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Sometimes, Sarah Tanner kind of regretted moving to Sternbild.
It was very different being there than it had been seeing it in passing on TV or reading about it in magazines. Sternbild University had the best Mesoamerican history department in all of North America, and it was Sarah's number one college choice for her history degree. She had been so happy the day she had received her admission letter from SBU, she'd almost missed the glossy picture filled students' guide and virtual orientation kit that came with it. She'd flipped through both of them in bed that night, and dreaming of the kind of student life they showed.
It was right then and there that she had decided to finally leave the sleepy small town she'd been born and raised in, and spend her college years in the big city.
Her friend Padma had nearly choked on her coffee when Sarah had told her of the decision to move. "Sternbild? Are you serious?"
"What? It's got a great university, all kinds of museums, food from all over the world, every store you could imagine, loads of concerts and live events, so many parks..."
"Have you never watched Hero TV?" Padma had asked. When Sarah still stared blankly at her, Padma had rolled her eyes and carried on, "Sternbild has something like four times the crime rate of anywhere else. People get kidnapped there by costumed weirdoes all the time. They had 600 bank robberies last year. They seem to have major terrorist attacks like every five months. There's something seriously wrong with that city. They need seven active duty superheroes just to deal with all the stuff that goes on there. Yorkton isn't that much smaller, and their government only employs two professional heroes. And one of them takes the summers off!"
"It's a big city. It can't all be that bad. There's so many people there, I'm sure I'll probably manage to avoid the worst of all that dangerous stuff if I try to stay safe."
"Mm-hmm," Padma had said, clearly not impressed. "I'm still going to look for you in the background any time I watch Hero TV."
On the day she left, Sarah's family had tearfully helped her pack her bags. Her Aunt had made a cake, and her parents had thrown a small farewell party with gifts. Her elderly Grandma had even dropped by to give Sarah a scarf she'd made herself, just in case Sternbild was cold in winter. Sarah had given her Grandma a kiss and promised to wear it as often as she could. There'd been a lot of crying that day as Sarah had gotten on the train and left home for good.
She'd heard all about what a terrible, decaying husk of a city Sternbild had been thirty years ago, but her first real impression of it was of a gleaming metropolis full of light and glass. Buildings topped with golden statues rose into the sky while endless swarms of people went about their daily lives on the ground below, going up and down on the transport elevators between Sternbild's three levels. She'd found a decently priced -- if tiny -- apartment on the Silver Stage not too far from the university, where she could kind of see the top of Justice Tower if she leaned out her window just right.
On Sarah's very first night in town, she'd thrown on her Grandma’s scarf to protect herself against the cool September air, and taken the city's circle line monorail to see as much of the town at once as she could.
And wouldn't you know it, the train had been hijacked.
It had been a terrifying experience. She'd clung to a support rail inside as the train had suddenly accelerated, and Hero TV camera helicopters had circled around outside.
It hadn't been too long before Wild Tiger, one of Sternbild's famous superheroes, had saved them all, but he'd destroyed the monorail track so thoroughly in doing so that all the passengers had been stuck up there until a transport blimp could be found to get them down to the Bronze Stage ground below. Sarah hadn't gotten home until nearly 2:00 a.m. that night, and she'd been so tired on her first day of classes the next morning that she'd spent twenty minutes listening to the wrong professor before realizing that she was supposed to be in classroom 326 instead of 362.
She sometimes wondered whether she had some kind of unconscious NEXT power that attracted criminals to her. In just her first couple months of classes, she'd had her rabbit backpack stolen by a man in a dolphin costume, been attacked by someone in a mecha suit with guns, been threatened by a NEXT who could manipulate cement like it was playdough, been frozen by accident while Blue Rose was trying to put out a burning coffee shop she’d been studying in when an arsonist had attacked, been held hostage by a thug with a gun dressed as a clown, had part of her apartment wall destroyed during one of Wild Tiger's battles, been thrown off the Gold Stage sidewalks and caught by Sky High just before she splattered on the pavement, and had very briefly been turned into a cat by a seriously embarrassed teenage NEXT who was still learning to control her powers.
Even by Sternbildian standards, that was an unusually high victimization rate.
Padma enjoyed emailing her holovid clips every time Sarah ended up in danger on Hero TV. Sarah could never decide whether to just delete them on sight, or save them in a folder on her computer. Who else from her high school could say that they'd been on an internationally syndicated TV show 27 times in less than six months?
The city was beautiful, her classes were amazing, and people here were incredibly friendly, but some days she just got so sick of supervillain attacks that she thought about running back to her home town and working at her uncle's restaurant for the rest of her days. It was nice and safe there, wasn't it?
So of course it figured that the one night she went to the Sternbild Museum of History to see the special exhibit featuring newly recovered Mayan treasures from Tikal was the very night it got held up by a vicious costumed gang.
She had no idea how they'd managed to sneak into the building dressed in full 18th century pirate costumes, complete with robotic parrots. Or when they'd managed to take out all the museum guards with a sonic disruptor. But it wasn't something you wanted to think too much about when you were cowering on the floor, trying not to get attacked by a laser cutlass.
"Listen up ye landlubbers!" the captain of the gang said. "We be the vicious Golden Beard Gang, and ye all be now our hostages! Yer not t'move one pretty little finger until the city gives in t'our demands! An' if they don't--" He grinned wickedly. "--we be given ye back t'yer families in pieces of eight!"
Sarah wanted to cry. Couldn't she go one day, just one day in this stupid city without something horrible happening to her? Why were there so many supervillains, and crooks, and people with terribly misguided fashion sense here anyway?
It was almost a relief when there was an explosion of glass from above, and a costumed hero burst through the skylight down towards the floor. Wild Tiger rolled his landing to control his momentum, and stood up to point an accusing finger directly at the pirate captain. "Hey! It is unforgivable to threaten someone like that! You let these people go immediately!"
"Nevaaar! Now, me mateys!" yelled the captain.
A pair of rough hands grabbed Sarah by the arm and yanked her upward. Sarah looked over her shoulder to see a man with an eye patch and stubble holding her. He pressed her back against his chest, and hooked the edge of his cutlass under her chin to keep her there. His hand was so close to her face she could see all the details of the circular snake and sword insignia on his ring. She could hear the pounding of her heart thrumming in her ears as she prayed he wouldn't hit the button to turn on the lasers and fry her with it.
A second figure dropped through the hole in the skylight and landed a little bit aways from the group. Sarah recognized him as Barnaby Brooks Jr, Wild Tiger's partner.
"You have completely given away our presence and lost the element of surprise. And now they're actively threatening the hostages. Nice going, Old Man," Brooks said derisively.
Wild Tiger started gesturing defensively to the group around them. "Well, I couldn't just let them threaten to chop people up! We need to save everyone!"
Brooks crossed his arms. "And so you deliberately ignored Ms Agnes' orders to wait until the commercial break ended, and Fire Emblem or Dragon Kid got here as backup, and broke through the museum's sixty-year-old art deco skylight without thinking. Bravo."
The pirate captain grinned as the two argued with each other. Wild Tiger clenched his fists. "Yeah, well... For a bunny, you are so uncute." On the last word he sprung into action and socked the captain clear across the face, causing the man to reel backwards into case full of Mayan gold. The captain yelled in pain and most of the other gang members dropped their own hostages to launch themselves at the two heroes. The man holding onto Sarah continued to grip her tightly.
"Do not break the priceless, irreplaceable artefacts!" Brooks yelled, as he kicked several of the thugs into the wall, where they fell in an unconscious pile.
"I know, Bunny," Wild Tiger said. The captain had recovered his balance, and was furiously lashing out at Wild Tiger with his laser cutlass. Wild Tiger was blocking with his arm guards, but the sword still left long gashes on the armour. There was a thud from behind, and Sarah saw the captain's eyes roll back in his head, leaving Brooks and his upraised leg standing behind them.
"I coulda done that on my own," Wild Tiger groused, kicking the cutlass out of the unconscious thug's hand. Its laser flickered off.
"And yet, you didn't," Brooks said, coming to stand by his partner.
Sarah felt a sudden rush of heat by her neck as the thug holding her activated the laser on his own cutlass. She could smell fabric singeing. She sincerely hoped it wasn't her scarf.
"You may have taken out our leader, but the Golden Beard Gang remains undefeated so long as one of us remains standing," said the man behind her. Wild Tiger and Brooks both turned to face them, both heroes instantly on guard. "If you come any closer, I will kill her, make no mistake about that."
As yet another criminal threatened to kill her, Sarah thought about just how right Padma had been. This was a terrible city full of horrible people that all wanted cause her harm and she just wanted to go home and leave this place and curl up in a nice ball where it was safe and warm and quiet and nothing hurt. If she somehow got out of this 28th attack on her, she was going to give all of her next pay check to charity. This time she meant it.
Wild Tiger and Brooks inched slightly towards the crook, and he backed away from them towards the museum's glass wall. Sarah could make out the flashing lights of the Hero TV camera helicopters streaming behind, silhouetting her and her captor across the two heroes' armour. There was some other shadow that looked kind of like a mouse barely highlighted against the back wall, but the shape made no sense to her.
Suddenly, the man holding her shook like he'd been hit by a taser and dropped to the ground. Sarah turned to see a tiny glowing Chinese girl burst through the glass wall, kicking the thug in the head. The man and Sarah went down together, and Sarah pushed the heavy pirate off her. Dragon Kid dragged the unconscious man off to the side of the room, and waved to the cameras with her capture.
Even without the constant threat of death in front of her, Sarah's heart was still pounding as she pushed herself up on her knees. Elsewhere in the room, Dragon Kid talked to some of the reporters who had rushed in for post battle analysis, as Wild Tiger checked on the other hostages, and police officers arrived to arrest the remaining Golden Beard Gang members. Sarah felt ignored and alone off at the side of the action.
So it was a total surprise to her when Barnaby Brooks Jr knelt down in front of her. He flipped open the faceplate of his suit and looked her over with a careful eye. This close, he was even handsomer than he seemed on TV. "Are you all right, miss?" he asked. He offered her his hand, and gently helped pull her back up to her feet.
"Oh, um, yes. I am now," Sarah managed to stammer out. "Thank you all for saving me."
He gave her one of those brilliant hero smiles she knew so well from his posters and TV interviews. She felt her cheeks redden in the heat of his focus on her. "Anytime," he said.
Okay, maybe there were some good parts to living in Sternbild.