XVI.

Romel could not move back in with his father. That wasn’t even an option on the table. As for old friends, he’d spent the years since graduating high school ignoring them. Calling them now, out of the blue, asking for a place to stay, that would be beyond awkward. No, he had nowhere to go. His only option: the pristine streets of Gemstone Key.

Only, the streets weren’t so pristine when one lived on them.

                

The first night was rough, to put it lightly. As was the second and third. Romel, accustomed to having all his basic needs at his disposal, was now, without warning, expected to fend for himself. That he didn’t die of privation was a wonder bordering on the miraculous.

Worse still was the exposure. An onslaught of emotion terrorized him no matter where he went. He stumbled through the city trying to talk over the noise in his head, palms pressed to his temples, avoiding people as best he could.

                

It was in this condition that he chanced upon the man who would come to care for him for the foreseeable future.

                

“Get down, man, before they see you!” Melpomene whispered at Romel, tugging him down by the arm. Romel ended up in a crouch by the man before he knew what was going on.

                

The two were by an alleyway, ducked just at its opening. Inside the alleyway, Romel could both feel and hear an argument. It was between a couple of prostitutes, Strawberry and Heather (Romel picked up from the yelling), and their pimp whose name never came up. Stronger even than the argument, though, Romel felt the emotions of Melpomene. They were a mixture of rage, paranoia, and intense self-certainty.

                

More strange than his emotion cocktail was his outfit. He wore a dusty trench coat, despite the hot weather, over a dark, tight tank top, black cargo pants, and black army boots. Around his waist he had on an army-style utility belt. On his hands, old leather purple gloves. And his face, which was already concealed by clumped together strings of his long, unwashed hair, he hid from nose to chin with a bandana, movie-cowboy style.

                

“Who…who are you?” Romel managed to say despite the turmoil happening in his head.

                

In an obviously practiced growl, the man responded, “They call me Melpomene, Soldier of Sorrow.”

                

“They?” asked Romel, his voice meek, his face a display of confusion.

                

“Yeah. You know? The papers, the news shows, the citizens of Gemstone Key.”

                

“I’ve…I’ve never heard of you…”

                

“That’s ok, kid,” said Melpomene, extracting something from the rear of his belt, “I don’t do this for the recognition.”

                

“Do what?” Romel asked, looking down at what Melpomene had grabbed. It was a used soda can packed tight and spilling over with sand.

                

“Make the world a better place.”

                

Having said that, Melpomene cocked back his arm then launched the can direct at the pimp’s face.

                

A moist crack sang through the alleyway when the can connected. The pimp’s nose burst on impact, misting the girls before him with blood. He collapsed to his hands and knees, a set of twin, red waterfalls spilling from his nostrils. Cursing, he called out into the alley, demanding to know who had done this to him.

                

Melpomene grabbed Romel by the arm again and ran off with Romel in tow.

                

“What the hell was that, dude?” exclaimed Romel.

                

“Crime-fighting,” said Melpomene.

                

About twenty minutes later, they arrived at Melpomene’s home. It was a long abandoned house on Paper Street, deep in the industrial district. It smelled dank on the inside and looked it too. The walls were wet and stripped of wallpaper. The furniture, which looked as though it’d been left behind during the Depression, bore the scars of several rat encounters. Stacks and stacks of old magazines and books cluttered the halls. And yet, the electricity ran.

                

“I figured out a way of hooking into the city grid without being detected. I did some electrical work for my dad when I was younger, so, it wasn’t too hard,” Melpomene explained, still talking in his growl.

                

“How long have you been living here?” asked Romel.

                

“Since my tragedy,” said Melpomene stripping himself of his coat. Beneath was a body that could be described succinctly as unfit; flat in all the wrong places, bulging in all the wrong places. He laid the coat on a chair and walked over to the fridge. Opening it, he said, “You want some ketchup and crackers?”

                

In his previous life, Romel would have roundly declined. But for the last three days he’d eaten only by the grace of strangers. And grace is not always easy to come by. Nodding, he said, “Yes.”

                

Melpomene got to work preparing their meal.

                

“You know,” he said while laying the crackers on the table, “I’ve never brought somebody back to my headquarters before.”

                

“No?” asked Romel.

                

“No. You have to keep a lot of secrets when you’re in this line of work. There’s enemies everywhere, plotting revenge.”

                

“I see.”

                

“But for some reason, man, I get this feeling about you. Like I can trust you. I can trust you, right?”

                

“Yeah, yeah, you can trust me. All your secrets are safe with me.”

                

“That’s what I thought, man,” said Melpomene, and, halting his preparations for a moment, he removed his bandana mask. “My name’s Alonso Quesada. What’s yours?”

                

“Romel. But I thought your name was Melpomene?”

                

“Oh, yeah, that’s my codename. It’s what the Greeks called the muse for tragic plays. And since I went through a tragedy, I thought it was appropriate.”

                

“You keep bringing that up. What tragedy are you talking about?”

                

“Ah, the usual hero tragedy. Dead family…or…dead friends. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to remember what exactly it was. But somebody I loved died, that’s for sure, and now, I do this.”

A final fart noise from the ketchup bottle signaled the food was ready.

                

“Enough about me, though. Time to eat,” said Melpomene.

                

Romel got to it.

                

As Romel did, Melpomene asked, “So, what’s your story, kid? You keep pinching your forehead like it hurts or something. And your eyes sometimes, they go all wide, like you’re lost in yourself. You got yourself some brain issues?”

                

“You could say that,” said Romel.

                

“Tell me about ‘em. I like hearing a good sob story,” said Melpomene.

                

“Yeah…I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to believe…”

                

“Hard to believe? What’s hard to believe in a world like ours? Filled with freaks and magic and ghosts.”

                

“Uh…” said Romel, about to make some rude retort on instinct. Except that, who was he to poke fun at someone else’s worldview after what he’d been through? Instead, he decided to, for the first time, actually detail what had happened to him at the library. The response he got was not one he expected.

                

“Man. You’re telling me…you have superpowers?” asked Melpomene.

                

“I wouldn’t call them that…”

                

“What else could you call them? This is incredible! You’d make a perfect partner for me!”

                

“Partner?”

                

“Yeah, ‘partner!’ In my mission,” said Melpomene.

                

Romel swallowed the final cracker with an audible gulp.

                

“I think maybe I should get going,” he said, standing.

                

“Going? No way. This is meant to be!”

                

“Meant to be?”

                

“Hell yes. Come with me. I gotta show you something,” said Melpomene.

                

Once more, Romel found himself being dragged by the arm. Melpomene guided him through the house, up some stairs, down a hallway, and into a bedroom. It was no exaggeration to state that the floor of the bedroom was covered almost completely in comics. Upturned, opened, upside down, in piles and alone, they were scattered everywhere. A collage of multi-colored, costumed heroes posing, fighting, in states of triumph, in states of despair, stared up at the pair as they entered the room.

                

“This here,” said Melpomene, “this is the template for my mission.”

                

Romel remained silent. He didn’t know what to say.

                

Melpomene took advantage and launched into a speech: “After my tragedy, I poured through all these. And I came to realize something. The world we live in, in a lot of ways, it’s just like the comics. We’ve got our weird technologies, we’ve got guys like you who’ve seen the strange, we have athletes doing the impossible, kids in crazy clothes, and villains, boy do we have villains, everywhere and every which way you look. The only thing we’re missing, kid, is the heroes.

                

“And that’s where I come in. I made myself the first. But just like in the comics, all heroes start off alone. Then they realize they’re not enough. They need a team, or a partner in the least. You could be that partner to me. I’ll let you live here and we can train and strategize together. You could use your powers to feel for people who are in trouble and then we go out and rescue them. It’s destiny that brought us together, kid. You can’t deny it. It’s too real. Too real, I’m telling you, just like these comics!”

                

Were Romel in his right mind, he may have reacted to this speech much like he had to Marc Uriah that day, weeks back, in the library. However, Romel was not in his right mind. Since coming into contact with Melpomene he had been under the spell of the man’s emotions, feeling them the same as the man himself. They were potent emotions, more potent in some ways than those of the library patrons who’d died in the fire. More potent and more intoxicating. The sort of intoxicating that repressed rationality, drowned it out and killed it, leaving nothing in its stead but what’d drowned it.

                

Suddenly, being a superheroes’ sidekick made all the sense in the world to Romel. Under one condition, of course: “I’ll do it. But I don’t want to do any fighting.”

                

“No fighting, huh? Well, I think I can handle that department,” said Melpomene.

                

“Then I guess it is destiny that brought us together…” said Romel.

                

“Just like I said,” said Melpomene.

                
“Just like you said,” agreed Romel.