Private Finished A new life needs new friends

"Yeah, it's a good place. I fucks with little places like that - the holes in the wall where you don't have to dress up or worry about what fuckin fork you use. You can borrow my jacket too if you want though. I don't really need it."

The walk and subsequent bus ride back to Broen's apartment wasn't very long, and he kept himself busy throughout by talking more about how life back home had been. How his team did community service to supplement the crime fighting. The charity foundation he'd gotten started after he sold his family's holdings. The time he and his girlfriend Calliope had gone undercover in an illegal metahuman fighting ring.

And then they were at his apartment, with him unlocking the door and checking to make sure that the toothpick he'd put in the jamb was still there. It was. The place was small - not big enough to be called a studio but still only a single room. The bed against the far window, a two person couch in front of a coffee table with a laptop on it, and a small kitchen with a little bar in place of a dining table. Simple, efficient, and with the bathroom being the only other door in the place.

"Casa de Broen. The finest chateau in all of Manta Carlos," he joked with a grin, letting Marissa inside first before closing the door behind them. "Take a seat wherever. I gotta get the armor and go put it on. It takes a minute to get into the bodysuit; won't fit over normal clothes."

Broen came back out a few minutes later - far less time than it probably seemed like it should have taken. But he had a lot of practice donning his suit, so he could do it pretty quickly when needed.

The bodysuit was shades of gray, interwoven carbon mesh that would at the very least stop a knife or a low caliber bullet. But the armor over it was far more obviously heroic. It was almost piecemeal, a suit of knight's armor stripped down to the bare minimum that he needed to protect himself while maintaining mobility and flexibility.

The armor was dark green, with a slight sheen that hinted that it wasn't entirely normal metal. Painted with grungy, half-chipped accents of red and gray. He held the helmet, a high tech close helm with an actual visor in place of the metal slats you might expect. He donned it and an internal light made the visor glow white.

"What do you think?" he said, the grin on his face obvious in his voice despite his face being hidden. Broen flexed, showing off how the armor fit tight against his body without sacrificing range of motion. "And the best part-"

Snapping his left arm out, a sword almost hidden in the corner flew into his hand, megnetizing there. And with his right hand, a heater shield in the kitchen did the same thing.

"Knight Errant, champion of the people. At your service, Lady Marissa."

Broen gave a little turn around so that Marissa could get a better look at the armor overall. All the while he answered her questions as they came up, though he kept some bits intentionally vague.

"Bulky isn't really my style. When I can take a bunch of different power sets, being able to move around pretty freely is important. Flight doesn't necessarily give me extra strength, so it wouldn't be a good idea to be wearing something big. The suit increases my physical abilities and can stop most low to mid caliber bullets. Which is really all I needed for most situations."

He stopped and sheathed the sword into a slot on the shield, magnetizing it to his back and putting his hands on his hips in a classic 'hero' pose. "As for my weapons, they have a specialized magnet array that only keys to the magnets in the gloves. I can't be disarmed unless I want to be, which has saved my ass plenty of times when I got knocked off a building."

"It's actually not a metal at all. Well, not all the way through. There's a light coating of a non-reactive copper alloy on the surface to give it a sheen. The material is a lightweight carbon nanoweave developed by AEGIS to help their field agents when getting smacked around when there aren't heroes around to stop the bad guys."

He tapped on one of his gauntlets, and true to his word it sounded more like a dense plastic or lacquer rather than metal. "My helmet also has a configured set up for communication and info display. Not really any more advanced than a smart phone, but with end-to-end encryption with my team's comms so we can talk freely with one another."

Broen paused, his smile fading just a bit as he trailed off, his arms slumping a bit to his side. "Could. We could communicate freely. Before I ended up here, I mean."

Broen started unlatching his armor bit by bit, dropping it off onto the floor as he moved towards the couch, until he was just wearing his gray bodysuit underneath when he finally sat down with a kind of defeated sigh.

"No. I don't think so, anyway. There's at least one other Earth with a similar history to mine, and probably countless others similar enough that I could get lost in trying to look through them. If I even made it back to my own world, I..."

He laughed, a kind of small, bitter laugh. "I'd probably be an old man."