It felt like he was always running. Running from something. In his line of work, it really wasn’t surprising that he’d have someone chasing after him most of the time. As he dived into alley after alley, he didn’t bother looking back. There was no point in doing so. He knew they were there. It would only prove with his eyes what he already knew.
“Get him!” “Cut him off!” “There he is!” The pounding of feet. He heard all of this above the beating of his own heart and the echoes of his own footsteps. The tails of his jacket flew wildly behind him in the low light of the middle levels of the city. Rather, the bottom of what could still be called the middle of the city. He could barely see more than ten feet in front of him. Smoke and soot, making their way down through the ventilation systems of levels above, covered everything, leaving the world enveloped in darkness. The few windows, few and far between, tended to be barred, boarded, or broken, a testament to the necessity of the work he did. No one was safe down here, and if he was hired to eliminate one of the thousands who were responsible for the anarchy, he was more than happy to do it. Most of the time, he got away cleanly. Even though there were usually witnesses to what he did, they tended to be convinced his target had just killed themselves: blew their own brains out. It was when he didn’t realize there were more watching that things got complicated.
Suddenly he felt his foot hit something other than the hard, cracked ground, and he sprawled on the cement, light scratches tearing at the skin on his wrists. He searched the air, first with his mind, and then, finding nothing, with his eyes. Looking back on his hands and knees, he stared into the eye sockets of a rat the size of a dog. One of the smallest he’d seen in a long time. He didn’t even give it a second thought as he picked himself up and started running again.
Jumping into another backstreet, he continued running through the low light. Soon, he began to pant. At just under 140 pounds, he prided himself on his healthy weight: not as skinny as those who lived below, and not overweight like those above. But not even his constant running could keep his weak heart in shape, and running through these endless alleys was getting close to torture. He couldn’t keep running anymore. He had to either lose them or kill them. They were lowly gang members, no one would miss them. The rich might even applaud his actions, if they ever found out. He couldn’t do that though, not in good conscience anyway. Even though they were chasing him and would probably kill him if they caught him, he had no personal reason to kill them. No, killing them would be a last resort.
He rounded another corner and skid to a halt. Reaching into his jacket he pulled out a revolver and popped out the cylinder for the third time today. There were still four shots left. Pushing it back in, he pulled back the hammer and closed his eyes. Even if he failed and the gang members kept chasing him, at least now he had some physical assurance. Beads of sweat quickly began trickling down his forehead as he concentrated, searching for their psyches. He only had one chance at this; otherwise he’d have to shoot them.
Their footsteps continued to pound closer, their panting louder than his. Then he found their feeble minds, and redoubled his efforts. Suddenly, he heard them slow down, catching their breaths.
“Goddammit dead end!” said the first. He sounded heavy set.
“Where the fuck did we lose that bastard?” replied the raspy voice of a second, followed by the obvious cough of a smoker.
“B-Bosh ish gonna k-k-keel ush iffen ‘e finds out ‘bout thish,” came the voice of the third.
A small silence fell over the group. A few seconds passed before Raspy spoke up.
“We go back, find that fucker, and then bring his fuckin’ head back on a fuckin’ stake.” Behind his corner, Nick imagined the other two nodding their assent.
The trio didn’t move for a good thirty seconds, still huffing and puffing. Poking his head around the corner, he looked at them. They were all dirty, unkempt, the one he assumed was Stutters was badly in need of a shave, and more importantly, all were heavily armed. Quietly smiling, he waved his hand around the corner up and down, as though to say, “Here I am!” They didn’t respond. They couldn’t. They couldn’t see him, or at least they were convinced they couldn’t. As far as they were aware, what they stood before was a solid concrete wall, the alley they had chased him down simply a dead end. Had they taken a wrong turn? There was no way he could climb these vertical walls. As he watched them walk off, he breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t often he’d have to resort to using what was both his greatest gift and worst curse to get away.
Sometimes, being among the empowered was amazing. Nick had been told that he belonged to the classification known as ‘telepaths,’ meaning his abilities revolved around his thought processes and those of others. It didn’t really matter to Nick what he was called, he only knew the consequences of what he could do were. Specializing in what he had termed the art of suggestion, he influenced the actions of others with his mind, but he was also able to communicate silently with others through thought and listen to what others were thinking. But just as he was blessed with the abilities that others would kill for, he had new dangers that others didn’t need to deal with.
They were known simply as the kiks. The CKs. The Cape Killers. They were well known throughout the city, and were paid quite well for what they did. Just because people like Nick had disappeared, didn’t mean they were gone. People with unusual abilities were hated and feared, and the people were justified in their fear, the oldest among them could remember the time when the empowered didn’t use their powers for survival but to dominate the city. They had thought they were doing the world a favor, erecting architectural wonders, advancing science decades faster than it normal would have, effectively eliminating crime. But they grew complacent in their power, and lost their vision of a better future. With their air of superiority they killed without fear, and came to be feared.
The Cape Killers, slipping unnoticed, developed methods to rid the city of the empowered. Within a month, those who did have abilities or physical features that made them different than their peers had disappeared. The modern Cape Killers traced their lineage to this heroic organization, but had splintered into competing factions over the profits that could be had from capturing and killing the few Empowered left, and competition drove them to become even more dangerous than their predecessors.
He eased the hammer of his pistol back into place before he began to walk slowly down the alley again. There was a cheap bar a few blocks away, and he needed to cool down with a cold drink. As it often did after jobs, his mind wandered upwards as he let his feet walk down paths he’d traveled many times before. Looking up, it was impossible to see more than a dozen stories above his head, even though he knew the shortest buildings continued on for at least another several hundred.
The city skyline extended for miles into the sky, and for the first time in history, society was literally segregated from top to bottom by wealth and power. The architecture of the city was a random amalgamation of styles from different periods, and as less and less room became available, they were slowly built closer and closer together. Walkways between the different buildings became more and more common. Eventually, these walkways were joined into artificial ground levels every dozen or so stories in the middle levels, or the Mids as they came to be known. As you traveled upwards into the Skyland, these ground levels became less and less common. Seeing the sunrise, the sunset, the moon, and sometimes, when the clouds of pollution cleared, even the stars, quickly became privileges afforded only to those wealthy enough to avoid the poverty and squalor below the thick concrete divider. But then again, even the Mids were a relative luxury compared to the Pit. The Pit was as close to a real hell on Earth as you could find. Over the millennia, collapsed buildings, terrorist attacks, and the burrowing of the poor had turned the lower levels of the Pit into an elaborate tunnel system, inhabited by those even the poverty stricken Midians had rejected. There were stories of rats growing to the size of a man, terrible mutations of creatures stalking their human prey in the dark tunnels, and the cave-ins that killed unknown masses of people were all too well documented. There was nothing down there in the bowels of the earth that was worth the trip.
He shook his head as his eyes came back down to ground level again. The sounds of the city were all around, and while the specifics changed, the atmosphere never did. The shuffling of feet from one of the main ‘roads’, the squeaks and growls of animals unseen, every now and then a gunshot, punctuated by a scream. Never before had such suffering ever been considered a luxury of the middle class.
Walking in silence, he glanced up. A neon “open” sign flickered dimly on the side of one of the soot covered walls. The P didn’t light up most of the time. The door was open though, and he could hear a crowd from inside, rowdily enjoying the alcohol they could afford perhaps once a month, their only reprieve from the monotonous hell of the lower Mids.
Inside the bar, there were eight places where the bartender would be able to serve you within fifteen seconds of ordering something. Of those, only five had fully intact chairs. Of that set, only two of them couldn’t see the TV, and even then only one was placed where the room’s natural acoustics made it impossible to hear the TV. When he walked inside, in that particular seat sat the same person who always did, about four beers in.
Looking to the right, it looked like any rundown bar in the lower Mids. Fairly empty, a handful of rough metal tables, some decorations reminiscent of days long gone, a sulking teenager in the corner. Looking to the left however, was anything but normal. A crowd of at least twenty to thirty people, all of them male, stood in a quarter-circle around the TV mounted in the corner. All generally faced the screen. Most held bottles of some kind. Some pompous Skylander was announcing the beginning of a concert of some new young pop star.
Ignoring the masses, he moved to go sit down next to the seated man away from the rest of the crowd when still more people, a couple teenagers, pushed him out of the doorway as they raced to join the crowd. He stumbled against one of the tables, shot the pair a dirty look, but continued on his way towards the other man.
“Hey Arthur,” he said, sliding into the next seat, jealous he wasn’t here in time to get the oddly specific seat Arthur always took. He laid his arms on top of the booth as his eyes wandered over the selection of cheap liquors.
The man didn’t look up when he responded. “Nick. Didn’t expect to see you back here so quickly.” He took another swig.
“Yeah, neither did I. I had to resort to something I didn’t want to.”
Nick zipped up his leather jacket, taking care to make sure he didn’t zip it too far.
“You idiot. The kiks will know. ‘specially with what you do.” Arthur, the older of the two, turned and looked at Nick. Arthur had a hardened face of about forty. Several scars were evident around his eyebrows, which were knit together in a fashion at once concerned and angry.
“Well what was I supposed to do? Kill them?” asked Nick.
Arthur’s expression lost the concerned part.
Nick rolled his eyes as he turned to again face the selection of alcohol. “You know that’s not how I do things; I don’t kill more than I need to.” He paused. “Sometimes I wonder why it’s me doing this job and not you.”
Arthur chuckled. “I’m not in need of money quite as bad as you are. If you need to kill to survive down here, so what? There ain’t no jail to throw your ass in.”
“That’s right. The only punishment they have down here is capital.” His shoulders sagged a little. Looking the other way momentarily, he bit the side of his cheek. “But what’s done is done. Hey Dick…”
Nick was interrupted by a loud cheer from the large crowd on the other side of the bar. Apparently the concert was about to start. Amid cheers and grunts, Nick could make out a sort of rhythm of minds. Elation, excitement, in a few cases arousal. Leaning back in his chair, he looked at the screen. Sure enough, it was that damned pop singer who looked like she was thirteen despite being nearly twenty, Hannah^O. What the hell did everybody see in her? Sure she wasn’t bad to look at, but she looked far too young for just about anybody over sixteen and if he’d been about five or six years younger, Nick probably would have found her attractive. Her music wasn’t that good either, yet somehow she was practically worshipped by everybody that wasn’t Arthur or Nick.
Through the static and the yells, it was possible to make out a fairly high pitched voice calling out to the crowd of hundreds of thousands in one of the many Skyland stadiums, and then millions, probably billions, more through the various means that others used to watch live.
“Hello everybody! Thank you so much for being here! I can’t believe that so many of you showed up! I love you all! Each and every one of you!” If Nick had still been paying attention to the screen, he would have been repulsed by the myriad of poses she struck as cameras flashed all around her.
“Hey Dick!” he called out to the bartender. “Could I get some scotch on the rocks down here?”
The stout gentleman, his bald, aging head beginning to wrinkle, nodded as he took down a tumbler and wiped it out with a rag. The ice quickly clinked inside as the liquor poured over them, causing them to crack as they were surrounded by the new temperature. As Dick slid the glass down the counter, Nick caught it in his right hand and lifted it in a mock toast before draining it and slamming it back down.
“So anyway about the kiks,” Nick said, looking at Arthur who had returned to his bottles. The collection had expanded by two since he had first counted when he came in the door. If Arthur could get drunk, it would be amazing how much he actually did drink.
“What about ‘em,” replied the older man, swirling about half a bottle in his left hand.
“How would they find me? I only used my ability in a very small area.”
Arthur sighed. He’d been through enough encounters with the Cape Killers to know that it didn’t matter if you thought you used your power or not, they would pick up on it somehow. He explained this to Nick, and took another sip.
“Why would they come after me though? The Serpents don’t have any kiks of their own do they?”
“Not that I know of, no.”
Nick’s face still pondered the issue. “So I have little to fear right?”
“You have to remember, the kiks get paid for every one of us they bring to the ‘authorities.’ Paid double if we’re still kickin’. They don’t need a more personal reason, money is personal to everybody.” Arthur looked at Nick. “I’d wager you’d fetch a good price. They might not do anything about it, but they probably know what you’ve done. Bringin’ you in themselves is too much work for them though, that’s why they let us fight amongst ourselves down here.”
Nick frowned. In just the past month, he’d added three to his body count. How much did that make him worth? Did they care that the people he’d been ‘taking care of’ were all gang members? Who were ‘they’ anyway? Nick had only seen ‘them,’ or what he assumed ‘they’ were, once before in his twenty-four years of living in the lower Mids, escorting a repair team after some building had been bombed. If that building had collapsed, it could have caused thousands of deaths. That wasn’t counting Midians and Pitters.
The first song of Hannah^O’s had ended, and the crowd around the TV applauded and whistled as though they were in the front row of the concert, when suddenly they stopped. They grew silent. Nick leaned back to see if anything important was happening.
Several figures dressed all in black had grabbed hold of the pop star. One of them had giant snow white bird wings coming out his back. Two of them grabbed hold of her arms, while two others held firearms of some kind. The starlet screamed as the two holding her quickly rose into the sky, followed closely by one of the others. The one with wings wasn’t so lucky. As his immense feathered appendages began to flap, some members of the crowd had grabbed a hold of the tips, and as he tried to lift off, they dragged him down. His two hands began to rapidly unload the weapon he held, flashes emerging from the front of the barrel, but not even the sound of gunshots could be heard above the immense noise of the crowd. People around him fell to the ground, bleeding. Some were already dead, and those that fell had no chance as they were suffocated by the mass of people on top of them. Splotches of red quickly blotted the otherwise white wings. Soon, the first wing disappeared below the crowd, and then the body. The last wing momentarily hovered above the crowd, a sail in the ocean of people, but soon, it too, dove beneath the waves.
“Arthur…”
Arthur looked up. Even he had noticed the changing tone of the crowd.
“It’s time to go,” he said, finishing off the last of his beer. Pushing his chair back under the counter, Arthur stood up and stretched. Both of them looked at the crowd, which was now becoming chaotic. Among the general cacophony, there were shouts of “capes”, “mutants”, and “kidnapping.”
Just think, don’t talk.
Arthur nodded his understanding. Where are we supposed to go? My place isn’t prepared for riots…
Nick started moving towards the entrance, he knew exactly where he was going. Follow me. Don’t fall behind.
Hello there, I'm Reclaiming Olympus here with a new world to explore.
First off a little background about myself, I'm a sophomore in college who's been part of this site in various manners for the past six years now (wow it's been that long?) and roleplaying for five. Recently I started wanting to write with the people on this site again, but many if not most of the active faces here are ones I'm not familiar with so I decided to create another nation to give myself a fresh start.
Regarding Reclaiming Olympus, this is a quite simply an unusual world. In a brief summary it includes elements of superhumans, cyberpunk, dystopia, class divisions, and a few other tropes. In essence it is a world created for anything to be possible, to remove the limits regarding traditional tech levels of MT, PT, FT, and FanT by taking the desired elements of them all and leaving those not wanted. This is a world that started being explored quite awhile ago but was never finished due to many of the members disappearing or becoming inactive, so with your help I'd like to get it off the ground again, except in a more open source fashion. Last time it was much more closed than what I intend to do with this. I'd like to open up this world for others to play with. Provided of course that it isn't just straight up stolen.
If this world and idea seems interesting to you, drop a post below declaring interest, putting forward ideas to take place within the world, questions about expanding the ideas I've set forward so far (which I know is incredibly limited), or criticisms. I've been gone from the scene for awhile, and this is indeed an ambitious project to undertake right off the bat. But being big means it has the success for greatness.