By Day and by Night

Prologue

Deafening winds tore across the gutters and the faces of brick buildings. The honking of car horns blended with the chirping of birds and crickets in the park two blocks over. Music blared, distorted across the wind, coming from someone's open apartment window. The sounds drifted in and out of earshot with the gusts from such a height. The aroma of wet cardboard and greasy grilled onions, of water poured over concrete near a construction site, the new car smell... Never had Adelae fallen more in love with a city, nor been more comfortable with its pulse, more at home with the movements of its people and their day to day lives. Especially compared to some of the places she'd lived before; dirty towns with unsafe streets where nearly every person that cried for help held only ill will towards their rescuer. They had been both intriguing in the girth of possibility, and absolutely hopeless when it came to organization or reformation. Truly, this beautiful and chaotic city needed her as much as she needed it.

So much had changed for this city in the three years since her arrival. So many possibilities had been explored and exploited. So many tiny corrections had turned this previously well-off city into the thriving market for the night life she chose to associate herself with.

Disidian was known as ground zero for the origins of the hero-villain conflicts. Twenty years ago, the streets had run rampant with murderous thieves and all sorts of criminals. The city had played a key role in the process of normalizing the idea that there would always be criminals, and there would always be those who would try to stop them. Instead of constant battle however, a few choice villains rose from the ranks and maintained their places over the city. Strangely, none of them wanted to enslave the people in fact they didn't care what the regular people did, leaving everyday life relatively uninterrupted. There were some citizens who even supported the goals and ideals of the villains. After a decade and a half of the rise and fall of this villain or that hero, it became obvious that the most successful operatives were those who benefitted the city in some way through their crimes, as people normalized the behavior and heroes were far less tempted to stop them.

The reported crime rate of Disidian had dropped severely in the last five years, changing from a wide range of messy, cruel games, to an arena of endeavors for criminal activity which now fell under exactly three categories. The regulation of such activities had become... strategic.

The northern half of the city, with its skyscrapers and piers and abandoned structures, played host to the elaborate drug trade. Only one man could grant permission for any product movement within his boundaries. Their contraband ranged from that which was intended for recreational use to the top secret formulas for biomedically engineered substances that could increase one's lifespan or cure one's ailments, for a price. All of the growth in both the lives of the common folks and those of the crew were at the behest of The Pharmacist.

The southern half, where the hostile divide between the old-money rich and the devastatingly poor had grown steadily from a fissure to a chasm in the last decade, made up the territory for the second of the three criminal organizations. Playing host to The Militia for the last few years, it had become a place where the young and the hopeless entered with little meat on their bones and minimal ability, and exited as trained warriors working for The Martial.

The third category skipped back and forth between the two halves of the city, as the woman who ran the only heist operations permitted had worked out a system with the other two that greatly benefited each of them. Lady Shade, the alternative identity of Adelae, maintained a couple of cronies at any given time, and with her long history of successful bank-robbing and her network of people with skills in money laundering, it would have been foolish for the other two to make enemies of her. Especially because she'd gotten her hands in the pockets of the police force when she'd married the Mayor.

From the rooftop perch, her gloved fingers gripped the concrete ledge, and she leaned out over the streets below, taking it in for another moment, before turning around to go home for the evening. Home, not to the small building of familiar rooms, but to the best partner this woman could ask for. Home to a man whose life and love created an unintentional barrier between himself and the woman he'd chosen to call his wife.