Beacon sits, surprised at Eldritch’s request. Moments ago, she asked him to stay in Liberty City and help her grow as a superheroine. Sitting in the hospital bed gazing at her hands, Hailey waits for his reply. Standing opposite Beacon, her mediator Erika stands breathless waiting for his reply.

Beacon’s initial surprise fades into a faraway look. The silence stretches out between the three, as Beacon remains silent. Clearing her throat, Eldritch begins to say something in a nervous voice before Beacon cuts her off as he begins to speak.

In a voice that carries the full weight of his experience, he says, “Let me tell you a story.”

Conjuring a chair for Erika, he sweeps her off her feet and into the faintly glimmering seat before beginning his tale. “I used to be part of a team, the team that became the backbone of the Association.”

Interrupting with a groan Erika says, “Everybody knows this story! It’s practically required reading in law school.”

With a hint of a smile, Beacon adds, “The storybooks don’t have all the details.”

Suddenly intrigued, Erika composes herself and visibly leans in to hear the story.

Continuing, Beacon resumes the story, “Erika seems to know the story so I’ll give you abridged version. I was part of a twelve-person team, most of whom are now dead or retired. But when we were just getting started, I met a brother-sister duo that the entire team agreed we should recruit. The girl could control metal while the boy, well the boy couldn’t do much of anything.”

“Then why recruit him?” asks Eldritch.

“To get her,” Beacon answers, “we would have recruited just about anyone. Besides, he did have a moderately useful power. He could create small voids.”

Erika’s sudden inhalation is all the warning Eldritch gets before she hears her companion explode saying, “Small! Like Hell small voids. Is he who I think he is?”

Beacon nods before continuing, “He is.”

Eldritch, confused, asks, “Who is he?”

Simultaneously they both say, “Ash.”

Beacon then continues, “But at the time we thought his powers were limited. We also thought hers weren’t.”

Eldritch then raises her hand and says, “I think I’m getting lost in the story, would you begin at the beginning please?”

Beacon nods and starts over. “Right, sorry. Imagine a world that didn’t have the Association during the height of the Cold War. Governments did everything they could to recruit, train, and capture supers without any sort of ethical considerations. It wasn’t uncommon for a young super to come home one day and discover the government had kidnapped their family or worse all in an effort to enforce compliance.”

Erika adds, “I’ve read some of the case files that were unsealed, both sides did some fairly despicable things. They even experimented with creating or improving superpowers, sometimes by going to extremes that were… inhumane.”

“It got bad, yes,” says Beacon before he adds, “In that world, openly becoming a super was a risky proposition. Once people knew you had powers, people might try to exploit them.”

“That’s a risk now,” Eldritch cuts in, “people will always try to take advantage of powers and the people who wield them.”

Beacon answers with a shake of his head, “It’s not the same. I don’t know if I can really explain it, the paranoia and fear of those years. Teams were unheard of, in no small part because you never knew if the people you were working with might turn over your real identity to the government. Even if you trusted them, could you trust them to protect your identity over the lives of their families, their loved ones, even over themselves? Questions like these haunted us. Suspicion divided us. So you can imagine why the idea to form a twelve-person team seemed audacious.”

Beacon looks off in the distance before speaking again, “I started with Jennifer, the psychic. She helped me find other candidates and vet them. When I met Ash and his sister, the team was almost complete.” Pausing, Beacon adjusts his bandages. Then he says, “They were an unremarkable pair. Ash had mangled legs and his sister spent most of her time using her power to help him maintain a normal life.”

Erika chimes in asking, “He was always crippled?”

Beacon replies, “Oh yes, he was born that way. Mistress Metallurgy,” Beacon grimaces at the name and adds as an aside, “well she’s dead so I suppose it doesn’t matter, Gwenny, she wanted him to live a normal life, so she used her power to help him walk normally.”

Eldritch interjects with, “That seems difficult. If she could maintain that all the time, she must have been incredibly powerful.”

Nodding, Beacon answers, “Oh yes, she was impressive. But completely devoted to her brother. The rest of their family treated him like trash because of his handicap, which only increased her desire to help him live a normal life.”

In a querying tone, Erika asks, “So how does a kid that relies on his sister to just to walk turn into Ascherus the Annihilator?”

Calmly, Beacon turns to look Eldritch in the eyes and says, “He went down the same path you’re starting on. He saw things and faced things that broke him.”

Hesitantly, Eldritch asks, “What kind of things?”

“He was the first person to fight Becca,” replies Beacon, “we didn’t realize what she was capable of, and so while the rest of us were trapped in illusions he suffered.”

Apprehensive, Eldritch interjects, “What about Jennifer? Her power counters Becca’s.

Beacon nods and answers, “It does, but we didn’t know that yet and neither did she. Jennifer had never fought anyone with an ability like Becca and she couldn’t defend against it yet. Ash was at the mercy of Becca for hours, by all logic she could have and should have killed him as she kills everyone else. Instead, she shattered his legs. The injury left pieces of metal mixed with pieces of bone.”

“Why didn’t she kill him?” Erika asks.

Beacon sighs as his look turns melancholy, “I don’t know. Perhaps he always had the Annihilator inside him somewhere and perhaps she could see it.” Lifting his gaze to meet Erika’s he adds, “Ash was the one who gave us her name. He said she asked him ‘who do you see’ and in reply, he asked for her name. She told him Becca, and the rest is history.”

Seeing the contemplative looks on the girl’s faces, Beacon pauses to clarify, “He wasn’t evil then, nor particularly powerful. Frankly, we all thought of him like a sidekick. His ability helped him protect the group by creating small shields and not much more. When you compare that to my ability or even Genikost’s power, it wasn’t that helpful. But Ash was friendly, polite to a fault, and always willing to listen. He became a mediating influence, the person who could resolve our disputes before they broke up the group. So discovering what Becca had done to him, we made our first mistake.”

At this, Beacon turns his gaze downward, contemplating the tile patterns of the floor. After a minute of silence, he begins to talk once more. “We put all our attention on catching Becca. It brought us national attention, and that brought notoriety. Other villains began gunning for us and Ash couldn’t keep up. The obvious divide between his ability and ours grew more apparent with each foe until finally we fought Anathamizer. He wanted to study our powers and so devised traps for each of us. We all escaped except Justice, Ash, and Gwenny.”

“Justice?” Erika asks, “isn’t it-”

“Yes,” replies Beacon, cutting her off, “at the time, however, he was merely Justice. He became Blind Justice after the Anathamizer removed his eyes in the process of his experiments.”

Hearing Eldritch’s sudden intake of breath, Beacon gives a grim smile. “While he experimented on Justice, Gwenny and Ash managed to escape by pulling the metal shards from his leg. From then on, Ash walked with his distinctive limp and the media began calling him The Cripple.” Pausing, Beacon contemplates something before adding, “I believe it was a handicap rights group that first gave him the nickname actually. He was the first openly crippled superhero and while I suspect they wanted Blind Justice to be the poster child, he hadn’t quite come to terms with his disability yet.” Refocusing, Beacon continues, “I suppose it doesn’t matter, what mattered was that the name stuck.”

Erika then asks, “I recognize the name, Anathamizer, wasn’t he the reason for the Temple?”

Beacon nods, “Yes, Anathamizer’s goal in studying powers was to reach the divine. Evidently, he failed, or perhaps succeeded and didn’t like the answer, because he turned on religion shortly after he kidnapped us. He tried to set off a cluster of bombs in every holy city in the world and we stopped him. The religions of the world decided to memorialize the event with the construction of the Temple of Interfaith Unity.”

“Is that where-” Eldritch begins before Beacon cuts her off saying, “I’m getting to that, be patient.”

Eldritch nods contritely and gives Beacon back the floor. “The Temple was built in Berlin. Reagan came to commemorate the construction with a speech that signaled the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It was a time of real hope, new heroes were emerging, people began to have faith in the government again, and the president dismantled the Committee on Un-American Heroes.”

“What went wrong?” Erika says.

“We grew too powerful,” replies Beacon, “the younger generation worshipped us while the older generation faded. We were the world’s most visible and powerful team and then Hellraiser attacked.” Shuddering, Beacon continues, “He’s still the most individually powerful person I’ve ever had to face. He managed to destroy half of D.C. before we won and it wasn’t without cost. Three of our number died, Gwenny retired taking Ash with her, and Jennifer went into her exile. Suddenly the world’s strongest team was only half as powerful and the threats hadn’t gotten any weaker. It was a crisis. We knew we weren’t strong enough to soldier on with just half the team.”

“Why didn’t you just recruit new people?” asks Eldritch.

“Hubris,” responds Beacon, “we couldn’t agree on who to add. We began to recruit followers, sycophants, and sidekicks in an effort to outdo one another. Without Ash to smooth over our differences, our infighting became near open conflict and within a year, the Association fell apart. It left each of us leading sizable factions divided by competing ideologies bitterly divided by betrayals, real and imagined”

Pausing, Beacon purses his lips in a tight arc, visibly angered by the memory before he calms and continues with, “The U.N. decided to step into the power vacuum our decline create just as the Soviets dissolved, bringing government oversight to our and other super’s activities. Suddenly, it seemed like the demons of yesteryear were returning, stronger and harder to fight. Fear divided us again as governments encroached on our safety and freedom. Politics began to create divisions that seemed poised to tear our fragile trust apart. But I led a resistance movement, instead asking the U.N. to ratify the Association Accords.”

“Did it work?” Eldritch asks intent on the answer.

Erika replies before Beacon can by saying, “No, the Association Accords were summarily rejected. Instead the U.N. created the World Super Organization, which lasted six months because nobody took it seriously.”

“It wasn’t worth taking seriously,” Beacon adds bitterly, “it combined all the biggest mistakes of the previous governments with all the inane bureaucracy of the U.N. They wanted a registry of super’s secret identities, handlers who would tell you when and how to act, civilian review boards that could send you to prison, it was a foolish nightmare devised by diplomats with no understanding of what we actually needed.”

“It was an early step,” Erika says with a frown, “not perfect and certainly flawed, but they did try.”

“It doesn’t matter,” responds Beacon, “either way, it failed. Without any real organization, the rest of the Association and I agreed to take unilateral action. We wrote up our own rules and told the governments they could abide by them or we wouldn’t help. The big mistake was leaving our team split up. Our ideological divides remained and instead of finding common ground, we turned the world into fiefdoms. Each of us took control of a piece and tried to stay out of one another’s way as much as possible.”

Erika then chimes in, “And this also failed, because blackmailing the government isn’t a good idea.”

“No,” Beacon answers in an irascible tone, “it wasn’t. But we were desperate and terrified of what they might do. The important part, however, is that our division stuck. We policed our zones and for years a tenuous balance held, governments negotiated with the Association and us with them. Supers could join us or work under the arm of the government, and everyone made their own choice. We stamped out the worst of the abuse and protected our own, keeping any malicious governing bodies in check. Then Gwenny died, and Ash became Ascherus.”

The story of Beacon continues next week dear reader in… “Ascherus the Annihilator!”