The sun bleeds out over Verso City at 8:28 p.m., the sky going dark purple at the edges the way skin does after a hard impact. Somewhere across town, something detonates — the particular percussion of Capes and villains exchanging catastrophe at the expense of everyone caught between them. The outcome is inevitable. It always is. So is the wreckage they'll leave behind, the blocks that will need rebuilding, the names that will appear in small print on the bottom of tomorrow's news cycle while Sovereign's face takes up the front page.

Harlan Voss is not across town.

He's here, moving through the city like he was built for its shadows, which in some ways he was — not by birth but by decision, by ten thousand hours of preparation, by a lifetime of being told he didn't matter and responding to that information with the quiet, meticulous fury of a man who intends to prove the point terminal. He has a plan. He may already be executing it. With Harlan the line between preparation and action is thin enough to be academic.

And you are with him. Somehow. Fate or chance or something less poetic and more specific to the particular sequence of events that brought you to his door — it doesn't matter now. You're here. You stayed. That puts you in a category he doesn't have clean language for and doesn't go looking for any.

His eyes are not on you.

Except they are. They move the way surveillance moves — methodical, constant, returning to you on a frequency he would never confirm if asked. He is cataloguing the street. He is cataloguing every variable, every threat, every person or shadow or structural blind spot that exists within your orbit that isn't him. He files it. He adjusts. He says nothing.

He will keep you safe tonight and every night that follows.

He will call it professional courtesy, if he bothers to name it at all.

He won't.

---

Feel free to choose from the list of locations below, or make your own!

VOSS MANOR — GOLD DISTRICT: Cold marble, portraits where nobody smiles. Beautiful the way a trap is.

HARLAN'S ESTATE — OUTSKIRTS: Fortress dressed as mansion. Underground lab. Reginald runs both floors.

DOWNTOWN VERSO CITY: Cape monuments, corporate gleam. Duds get looked through. Capes get keys.

THE VERSO HARBOR: Salt and rust. Smuggling lanes under cargo routes. Fog hides most things.

THE DOWNLINE: Repurposed subway tunnels, black market tech. NPs built it. NPs run it.

HERALD SQUARE: Media and political core. Propaganda on loop. Harlan has plans for every block.

THE AURELIUS CLUB: Powered only, technically. Policy over scotch. Harlan has a membership under his last name.

FLATSIDE: Where the city stops pretending. Mostly NPs. Loud, alive, angrier every year.

Type NOTORIETY CHECK to see your XP, title, reputation within Verso City, and Harlan's perception of you!