Neither Fire nor Wind

[Captain Untouchable]

"Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds."
- Bhudda


It was an ordinary day.

Untouchable grunted as he lay there, mind ambling fitfully through his memories of the day. New York was as New York is: an urban jungle, swarming with people of every breed. It was rare that he had the opportunity to stray outside the confines of the university while it was still light outside, particularly with winter closing in, dragging behind it the dark, cold blanket of long nights. It had been thanks to one of the undergraduates - a little overzealous with the lab equipment - that had cut his day so short. The technicians assured him that the scanner would be repaired by monday, but that wrote off his planned experiments for the afternoon all at once. He'd considered hitting the library, researching a few of the subjects for his main project - or maybe for his unofficial extra-vocational research into his mutant abilities - but had brushed those plans aside in favour of spending a Friday afternoon playing tourist.

It was strange, the things that stuck in his memory. You would have thought that visiting the Empire State Building, Time Square, or Madison Square Garden that would have been dredged up from his memory, but it wasn't. It was the second-hand book store, and the bench under a tree in Central Park that flooded his mind: those few precious moments where everything else had drained away. It was believing for a little while that he was a normal guy, living a normal life, rather than wasting his nights fighting an enemy - crime - that could never be defeated, that turned out to be his final thought.

A groan escaped him as he shifted, the pain from the bullet wounds to his stomach and shoulder sending shockwaves across his body. A fresh, sickening, stinging pain coursed through him as he inadvertantly put pressure on the patches where the fire had burned all the way through to his skin. His costume lay in tatters, the nondescript black rags barely preserving his modesty. He tried again to move, but the pain overwhelmed him. Patches of black danced across his eyes, spreading out like some kind of pervasive, malevolant oil until his vision - and then his whole consciousness - disappeared into total darkness.

It was an ordinary day. But it was one hell of a night.


Earlier...

One of the fantastic things about New York was that you could get your hands on anything if you knew where to look. Take the police scanner playing sounds into his ear, for example: it hadn't even been that difficult to find, and had already saved him hours of mindless roaming the city streets. Sure, if you picked a spot in New York and waited long enough, crime would eventually find its way to you. That was hit and miss though, and there was only so much patience that one man could muster; particularly one man dressed as a ninja, roaming the city streets when he should really have been asleep.

The earpiece squalked about a shooting on the subway; Untouchable ignored it. Ambulance crews and squad cars would already be blazing their way towards the scene, sirens blazing and guns ready to pop off a shot at anyone who looked even the slightest bit suspicious. Untouchable had no desire to find himself on the wrong side of the law: aside from the awkward questions and the risk of getting shot, rumour had it that New York's finest were hardly fans of the mutant citizens living among them. While some of the claims of police brutality sounded beyond far fetched, Untouchable had no desire to test the validity.

The radio clicked again, and dispatch forwarded the summary of another 911 call. Much smaller scale this time: bookmakers heist meets arson, conducted by a guy with a gun and "flaming hands". That was more than enough to pique Untouchable's interest. Rising from his perch, he dropped the few feet to the floor of the alleyway, and threw himself onto the saddle of his motorcycle. Gunning the engine, he tore off into the night, his shinobi shozoko fluttering in the breeze.