gull
@gull

"... yeah, Mom. I'll... find something, somehow. Bye."

Beep. Click. Tama slipped her flip-phone into her pocket and flopped her arms behind the bench, in the kind of way that proudly proclaims that you have given up on any hope that her evening would contain anything to turn around her shitty afternoon. Another long day of trying to explain that no, she is not legally permitted to elaborate upon her time with the Soleil Defense Squadron without divulging at least five government secrets, and another day of being turned down for promising jobs she just couldn't provide proper paperwork for without accidentally letting three more slip.

It didn't help that her current legal identity was only supported by that highly confidential SDS-marked paperwork from her last days there when it came to her background. She didn't bother checking in with any prior employers or the schools she'd gone to to see if she could update any of it, because as far as she knew she'd be part of the SDS for life. After all, anyone could tell you that just about everyone in the SDS past the front desk was a guaranteed lifer, between the generous pay, copious government-supplied benefits and the kind of prestige that lets you wiggle your eyebrows and say 'yeah, I help fight the dark denizens that pour from the Great Wound on the reg, so what?'.

Especially the Steel Saviors.

ESPECIALLY the Steel Saviors.


Old Steel Savior Vanilla Blazer - hero to all of Soleil - had to be sixty-five by now. He was one of the few who were allowed to have public identities, and Tama with all her experience on the subject wouldn't dare disagree that he earned that honor. From the Gigasbeast days of yore to the great paradigm shift of the Iron Traitors all the way to the modern Great Wound Crisis, the Steel Saviors have fought to be the saviors of all who need it. Tama knew that each and every one of them loved every second of the work - they wouln't willingly hang up the helm for the world. The Steel Saviors are tighter than bark on a tree. Nothing, she'd once thought, can tear them apart.

And here atop this bench sprawled former Steel Savior Amazing Hammer, booted from the best job in the world by a bunch of marketing goons. She rolled over from a standard bench-slouch to a reversed one, upper body slung over the back of the bench, gaze barely even registering the odd passer-by. She felt a soreness creeping into her neck through the advanced spine-guard that presently sat in her, along all the other bits they fit into the Steel Saviors to facilitate their super-human transformations.

It never used to ache like this.

The Office for Brand Integrity was recent - as in last three years recent. None of the Saviors wanted it, and they were incredibly unpopular with most of the SDS support crew. Unfortunately, 'popularity of Marketing amongst the people they're going to turn into merchandise' was not a metric the current Soleil city government thought was more important than 'potential money to be made from selling toys and movie deals of our boys', so there they were. Tama - though she wasn't Tama, at the time - had been Amazing Hammer for a solid year, and her comrades of 'Saviors East' had practically been her second family, so finding out that a bunch of suits were about to start intruding on what they had...?

She rolled back into the more comfortable back-slouch, stretching just so such that she'd crack her bones. It was some relief, at least, even if the crack of forbidden metals snapping back into place uneasily was loud enough to be distracting. Her eyes stared straight into the cloudy sky above.

She remembered the words the 'Director' of 'Brand' 'Integrity' used to try and couch their reasoning for booting her off the team mere weeks after she'd finally jumped through all the needed legal hoops to finally have her own name, her own gender, her own everything finally recognized by the country - they stung harder than any Woundgraver could, even now, weeks after she heard it. "A fourth girl would throw off the balance of the team," he'd told her, "and besides - your combat performance has been slipping. It's time we got a fresh face to maintain the Hammer's consistency - it's what he needs."

And that was that. She had to be quietly shuffled out her spot on the Saviors in the dead of night. They were replacing her natural talent behind the mask of the Hammer with some fresh-faced nobody she'd never heard of, and they wouldn't even be telling the other Saviors beforehand. She had to wipe the contact information of the rest of the Saviors off her phone - lest her past be brought to light, and the rest of the Saviors' identities revealed. She didn't even get compensated for her last few days of work, and thanks to a variety of legal snarls she could swear hadn't existed until the current administration came in and began fucking with the whole setup.


And that led her right back to here, now, slung across a bench, severed from the only people who understood her, unable to tell anyone the way it felt, utterly alone in a sea of concrete and glass.

Well, except for the Woundgraver tearing through the sky, plummeting towards her, approaching its latest victim.

She couldn't even bring herself to pretend to be scared of Monster of the Week Number 213 as it slammed into the street in front of her, leaving cracks spreading all the way to the sidewalk. She pushed herself to her feet, scratching her cheek with one hand while the fingers of her other twitched in the direction of a Steel Driver that no longer adorned her waist. She took a deep breath in, then exhaled slowly as she looked wearily at the twisted beast approaching her. "I hope you're planning to not eat shit this time," she remarked resignedly.

The barest smile snuck onto the corners of her lips as the Woundgraver lumbered towards her, claws clacking against each other and saliva trailing from its maw. It felt so good to be able to swear again while facing down a Woundgraver, vulnerable as she was - the boys at Brand Integrity put public swearing on the chopping block first ('heroes shouldn't swear so brazenly! Think of the words you might get children to say in polite company!'), and dire as the present situation may have been it was the little liberties she appreciated having once again. Unfortunately, however, little liberties were not able to protect her from getting picked up and hurled into the wall behind her, the sickening crunch of bone and voidsteel and slightly reinforced flesh meeting brick and mortar and being unable to come to an agreement as to which should give first rattling through the air as she slid to the ground, already bruised and battered, starting to bleed where the claws had dug. Pedestrians were already starting to gather at a safe distance expectantly, pulling out phones and cameras and little novelty beepers they'd started selling two years back after Resonance Arrow hit the big ten-year anniversary of Saviorhood.

As she squeezed her eyes shut in pain, as she pulled herself into a sit against the wall and rolled all her joints back into place with the assistance of the internal modifications, she wondered who the SDS would dispatch. She hoped, more than anything, that it would be someone from Saviors East - someone who would recognize her, who would really help her, who would finally have a chance to reach back out to her. She missed them, and she knew they missed her dearly. The siren announcing the presence of an approaching Savior caused her to flinch deeper for just a moment, then slowly - slowly - open her eyes.

Thud.

Right there, in the middle of the road, was Steel Savior Amazing Hammer.

The new one.

Tama frowned intensely. This evening, the universe decided to spite her one more time with this spandex mockery. He looked just a little uncomfortable in his stance, standing in a cheap imitation of her own that she'd perfected over her years of work. He spun the Break Hammer like an amateur, letting it wobble unacceptably hard. And when he spoke to the Woundgraver, who had turned to face its opponent, it was in a barely passable imitation of the voice she'd always dropped into behind the mask of the Hammer, even when hers changed with time and tide. "Creature of the Wound! When I send you back to the Great Wound, you'll regret the day you ever messed with the people of Soleil!"

He didn't recognize her. The two never met face-to-face, after all, and she was still one of the private Saviors when B.I. decided to switch her out for this... this...

"Fraud," she muttered, barely audible even to herself.

She began to grit her teeth. He was a fraud, put there by a bunch of corpos who thought they knew what the team needed more than they did. He was a replacement goldfish for a fish that did not fit their exact fishbowl dynamic plotted on a slide-show somewhere. He was the symbol of everything she'd come to hate about the job she'd loved despite the suits' best fucking efforts.

And she was sick of it.


SAVIOR.

Time seemed to grind to a halt around her.

THE SAVIOR THEY WOULD DISCARD.

She couldn't move within it. She was locked where she was, trapped in the frozen air.

THERE IS A SECOND GREAT WOUND IN THE WORLD.

Her back ached terribly.

DO NOT LET IT BLEED FURTHER. RECLAIM WHAT YOU HAVE LOST.

It spread to her arms, to her legs.

FORCE IT TO CLOT.

To the base of her skull. She became acutely aware of the metal laid over her bones, bracing them in, holding them together, strengthening them.

FLUSH THE DEBRIS.

She pushed herself to try moving. She pushed herself so hard, but she could not move. The voidsteel throughout her felt like it was buzzing in a way it never had before.

SCAB OVER THE WORLD.

Every fiber of her burned with a need to do something, to move, damn it, move, stand up, fight, fight,

FIGHT.

Tama was already on her feet, sweating bullets and panting heavily, legs beneath her aching with a mix of pain and the buzzing of the steel. The world hit her all at once, the false Amazing Hammer swinging madly at the Woundgraver, who parried each blow. When did she stand? No, this wasn't the time to wonder. Her fingers tightened around a block of voidsteel she barely even registered as foreign to her hands. It felt so familiar, after all, and who was she to question where she got a pseudo-Steel Driver? She moved it to her wrist, and it latched on by its own power.

No, not its own - she knew where this power came from. Within her, when she was Amazing Hammer, she'd almost unconsciously felt that strength and that glory and that passion sink deep within her after the day was done, slowly building. It lived at the core of her, and now - mingled with rage - it had ripped itself out and placed itself in her hand. She was more bloodied than she was just a little bit ago, wasn't she? Her blood soaked her coat and her nice white shirt and her tie and her suspenders and her pants, but she didn't mind.

As Tama pulled the handle back, the air felt as though it charged around her, as though it was expecting something of her. Noticing this, the Woundgraver turned to watch as it batted away the new Hammer's attacks, who started with a "You can't afford to get distracted on the battlefield, you-!" before himself noticing the bloodied civilian sporting what looked to be some kind of strange take on a Steel Driver mounted to her wrist.

As she pushed the handle in to engage the transformation, its screen flashed a single word, illuminated in light blue.

JUDGEMENT.


The familiar feeling of the suit, building itself up around her; the feeling of her body, becoming more than it was ever designed to be; the feeling of the helmet, slipping over her head, revealing a new facet of herself to the world. It all felt so familiar to her, and yet there was something new and different, some new kind of will drawn from within her to create this. Her form - new and pristine - still had notes of Amazing Hammer within it, reshaped to fit the new context of her as she was now. someone so much more than the old face that was staring back at her. She felt renewed, driven, ready.

She lowered her head from its upwards gaze, staring straight ahead at the Woundgraver and the new Hammer. The monster backed away, standing at a middle distance between the pair of heroes and the crowd, who were all simply watching in awe as some new fellow appeared from seemingly nowhere. The new Hammer raised his free hand to point at her. "Identify yourself! I am the A-"

"- am the Amazing Hammer," she finished for him, dropping back into the real Amazing Hammer's voice for the effect, "or, more accurately, was the true Amazing Hammer, returned from the hell your board-room superiors decided they should fucking cast me into." As she spoke, she slowly brought her voice higher naturally, closer into what was now her usual vocal range, if not perhaps a hair lower. "I'm here to... set right what they rendered wrong, to punish them for the havoc they have wrought upon the people that cared about me most... and to mend the Great Wound, of course."

The new Hammer backed off nervously as the crowd began to whisper amongst themselves. "Big - big talk for a civilian...! Where's YOUR hammer, then!?"

She silently raised her hand up to the air. Pouring forth from her - the second wound in the world - was a new hammer, far larger, far more impressive, far more dangerous. Once it materialized, it immediately swung forward to the ground with a street-shattering crash.

The new Amazing Hammer was left speechless.

She rolled her neck, examining the new suit she'd manifested. "I'm no 'Steel Savior'," she said airily, "but I still need some kind of alias. How about... 'Radiant Judge'?"

She saw her junior stagger under the weight of his own hammer with some amusement, before turning her attention to the Woundgraver. Before she could enjoy messing with the new kid, she still had a responsibility to Soleil and her people, SDS backing or no.

Radiant Judge smiled beneath her helmet as she drew her massive hammer up and began to spin it in the air.

Even if she wasn't getting paid for it...

... she missed this.


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