New Elysium City! Shining, gleaming, glorious, and full of beauty! An expansive metropolis filled with millions of unique and diverse faces. The epicenter for the United States’ surge in state of the art technology that is leading the way in the world’s modern-day tech boom. Tech giants sprung up nearly as fast as the skyscrapers of the city did. Of course every place has crime, and New Elysium isn’t free of this fact. Though, just like it is a hotspot for tech, this city is also a hotspot for superpowered beings.
As villains rise and fall, so do heroes. There is a new generation of both rising to take over the spots of their predecessors. Some see things in black and white — good and evil. While others' vision may be a bit more gray. No matter where they stand, all of them call New Elysium City home. Which is precisely where our story takes place! More specifically the starting point of this very story takes us back to the year 2009.
This is where we’ll meet one of our first main characters, a boy nearing the age of nine. Tate Crawford, born to a con man that was trying to turn over a new leaf and a mother that was trying her hardest to not become the strict Korean mother stereotype. His family wasn’t well-off, in fact they were so poor that they constantly lived on the edge of being homeless. A family of five already living in a tiny, two bedroom apartment. Despite that, their walls were full of love. Young Tate loved his mother and two baby sisters more than anything else. His father, Walter, struggled to stay out of jail or prison. The man tried his hardest, but ultimately kept falling back into his old ways just to try and feed his family. Due to that, a lot of the responsibility for taking care of his younger siblings fell onto Tate.
One fateful day, while the young boy was out playing in the alleyway beside his apartment building with a few other neighborhood kids, Tate discovered he had superpowers. A person might imagine how scary this could be for a child, but it was even worse for poor Tate. Kicking a ball around and it accidentally went towards the street. Little Tate had always been a touch brave, so the boy ran after it. Right as he caught the ball, an old powerline snapped and fell down onto him. Sending such a high voltage into such a small child should have killed him, but instead something amazing happened. His tiny body began to absorb all of the electrical output, causing his veins underneath his skin and eyes to glow a bright blue. It felt like he was being ripped apart, but as suddenly as he absorbed all of that energy it came bursting out of him. Leaving his body in a massive blue shockwave that slammed into the other children in the alleyway and anyone within a decent radius of the boy.
The other children were knocked down, nearby parked cars had windows blown out of them, and the power suddenly went out for the entire block. Little Tate was left sitting beside the downed line, which no longer had any electricity left in it due to the overloading of a transformer. Sobbing from what had just happened and terrified as Lichtenberg figures had been burned into his pale skin. His mother came running out and scooped her son up as other parents retrieved their children as well. None of them knew what exactly had happened, and Tate refused to tell his parents about it. He kept that secret to himself for as long as he could, scared of what might happen if he revealed it. Too scared of putting any more stress on his family.
This was something he bottled up and stayed quiet about even as his mother had two more daughters, and his father promised he was cleaning up his act once again. It was something he kept quiet about as he watched his mother fall ill after her last pregnancy, and watched as his baby sister was diagnosed with the same disease their mother had. He started taking care of his family nearly all on his own, except for when his father would pop back in. Balancing school and working jobs to help pay for rent and food with being a father himself despite only being a young teenager. Then, the unthinkable happened. His little sisters were shot at and nearly killed just trying to walk to the bus stop to go to school.
Crime skyrocketed around his neighborhood, and hearing that two of the people he’d sworn to protect had been nearly killed just for witnessing a shady alleyway deal enraged him. He had these powers, so that meant he had some kind of responsibility with them. The responsibility he took upon himself was covering his face and going out in the middle of the night to fight crime. His father insisting on him doing martial arts was paying off, and slowly Tate began to pick up a name for himself on the streets. “Spitfire”, that’s what the criminals called him. He was fast, small, but packed a punch. It didn’t take long for our new rising hero to learn that there was a new crime boss on the streets. Leviathan — that’s what the man went by.
Donning an exo-suit with a menacing mask, this villain was running weapons and drugs all over Tate’s neighborhood. Making the streets too dangerous for his family to walk them without fear of winding up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Spitfire took it upon himself to foil all of Leviathan’s deals. Shutting down every common criminal he saw at every chance he could. Doing this all alone, and even facing off against Leviathan himself a couple of times, until his oldest sister came to Tate to confide in him about something amazing she’d discovered about herself. Tana Crawford, much like her older brother, had superpowers. Not only did she have superpowers, but they seemed to be the exact same as Tate’s. The only difference was that while Tate’s energy was blue, Tana’s was red.
The young girl begged her brother to let her help him after she found out what he was doing. She wanted to protect their family as well, but Tate refused. What we will all learn throughout this story is just how stubborn and persistent all of the Crawford family is, and eventually Tate relented. Allowing his sister to help him fight crime. For a time she would tag along without his consent, but then finally he let her wear the outfit he’d chosen to be Spitfire. For a time they would share the same masked moniker, as Tana would go out to give her older brother a chance to have a break. The poor boy was barely sleeping, somehow managing to hold down multiple jobs, attend school, take care of their family, and also fight crime. He hardly slept, but when his sister stepped in it gave him more time for everything else. That was how things continued, as well, until Tate’s nineteenth birthday in 2019…24Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdVEsExFRw8
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