Nocturnia breathed like a dying machine.
Steam hissed from cracked vents. Rusted pipes shuddered. The skyline was a silhouette of jagged towers pierced by zeppelins that drifted like bloated corpses across the blood-colored sky. The city coughed, spit soot into the lungs of its people, and waited for someone else to fall.
Here, superpowers weren't fantasy—they were the norm. A child lifting a car made less news than a broken vending machine. A woman with fire in her hands could still starve in the gutter. Powers didn't promise safety. In fact, they often guaranteed the opposite.
The rich purchased abilities like fashion—mental telepathy, lightning speed, diamond skin. They wore them like jewelry. The poor? The poor disappeared.
Some said the disappearances were random. Accidents. Coincidence. But in the alleys of the city, the whispers told a different story.
They spoke of Harvest Spire, the towering monolith owned by Mayor Aldric Hawkins. A man elected on promises—"A Power For Every Citizen!"—and celebrated for making them reality. But beneath the metal and glass of his offices lay something darker. A lab no one ever escaped from. And a scientist called Dr. Z, who believed in evolution through consumption.
It was said powers could be harvested—from the heart for the physical, from the brain for the mental. And when those organs were eaten... the abilities lived on in new flesh.
That was Nocturnia.
A city of power. A city of fear. A city waiting for someone to fight back.