Horrigan’s [Open] Characters: Richard Hastings, Open to All Setting: Horrigan’s Bar – so late it’s early Content: Currently Worksafe Summary: After another night of saving people, signing autographs and posing for tourist cameras, LiveWire, once again mundane scientist Richard Hastings, enjoys a long cold beer at Horrigan’s Bar. Its clientele are mostly super heroes on their days off, or between rescues, and it is almost an unofficial HQ. But it is not only for their use and non-heroes also frequent the bar, and so the heroes can never reveal their identities while there. Still, it is surprising how few brawls happen at Horrigan’s, a little island of tranquillity in one of Axis City’s most turbulent neighbourhoods.
It was cold, and the droplets on the outside of the glass refreshing as his hand curled about it. Twenty minutes ago such exposure to water would have left him twitching and smouldering in the middle of the street, but he could feel that the charge in his body had returned to normal, mundane levels. But that was the price one paid for fame. He had rescued the idiot kids from the power station, absorbing the energy which would have fried their empty heads, and got them out of there.
Of course, he couldn't tell them they were stupid to play in such a place, but he hoped they he wouldn’t have to pull anyone else from it again. The Mayor would have to pull his finger out and get the place patrolled by security, or at least fenced off, and he had said as much to the reporters. Well, not word for word. Super heroes had to be all goodness and light and love children and never have an impolite word for anyone. Who the hell could live like that though?
He paid the barmen, and moved away to the pool tables opposite, setting his glass down as he picked up a cue. The evening, he decided, was his now, no matter how many kids played hide-and-seek in transformer stations, or got their kite-strings tangled in over-head wires. What the hell were their parents doing, anyhow?