by Jay Phillips
On a personal note, I would like to publicly thank a member of our security force, a man who asked not to be named. Chancellor Rogers chose to not only target me, but to also target my wife and daughter, innocents in this cold war between our two nations. This man I mentioned, this hero, put himself between two bullets aimed at my family and gallantly defended them without regard for his own safety or well being. I, personally, will forever celebrate this man, a former American citizen, I might add, as a hero not only to me but to this great nation.
In closing, I send this message to the Americans. Stay off of Canadian soil. Canada is protected from those who would do evil, including the all powerful Seven. If you come to this country with murderous intent, be prepared to fight and be prepared to be defeated. And to my fellow Canadians, sleep well tonight knowing that your country is still the home to freedom.
God bless Canada, and God bless those throughout the world who choose to embrace liberty.
(End speech)
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SEARCH DESIGNATION: 616
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1 RESULT: OPEN RESULT
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Super Powered Containment Unit #3
Prisoner 616
Real Name: Unknown
Known by the moniker The Detective
Abilities: Enhanced senses, increased hearing, highly accurate olfactory abilities, and advanced levels of taste and touch. Adrenaline gland is five times the size of a normal’s, resulting in intermittent increases in strength and speed.
Current containment status: Classified.
Current location: Classified.
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CLOSE RESULT
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After his shower, The Detective sat on the end of The Ice Queen’s bed, wearing nothing but his pants. He didn’t see any reason to put a clean shirt over a wound that was still oozing blood. He was amazed that a place this big only had one bedroom and a single bathroom. Obviously, she wasn’t planning on company. The bedroom was something to behold, with a bed twice as large as a king size, covered in pillows and much softer looking than the bunk he used to have in Canada. He assumed he would be regulated to one of the three couches in the living room.
There was also a closet which was bigger than most every home he’d ever had. But all of those places were dumps, so he guessed it didn’t count as an accurate comparison. Yet the truly remarkable aspect of the bedroom was the window which made up the entire outer wall, providing a view of the entire city being bathed in moonlight. He was impressed.
Ice had told him to wait in there for her to patch him back up. She’d probably expected him to sit in the desk chair by the door, but the bed was way too comfortable looking to pass up. That, and he figured sitting on her bed without permission would irritate her, and he loved the look on her face when she was annoyed with him. She walked in, a load of bandages and tape in her hands.
“I see you’ve just made yourself comfortable,” she said, a sarcastic tone in her voice. She took a long look at his shirtless body. “And I see you’ve managed to stay in shape during your stint in prison.”
“Well,” he said, flexing his arms a little now that he knew she was looking, “I do what I can.” He pointed to the wall of glass. “Aren’t you worried about peeping toms?”
She walked next to him and looked at the wound on his shoulder. “We’re on the sixtieth floor. This is the second tallest building in the city, so no, I’m not worried about peeping toms. Why have you got something to hide, something you‘re afraid of people seeing?”
“Well there’s a freckle on my back I’m really insecure about,” he answered with a smile.
“Whatever.” She positioned herself directly in front of him, her body less than a foot away from his face. “I see the bleeding has slowed down, but we’ve got to get this thing covered before it gets infected. I can’t let you die on me until we catch this bastard.”
“Yep,” he answered, hopelessly distracted by how close she was to him.
She leaned in closer, placing a bandage on his back. Her shirt pulled up a little, and he could see her flat stomach. She had a small snowflake tattooed around her bellybutton. Before he even realized he was doing it, he bent his head forward and planted a kiss on her bare stomach. She didn’t pull back. He thought he would risk her wrath and do it again. He placed his lips to the right of her naval and then again on the left. She didn’t pull away.
“So what’s your deal?” she asked in a voice that was almost sweet. “When you wanted to distract me in the middle of a fight, you kiss me, and when I’m trying to do something here that takes concentration, you start kissing on me again. Do you want me to screw up on this and you bleed to death?”
“Yep,” he answered, kissing a little bit above her bellybutton.
“Did you hear a word I just said?” she asked.
“You wanted to know if I like to use kissing to distract you, and after thinking long and hard on the subject, and much internal debate, I decided that the answer is, in a single word, yep.” He continued kissing her stomach, working his way beneath her tattoo.
“I hate you,” she said as she finished taping up the front of his shoulder.
“I hate me too,” he said, moving his lips to the edge of her skirt. He brought his hands up and gently unbuttoned it, kissing her much lower than before.
“If I bandaged you wrong and you bleed to death, it’s so not my fault.”
“I won’t blame you,” he said as he gently pushed her shirt up and kissed just below her breasts.
“You’d better not,” she said as a little moan escaped her lips. “Fuck it.” she said finally, bending down and kissing him deep on the lips. She pushed him back onto the bed and climbed on top of him, straddling him with her legs and kissing him as hard as he’d ever been kissed before.
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Journal Entry
[Found on page 57]
Note: The following is a transcription of a video found on Rogers’ computer, recorded almost a year ago from his penthouse. The Agent is sitting at his desk while his favorite lackey, the lawyer named Grant, stands across from him.
The Agent: (opening a file folder that Grant had just handed him) What do we know about him?
Grant: Nothing more than we did. He didn’t say a word during his tribunal, not the first syllable.
Agent: Any luck finding out who he was?
Grant: No, sir. He probably employed a pre-war technokinetic to eliminate his old identity. We even hacked the Canadian database. They know less about him than we do.
Agent: No family, no friends, no one in the world to care whether he lives or dies.
Grant: For all intents and purposes, sir, that is correct. May I ask a question?
Agent: Within limits.
Grant: Why go through all of this, just for this one particular man? A fake people smuggling operation to lure him back to the states, a rigged tribunal to find him guilty of treason, a maximum security containment unit usually reserved for the most powerful, the most dangerous of supers, why go through all of this just for this…Detective?
Agent: I never forget a wrong, Grant. You would be wise to always remember that. This Detective is simply a wrong I am finally going to make right.
(End video)
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M36S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M35S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M34S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M33S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M32S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M31S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M30S
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REPAIR TIME REMAINING: 4H47M29S
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FILE SYSTEM REPAIR: COMPLETE
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ACCESS FILE: SELF DEFENSE PROTOCOLS
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FILE LOCATED: OPEN FILE
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SEARCH WITHIN FILE: FIRE MAIDEN
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Journal Entry
[Found on page 79]
Note: The following is a newspaper column published in New York’s Daily Sun illegally the day the government took over all media stations.
I apologize for the brevity of this writing, but as I type this, Chancellor Rogers' men are on their way to remove my keyboard from my fingers. Today, we lost the last of our individual freedoms; the right to free speech died a sad death, and she went out, not with a bang, but with the proverbial whimper. We, as Americans, as people, as human beings, deserve better than the tyrant we were given, better than the dictator who claims to look out for our best interest while only looking out for his.
Even his own kind, those with powers, whether they have come to realize it or not, have become nothing more than subservient tools to a man who is no more loyal to them than he is to the proverbial rat that now overruns our once proud cities. Sure, he’s eliminated crime; he’s removed drugs from our streets, and random murders are no longer something we have to fear. Now we have to fear that Rogers' own security squads will invade our homes and eliminate us from society because we did, or said, or thought, something that made us no longer fit into the Chancellor’s seemingly perfect society.
I have to stop now, even though I have so much more to say. There is only so much time to get this, the last honest edition of this paper to be published, to press before The Agent’s men break down the doors. To all who manage to read this, I say to you, pray. Pray for your fellow Americans; pray for our once great country; pray that hope and freedom are one day restored to men and women who deserve so much more than the virtual Hell we have received.
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The Detective stood in the nude beside the bedroom’s giant window. The city below him held a quaint beauty he had never really noticed, but, of course, he had never quite seen it from this angle before either. The full moon bathed the city like a blanket on a cold night. The light was all encompassing, yet never intruding, portraying the city as a place of beauty instead of the capital of deceit and pain as it had become known.
He realized, in the hours since he had been “released” from prison, he hadn’t really taken the time to let himself breathe and relax, free from the confines of a small containment unit and contemptuous jailers. It was also, while staring out over the vastness of the city, the first time he had truly felt free. Nothing like a bullet wound and sex with a beautiful woman to make a man feel the pangs of freedom.
He turned back and looked at Ice. She laid nude on the bed, the moonlight sparkling off of her beautiful body, glistening in her snow white hair. She rolled on her side and propped her head against her arm. She stared back at him, a content smile across her gorgeous face. He wondered, for the first time, if she had realized that, whether they caught this guy or not, he wasn’t going back to prison, not willingly anyways.
“I believe,” she said, “that half of what we just did is considered illegal under the new regime.”
He looked back at her and smiled. “Not in Canada. There’s fewer laws there concerning what takes place in the bedroom.”
“I see why you like it there,” she said, a genuine tone in her voice.
“There’s less dictatorships, too.” The smile faded from his face, and he turned back to the window.
“You really hate what we’ve done here, don’t you?”
“Does it matter what I think?” he asked without turning around.
“No, not really.” She climbed off of the bed and put her arms around him from behind. He could feel her breasts pressed against his bare skin. She pulled away a little and rubbed his back, touching the many scars that covered it.
She changed the subject. “I see that tonight wasn’t your first bullet,” she remarked, touching the tip of her forefinger finger against the three other bullet hole scars.
He reached around and took her wrist, guiding her hand to the back of his left lung. “That one I got when I was still a cop.” He moved her hand to his right kidney. “Those two earned me the Canadian Medal of Honor.”
“What did you have to do to get that?”
He turned around and smiled at her. “I personally saved the national maple syrup factory from a terrorist attack.”
She gave him a little push against his uninjured shoulder. “You are so full of shit, and I have no idea what I see in you.”
“Maybe it’s my charming wit and lovely personality?” he asked.
“You wish,” she said in return, still rubbing his back. “More likely, it’s that thing you did with your tongue.”
He smiled at her. “As long as I’m popular, I’m content.”
“What about these?” she asked, rubbing her hands across the other numerous scars covering his flesh. “These look like whip marks.”
“They’re whip marks.”
“I get that, you idiot, but how did you get them?”
He turned his head back towards the window, staring out at a moon that seemed too full to be real. “It’s a long and sordid tale. Are you sure you’ve got the time?”
“Let’s see,” she said, wrapping her arms back around his waist and pressing herself hard against him. “I’m nude, leaning up against a naked idiot, awaiting instructions that aren’t coming until morning. I’d say that I’ve got all the time in the world.”
He put his hands on top of hers, thinking to himself about how soft and cool her skin was. She still smelled like strawberries. “It’s your dime, princess. Let me think---”
“Wait,” she interrupted, “you’re not going to make up some story with an asinine ending just to see the look on my face, are you?”
He laughed. “As much as I love that look you get when you’re annoyed with me, and I do love that look, the answer is no. I’ll tell you the real story.”
“Then please continue,” she replied.
“Somewhere around seven years or so ago, when I was working as part of the Canadian Prime Minister’s personal security detail, three members of the security team were kidnapped from their homes and tortured; the kidnappers were looking for the access codes for the Minister’s family home. I was one of the three.”
“Were you all super powered?”
“Two of us were, and the third, she wasn’t,” he answered, still holding the back of her hands and staring out the glass. “They chained me up in some old abandoned warehouse, with my hands up over my head. I could hear the other two screaming for hours before they finally made it to me. They used this former superhero from America to do the torturing, this bastard who called himself The Lash, cause he could make a telekinetic whip with his mind.
“I remember him. I hated that son of a bitch, him and his invisible weapon. He was so damn cocky and full of himself; I couldn’t believe he was on our side. I thought about killing him myself a couple of times during the war.”
He laughed. “I wish you had, would’ve saved me so much trouble. So where was I?”
“You were tied up.”
“Oh yeah. So I’m tied up, and this bastard starts whip
ping me with his invisible telekinetic whip. I’m losing blood all over the floor, and these two other guys keep asking me about the security codes for the Minister’s home. I didn’t give up the codes, but I did keep talking. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people tend to think I’m a bit of a smart ass at times.”
“I’ve noticed,” she replied quickly.
“I have no idea how people come up with that image of me.” He looked back at her and slightly smiled. “But it seems to happen more than not. So the more I talked, the more pissed off The Lash got. The other two kept asking their questions; The Lash kept whipping, and I kept on being my pleasant to be around self. I guess they got tired of asking and went off to question one of the others. The joke was on them, though.” He laughed a little bit beneath his breath, turning back towards the window. “I was the only one of the three who knew the codes, and I wasn’t going to tell them.”
She squeezed him tighter, a hug that was almost as impressive as the one Fire Maiden had given him earlier in the night. “How’d you get out?”
“They knew about my enhanced senses and all of that, but they had missed the memo about what happens when I’m scared, angry, or in pain. Once they left me alone for a few minutes, I broke free of my chains. The dumbasses actually left all of my stuff in the room with me. I found my gun; I found The Lash, and I put half a clip into his brain. Then I found the other two. The normal of the two died with two bullets in his chest, and the third was a teleporter, and he removed himself from the situation.” He sighed. “The other two members of my team were dead. I was too late to save them.”
She pulled his head around towards her. “You did what you could; you did your job.”
“I didn’t do it soon enough,” he said, smiling a half smile in her direction. He turned around and pulled her close against his body, then kissed her full red lips. She still tasted like strawberries. “I’m tired of talking. Is there anything we can do that doesn‘t involve conversation?”
She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him back to the bed. “We have a few options,” she said with a smile.
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Journal Entry
[Found on page 31]
Note: The following is the written transcript of video footage taken from The Agent’s personal computer. I attest to the authenticity of the video, having seen it for myself, and I hereby describe the events from the video file.
