[hr][b][h1][color=39b54a]Nick O'Connor[/color][/h1][/b][hr][hr]
[i][u]Springtown, Hedgemount.[/u][/i]

As his morning run drew to a close, Nick's pace slowed until he eventually came to a stop in front of the door to his apartment building, doubled over panting and bringing a sweat-soaked hand up to his equally sweat-soaked brow. He'd had a feeling that two miles every day had been pushing his personal envelope somewhat, but it was something to work towards.

Still breathing hard, he slipped through the door and made his way quickly to the staircase, privately thankful that none of his 'neighbors' were present to attempt to engage him in conversation. He had thought that a crappy apartment complex in the worst part of town would be the perfect place to be completely ignored, but instead of a bunch of maniacs and criminals it seemed he was surrounded mainly by poor elderly women who got all their entertainment from snooping into the business of others. Nick supposed he was just lucky none of them had made it inside his apartment yet.

First floor up, second room on the left. Nick dug his keys out of his pocket, opened the door the slightest crack necessary to slip in, and immediately turned to lock and bolt the door back up. 

The floor was crawling. A teeming carpet of insects writhed all over the room, packed so thick it was hard to tell where one began and another ended. In the corner was an enormous mound of fleshy, grey hive-material that dozens of worker bugs were crawling over, building and reinforcing. A huge flyer buzzed past Nick's face as he stepped inside, moving from one of the grey, bulbous roosts that dangled from the ceiling to another. The sound of clicking and chittering filled the room as all the insects carried on their business.

Home sweet home. Just how he'd left it. 

"Make a path, guys," he panted out to the swarm. Immediately, the bugs carpeting the floor crawled over each other and shoved to the side to clear a two-foot road between the door and Nick's dresser. The sight of the insects obeying his command long since having grown dull to him, Nick plodded over to the dresser, already peeling off his sweat-stained workout clothes. He was midway through changing into more work-appropriate attire when he slapped himself in the forehead.

"We have a new queen, don't we?" Nick had trouble telling most of the fist-sized insect eggs apart, but it was quite easy to tell when one was going to hatch into a new queen, considering the fact that such eggs usually grew to the size of cantaloupes and had reddish streaks on them. One such egg had been gestating for most of the previous day; he couldn't believe he'd forgotten about her already. "Could the new queen step out here, please?"

A moment later, an enormous, bloated grey sack wriggled free of one of the holes in the hive and dragged itself towards Nick, its beady head staring up at him. "Hey, girl," he cooed at the creature, crouching down to pat it on the egg-sack. "Welcome to the family. Your name is going to be Sally," he said, leaning over to the coffee table and picking up the red Sharpee he saved for this purpose. "From now on, when I say Sally, I mean you. Understand?"

Taking a knee, he quickly wrote [i]Sally[/i] on the new queen's eggsack, as was his custom; it made it much easier to give orders to individual broods when he could tell the queens apart. The discovery that individual queens could pass on standing orders to the insects they birthed through a 'hive-mind' had really taken a lot of management stress off him; before he'd known that, he'd just shouted the ground rules every half hour just to make sure every new insect was hearing them. 

"Alright, Sally, I'm just going to lay down some ground rules. Pass these on to your kids, okay? One, no hurting people unless I say you can hurt them, or they're trying to hurt me. That goes for pets, too, cats and dogs and stuff like that. Two," Nick paused, swallowing sharply, "People aren't food. No stealing food from people, either. Garbage is fine. Three, don't let anyone see you unless I say it's time to go loud. Four, the bed, the couch, the fridge, the TV, the table and the microwave are off-limits. You can go anywhere else in the apartment, do whatever you want." He straightened his back and gestured back to the hive. "Got all that, you can get back to what you were doing." 

The queen wriggled its way back into the hive, and Nick got back to dressing for another day of work (which was to say, putting on jeans and a hoodie; his taxi company didn't have what you'd call a strict dress code). "I'm headed out, everyone," he announced as he snatched his keys up from the coffee table and pulled his hood over his head. "Be good."

Nick was a practiced expert and making quick, quiet escapes from his building, and before long he was plodding down the sidewalk to the parking lot of his taxi company, about two blocks from his apartment. Time for another great day of driving strangers around.


[hr][b][h1][color=a0410d]April Cooper[/color][/h1][/b][hr][hr]
[i][u]Courtbridge, Prince Ed-Field[/u][/i]

April's legs dangled over the busy street as she peered down from her vantage point atop the massive office building. She was not, strictly speaking, supposed to be up here, but one could be surprised at how easy it was to get places if you walked with confidence and flashed any badge at all. 

The RAVEN operative gathered a glob of spit in her mouth and spat it down the road below her, peering down to track its progress. It fell slightly short of her previous record, an observation that brought a slight frown to her face. Rolling out the cracks in her neck, she reached into the pouch at her waist to produce a cell-phone. Under normal circumstances, she would have derided the garment as being far too close to a fanny pack, but the tights she was wearing didn't have pockets, and anything that did would be far too baggy for the day's activities, so she had to make do.

A particularly loud truck sped below her, narrowly avoiding T-boning an SUV. "Asshole," April murmured as she listened to the dial-tone of the phone she held at her ear. A moment later, it was replaced by a familiar voice.

"Hello? Sheriff Cooper speaking." April smirked at that. Even in the modern day, the old lawman refused to buy a mobile phone, forcing her to always call at his office.

"Heya, Uncle Bill. It's April. Just checking in."

"April! How the hell are ya, Darlin'? Life in the city all you'd hoped for?"

The girl chuckled and kicked her feet. "It smells like ass and there ain't no stars, but other than that it's pretty good, same as last time I called. How's the office?" 

The old man on the other side of the phone sighed. "It's been a rough couple days. That business in London's got folks all riled up, worried the same thing's gonna happen in there houses; even have a few of them 'Savior' boys tryin' to start shit with the metas, sayin' it's their fault. Damn mess. Reckon it's not any better over in your town."

April sighed. The Black Hound's attack on London had been public and brutal, and it wasn't an overstatement to say that it had scared the shit out of a lot of people. "Folks are scared."

"Say, Darlin', it's the middle of the day. Shouldn't you be out fightin' the good fight?"

"It's my day off, Uncle Bill. Not that it's much different from my days on, really."

"Hey, you savor your free time, girl, you gonna wake up one day and figure you didn't have enough of it. Alright Darlin', I gotta go, but thanks for callin' every now and then."

April chuckled. "Of course, old man. Talk to you later." She hung up the phone and tucked it back into her almost-fannypack. The young women climbed up to her feet, wiping some of the asphalt dust off her legs and rolling out her shoulders. She turned and took off towards the other end of the building in a run, making it halfway across the roof before she activated her powers.

Immediately she began sliding across the roof, just as fast as she had been going before. The air slid past her body without producing any drag, allowing her to skate while barely losing any momentum. Soon after, she went off the side of the rooftop, falling ten feet to the neighboring rooftop below, grunting and bending her knees as she landed but not losing any of her speed. She began to make the motion of running once again with her frictionless body, allowing herself to fall into a rhythm before she deactivated her powers and the laws of physics quickly reasserted themselves on her body, turning her confident stride into a more panicked stumbling as she checked her own speed and awkwardly turned to face her right, where there was another rooftop she could skate to.

With a whoop, she reactivated her powers and off she went.