The media likes to show us the human side of evil these days, show us their families, their friends. What they like to do on Saturday nights, and how surprised they are when they finally get caught. It gets so that the average person has trouble separating the man who gave a standing ovation at his daughter's first dance recital to the man who brutally murdered the pizza deliveryman who was screwing his wife. It makes people paranoid, seeing killers, perverts and maniacs everywhere they look. They're wary of police officers, priests, and schoolteachers. Of the girl next door who has four piercings, and of the quiet man who always takes a walk at dusk. The paranoia is bad, it leads to incidents like mothers shooting the man who was just trying to help pick up a bag of spilled groceries, which gives them something else to show to the masses, a poor confused mother who got scared and killed someone.
People don't feel safe anymore, they use too many locks, rely too much on technology to keep them safe, to keep them alive. They don't remember that there are people out in the world who spend their entire lives devoted to saving others.
It's really not fair, blame the media. Or blame the idea that all the good superheroes are dead, killed by their enemies, or from old age. Or the fact that many superheroes didn't really devote their lives to keeping the world safe, but to revenge, or to a sense of duty. Maybe because the best heroes have been forgotten, left behind because they aren't flashy enough, or powerful enough, or just too human for the average person's taste.
Whatever it is people think that their gods have left them- that their blessed protectors have left them, that there is no more room for saints in this ugly world. They take justice into their own hands, go down in a blaze of glory, blaming everyone that didn't save them. Personally I think that it's time to save them. Time to give people hope and give them reason to trust their neighbours. Because things don't have to be perfectly scientific to be real, and the least believable possibility can sometimes be the truth.

I was six before my parents realised that something was different about me. It wasn't something that the doctors could pick up, because there really was nothing wrong with me. I would have nightmares, incredibly vivid ones, which in typical child-like honesty I would relate them in great detail over breakfast, and then when they watched the evening news my dreams would be reported with startling accuracy. After five or six of these occurrences they drilled that I should never tell anyone about my dreams into me. Around this time they also noticed that I was red colour blind. I have never seen the colour, but it took my parents several years to realise that I couldn't differentiate between red and green.
These were things I could fake, learn to get around. And if I had a dream about something happening to a friend of mine, I would prevent it from happening. It wasn't hard. It took until I hit puberty for things to get weird. The summer that I was thirteen my hair faded from black to a dark grey.
Then one afternoon when I was at a convenience store with my best friend hoping that our presence would prevent a robbery, some bastard took a shot at me, and the bullet passed right through my body. I was hysterical, and incorporeal, and the young Constable called to the scene had to talk to me for an hour solid, assuring me that I was safe, before I solidified again.
After that I vowed not to be so scared again, and my mom enrolled me into every self-defence, kick-boxing, and martial arts class that she could. I even managed a fencing class in there as well. By the time I graduated high school I could fly at will, know exactly who what when where and why after I awoke from a dream, and fight hand to hand with the best of them.
My ability to become incorporeal appeared to be limited to life threatening situations. And once, during an ugly fight with a few thugs much bigger then myself, I somehow ended up back home, in my room, with no idea how I got there, and only my still bleeding wounds to tell that I had ever left my room in the first place.
For my eighteenth birthday a psychic friend of mine sketched out her idea for my uniform, and within a week I was going to people's aid dressed in an outfit very similar to the one I do now. Let me tell you, for some reason spandex garners a lot more respect then blue jeans.
So this is me now, spending my nights, and some days, flying across the city, following my dreams.
Dena (Reverie)