The smell of fear...
Fear is a tangible thing. It can be collected, bottled. Its is real as real can be. Oh, we like to imagine it as an emotion, something that can be substituted for another, driven out by a simple frame of minded, in other words, ignorance.
No, fear is physical, and just like any physical thing, detectable. It comes as a cocktail of stomach acid, adrenaline, and many other chemicals. You can smell it yourself, sporting events are massively swayed by it. We call this detection "stage fright" or "home field advantage" or many other things. To Barsavis, however, it was more. He could tell very subtle differences. Terror was different from worry, spooks were different from startles, even uncertainty was different from certain but negligible misfortune. To describe it as oder would be not particularly accurate, it was a different sense altogether just as sight was different from taste, and taste was different from touch. Describe the Mona Lisa in the form of sound. You can't do it in a way that makes sense. Now use words to describe it, that is much more plausible. So it is the same for Barsavis.
A new scent had arisen. It was a resounding dread almost, as if fear had come and stayed. It was elusive. Night after night he probed and searched with little success. So he tried searching nightmares. Such tragedies would surely yield nightmares, and there he could find this victim and glean information from them. He thought he had found it, but instead he had found Rokhan. He wasn't entirely sure who or what it was, but Barsavis called him "The Fighter" because every day he struggled against something. His dreams were plagued with imagery so terrible. The question remained... where in the world was he? Who was he? What... was he? Barsavis could honestly not say if this was a human or not, and that made him curious, and as you well know curiosity was a seed of mystery.
There had come clandestine communication, starting with Rokhan. Barsavis wasn't entirely sure how, but the entity had pieced together some considerable evidence, not on the WHO Barsavis was, but on the impact he had on crime scenes. Rokhan was not entirely sure on who was fiddling around with things, but he had scried objects moving on their own, villains being subdued by a force that was insubstantial.There was a note and a clue, and that came with a likewise veiled response on behalf of Barsavis. Trust didn't come easily, but it wasn't the trust of others that was the issue.
It had been some time that Barsavis worked overtime trying to track down his associate to be sure of who he was involved with, and no matter how far he looked, he never found him, Rokhan was always just out of reach. Barsavis began to collect a grasp on just how far-reaching Rokhan's powers were, and it didn't settle well with his own modest abilities. One thing brought him comfort, nobody knew who Barsavis was, nobody, but his wife. Autumn was just getting used to her abilities, and far from practical use. Barsavis was proud of his handful of foiled crimes and the fact that no one, not even the crooks he fought, could fully testify that it was even a someone. Most reguarded it as mere dumb-luck. They blamed the convenient placement of incriminating evidence was simply illegally obtained, or that someone had ratted them out, but they couldn't tell who. Only a couple suspected a mind behind the catastrophic failures that resulted in police response. The vigilante justice enacted in back corners was not something they could testify to, some suspected guardian angles, or even demons that protected the victims. Guns failed to fire, knives failed to cut, muscles refused to follow through, and poison always seemed to be misplaced. However, none, not even one, could testify that it was a person pulling the strings, that they were flesh and blood, or that Barsavis was more than some supernatural gobbledygook.
Tonight was different, Barsavis knew it. There was something on the air. All day he had been distracted, and he was busy. Autumn had been understanding, and she had done her part as the crime-fighter's wife, but Barsavis had been out all night, ranging to all corners of the city. His efforts were failing, the criminals weren't getting more or less affective, but there WERE more OF them. This wasn't fun any more. There wasn't a lasting impact. It seemed like pulling weeds in a vacant lot. No matter how carefully extracted, how much poison or fire was emptied on the evil, the field would sprout twice fold with more contaminating vegetation outside of his reach, outside of the field he tended. Lately, even though most of his powers were not the sort that taxed the body, he was getting tired, frustrated, and he had noticed everything had dwindled in his doubts. This wasn't working, the superhero needed help. He needed a team. For one reason or another, he had never considered asking Rokhan for help with this. Now, now it was time.