Guardians and the newspaper. She had basically said that she was incredibly proud of this burgeoning new team, and that had we not acted the Guardians wouldn’t have been there in time to have prevented Dragoon from causing massive damage to life and property in her, likely successful, attempt to escape. 

I looked up at Felitrix, and she just looked back down at me, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t know what to say, of course. It had been a hell of a day, I hurt everywhere, had a naked picture of me on the front page of the newspaper, had recently been cut nearly in half, and sewn back up after getting boiling liquid poured into the hole in my chest. I really just wanted Andrea to crawl into the weird rolley bed and hold me, cry for like an hour, the gross sobbing kind of crying, too, with like zero chill or composure, have some morphine dripped into my veins and forget this whole day had happened for a little while. Didn’t matter, though, Felitrix wanted me to say something, the right something, and she always managed to get people to do what she wanted. “We aren’t a team, Anne,” I said to her, dumbly, clearly flailing for something smart to say and just flopping instead. “Of course you are, says so right here in the paper,” she countered, feline smile spreading across her face. She’s pretty, Anne Scarborough, but she has the biggest mouth, and the evilest grin I’ve ever seen. Like, Jagger big mouth. Like, Jagger Face on the Cheshire Cat big mouth. Wonder if that’s a meme somewhere? It should be. “Never met them before in my life,” somehow her grin got even longer, wider, and I was starting to think there might be morphine in my drip after all. “Sure you have, Alex,”. 

I thought to myself, “Holy shit, have I?” like a total tool, and squeezed Andrea’s hand, making her squeak again before Anne finished her sentence. “you fought off Dragoon together just a few hours ago… Did really well, too,” she leaned over me and pushed the bookmarks button on her Scarborough Enterprises psyPad Septum, pulled up some website. We were all over the Halcyon City page, the city run one for upcoming events and names of important people next to their business numbers and job titles, and people were actually cheering for us. Like, really applauding us for what we did. I mean, half the comments were about my boob, but most of them were people thanking us for finally doing what the Guardians had failed to do for ten years. One, I read it aloud and showed the screen to Andrea, was this lady, Maria, saying Dragoon had killed her eighteen year old son on the first day of his internship with some indie newspaper company, and that she had night terrors for years thinking about if she might show up and do the same to some other poor woman’s baby, and said that the night before was the first time she had gotten a good night’s sleep since her son, Victor, had passed. She posted his picture along with the text, and it just went nuts. Like a hundred people wrote on it that they remembered Victor and what a good guy he had been, and it just spread from there with hundreds of other people posting pictures and stories of how Dragoon had killed this person and that person. It seriously blew my mind. 

I mean, first of all, I’d always known that there were some real baddies out there, but not kidding, thousands of people posted about how Dragoon had killed someone that they loved. It reminded me how in over our heads me and Andrea were in going up against her, but I think it’s where I first realized just how much people really need super heroes. I mean, Dragoon had been doing this shit for a decade, and had hurt who knows how many people, reasonably okay people, in the process. I don’t have an official list from anyone, but I sure as hell saw enough people on that website to feel like what me and Andrea had done was worth the scars. “I always thought you two would wind up on Ken’s team, but I guess it’s time to let that one go, [i]for now[/i],” Anne stood, put one of those canvas book bag briefcases stamped, “Scarborough Enterprises,” all officially on the foldey flap part onto the folding tray on the hospital bed’s left arm rest, collected her tablet, and made her way to the door. “Clearly you five have a lot of good work to do. Keep the other supers on their toes,” and she left, still grinning like some caricature of a person. Andrea said something about that being super awkward, and I nodded, patting the briefcase down with my left hand, still refusing to take my right from Andrea’s, before reaching into the main partition of the unzipped sleeve. There were five phones, Scarborough Enterprises pay as you go psyPhoneGo brand ones, stupid name really, and a blonde wig, for some reason. “Wait, what…?” 

"Where is my f#$%ing hair!?!?!?!?" [/hider]

Seriously though, we could go with this ant invasion and either scrap Dragoon or just have that be something that happened at a different time, either way.