ic Don't Ask [IC]

[Ari]

November 28th, Thanksgiving Day, 2019, 8.45AM, 

The woods of Bayview, overlooking the lake

 

"Felix, they are...they are dead." Leroy whispered, as if he was afraid to awaken the two men under the leaves. Both were stiff, face-down and swollen, wearing soaked and muddy winter coats, hats and scarves to ward off the approaching chill of another polar vortex. Standing over them in his loving recreation of a Puritan's costume, hat crushed between two slender fists, the chatty Dragon Prince of Earth-2 was at a loss for words for the first time all morning.

 

Felix and Leroy had set out on a mission of mercy. With his power to conjure the mysterious black diamonds growing, Leroy had decided to set up a shelter in the woods at a homeless community he'd heard about on the Bayview Slack. "Think of it, Felix!" he had told the other boy over lunch the other day, "Heat, food, water, cleaning supplies, building materials, clothing, medicine, in any amounts and at any time! That is what being a hero should be about, changing lives for the better!"

 

So the two had set out into the woods with samples of all those things after a trip to Bayview Mall. At Leroy's passionate insistence, they had dressed up like Puritans. 

 

Now they were standing over two ice-cold corpses, the chill wind off the Atlantic Ocean rattling in the skeletal trees above.

 

Finding his voice, Leroy murmured "Felix...their heads...twisted around. Someone killed them."

 

On a closer look, that suddenly became very apparent. The faces were turned to the hard earth, but their bodies faced the flat grey sky.

 

 

Edited November 19, 2019 by Ari

[secondling]

Legatus

 

Felix had been somewhat nonplussed when Leroy had approached him about his "mission of mercy," but had acquiesced rather quickly when he realized, silly though the outfit made him feel, the other boy had a point. Heroes should change people's lives for the better. That was what Centurion had done through his iconic prowess and nature. Though he had offered to carry a lot more of the things they had purchased at the mall than Leroy, Sun Dragon had shown that he, too, was quite powerful.

 

Now, as he knelt on the frost-hardened earth, XVIII's expression twitched violently, flashes of the bloody mess that was all that had remained of XV swiftly stealing through his thoughts, followed shortly by the broken corpse of XVI. No. Not now. He forced his mind to the moment.

 

"Yes." He said after a long moment. "And by someone - most likely someone, and not something - with greater than human strength." He lifted one of the corpses gently, respectfully, to look at its face, before lurching back with a curse in Latin. XIX?! For a moment the man had looked almost like his brother, dead by the hands of their own kin. Though he had not seen the corpses of XIX or XX, his imagination was quite willing to supply horrific images of the dead.