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[b]S A M A R[/b]
[i]The Visaya Islands, Philippines[/i]

The rain had intensified for a few moments, then was suddenly quiet, leaving only a still night air cooled by the mist rising from off the muddy rivers that had become of the streets. Maria had dozed off to sleep, the nearness of her tugging at Christopher's consciousness as he could sense her mind drift to somewhere, where dreams were made. At long last, the young Hellspawn surrendered to the hope that he might find this sanctuary of the mind for himsself, and closed his eyes. And in that moment, Christopher dreamed of tomorrow...

...and tomorrow never came.

The child's eyes snapped open in the moment between the flash of lightning and the clap of thunder, not for the sudden flash but rather a feeling that had just begun. [i]Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.[/i]

The rain hit the house with the full force of a sudden gale, ripping up loose boards in the porch as a terrible howl pierced the air. The chain and tarp hammock came apart in an instant, hovering in the defiance of all Newton's laws before winking out of existence. Within the house, Christopher materialized from out of the air in a plume of Hellfire, the red cape billowing about his small form, which was now fully armored in the black and white colors of Al Simmons. Depositing Maria safely into the arms of her family, the boy again faded into the air.

Phasing through the roof of the house, Christopher shot upward into the air for an aerial view of what was happening, which is when he realized... the earlier quiet had been nothing more than the [b]eye of the storm.[/b] A typhoon had come to Samar, tearing through houses pushing water up into the homes of those which would not yield to it. And he could sense the pending death. A dozen at least. A hundred?

The young Hellspawn was overcome by a sense of the utter futility of one hero's actions in the face of nature's wrath, and yet... he could not save them all, but he could save [b]someone[/b].

Plunging back into the town, the young Hellspawn ghosted across the muddy river that now rushed like a flood through the main street, chasing behind the sense of impeding death until he saw a house ripped apart to its very timbers, shuddering under the weight of its own roof. A Filipino man was trying to fight against the wind and rain to free his family from out of the home. A loud crack heralded the release of the roof's support beam, as the half-ton beam came down to crush the man and his family. Instead, the beam struck the young Hellspawn's cape, driven into the ground behind him like a stake and extended forward to create a brace. What remained of the home's foundation cracked underneath the weight of Christopher and the collapsing structure, the young Hellspawn struggling for his footing as he tried to maintain the stability of the structure, as his cape expanded to shelter the man and his family huddled at the boy's side.

They were calling to someone. As Chris looked up, he realized an elderly matriarch was kneeling before an icon of the VIrgin Mother and praying. Grimacing, feeling the timbers about to give, the boy fought to maintain his control over the symbiote even as he stretched himself further still -- sending tendril-like chains to ensnare the old woman, forcibly dragging her away from her candlelight vigil and into the sanctuary of his damned suit.

As soon as the old woman had landed at his feet, the child snapped the cape shut around them all, teleporting across town to appear from out of the ceiling of Maria's house, depositing those within into the already crowded interior. The roof had sprung several leaks, and water was coming in from underneath the doors. "We can't stay here," the young Hellspawn realized aloud, looking at the faces of the assembled people he had gathered inside the home. "Is there somewhere else we can go?" the boy inquired.

Except Christopher didn't speak Tagalog. 

The roof collapsed under the weight of water and the pressure pushing against it. Christopher tried to look up as a deluge rushed over him, as the house literally came down around him and on top of him.

[i]Darkness there, and nothing more.[/i]