As a little girl Keira had watched soldiers on leave from nearby Fort Bragg and sometimes daydreamed about what it might be like to join the Army. Three excruciatingly long months of Bloody Mary's incessant, maniacal screeching wrapped around a physical training regimen that had at times left her collapsed in her bunk and halfheartedly praying for death -- and she'd been an aspiring college athlete before the Dusk attacks, for God's sake! -- had cured her of any lingering romance about military life. Ante, apparently the only person attached to the HERO program who hadn't had a metal spike surgically implanted up his ass (Bloody Mary's had been covered in ground glass and tabasco sauce first, Keira was certain), had done his best to make the time bearable, what with his little jokes and his poker games, but there was just no denying simple reality: this whole thing<i>sucked</i>.<br/><br/>At least, she thought, she wasn't the only one for whom the training had been noticeably taxing. The Oriental girl, Cryo, had slept through one of the sadistic harpy's classroom lectures one day, and against her better judgment Keira had made excuses for her. The episode had ended badly: for three days afterwards Keira had wound up with double the calesthenics, half the sleep, and an extra ration of Bloody Mary's howling shit. That was the closest Keira had come to lashing out at an instructor, and in hindsight she supposed her exercises with Blowtorch had helped her find the will not to.<br/><br/>Most of the other students -- inductees? Trainees? Keira was never quite certain how to think of them all -- had come to the HERO program some time after their powers manifested, and so were building on a base of existing experience. Keira was one of the few who'd been snapped up by the military almost immediately, and was learning her powers from the ground up. She was a mutant, a living reservoir of dark energy. She'd learned to project it, to shape it, and even use it to gain limited control over gravity and visible light. Blowtorch would vary her training between pitch-black and agonizingly-bright rooms: though her energy-infused body was adapted to the former to the point she could see in lightlessness as well as in daylight, she'd invariably leave the latter with searing headaches and something like a light sunburn. The techs had warned her that highly energetic light, like the nun Chiaro could produce, could affect her even more severely. Apparently that, and having to eat about three times as much as anybody else, was the price of being able to create dark energy force fields and constructs, project modulated dark energy blasts and bursts that could seriously<i>wreck</i>shit, create and control darkness, move and heal much faster than a normal person, and fucking<i>fly</i>.<br/><br/>And the techs said that she --<i>Nova</i>, now, like those titanic explosions out in deep space; she was still getting used to thinking of herself by that name -- hadn't yet reached her full potential, either.<br/><br/>The day had started like any other, with more of Bloody Mary's unholy bellowing (Nova imagined they could end the war permanently by dropping the bitch and a megaphone into Dusk nests), and her throwing on her typical attire -- leggings, halter-top, combat boots, and fingerless gloves. Her parents, God rest them, would be mortified that their blonde Southern belle of a daughter had turned into a revealingly-dressed tattooed punk, but that life was... lost. Gone. It hurt to think about it, so she put on her customary scowl and stepped out her door.<br/><br/>And fell.<br/><br/>For a moment she was too startled to do more than curse the uprushing air blue, and by the time she'd recovered enough to warp local gravity in the way she'd been taught she was already slowing.<i>Another fucking surprise exercise,</i>she thought bitterly, tasting last night's dinner at the back of her throat. She spit as she got back to her feet, and not for the first time wondered if she shouldn't complete her look by taking up smoking. But those thoughts died when her gaze fell on the Dusk hive, and while supressing an involuntary shiver she forced herself to pay attention to the three trainers' speeches.<br/><br/>Returned to her room, she grabbed a drab, oversized zip-front hoodie and her one concession to military practicality: a web belt with a few utility pouches attached. She could<i>make</i>weapons -- swords, knives, whips, all comprised of dark energy. But a first aid kit, a multi-tool, a Zippo lighter, a few feet of paracord, a water purifier, some energy bars... if she was going to be dumped in the middle of nowhere near a Dusk hive, it wouldn't be without some minimal survival gear.<br/><br/>She was silent as the metal disk carried the group of them, though glints of ghostly blue-black lit her eyes in the pre-dawn darkness. She refused to be surprised again, and when the disk winked out of existence over the saltwater lake, she was ready for it, dropping gracefully to just above the water's surface, and then gliding to shore<i>sans</i>the indignity of getting soaked and filthy. As the other trainees clambered out of the water she cast her eyes towards the Dusk hive looming in the distance, and she supressed another shiver. She steadied herself: level-headed Nova might survive this, while scared and pissed-off Nova would just attract Dusks and die quicker. And she was<i>not</i>going to die. She'd been haunted by her parents' and sister's dying screams for too long. Time for payback.<br/><br/>She turned to help stragglers out of the water. "Cryo? Hercula? You guys okay?"<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>