FSE

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A pair of tweezers were set down on a metal table, making a soft clanging. "You can see him, now," a voice informed. The wolf couldn't make out what the voice sounded like, akin to his eyesight. Everything was blurry. He was barely awake, even!

A blur grew bigger and shrunk shorter. "I'm not really sure how the hell you survived a fall like that, especially with your arm ripped off-"

The lupine remembered the fact that he was missing an arm, and the pain followed suit. "AAAAHHH!!!!!" he screamed. His vision and hearing returned tenfold, as he could hear and every little fiber of the curtain isolating the "room" from the rest of the building being moved as the curtain was swiftly reeled back.

"Damn it!" the doctor yelled as he took a syringe and inserted it into the wolf's neck. The pain slowly disappeared with his consciousness.

---

---

A paw rested on the wolf's right shoulder and gently shook it. "Kerl. Kerl!" A female voice poked at him. "Come on, Kerl, you have to wake up."

The wolf opened his eyes and saw not his mother, but a white and black opossum. The room was grey concrete and filled with medical supplies surrounding the metallic table Kerl was resting on. The toned opossum was sitting on the same surface near the canine's feet.

Kerl blinked. He remembered landing. His head slamming against the hard dirt as he blacked out. He moved his right arm to feel the back of his head, but felt an odd sensation. He looked at where his arm would be and saw a mass of wires, frames, and cords. He saw-

"A robotic arm. Pretty nifty, huh?" the opossum said in a slightly higher pitched voice. He hopped off the table, landing silently. "The things doc can come up with is amazing."

"Gotta love robotics!" a male voice called out.

"Come with me," the opossum asked of the wolf.

Kerl slid off of the table and stepped on his feet, the cold stone floor stealing any heat that was still in his pads. A new white shirt hung from his shoulders and blue jeans covered his legs.

He walked out of the room and into a large, empty, concrete room. The only furniture that decorated it was a wooden table cluttered with some paper and an old torn up couch.

"Yeah, we don't have much at the moment," the opossum admitted, "but we hope it'll turn into something more."

"Who are you?" Kerl inquired in his lower voice.

"People tend to call me Gio."

Kerl turned to look at the taller marsupial, and a hollow rectangle outlined Gio's face. A .txt document popped up with it, showing his history and name; Giovanni Santana.

"WHAT THE CRAP!?!?!" the wolf screamed, backing up into a wall.

"Don't worry!" a lithe dingo quickly said, running over towards the two. "We put a display inside of your eye."

Kerl calmed down and looked at the dingo as well. The same came up for him, his name being Ed Leblanc.

"Who are you?" Kerl repeated, meaning something slightly different.

"We are The Network," the dingo answered.

"What!?" Gio shouted. "We didn't decide on the name yet!"

"So I was supposed to say 'I don't know'?" Ed fired back.

"Yes!"

"Over a bloody name!?" Kerl yelled.

Embarrassed, Gio and Ed shut up. "Well, yeah."

"Pretty much."

For the third time, but with yet a different meaning, Kerl asked, "Who are you?"

The opossum answered. "You know how Drenenth has a stupid high crime rate, and the cops can't do anything because they don't have enough officers?"

Kerl looked at him like he was stupid. "No, I didn't notice that."

Gio sighed. "We think there's only one way to stop it." The opossum scratched his upper arm. "We need to make a group."

Kerl squinted curiously and tilted his head to his left a little. "What do you mean?"

Ed took over and explained. "Some people have been born with some," he nodded his head sideways, "interesting traits lately. Some of these traits are pretty significant, like being able to teleport, jump higher; I think I saw something about a person lifting a bus recently-"

"Ed!" Gio barked.

"Sorry. But there are some people that have, pretty much, shown the qualities of-"

"Superheroes" Kerl finished.

"Why is everyone cutt-"

"And although you haven't shown anything," the opossum interrupted. Ed threw his arms up in complaint, "with that robotic arm now, you could basically do the same."

"So what do I have now?" Kerl asked, raising his new arm into view to investigate it.

"Oh, no; we haven't gone that far yet," Ed replied. "We wanted to tailor it to what you do best."

Kerl nodded. "How about hacking?"

Ed looked at Gio and back at Kerl. "We could figure it out," the dingo replied sheepishly. "We do have a way to connect to just about any electronic device that exists. So putting that into your arm should be easy. At least it should."

"Just do it."

---

"He could cut the power, making it easier to get in."

"But it would be noticed."

Kerl opened his eyes to the same room as before. "I could distract the guards with some sort of diversion, letting us get through."

Gio nodded. "That would work."

"What are we even doing?" Kerl asked. He rubbed the back of his head.

"We have to get into the police department to-"

"I THOUGHT WE WERE THE GOOD GUYS!!!" Kerl screamed.

"The police department has someone in there that should be able to help us."

"Again! I thought we were the good guys!"

"He was wrongly convicted of theft, Kerl," Ed informed the wolf. "He's waiting to be transferred out of the city."

"The hell did he steal?" Kerl asked.

"He didn't steal anything. What was stolen was a flash drive."

"Let me guess," Kerl finished, "it had very important files on it, right?"

Gio answered. "Yeah. And now he's off to frickin' Detroit to get a plane ride to D.C."

"So we need to do this fast," Kerl summarized.

"Yep. Now let's go," Ed replied.

"Wait," Kerl stalled Gio. "What can you do?"

"You'll see," was all he said.

Kerl looked at the dingo. "It's hard to explain. Both of ours."

---

Neon lights shined off of the wet concrete below Kerl's shoes. There wasn't any need for street lamps because of the intense amount of neon signs lining the street. The three had to separate in order to keep from getting any unnecessary attention.

The cocking of a gun hit Kerl's ear. He turned and looked down an alley that was almost dark but the influence of the lights still owned it. He saw a shadey figure pointing a pistol at someone, holding them down with their other paw. He walked down the alley.

"Just give me your wallet and you can walk away without a bullet in your head," the figure told the victim.

"A mugging in an alleyway?" Kerl commented, the criminal quickly looking at the wolf. "That's a bit clichee, don't ya think?"

The thug lifted his left arm as a ball of electricity floated in their paw, lighting up the criminal's brown, feline face. "This is over twenty volts, right here. You can just walk away right now and forget this ever happened, kid."

"HACKABLE" came up on Kerl's eye, along with an outline of the device that allowed the robber to create the ball. It started as a wrist band and turned into a wire that coiled all the way up his arm and into the back of his hoodie.

Kerl raised new arm up and pressed a button that said "HACK". The ball of energy soon disapated.

The attacker was confused, shouting, "The hell!?" The thug, scared, dropped his pistol and booked it. Kerl searched around for something useful to hack in order to get the criminal caught, but found nothing. He returned to the victim.

"Thank you, sir!" the black and white sergal thanked him.

"Any time," Kerl replied. "Do you know him?"

"Not at all. Do you?"

"No," the wolf answered, shaking his head. He looked at the sergal and said, "You can go, now." The sergal shook his head and ran out of the alley. Kerl picked up the pistol. His HUD showed it to be a Glock 18, and said that there were twenty-one bullets in the clip. "Never even shot the bloody thing."

Kerl pocketed the pistol and continued walking towards the police department.

*BOOM*

Kerl sourced the location. "Frick."

He ran towards the burning remains of the department, knowing that he was late for getting to the meet up point and that Gio and Ed were there already. He went to his destination and was petrified. An opossum and dingo were being encased in blue, zippered bags on stretchers. Kerl closed his eyes and held his mechanical paw up to his face. A tear scrolled down his cheek from his right eye, the green scratch in the iris blurring from the refraction.

A brown wolf in a police uniform walked up to Kerl. The clothes bore a stitched name that read "Elden". "You know them?" the officer asked in a collected voice.

"Just met them earlier today," Kerl replied in heavy breaths.

Elden nodded. "This city's been through enough, and now we've got someone terrorizing the frickin' place. Where are super heros when ya need them?"

Kerl lowered his paw walked away. His eye caught the cop, quickly, though, and the name Tom Elden showed up on screen. He took note of him, and continued walking back towards the home.

The lupine whispered two words as he quickly walked down the street:

"No Heros."