A Hero's Song (Darkest Secrets Volume 1)

Chapter 2 - Omen

Groaning, Gabriel engaged his generator on low power to exit the room. He would heal in around an hour he thought, maybe less if he laid down and got enough calories in his system. He would make a point to threaten whoever was responsible for this lack of briefing on the training robot's power level.

Floating out of the training room, he started towards his quarters. About five minutes later he reached his lab. He liked the place, after all, it was the room he had grown up in.

He could feel his torn fibers repairing themselves. The pain along his spine had lessened, but his ribs and sternum still threatened to make his eyes leak tears with certain movements.

As Gabriel floated into his quarters he passed through the foot-thick plexiglass dome that served as his "room". He was pleased to see food arranged on one of the four tables that took up the center of the room.

For many metahumans, rest and recuperation were a big part of life. Many healed like regular people. Even some Class 4's or 5's with nigh impenetrable skin took weeks or months to heal from serious wounds. In some cases, a Super might heal even slower than the norm.

In the unluckiest cases, Supers might not be able to heal on their own at all.

Gabriel's body healed at an accelerated rate. He couldn't grow a limb back or anything like that, but his cells tended to want to stick around, to say the least.

This process would happen over time, but he could help it along by providing his body more calories. That meant eating, and in this case, eating a lot. He filled his plates with everything from greasy to expensive and sat on a stool.

While he ate, Gabriel thought about the fight. It had been hectic, no. It had been a trial. As his supercharged adrenaline tapered down he acknowledged he'd been lucky to even survive.

Even if they hadn't briefed him, his carelessness in juggling his inventions had lost him the extra edge his mind had already created. He needed to upgrade his suit soon, as in during the next few hours. Before then he had to debrief. He had a few choice words for the scientists.

He tried to take off his suit, but a few of the straps had fused together from the heat of his generator. It would take him a bit to separate them, so he started eating while thinking logistics.

He would revamp his software, he needed an easier way to shape AM Constructs with a more accessible method than the ocular interface. A more efficient coolant and heat sink system would give him more than the three Constructs an hour in his repertoire for any future battles.

His gut wrenched and he froze for a moment after thinking of a real mission, remembering the elephant in the room - or rather his head - for the first time in a few days. As he had grown, Gabriel developed crippling anxiety. He had been told the anxiety was a side effect of his mutations.

After research, he discovered that mental imbalances were commonplace in the super community. These imbalances could range from fear to joy, but they were obvious in most cases. Higher Class supers weren't immune to mental illness either. The more extreme a person's abilities, the greater the chance for mental imbalance.

While he loved people, nature, and culture, he only interacted with them through the Net. He experienced severe panic attacks when he imagined being outside. Even just thinking of a random street or a beach. Gabriel frowned, he told himself he could deal with it when the time came, though no remedy apart from therapy had been found for such problems.

He pushed the thoughts away, returning to the task at hand.

His last project would be adding the titanium-carbon polymer muscles and armor plates to his suit. The armor plates were strong enough to take a hit from a Class 4. The "muscles" as Gabriel lovingly called them weren't the typical system of actuators and metal rods in most powered suits. Instead, he had designed a system that mimicked the structure of the human body.