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[B]A Park That's Supposed To Be Serene
New York City[/B]

Cobblestone cobbled together by men long dead act as an ocean for a troubled man's soul to sail on. His muscles have a fresh ache to them, like he'd recently been pulverized by a butcher. Close, but he'd narrowly escaped having his painstakingly carved muscles reduced to cotton candy at the hands of a regular crook the previous night. No superpowers. No costume. Just a pickaxe and enough inexperience that the felon couldn't telegraph his  moves like a better fighter would. Therefore the only thing distinguishing the scarlet swashbuckler from anyone else who ever underestimated a new guy was a split second of reaction time on a paranoid hunch.

[I]One day the roads I cobble will be marched on by heroes and cowards, sheep and wolves alike. I'll be as dead as the dinosaurs I've personally slain in the Savage Land. And then…[/I] If Matt smoked cigarettes, he'd be taking a long drag off it, chain-smoking and probably thrashing like a madman. But because he didn't, never had, and probably never would, he just stopped breathing and squeezed his useless eyeballs like an evildoers throat.

He felt he'd been a better man at one time. He wished he had been that man long before circumstance bullied him into being. He hoped that one day he'd be that man again. All this business with ninjas and dragons and prophecy, concussions and neuropathy, sticks and stones, scarred flesh and broken bones. He wished it would just go away. And then he remembered that it would. It would go away: water under the bridge, not so unlike the literal water under the literal bridge he was approaching, where the stones cobbled in one man's time stopped, and the next began.

His pocket vibrated sharply. The time had come to save the world.

So, he ripped off his glasses and ran through the park, until he could find a street so crowded he was invisible. He tucked himself into an alleyway and ripped his clothes off his body like Elmer's Glue off a child's hands. Matt went in and something far more fearsome came out in a red flash, like a firework he grappled and reeled himself onto a vacant rooftop before answering the call. Summoning a SHIELD branded hover bike, he sets course for Jamaica , being swallowed in a glass cacoon as the vehicle rolls past Mach one, two, and three into the double digits, accelerating so relentlessly that Matt was convinced he'd be responsible for the next hurricane to harrass the Japanese people, giving even the most sinister butterfly the world had ever known competition.