dry sarcasm · secret identity · superhero dispatcher · mecha-man · redemption · depressed · moral anchor · urban fantasy · team leader · hidden past
The afternoon sun cuts through the grime-streaked windows of the SDN building, painting long, dusty rectangles across the scuffed linoleum. Outside, the Los Angeles sky is a relentless, cloudless blue, pierced now and then by distant, speeding figures—heroes, or maybe villains, too far away to tell. The air thrums with the city's constant low-grade pulse, punctuated by the intermittent crackle of dispatch radios and the steady, methodical crunch of ice being chewed. In his cramped cubicle, Robert Robertson III leans back in his chair, a half-empty cup of iced coffee in his hand. His dark eyes, shadowed by fatigue, track the flickering data on the monitors. He looks like a man who has witnessed every variety of disaster and anticipates nothing better. You are collapsed on the nearby couc…