– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

April 20, 2011

"Good afternoon, Brockton Bay. I'm Jack Trask."

"And I'm Susan Runyon. Our top story today; In a joint press release, the PRT has officially confirmed the ABB as behind the series of bombings throughout the greater Brockton Bay area. In addition, multiple joint raids with the Brockton Bay Police Department have been reported on suspected ABB locations." The female anchorwoman read through the teleprompted lines with little emotion, quickly making clear to anyone watching that she had been hired more for her looks than anything else, her male counterpart doing a far better job of seeming invested. As far as the residents of the room were considered, it was as good a reason as any seeing as they weren't paying either of them more than the slightest bit of attention.

"While arrests have been made in regard to the volatile situation gripping the coastal city, the multiple injuries and deaths on record have raised some questions regarding foul play and suspected parahuman intervention. For more on this, we turn to Action 9's Neil McNabb, live on the scene. Neil?"

A chromatic blue and silver graphic suddenly flared across the screen displaying the words 'Action 9 News - Brockton' as it twisted and turned in multiple revolutions with the sort of over-the-top flair characteristic to news broadcasts. After a few seconds, the graphic vanished, displaying a split-screen with the blonde anchor on the left and a nondescript Caucasian man on the right, the new figure standing on a crowded sidewalk.

Raising a microphone to his mouth, the reporter began to speak. "Thank you, Sarah. I'm here on the Downtown Coast, right on the intersection of Crescent Avenue and Marine Row. Quite a chaotic scene here as the police work to keep people off the streets and away from the crime scene as they access the situation. Right now, I am directly across the street from one of those raids right now. As you can see behind me, the police have cordoned off this warehouse for nearly an hour already as they made dozens of arrests. Several explosive devices believed to be of Tinker make and design have been seized from these locations and delivered to PRT custody but the bombings themselves have not yet ceased.

"While both the PRT and police have been making headway in responding to the threat of the ABB, recent reports have highlighted that several of these hideouts have already been assaulted, with overwhelming evidence pointing towards a parahuman."

The female anchor nodded her head, her expression shifting to look somewhat interested in this new development. "A parahuman, Neil? You mean, one of the local Protectorate?"

"Highly unlikely, Sarah. Some sources have pointed towards this parahuman being the same one suspected to be the assailant against Brockton Bay Ward, Shadow Stalker, and a potential member of the Empire Eighty-Eight. However, reports from the PRT indicate this parahuman as likely being an Independent but that, again, is still under investigation. There is still a lot we don't know."

"And what do we know, Neil?" Jack chimed in, the camera shifting over to him as he spoke.

"So far, Jack, Sarah, not much at all. The police have released information stating this parahuman to be a Caucasian male in his early to mid-teens, going off his height and somewhat high-pitched voice. Eyewitness reports over the past twenty-four hours have described the young man as wearing a black bodysuit and a red piece of cloth tied around his neck. More recent reports from this morning have him supposedly with what looks like a Japanese sword of some type."

"I believe we have a picture actually, Neil," the female anchor quickly interjected, gesturing offscreen. A moment later, an image appeared over her half of the split-screen, showing a sketch of a thin figure in all-black clothing and what looked like a katana hanging from his waist.

"Whether or not this depiction is completely accurate," Neil continued as the image on the other screen scrolled from side to side, "it remains clear that this parahuman is clearly not one to be underestimated as his repeated attacks against the ABB have led to dozens of gang members requiring rapid hospitalization, due to life-threatening injuries and multiple deaths. Some fear that such brutal action will result in an increase in violence from the ABB side, an understandable worry.

The PRT is requesting this parahuman stand down and if possible, turn himself in bef..."

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The television continued to blare pointlessly throughout the hospital room, none of its occupants paying it any real attention. Most of them were in no real state to watch TV, drugged almost to the gills as they were to avoid the worst of the bone-wracking pain they would have felt otherwise.

"You're done, sir."

The man blinked in surprise at the frizzy-haired girl sitting in front of him, hands clutching at himself with frantic and unbelieving desperation. She often received patients like this, themselves almost as annoying as those who had the nerve to ask requests of her. Thankfully, these last thirty hours were made up almost entirely of the former, each one with their own tearful thanks blending into each other that she couldn't even be bothered to respond back anymore.

Drawing off past experience, Amy Dallon slid back a few feet in her hospital-provided rolling chair and let the orderlies cart the man outside of the room before he could lunge for her, trapping her in a teary-eyed embrace she didn't want or need.

Not from a patient, at least.

Definitely not from someone who felt like they owed her anything.

As he was wheeled out the door, Amy caught the last of the gibbering thanks as they fell from the patient's mouth, the thankful man holding up an arm that minutes ago was nonexistent.

For what was certainly not the first time today, Panacea fought the urge not to let out a deep sigh, not for the risk of lowering the morale of everyone around her even further. She settled, instead, for lowering her head and allowing her white hood to obscure what her scarf didn't cover with cloth and shadow. Her shoulders slumped beneath her voluminous robe, the teenage girl stopping just short of sinking into her chair.

God, she was tired.

It wasn't physical tiredness. Not that she didn't feel that as well; the four hours of sleep she managed to scrape in a spare hospital-provided cot had not done much for her.

Blinking away the lure of sleep with tired eyes, Amy forced her lids open and stared at the only thing available from her vantage point. Her hands rested in her lap, fingers twitching and picking at loose threads of white fabric as she made another futile attempt at ignoring the growing pit in her chest.

The thought of doing this for even one more minute…

Being stuck here…

The very idea made her want to scream.

Personal feelings aside, it wasn't like she could simply stop even if she wanted to. Just like it had been yesterday, there was a constant flow of people who needed her help. A constant flow of screaming, pained, and terrified patients who weren't going to get the help they needed without her.

It was obvious to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention that there weren't enough medical resources to go around in the city right now. MedHall Medical Center may have opened its doors to the public for disaster relief but it wasn't anywhere near enough to stem the tide.

Certainly not with a major hospital across town still the macabre scene that Sunday's events had left it. The blood and gore itself wouldn't have been much of a problem for the city to handle but the crystalline remains of those not close enough to be caught within a few meters of the blast had been impossible to identify or deal with without calling in heavy machinery. The crystal figures that had miraculously remained intact might have been considered beautiful works of art were it not for their horrific composition.

Panacea tried not to left her mind drift back to what that niggling thought in the back of her head suggested when she witnessed the remains of that horror. Triumph's mangled body in the back of an ambulance had been nothing compared to what her own mind could dredge up to frighten her with.

With Brockton Central out of commission, all their existing patients had to go somewhere and Portsmouth Regional was the only other hospital both close enough and large enough to suffice. And that's where Panacea had found herself for the last thirty or so hours, healing patients as they were wheeled in to her care.

A cycle that just wouldn't end.

All this in mind, Amy knew that a single moment to catch her breath wouldn't even be on the table, far too many people in need of healing for any of the staff to even bring up the notion without her doing so first. She wondered if they would be so selfless in her place; being expected to heal on command.

It was days like these that she realized that she couldn't bring herself to care about the people she healed. What was the point of it anyway? What was the point of healing anyone when it didn't matter in the long run? Over a hundred people died every minute, after all.

Amy had looked up the statistics one day — just to torture herself, maybe — and the number had remained a context fixture in her thoughts, taking every silent moment to remind her how pointless this whole thing was.

One hundred people a minute.

It took her almost five times that long to deal with something as simple as a patient with a few broken bones. Five hundred people dead in the time it took her to help one person. What did a single person mean in the face of that? Would it be so wrong to be anywhere else doing anything else?

...Ugh. Amy let out the slightest of groans as the familiar line of reasoning worked its way through her mind once more. The thought itself left a bitter taste in her mouth, as it always did, her own selfishness slapping her in the face and forcing her to see what kind of person she really was. Part of her didn't find the idea all that selfish, though. It didn't at all help her mood that she only hated herself even more for entertaining anything that came from that self-centered portion of her mind.

Once again thankful that her hood covered most of her face, Amy couldn't help but flinch at the shrill squeak of rubber tires on linoleum as yet another stretcher came to a halt in front of her. She lifted her hood back slightly, raising her gaze to witness an orderly place the patient's IV stand on the floor next to the yellow stretcher, the clear bag of painkillers swaying slightly as it settled into place.

Her next patient was a woman, Amy realized with slight displeasure rising in the back of her mind. She didn't much like women patients for the simple reason that they were the vast majority of those that had to ask for things, never quite feeling satisfied with her help. Amy pushed that thought even further back in her mind as she realized just how badly in need this patient was.

Blood-stained bandages and gauze covered most of the skin Amy could see, a sky blue latex tourniquet around her upper arm serving as a stopgap likely to keep the woman from bleeding out from what was likely a massive gash on her forearm. Amy's gaze shifted, eyes darting over the patches of brown and red staining her body and the bandages visible on her stomach just below what remained of the shredded top of her scrubs. Above the yellow neck brace keeping her head steady, bloody bandages crisscrossed the woman's face, the largest ones covering nearly the entire right side of her face, eye included.

"Hello, ma'am…" Amy inched closer in her seat and looked the patient in the eye, trying to establish eye contact before going any further. Parahuman healing skills or not, she had been doing this long enough to know to maintain her bedside manner. The woman on the stretcher stared back at the girl in white with a limp expression, one visible eye dulled from the constant drip of what had to be morphine in her IV keeping her numb to the world.

"My name is Panacea," Amy leaned forward even further, careful not to raise her hand yet. Making the first move before the patient responded was something else she had to be careful of, the hospitals wary of lawsuits. "Do I have permission to heal you?"

A single blue eye blinked at the parahuman, a sudden awareness filling it as the woman's gaze shifted. Stiff blonde hair dyed an unpleasant brownish-red with blood fell down in clumps over the woman's face as she tilted her head forward in a nod.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

“...going to have to cut you off, Neil,” news anchor Jack Trask announced with a reserved expression, the anchor’s side overwhelming the split screen once more. “Breaking news here at Action 9 this afternoon; A series of explosions in the Bay Central area have forced the spread of fires in Downtown Brockton…”

Jack paused, a shocked expression on his face as he raised two fingers to one ear. The man’s gaze turned to his co-anchor, Sarah’s expression just as surprised as his, before he turned back to face the camera once more. “Wait, I-I’m… Recent serial bomber and ABB-affiliated villain Oni Lee has been spotted engaging two heroes in Downtown. Reports of explosions and several civilian deaths are already being confirmed. This cou…”

His hand rose back to his ear, eyes widening again. “Oh… Oh my God. For all the viewers at home, I’m receiving news right now identifying the two heroes as Shielder and Laserdream of New Wave, who appeared to have been assisting rescue operations at the time. Shielder appears to be somewhat… somewhat injured but Laserdream seems to be in perfect health. B-be assured that we at Action 9 will keep track of this situation as it develops.”