The Aegirian Templar/Left Up to the Templar: Paragon's Paladins
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Contents |
Author's Notes
This is the first of three semi-interconnected stories featuring The Templar. They first appeared in a somewhat condensed form as a single thread in the role-playing forums on the Millennium Paladins website. After a good deal of creative revision and editing, I managed to separate the existing material into three individual storylines and expand each one into something standalone. I decided to post these stories here for two main reasons. I wanted to put this material somewhere besides the MP website, both for safety and for greater public accessibility. Secondly, it's here because I just love VirtueVerse. I love the idea, the content, and the characters, and these stories are my homage to the site. When necessary (and sometimes just for the fun of it) I've thrown in mentions to prominent characters and groups that I've come to admire during my explorations of the wiki; so if you see your name mentioned, it's just because I'm a fan.
This first story is meant to focus as much as possible on the Millennium Paladins, despite the necessity of having Temp remain the focal point of the tale. I've tried to include other supergroup members and MP-related events as the bulk of the text, albeit from the Templar's perspective, since I believe the MPs and their adventures to be deserving of their own bright, if small, spotlight.
Preface
"You're all here because you're the best of the best; Marines, Air Force, Navy Seals, Army Rangers, N.Y.P.D."
- ~~Agent Zed, Men in Black
"Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children."
- ~~Ezekiel 25:17
"It seems that a new knighthood has recently appeared on the earth...this, I say, is a new kind of knighthood and one unknown to the ages gone by...He is truly a fearless knight and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armor of faith just as his body is protected by armor of steel. He is thus doubly armed and need fear neither demons nor men."
- ~~Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood
Chapter 1
In any other city, it would have been bizarre, a matter for wonderment or...alarm. In Paragon City, however, it was nothing special. Costumed superheroes crouched on the ledges of buildings all the time. While there really wasn't always a crimefighter perched on every single building in the city at all hours of the day, the common citizenry were so accustomed to seeing them running through the streets or flying overhead that they almost took them for granted. Not to mention the fact that most superheroes kept perch at altitudes that most mere mortals couldn't easily lay eyes upon. At this time of night, however, the streets of Independence Port were dark and deserted, so there was little chance that anyone was around to spot the dull blue-colored figure posted on the edge of the small, four-story brownstone.
The Aegirian Templar, newest member of the Order of the Einherjar, stood like a granite statue, his gaze firmly afixed on the squad of elite Council soldiers that were out on patrol. His Security Level had surpassed the point at which he was expected by the Freedom Phalanx to help preserve the status quo in Paragon City's primary port, but being a hero wasn't about always being where you were facing equal-rank supervillains. Sometimes you had to spend time taking down the little fish - with dynamite, if necessary. Besides, as the first ever member of the Order to be stationed directly in Paragon City, it was the Templar's responsibility to gather intel on all of the various villain groups that operated within its walls. He personally didn't like the Council - not one bit. Anyone with their obvious power, size, and resources that was bent on world domination was someone that the Einherjar needed to take an active hand in trying to stop. Despite their overt rather than covert nature, their other qualities made them nearly as dangerous as the Scourge.
The Einherjar still knew almost nothing about the Scourge, despite having fought against them for over fifteen centuries. Simon at least had an inkling about what lay at the origins of groups like the Circle of Thorns and the Council. The Scourge were an unknown - a nearly faceless, silent, insidious force that struck without warning wherever they were least expected. No one knew where they operated from or what their ultimate goal was.
His gaze remained fixed, but his mind wandered again. Somewhat like this 'mysterious future cataclysm' that Twelve talks about, he thought to himself. It had only been a short while since Simon had decided to join Servant-12's superhero organization. In that time, they had not further discussed the Templar's mission, his Einherjar brethren, or the Scourge. Nor had Twelve further discussed his own agenda, outside of recruiting new members and forming coalitions with other groups.
The Council squad continued moving away, and Simon adjusted an invisible subcutaneous control on the left side of his helmet. With a visor that possessed built-in multi-spectral vision modes and enhanced digital zoom, the Templar had no need for binoculars. Silently, he leaped to the rooftop of the neighboring building. He still wasn't completely sure what to make of Twelve. There was very little about him in the usual databases. Simon had made a point of learning all he could about the most prominent superheroes and villains in the City once he had arrived. Grae Knight, Xanatos, Ascendant, Doctor Lazarus Crom, Dead Eye Jake, Crimson Cutlass, Black Starbeam, The Imperial...those were just a few, out of a rather long laundry list; all highly prominent, all fairly high-profile. Almost nothing on Twelve.
He knew that Twelve was a good guy. That much was undeniable. He cared about his people, and his heart was in the right place. He was obviously a very religious man. Simon had never been terribly religious. Spiritual, to an extent - one could only study Eastern philosophy and martial arts for so long without developing at least a marginal sense of spirituality - but not religious. Actually, Simon didn't truly believe that Twelve was 'religious' in the sense that those evangelical Christian yahoos were 'religious'. Twelve was probably closer to being just 'spiritual', just in a way that involved him always utilizing religious language.
It didn't bother Simon - at least not much. He had always been a little wary of those kinds of people - people who did things like say 'God bless' to total strangers in the course of everyday conversation - they just seemed a little strange to him. He didn't mind that Twelve was a religious man - he was a superhero like everyone else, as well as a good leader, and that was all that really mattered. What concerned him was the nature of this mysterious and devastating future event that Twelve had claimed to have seen. Simon wasn't one to believe in prophecy - although given the kind of world he lived in, he wasn't about to rule out psychic clairvoyance, either. But he didn't believe in coincidences. If there was some sort of disaster coming, what made it different from all the other disasters Earth had faced so far? Surely it had something to do with one of the world's various villain groups.
The Council squad rounded a corner, and Simon's gaze shot ahead of them to a spot several hundred meters away. A sizeable gang of Family was loitering in the street outside their favorite club. At any time they could meander into the path of the armed troops approaching them, and there would be a full-blown firefight raging in the street. He would have to take out the Council troops before that happened.
The Templar crouched on the ledge of the building, loosening his katanas in their sheaths. Neural commands shot through the suit's control interface like lightning bolts, readying the battle systems. Its jumpjet-enhanced leg servos coiled like springs as he tensed to jump. Time to be a hero again, he thought, then vaulted off of the roof.
Chapter 2
The fight was quick and fairly brutal. The Council troops were not equipped for close combat, apart perhaps from the man with the flamethrower, and the Templar's armor was highly resistant to those kinds of temperatures. Simon had pummeled their leader to the ground before he even had a chance to bring his heavy, unwieldy chaingun to bear, and he took down the two nearest enemy troops with a quick flurry of superhuman katana strikes.
The remaining Council soldiers aimed their assault weapons skywards as Simon suddenly vaulted into the air, his armored form disappearing from view as he catapulted himself straight up. Stray bullets pinged off his armor, but his opponents were shooting blind and most of their fire went far and wide. The Templar plummeted back down into their midst as suddenly as he had disappeared, his armored bulk shattering the pavement and tumbling the soldiers off their feet. A quick series of swings to their helmets knocked them out cold, and Simon sheathed his blades and threw down a locator beacon for the PPD.
One of the benefits of having a pair of swords that were, for all intents and purposes, a linked extension of the armor, was that Simon could control their sharpness. A simple mental command allowed him to dull the edge instantaneously, in essence giving him nothing more than two fancy-looking metal clubs. He had no doubt that he had broken more than his share of bones in his short career, but at least he wasn't killing people. Of course, if he was dealing with zombies, robots, or other nasty things that just plain needed to be taken out, he could sharpen the blades just as quickly. Things generally got much nastier from there.
He returned to his rooftop, getting ready to make another sweep of the port, when an icon on his visor's internal HUD lit up - incoming communications signal. With a flick of his eyes, he activated the header, bringing up the transmission data - strength of signal, location of signal, sender of signal, etc. He stiffened involuntarily. It was from the Crusader. Slowly, deliberately, he reached up and touched another invisible switch, this one on the right side of his helmet, just beneath the comlink array.
In as calm and measured a voice as he could muster, he said, "Templar here. Go ahead, Crusader."
Chapter 3
The Crusader's clear, strong tones came across the comlink with crystal clarity, despite the several thousand-mile distance between himself and his newest subordinate. "Hello, Simon. How are things going?"
Simon knew that the Crusader read every word of every weekly report that he sent to Norway, so he obviously wasn't asking about Simon's investigative or combat operations. Besides, the Templar had a sneaking suspicion that the Warder was hanging around in somewhat closer proximity to the Einherjar's newest member than he was supposed to be.
"Things are going fine, sir. Still nothing new to report, but anything could happen, as I'm sure you know. But I'm sure you didn't call me just to get another status update." Simon was careful to keep his tone neutral, but he was starting to feel just a tad apprehensive.
The fifteen-hundred year-old warrior chuckled. "Always the astute observer, Simon. That's one of the things I like about you - you can chit-chat nicely for awhile if you have to, but when you need to, you cut straight through the crap."
He paused slightly, then continued. "I hear you've gotten yourself accepted into a supergroup."
Simon stiffened involuntarily, and he felt a brief twinge of genuine fear that he might have overstepped his bounds. Dividing one's loyalty was something that was customarily frowned upon, even for seasoned veterans; for rookies, it was often looked upon as the worst kind of arrogance. "Ah...yes..."
His unease clearly must have come across over the line, because the Crusader chuckled again, this time in a reassuring, rather than an amused, way. "Relax, Simon, we're not going to rescind your Order membership - not yet, at least. We dispatched you to Paragon to root out the Scourge, by any means necessary. None of us expected you to handle the job yourself - not in a place that's literally crawling with other heroes."
Simon relaxed slightly. "So you're not upset that I've potentially put all of our asses on the line by aligning with outsiders?"
The Crusader scoffed, the first genuine sound of displeasure he had made during the conversation. "Of course not! I'll forgive you for saying something so distinctly un-Einherjarian since you're the green rookie, but please, try not to do it again. In case you've forgotten, we've spent the last thousand years 'aligning with outsiders', as you put it. Granted, we did it with other people's troops, not our own, but we don't exactly have a track record of fighting our battles all by ourselves. Besides, it's not like we're exactly clandestine anymore, after what we did during the Rikti War."
Simon shifted uneasily. He had been so uneasy about what the rest of the Einherjar would think that it had made him lose his focus. Despite all his experience and training, his status as the newest member of the Order still set heavily on him, and sometimes it interfered with his mental machinery. "I know, and you're right. I didn't mean to forget all of that; I was just a little...distracted."
The Crusader cleared his throat. "Remember, we gave you discretionary authority to utilize whatever resources you need in order to accomplish your mission. That includes seeking out third-party support. Besides, we've been keeping tabs on your new friends for awhile now. Personally, I don't think you have anything to worry about. Mykal Tannan runs a clean op, both publicly and clandestinely - not unlike ourselves. Trust me, you could do worse."
The Templar nodded. "I agree. I just wish I knew more about this disaster he's foreseeing."
"Well, you can help him unravel that as best you can. He and his group aren't the only ones focused on averting world-shattering disasters; if you need outside support on whatever it is, let us know. Just remember that your primary mission is to locate and attack the Scourge. Either way, just say the word - we can have half a division of Midgardians in Rhode Island in the blink of an eye."
"Acknowledged. Thanks for the support."
Simon felt rather than heard his commanding officer's grin. "Don't mention it, Simon. Just keep up the good work. Good hunting, Templar."
The connection went silent, and Simon mulled things over for a few moments. It had never really occurred to him to examine the public records for Tannan Enterprises, or Mykal Tannan, for that matter. He was too used to simply thinking of him as Twelve. He made a conscious note to himself to pay more attention to the 'normal' side of things. First thing tomorrow morning, he'd see what Mykal and his corporate crusaders believed in.
Chapter 4
It was not until afternoon the next day that Simon was able to begin examining the available information on Tannan Industries. As usual, real life had interfered, and it was only after eating, exercising, lecture preparation, and term paper grading had been settled that Simon was able to sit down at his small computer desk and begin reviewing Tannan Industries' public records.
Their approximate net worth was about $1.65 billion - respectable for a company their size. They had 362 full-time employees - probably about average, although it might be a bit more than a comparable corporation might keep on the payroll. They had just begun an only marginally-publicized move to a brand-new corporate headquarters in Steel Canyon - an area widely regarded as the most affluent, influential, and expensive neighborhood in Paragon City. It was where the big boys went to play, and only the best got to join in - you needed good growth and a lot of liquidity to pull off a flashy move like that.
They had made the Forbes 400 list three years running, and their cash flow and expansion had stayed stable over that time, despite the economic disruptions inherent to the turbulent environment that was Paragon City. And despite all that, they had done all they could, much more than many other companies would have done, to ensure that they would not have to lay off any of their employees. They donated a great deal of money, man-hours, and equipment to support charities at home and abroad, far more than even the largest of their direct competitors did. And yet they were not only holding their own, but expanding steadily.
Simon sat back in his chair and gazed at the screen. It was evident that Twelve's leadership was at work here as well. No company this small could survive and thrive in a pool full of corporate sharks without a strong executive, but nor could that be accomplished simply by one person; that meant that Mykal had succeeded in building himself an executive staff comprised of people who shared his ideals and weren't shy about supporting them. It was hard to sell charity and idealism as profitable commodities, and even harder to find people to help you sell them - especially young, ambitious Harvard MBA-holders just itching to get themselves cushy, high-paying ivy league jobs.
Simon's brain went into superhero mode momentarily then, and in the back of his mind he wondered how much of Tannan Industries' efforts went towards supporting Twelve and the Millennium Paladins. The inevitable comparison to Bruce Wayne was ever-present in Simon's mind, given all of the various battlesuits and gadgets contained in Twelve's arsenal. What he did know was that Mykal was very good at keeping his business persona completely separate from his alter ego, and he was personally confident that very few, if any employees at Tannan Industries knew anything about their boss' 'other group' of associates.
The company certainly did enough R&D to provide for Twelve's 'toys', but Simon doubted that anyone but Mykal had much of a hand in designing and building them. His corporation had few discernible military contracts or military connections of any kind - probably in keeping with Mykal's beliefs; Simon found it hard to believe that he would have anything to do with blatantly manufacturing weapons tech. He supposed it was possible that the company might have some hidden projects, but he doubted that, too - Mykal didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd do anything major on the down-low. He knew a good deal about Twelve's arsenal of weapons, but nothing like that had yet shown up on the open market. Granted, Twelve had a much lower superhero profile than Batman, but he still wouldn't get very far if his signature weapons were offered up for sale for all to see.
In a way, Simon was glad of that - with a company like Crey Industries floating around, the last thing the world needed was another corporation running dozens upon dozens of black projects that made the usual government-level shadow ops look like after-school programs. He was also glad that Tannan Industries was small and successful, as opposed to huge and secretive. Any bigger and Mykal might get it into his spiritual, moderately idealistic, well-meaning head to turn his company into a mirror version of Crey Industries.
Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing - with all the piecemeal efforts and tiny stings of individual heroes failing to do much more than slow Crey down, it'd be nice to have someone of equal strength go toe-to-toe with that sociopath Countess Crey and her army of goons. But the last thing the planet needed was to have a full-blown, multi-national corporate war start raging unchecked; it had gone through enough turmoil over the centuries just as a result of the secret war between the Einherjar and the Jotunheim Scourge, not to mention two world wars and an alien invasion. Besides, Simon didn't think that Mykal was the sort to start waging crusades; just because he was a holy man didn't make him a fanatic. Engaging in open warfare against an implacable enemy, no matter how dangerous, always ran the risk of bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. It was better to do such things as clandestinely as possible, which was what Twelve and his Paladins largely seemed to do; in that regard, Twelve's attitude was strikingly similar to that of the Order.
Simon got up and stretched. Well, lucky for him he's got me on his side now, he thought to himself. He doesn't have the numbers to handle a major situation if it arises - and knowing karma, one probably will, sooner or later. When it happens, having a few hundred Midgardians on hand to 'calm things down' might not be a bad idea...'
Chapter 5
Simon glanced over at the clock and grimaced. It was nearly four in the afternoon; he'd been looking over the public files for nearly three and a half hours. He closed the browser and shut down the laptop, then glanced out of the window. The sun was steadily sinking towards the horizon, its fading light barely visible amidst the inky shadows of the towering skyscrapers. Been at this for long enough, he thought to himself. No rest for the righteous. Time for another patrol. Simon went over to his dresser, reached over and pressed a small button on the back side, and pulled out a special suit of clothes from the hidden drawer that quietly slid open at the bottom of the unit.
An hour later, Simon, having showered and dressed, finished up a simple meal of rice, steamed green beans, and baked fish and went back up the short flight of stairs to his bedroom. Walking over to his closet, he lifted up one particular section of loose shelf, and the back wall slid away. Simon's apartment was located on the fifteenth floor of one of the newest housing complexes in Galaxy City, and sat up against one of the massive corner buttresses that extended all the way down to the street. To an outside observer, these huge steel and concrete pilings served no other functional purpose than to shore up the weight of the multi-kiloton skyscraper, and they would be right - at least, for the most part. When the structure was being designed and built, several members on the architectural and construction teams had arranged for a special element to be built into the buttress against which Simon's apartment just happened to sit - the entrance to which Simon had just opened from the confines of his bedroom closet.
Simon strode through the opening, his right hand reflexively hitting the hatch reseal control on the wall behind him as he passed by. A narrow spiral staircase wound down through the thick concrete of the buttress, dimly lit by a thick band of fiber-optic cables mounted to the wall. Simon descended the steps purposefully, his stride and posture subtly altering as he moved deeper towards his destination.
When he arrived at the second door at the foot of the staircase, this one a heavy impervium-alloy security door triple-locked with a retinal scanner, palm scanner, and voice scanner. Simon looked into the eyepiece, waited for the beam to finish scanning his eye, placed his hand on the palmrest, waited for that to finish scanning, and then spoke clearly into the microphone. "Sky give me strength to protect the earth."
The third red light on a small side readout panel winked to green, the grid of red beams of light barring the door switched to green as well, and the narrow door groaned open to reveal...blackness. Simon walked forwards through the threshold, and lights came to life on either side of him as he moved into the small, dome-shaped room. A dozen LCD screens mounted along the walls flickered on, and a single brilliant, luminous beam of light shone down from the pinnacle of the dome onto the room's centerpiece. Mounted upon an intricate marble pillar that itself rested on an elevated dais, was the Aegir-Aspect armor.
Simon glanced at each of the LCD screens in turn, drinking in the streams of information that they were busily displaying - intelligence reports from Order operatives stationed all over the world. As much intel came into this small room as did into countless national war rooms throughout the world, all of it available to Simon at the touch of a button. Satisfied that there was nothing of importance occurring that would require his personal attention, he ascended the small flight of steps to the walkway that encircled his armor's diagnostic column.
A number of small data consoles were built into the circular metal railing that ringed the walkway, each of them feeding him detailed status reports regarding the armor's condition. He quickly looked over the readouts on each screen, ensuring that the maintenance computers, servomechs, and the suit itself had completed the last maintenance inspection cycle without any hitches. A checklist full of green readouts greeted his query; satisfied, Simon cheerfully entered the commands required to clear the armor for extraction.
Simon stepped up to the column and spoke directly to the armor. "I'm here. Time to go again."
Hatches opened all up and down the length of the column, and small hovering servomechs attached the inner armor layer to the special bodysuit that Simon wore. A few seconds later, with his HUD indicating a good seal, two robot arms capped with nozzles emerged and flanked him. A viscous mass of dark gray nanotech material emerged and enveloped Simon from head to toe; then the servomechs rapidly encased him in several dozen pieces of sea-blue alloy armor. The suit's three layers of multi-function armor coalesced and came to life instantly, filling Simon's visor with light as the main computer personality came online.
'Good evening, Templar.'
Chapter 6
Five months later…
The Templar stood atop the central platform of the Upper Room’s workshop, busily typing away at his favorite console as the sounds of the open room buzzed in through his helmet’s auditory sensors. Nearby, Ionic Revenger and Vic Furious were carrying on with their own business. Down the hall, Servant-12 and Kuragari Umbra were in the control room, entering data into the massive supercomputer that Kura had designed and built with his own hands. Simon had only the most basic knowledge of computer science, and couldn’t imagine the complexity involved in erecting an electronic device of that size and strength.
It was January of 2009, and Twelve had just completed a new round of recruiting for the supergroup. It had been only five months since Templar and Ionic had been inducted into the Paladins, and already they had both been made officers. The Paladins had grown and shrunk many times over the years, according to the records that Simon had dug through, and Twelve had need of subordinates to help him manage the new programs he was implementing. The Templar himself had been assigned to oversee the orientation of two of the new recruits, neither of whom he’d met yet.
Two of the new recruits entered the workshop, walked over and began talking with Furious – ‘Marshal Furious’, as Simon liked to call him, after his rank in the group. He had no idea what the man’s official rank was, assuming he actually belonged to a legitimate military unit – which Simon didn’t know either. Like most of the current Paladins, Vic was a mystery; very little solid information available in any of the existing datafiles, at least not that Simon could find – and he’d done his fair share of mining in all of them.
He glanced over at the two recruits who were talking with Furious – well, one of them seemed to be talking, anyways. The woman – short, blond, pretty…feathery wings on her back – was talking fairly animatedly. The man - tall, dark and gruesome, with spiky black hair and a bandana covering the lower half of his face – more or less stood there, arms crossed, either grunting or speaking only a few words at a time. Hmm…my kinda guy, maybe. Simon regarded them both with a growing degree of interest, his attention wandering from his console. I spend far too much time performing these suit analyses anyways. Might as well go say hello.
He strolled around the bank of computer consoles to where Vic and the oddly-matched pair of recruits were talking. The tall man with the gray-streaked hair and the black eyepatch shifted his good eye over to look at Simon as he approached. “Templar. Good to see you again. These are my friends Grifter Storm” – he gestured at the dark man – “and Nyte Shaide.” The girl with the wings looked up at Simon and smiled, her bright-eyed gaze not seeming to dim even slightly as she took in his visor-shrouded face.
A person’s initial reaction to his armored face told Simon a lot about them. Interpersonal contact relied heavily on being able to see the other person’s face – subconsciously reading dozens of tiny signals emoted by the eyes, the lips, the facial muscles, even the nose and the brow. Knowingly or not, people got used to being able to see those signs, to look at them. They got used to seeing ordinary human faces - talking to ordinary human faces. Not being able to was something that bothered most people.
Anyone who’d entered and lived in the world of meta-humans for very long got used to it after awhile – even the civilians who called Paragon City home. There were ways – clever little tricks and mind games, mainly – to deal with talking face to face with helmets, masks, hoods, disfiguring scars, wolf heads, lizard heads, robot heads…heroes and villains in Paragon ran the gamut, from cool to garish, weird to freakish. Heroes usually did a better job of dealing with that fact than civilians did – a necessary job skill in this business – but there was still almost always a twinge, or a twitch; some kind of tell that a person gave off, no matter how good their poker face, when talking to something that was not a normal face.
Simon got no sense of a tell, visible or otherwise, from either Grifter Storm or Nyte Shaide. Grifter’s stare was focused and narrow, clearly sizing up the Templar. This one’s been around awhile, Simon thought. And not on the straight and narrow side, either. Automatically assesses every new object’s potential threat level – doesn’t take any chances ‘til he’s sure. Probably not even after he’s sure.
Nyte’s face, however, was open and friendly. She seemed considerably younger than Grifter, although she didn’t look very much so, at least physically. Her eyes held only an iota of the wariness and suspicion that Grifter’s did, and Simon could tell that the full weight of it, small as it was, wasn’t currently focused on him. This one’s much more trusting...hasn’t been in the game long enough to get jaded yet. Probably busy wondering what I look like behind the mask. Curious. She’s not afraid…but not because she’s too naïve to be…because she doesn’t think she needs to be. This one doesn’t scare easily; she’s tougher than she looks.
Simon stopped in front of them, nodding to both in turn. “Nice to meet you, Nyte – Grifter. Welcome to the Millennium Paladins.”
Working with these two should be interesting, he thought to himself. Should be interesting for a long time…
Chapter 7
Another five months later…
The Templar once again stood in the humming workshop of the Upper Room, typing into his favorite terminal. Damn, but I spend a lot of time on this platform, he thought to himself. Not quite as much time as I spend out on patrol…but almost as much time as I do in my apartment. He either needed a new hangout or a new hobby...or both.
It was now the beginning of July, 2009, and the Millennium Paladins had done more in the last five months than they had in the preceding five since Simon had joined their ranks. During that time, they had fought against most of the major villain groups that were combated by high-Security Level heroes: the Carnival of Shadows, the Praetorians, the Rikti, Crey, Nemesis, the Malta Group and the Knives of Artemis - not to mention the most notorious culprit of them all – Arachnos.
Simon remembered their most recent mission, a lengthy and dangerous affair designated as Division: Line. Their battle against the Rikti Restructurist faction had been nothing less than epic, carrying them across half the city and to not one, but three alternate dimensions, as well as pitting them against not only the Rikti, but the Circle of Thorns and Nemesis as well. The knowledge that the seemingly implacable Rikti guerrilla army was, in fact, fractured and divided, had at last given the Earth’s leaders hope that at least part of the war might begin to abate.
The entire mission had presented Simon with no small amount of difficulty. The inevitable and still-unexplained tendency of his battle suit to develop a mind of its own when confronted with Rikti soldiers had plagued both him and his groupmates all throughout the mission. It had been in the winding caverns of a cave system that he had suffered his most remarkable episode. His suit’s independent nature had exploded in a superhuman fury, and Simon had once again been reduced to a subservient observer in his own body as he charged headlong into entire squads of Rikti soldiers, mowing them down like so many stalks of wheat.
His groupmates had been extremely wary of him during that particular episode, and rightly so. At the time, Simon had considered it a miracle that he’d survived; the fact that he had survived his own battle suit’s single-minded genocidal fury was a testament to the extent to which his friends had his back. Between Nyte’s empathic healing abilities, Servant’s and Furious’ firepower, Ionic’s shielding, and Grifter’s raw clawed fury, they were able to cope with their blue friend’s sudden and alarming tendency to mindlessly attack every alien in sight. The commentary from the five of them had, expectedly, subjected Simon to no small amount of good-natured, if slightly sarcastic, ribbing. He had responded with characteristic sardonic wit, even as he had knelt on the rock floor clutching his sword, panting and tired.
“Hey, I never go charging recklessly into combat without a plan, unless that’s what the plan calls for. Except, of course, when Rikti are involved. Then it’s all the suit’s fault.”
He chuckled despite himself at the memory. The mission had given him a chance to field-test a new suit subroutine, designed as a brute force measure to convince the suit which kind of Rikti it should attack. It had been more or less successful in forcing the suit’s VI to differentiate between the rogue Restructurists and far more peaceful Traditionalists – a fact to which the Rikti scientist C’Kelkah owed her continued healthy existence. It would have been extremely embarrassing, to say the least, for Simon to have unintentionally killed the person who was the linchpin for the success of the entire mission.
Thankfully, his groupmates had been granted a good deal more time to get used to his quirks, and that of his suit, since then. He had gotten to know Nyte Shaide and Grifter Storm quite a bit better - Nyte more so than Grifter, but at least he and Grifter got along well enough in and out of combat. Not only that, there was another ‘new’ member once again in the Paladins’ ranks. Vincent Bane, better known as Retaque, whom Simon had heard of but never met before, had rejoined the MPs. Twelve had been pleasantly surprised when the masked, dark-haired, pointy-eared, broadsword-wielding hero had asked for his new set of teleporter codes, and since then, he and Simon had done a good amount of villain-thrashing together. It was hard to forget their recent battle against one of Malta’s towering Kronos-Class Titans, a culmination of a particularly traumatic mission to foil one of Malta Group’s nastiest plots ever.
The Paladins’ missions hadn’t been restricted to the known rogues gallery, either. First there had been Servant’s discovery of the Lost Boyz gang. A mass jailbreak from a federal psychiatric institution had resulted in several hundred masked psychopaths being released onto the streets. The murderous Lost Boyz were among the most dangerous and difficult foes that Simon, Twelve, and the rest of the Paladins had ever fought against. Their rampage had culminated in a deadly attempt to bomb Faultline; with powerful explosives planted directly on the geological weak point beneath the zone, the madmen could have destroyed the entire neighborhood and everyone in it with the push of a single button.
Simon knew that Twelve was one of the city’s heroes who had seen and known Faultline before it was Faultline, and that he had some kind of connection to the neighborhood and the people living in it. It was Twelve’s single-minded determination to find the escaped lunatics and defeat them all that had driven the Paladins to success. If not for his leadership, then Faultline would have been reduced to a smoking pile of rubble.
And then there was the Council, and their newly-ordered army of supersoldiers. The Nictus-dominated geniuses had contracted with a man named Zeruel, at best described as a lunatic with a god complex. Only a lunatic with a god complex would have gone the route that he had. Any normal evil genius tasked with creating a superhuman army would have taken volunteers or abducted innocents and used whatever scientific methods were available to turn them into mindless killing machines. Zeruel had instead started from scratch, growing a number of genetically-engineered artificial humans and bringing them to life with something called The Synthetic Soul. Simon had no idea how something like that could even exist, much less work, but it had – and that was a kind of power that no mortal being should be allowed to possess. The weak link in the chain had been Elyhaim, a synthetic human prototype who hadn’t quite measured up to the Council’s standards of quality. Simon knew enough about on-demand, superhuman armies to know that fully self-aware, free-willed supersoldiers did not exactly fit the bill, and that was exactly what Elyhaim had turned out to be. With her help, Templar, Retaque, and the rest of the Paladins had succeeded in defeating Zeruel and his prototypes, and had recovered the Synthetic Soul. What would be done with it, though, was what really worried Simon.
In this business, it was rarely hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys – but sometimes circumstances threw you a curve ball. The doomsday machines and super-powerful gadgets that these supervillains concocted were too dangerous for anyone to have control of. Sure, the superheroes were always sent in by the authorities to beat down the baddies and snatch up the wonder-weapons – but who was to say that the government agents that they turned the super-tech over to were completely free of temptation? Simon was reminded of the parallel from Raiders of the Lost Ark – no doubt all of these devices were carted off to some secret warehouse somewhere in the Midwest, to be studied in seclusion by ‘top men’.
In the worst-case scenario, Simon realized, the heroes had to do double duty. It was not always enough to simply rein in the villains; superheroes often had to keep an eye on the governments and the people that ran them, as well. After more than a year spent operating in this city, he was starting to understand, if not quite agree with, the attitudes of all of those hard-bitten ‘anti-heroes’; their willingness to bend or break the rules in order to ‘get the job done’ made sense when placed in the proper context. Simon and the Templar all but eschewed the company of such people; more often than not they were blunt, tactless, argumentative, rude, crude, and generally unpleasant. But when push came to shove, the Templar would rather have them around than not. When it came to storming an enemy base, somebody had to sneak into the bowels and do the dirty work, and somebody had to watch those people’s backs by dealing with the horde of minions outside – and the Templar was much better suited to do the latter than the former.
I'm a warrior, plain and simple, he thought. Let the rogues and assassins play their game of hide-and-go-kill; I'll be on the battlefield, doing the simple job of combat and keeping their immoral butts free and clear. If that makes me nothing more than a dumb, expendable tin can in their shifty eyes, then so be it. Me, I know better.
Chapter 8
August 7th, 2009, 9:00 PM; A.E.G.I.S. Project Base
Simon sat alone in the largest, emptiest room he could find, trying rather unsuccessfully to meditate. He had spent over a month doing little but keeping watch over as many neighborhoods as he could manage, hoping in vain for someone to return. Most of the Paladins had not been seen in at least that long, and some for longer. He had reported regularly to the Crusader, but the Order had been unable to help him find any of his wayward comrades. The problems faced by the world were too large for the Einherjar to spare resources trying to track down a few dozen wayward superheroes, and Simon didn’t have any established out-of-group communications channels with his fellow Paladins. They were simply gone; off the radar; incognito, and there was no way to find them. When superheroes decided to disappear, they usually succeeded in doing so.
Simon looked around at the bare walls of the empty room. The A.E.G.I.S. Project base was oversized, sprawling, and…empty. No briefings were held in the main hall. No rounds echoed in the target range. No fabricators buzzed and hummed in the workshop. He had come here many times before, and apart from the second time, he had always been the only living soul inside. The members of A.E.G.I.S. Project had once been coalitioned with the Millennium Paladins, but no longer; they were a defunct group, their roster vacated, their base all but abandoned. Simon always felt sad when he came here. Who knows what these walls had seen and heard while superheroes had lived and worked here; now, it was doubtful that anyone but him would ever walk these darkened halls again.
He’d been here with Nyte, Kura, and Ionic once before. They’d roamed the halls for awhile, exploring every room and corridor of the base. It was massive and very well ‘tricked out’ compared to their own base...but it was also empty. Simon had been determined never to let that happen to their Upper Room…but it was, slowly but surely.
All of Twelve’s coalitions had long since fallen apart, several while they were in the planning stage. The most recent had involved Arbiter Death’s rather ill-informed attempt to convince the Paladins to join his...attempt...to get elected Mayor of Paragon City. To Twelve’s credit, he had listened patiently to the man for ten whole minutes before showing him the way out. Personally, Simon thought that the whole group of insurgents ought to have been run out of the city...but the PPD and Longbow had bigger fish to fry.
Simon closed his eyes again and tried to concentrate. He tried to convince himself that his mission had not failed, but in all honesty, it was a hard sell. He had been largely aimless in the months prior to joining the Paladins, unfamiliar with the city and its inhabitants and completely unable to find any leads on the Scourge. He had spent an entire year surrounded by his friends and fellow officers in the MPs, and in that time he had learned the ropes, mastered all of his skills, maxed out his Security Level, traveled through time, been declared Hero of the City, and even rescued Statesman from the lair of Tyrant himself. Even his personality had changed, even if only a little.
Now that the Paladins were gone, he felt himself drifting again. There was nothing new to find by digging through the main computer’s databanks – he had established a mere two months after he had joined that Twelve knew nothing about the Scourge – and without Paladins on-station, no new data would be transmitted, either. After a year poking through secure data storage systems belonging to Crey, Arachnos, the Council, and Malta, he had not found one reference to anything even mildly resembling the Scourge. If he couldn’t make some progress, the Order might decide to pull him out of Paragon altogether – stick him somewhere else where he might possibly accomplish something useful.
He sighed. Engaging in RPD - Rumination While Depressed – usually didn’t get him anywhere, first because it wasn’t a collaborative effort, and mainly because it was unsettlingly close to fruitless self-commiseration. What he needed was help. He missed Twelve...and Kura, and Nyte, and Ionic. Hell, he even missed Vic and J U S T I C E and - God help him - Grifter. He had never gotten to know Vic and J U S T I C E terribly well, and he only just managed to get along with Grifter – though to be fair, that described most of the MPs’ relationships with the ‘metal-clawed madman’.
Nothing had gotten Nyte as mad as people giving her friend Grifter a hard time. Simon could understand that; if someone had been hassling his soul mate, then he’d probably have gotten angry with them too. It had been a source of tension between her and Twelve, since Grifter’s ‘ends justify means’ view of crimefighting had always been diametrically opposed to Servant’s ‘honor, courage, commitment, purity’ philosophy. The three of them had almost gotten into a fight in the Upper Room’s medbay during one particularly trying mission, and Simon had almost gotten pulled into it on Twelve’s side before it had ended. He wished the three of them would show up, even if they did start fighting again. He could stand a little interpersonal drama over sheer boredom any day.
Simon opened his eyes again. This was getting him nowhere. He was going to have to find a new place to meditate, because every time he came here now, it distracted him. The Templar stood up and stared at nothing but the inside of his visor. It was time to focus. Time to go.
The Templar would spend another day vigilantly guarding the bases, another day watching the comm channels and the surveillance feeds. Another day doing his exercises, practicing his katas and running his combat drills. Another day in the workshop, honing his sword technique and tinkering with his battle armor. Another fruitless night ‘observing’ people and ‘overhearing’ their conversations in the D – he never paid too much attention to any one person or any one talk, since most of them were mundane and inconsequential. Another day of watching, waiting, recording, reporting, and waiting again. No matter how long it went on, no matter how long it took, he would do it. He would do it because it was his job – his duty – to see it done. He was the Aegirian Templar, and he could do anything – even if it meant doing nothing at all.
Chapter 9
December of 2009; two weeks before Christmas
Servant 12 had called it 'Project Rebirth'.
Simon looked around at the newly-reorganized halls of the Upper Room. The Embarkation Hallway with its teleport pads had been shifted and re-aligned, and a doorway in the Entry Foyer where none had been before opened into a new room only barely sectioned off into the empty, unfurnished shells of personal office spaces. Another massive room, this one as big as the ever-popular Workshop, apparently served as the new home for Kura's exquisitely-crafted supercomputer - this one an updated model dominated by the huge central processing core that hung from the ceiling of the humming chamber. The old Control Room with its now half-empty upper level and small, secondary computer bank looked forlorn and purposeless without it. The Power Room had been narrowed significantly; gone was its massive blue-grey Office Block with its small labyrinth of rooms; instead there was the hum and whine from twin banks of generators and the wide avenue of ionizing floor plating that separated the conduit walls that housed them. Only the the Entry Foyer, the Medical Bay, the Briefing Room, and the Workshop had escaped untouched, and the newer additions to the base were still incomplete.
Simon knew for a fact that the Millennium Paladins, like the legendary phoenix, had many times risen from the ashes. Servant 12's supergroup had suffered many setbacks throughout the years of its existence, experiencing cycles of decay and inactivity as members would leave to pursue other missions, join forces with other contacts. It was only through the utter dedication of its core members to the cause they followed that the Paladins would recoup and recover, expanding their relatively small Upper Room to more adequately handle the new challenges they faced and seeking out new superheroes and crimefighters to help them in their mission to find the mysterious Twelve. Simon himself had been recruited at the extreme tail end of one such period in the Paladins' history, and after more than a year amongst their ranks, this was the first of the group's apparently cyclical 'reduction periods' that he was present to experience.
He had no idea what form Servant's bold new initiative would take, and as before, he was unsure as to what task his leader would assign to him in order to further that goal. Twelve had made it clear that another round of recruiting was in order, and as one of the only active remaining officers, Simon worried that at least some of that arduous task would fall to him. Many of the Paladins had not been seen in months. Vic Furious, Ionic Revenger, Retaque, Nyte Shaide and Grifter Storm, J U S T I C E and W I S D O M...no one had seen or heard from any of them. What few new recruits who had been accumulated in the previous months had all departed, leaving behind the inactivity of the Paladins for other groups or other cities. At this point, only Kura, Simon, and Mykal were still actively serving as the leadership of the Paladins, leaving them with few subordinates and even fewer allies. None of their old coalitions were still intact. A.E.G.I.S. Project had finally and recently folded for good, their base reclaimed by the city in some way or another. For all intents and purposes, the Millennium Paladins had nothing to link them to the outside world.
The Aegirian Templar stood silently in the Entry Foyer, taking in all of the changes that had overcome this small but familiar second home. It was not the first time that change had come to the Upper Room; he hoped - he believed - that it would not be the last. All he could do now was what he had always done - follow Servant 12's orders, lend what time and effort he could to his cause, and wait to see in which direction the road of fate would unfold.
Chapter 10
2011, the Ides of March
The base was still there; for his part, Simon hoped that it always would be. He knew that in an alternate timeline, now erased, that even after two hundred years, even in the face of an apocalyptic world war, the Upper Room had still survived. He didn't know what safeguards Mykal Tannan had enacted for the survival of his dynamic corporation, especially in the face of the eventual passing of its phenomenal and charismatic CEO, but Simon was sure that Tannan Industries too, like the Millennium Paladins themselves, would survive.
The Upper Room was still there; still powered up, still functional. But Simon knew that he would probably never see it again.
Paragon City had changed drastically in the last year and a half, but in a far different way than the Upper Room itself had changed. The city had been flooded with an influx of new immigrants. Praetorians, escapees from the dark mirror dimension where an evil version of the Freedom Phalanx ruled the Earth with an iron fist, had come to the Primal Earth dimension in droves. Invasion forces comprised of Tyrant's brutal shock troopers had followed, bringing even greater chaos and destruction to a city still struggling to endure monthly Rikti assaults. For the first time, former villains and ex-heroes walked the streets of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, as meta-humans either succumbed to the lure of lawlessness or atoned for their past crimes and were redeemed. And in the extra-planar regions, from Ouroboros to the Shadow Shard, there were whispers that the Well of Furies had been re-opened, and that Incarnates the likes of Statesman and Lord Recluse would soon be coming into their own.
While activity of all kinds in Paragon City seemed to be ramping up, the same could not be said for the Millennium Paladins. The man responsible for the dramatic upgrades to their base, and one of the three legs of the vital tripod that held the group together, Kuragari Umbra, had dropped off the grid. Neither Servant-12 or the Aegirian Templar knew why or how he had disappeared, or where he had gone. Templar hoped that he had not finally succumbed to the machinations of his pursuers - if Crey Industries had indeed finally caught up to Kura, then it was very likely that he would never be seen again. Of course, even that would be preferable to the alternative - that Kuragari had once again been drawn into the dark and dangerous Netherworld. Despite being the apparent source of his shadowy powers, Kura had been trapped there once and had only barely escaped with his mind and soul intact. If he had somehow been returned there, then it was doubtful that he would be able to escape again.
Servant had been able to bring in a few sporadic recruits just prior to the time of Kuragari's disappearance, but like all such recruits, they had quickly dropped off the radar within a month of their inclusion into the Paladins. This seemed to be the standard pattern of behavior for all of the Millennium Paladins' 'replacements', and it was a pattern that Simon had seen enough times to last him a lifetime. It seemed as though the act of joining a super group (if not the act of becoming a superhero itself) was devolving into some sort of fad. This newest generation of heroes seemed less interested in working together and combating real threats then they seemed intent on simply running conjured simulations in the halls of Architect Entertainment for their own enjoyment and profit.
Even Templar's own mission seemed to be winding down. The sudden influx of Praetorians to Paragon and the Isles seemed to have thrown the Scourge off-balance; their attempts at infiltration and subversion within the city itself were becoming less pronounced. Simon had spent more time overseas, attempting to track down any links between the Arcova vampire clan and the Scourge, and most of his time in Paragon was devoted to securing materiel and supplies for the ongoing Project Belisknir. As the weeks turned into months and no new developments within the Paladins occurred, Simon was finally forced to make the decision to leave. In all honesty, there was really nothing else that the Paladins, as a group, could do for him anymore. Servant-12 was still an important ally - and Mykal Tannan and Tannan Industries even more so - but the unfortunate truth of the matter was that the Millennium Paladins were, for all practical purposes, defunct.
Personally, Templar felt sorry that all of Twelve's ambitious goals and plans, his desire to turn the Paladins into a renowned and effective fighting force, would likely never come to fruition. He had not taken his leadership duties as an officer lightly, and his decision to leave even less so...but the truth was that there was simply no one else left to lead. The Aegirian Templar still had no small number of Midgardians to lead - brave men and women who were fighting on the front lines every day, no less than any of Paragon City's heroes, perhaps with less power but certainly with far greater discipline. He had never felt as much pride or responsibility as an officer of a small supergroup as he had in serving as a commander of the Order's paramilitary forces, and he knew deep down that that was where his true calling lay. From this point on he would always be 'General Templar' to those that he served, just as much as they served him.
Simon left his office untouched as he left - just as absent Kuragari's office remained the same as it had for all those months. He doubted that he would ever go back...but Paragon City was a big place, and maybe - just maybe, sometime in the distant future - he would fight alongside Paladins once again.
