So, his cousin was getting married to the poet. Dan wasn't surprised, they'd been seeing one another for nearly five years now, and had been living together for three. Elizabeth was a smart girl, and was on track to receive her MBA this year. Corwin balanced her out nicely in Dan's opinion, and was so obviously besotted with her it was hard not to want them to succeed. Just another lunatic in the asylum that was his family, really. And it would be nice not being the only one named after a fictional character for a change.

He grinned and folded the letter back into its heavy cream-colored envelope. His name had been written in a heavily slanted, almost calligraphic scroll across the front: Lt. Elrohir Elladan Alexander. He had just turned twenty-five, and was an extraordinarily tall man (almost 6' 7"), with a long narrow face and an aquiline nose. He had a generous mouth, though he rarely smiled, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw. His large grey eyes were as expressive as his lips were not, and they gleamed below slightly arched brown eyebrows. The whole of it topped off with a haircut that wasn't exactly regulation, but could be. He was broad shouldered, barrel-chested and had kept in shape almost religiously even before joining the Service. He was good looking, knew it, but had spent so much of his adult life in uniform that his sense of style tended towards the utilitarian and the functional, which was probably for the best.

He regarded the letter again, happy to see his new address in the City written across it beneath his name. He wondered what the US Postal service would have done with his letter if his parents had addressed it in Sindarin as well; probably sent it straight to the top of the Dead Letter pile. He tossed it onto the half bar that separated his kitchen from his small 'dining area' and then turned his head to stare at the stack of boxes scattered about his living room. The place was listed as a one bedroom, but was really more of an efficiency with walls. He had neighbors on all side save one, and both upstairs and down. Thankfully none of them set off QE.

He did like the sealed concrete floors though, and he had a decent view of a rooftop garden out the sliding glass doors of his living area. The laughingly named 'patio' was really just the fire escape, but there was room to stand out there if he'd had a mind to; maybe put out a plant or something. The Army had taken great care of him, and so he hadn't felt compelled to invest in the things that filled up a private space like an apartment. He was rarely home during his tour anyway, having spent three years learning his trade (communications and surveillance) and the language (Farsi), and then another three practicing it; base housing had sufficed.

Then there had been the incident, nearly three months of intensive examination and testing, and then another two years in the field using what all that testing had uncovered about Dan, and about QE

Quantum Entanglement.

Two little words that encompassed a hell of a lot of weird places and even more outrageous things. He'd seen things… hell, he'd done things that would make his parents blanch and The Author… well, who knew what The Author would have thought of the world as Dan knew it to be. Maybe that's where some of his characters came from in the first place: maybe he'd seen some of the early metahumans out on the battlefield as a young man, and they'd fired his already vivid imagination into overdrive, spawning stories of talking trees and winged horrors, beastial humanoids and immortal protectors.

He looked down at his hands, flexed his fingers. Nothing there now, nothing glowing or dripping or gleaming in the pale, always too bright light of the low-energy bulbs that everyone seemed to be using nowadays. Kind of nice in a way, to just be a normal guy, living a normal life.

Even if he wasn't.

He shook his head and grabbed a box marked "Kitchen" and, scooting around another four box stack marked "living", moved into the cramped area of his place that held a surprisingly new gas stove, an ancient dishwasher, and a tiny but barely full-sized fridge, and was therefore his kitchen. He nearly forgot to duck, but did so just in time to avoid the weird little arched entranceway that had caught him twice now across the top of his skull. Vaulted ceilings would have been nice, but way outside his price range, and besides, it did look kind of cool in a retro seventies way. He suspected he'd have to chain his mother to the wall when she saw it: it just itched to have some flowing Quenya or Sinadarin welcoming scrawled along its edges. Preferably in gold.

Cause he could afford to lose his deposit over that… not.

He'd get a decent enough check from the Army for…. well, for the rest of his life probably. But it didn't allow for luxuries, especially in the City. Still, he was just a few blocks away from Chinatown, and not that many more from Central Park (relatively speaking) so he considered himself lucky. And he had a couple of job interviews lined up for next week as well. One with the NYPD for a dispatchers position, and another as a lineman for AT&T mobile. Either would work, and both had their appeals. And in today's economy, he had considered himself damn lucky to get the interviews so fast, though he suspected the Colonel may have had something to do with it.

Probably the closest thing he had to a friend, the Colonel. Even if the man had sent him on several missions that could have ended in death or dismemberment. He snorted as he unboxed a set of glasses that had never been used (gifts from Lawrence, an ex boyfriend who he still stayed in touch with) and began to line them up, upside down, in neat rows in the glass fronted cabinets above his sink. He caught his reflection in the cabinet door as he shut it, regarded himself calmly for just a moment, smiled, then went back to unboxing. It was a handsome face, if not classically so. When he was a teenager he'd once let his hair grow long, and tied it back with a leather thong. If they'd have tossed a couple of Spock ears on him and give him robes and a bow he could have been an extra in any of The Authors latest films. Thank God those days were behind him, but man would he have looked the part! And even then he definitely could talk the talk, and probably even walk the walk.

He laughed again, more of a rumble deep in his chest as put plates in the cabinet near the glasses, then opened the next box. He froze as he felt it. Just for a moment, barely on the periphery and then gone, but it had been there. The QE, reaching out and connecting him to another, giving him insight and ability for just a moment, and then fading away. It had been a Tank; strong and tough, with enough power to toss a Lexus several yards up Fifth Avenue. And for a moment he knew his own skin could take on that look that said armored, or his mind could fill with an energy that could slip down into the Tank and scramble it's neurons, or maybe he'd go translucent super-porous. Endless possibilities, but never ones he could choose; QE was as random as it was thorough, and it decided what was needed for any given situation. Thankfully whoever it was had gone out of QE's effective range almost as quickly as they had come into it, and so the power folded itself inwards, settling once more deep into his bones.

Dan released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding and relaxed. He was going to have to get used to that, in a city this big. It was inevitable that he would run into people for the QE to connect with, and he'd have to deal. He quickly finished off the last two boxes (silverware and spices, pots and pans), and ducked through the archway back into the 'dining room' and snagged the next row marked 'kitchen'.

He finished unpacking the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and most of his bedroom by ten, stopping a few minutes around six to snag a subway sandwich and a tea. A footlong spicy Italian, double-meat with extra mustard. Two bags of Doritos. Man, was there anything better than Doritos? He'd devoured the second bag as he finished the unpacking, then decided that he deserved some lazy time. He headed into the bedroom, flopped on his bed, legs dangling over the edge like always when his cell rang: Vader's Death March.

That meant the Colonel. Who seemed to have a damned bug planted in the place already, considering the timing of the call. Dan scooped up his phone from where he'd tossed it on the bed earlier, tapped the little icon, and then said, "Sir?"

"How's the place?"

"Fine sir."

"Got what you need?"

Dan nodded. "Yes sir."

"That's good. How's it doing?"

Dan knew what he was talking about. "Fine sir. Nothing's really changed."

"Good. That's… good."

There was a pause. Then, "We'll be in touch."

"Yes sir." The line went dead.

Bane sighed and covered his eyes with his forearm, letting the phone dangle loosely from his hand. He had no doubt at all that they would, indeed, be in touch. He'd joined the service right out of high school, and had nearly crapped himself when a very stern looking pair of MP had marched into the barracks three days into Basic and asked him to 'come with us Private, the Colonel wants a word." It was his blood tests - they'd found the markers for the metagene within him and placed him, along with two others, in a very special sort of boot camp. Dan, Specialist Linda Reynolds, and Private Robert Ortega: Triad 4, or T4 for short. Linda was a Tank, hard as hell to take down and capable of bench pressing several tons. Ortega was a mechano-kinetic. Could control machines and things with gears and cogs, from wind up watches to a B-52 bomber.

He was kind of bad ass in traffic. Especially when he did the "parting of the Red Sea" thing in rush hour.

They'd been a hell of a team, had each others backs on several occasions, and scared the living crap out of the regular meat-sacks they often worked along with. Now Linda was a stay at home mom, raising twin girls out in Idaho. Ortega was still in the service, and last Dan heard, he was stationed in Afghanistan rooting out jihadists from caves.

Cave work sucked. The good lord knew he'd been in enough of them himself the last couple of years.

Dan sat up on the edge of the bed, eyes moving towards "The Collection" that the Army had helped him build. Four shadowboxes, freshly hung on his bedroom wall opposite the bed, each little nook and cranny filled with a memento from all his QE events. Sometimes it was a little piece of rubble, like the two inch chunk of masonry from a San Diego safe house. Or it was a charred or torn piece of cloth or uniform, taken from a downed opponent after the smoke had cleared, or the ice had melted, or the radiation levels had gone down to something tolerable to humans. The third box in from the right, fourth shelf down; now THAT one was memorable. A single metal ring, roughly 3 mm across, made of some black, cold metal forged the Gods alone knew where that was suspended in a small wedge of polycarbonate. The Army had run just about every test known to man on it, and came up with zero as far as a known chemical composition or metallurgical make-up. One guy thought it might be Oracalcum, a metal forged in Atlantis or something like that, and maybe he was right; he was classified as one of the militaries magical assets, so who knew? The link glowed a very very pale blue, so soft that you could only see the glow at night or in the dark, and had come from a guy in New Mexico calling himself Knightmare. Rode a horse made of this inky black stuff that you just couldn't hurt, and carried a huge ass sword. He'd worn a set of chain mail made of the glowy rings, and had run Dan through the shoulder as easy as you please with aforementioned huge ass sword when Dan had stepped out to lay the QE on him. The Border Patrol agents had dragged Dan, bleeding and dazed, behind a vehicle, and put some concentrated fire into Knightmare and his freaky steed, but the guy had just laughed, trashed all their vehicles and flipped them off as he rode off into the cold, night time desert. Something must have gotten through though, because one of the Agents found a scrap of the assholes armor.

Dan learned that day that QE couldn't lock on to magic. And he learned something else too: overconfidence in QE meant a trip the the M.E., PDQ. He still had the scar to remind him if he ever got cocky about it.

There was a napkin from The Back Porch, in Boerne Texas, second box, middle cubby. Dan had lost the power of flight about thirty feet above the rustic hamburger joint when the flier he'd been chasing had kicked in the afterburners and took off at like Mach 8, effectively removing herself from QE's effective range very nicely, thank you so much. Dan remembered vividly that he'd wanted her to die in a fire as he plummeted towards the bright shiny building below. Thank God for sheet metal roofs that bent on impact, and for the grey set of special fatigues the DoD had whipped up for him with the kevlar threads. The suit hung in his closet now, and Dan wondered how long it would be before he had to put it back on. Despite it, the bruise from that fall hadn't faded for like a week.

Buttons and pens, pebbles, a small stoppered glass vial full of golden sand and even a crushed Coca-Cola can wedged next to a compartment holding a black crows feather. Jesus, the feather. Dan had perched, huddled and shivering in a nasty Kansas City sleet storm for three days and nights outside a black market weapons warehouse run by some doofus who was terrified of crows. Guy could throw lightning bolts with the precision of Zeus, but one swoop at his head while screaming "CAW!" had made him wet his pants and scream for his mamma in Farsi. Life was like that sometimes, and QE could be a dick when it wanted to be. There were days Dan swore the thing had a kind of vicious intelligence. Still, flying was always kind of cool.

At this point his Collection held 47 unique items so far, and he had no doubt the number would grow. Especially given the delivery he'd received this morning.

The envelope containing a phone, a business card and a debit card.

Dan looked at the phone, resting atop the mailer it had come in like an unexploded bomb. He'd tossed it on his old Army locker at the foot of his bed, the debit card and the business card lying next to it. Ten grand, and an invite to "Make a difference!".

Shit.

His gaze remain fixed on the oblong black square of the phone, and his hands tightened on his thighs as he considered what that phone represented. He could either trash it, take the money (which honestly he could use right now) and go on about his business; interview with either NYPD or AT&T, get a normal job, and find a normal guy to settle down with. New York was huge; there had to be somebody out there for him. Pursue that whole 'normal' thing that so many people seemed to whine and moan about so much. That whole 'normal' thing that seemed kinda nice after being through the kind of shit he'd been through to acquire his Collection. But at the end of the day he wasn't normal, and never would be, and if the Army had taught him anything at all, it was to use all his skills and talents to his best advantage, and to see what was put in front of him for what it was.

"Shit."

He flopped back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling fan as he weighed his options. The Colonel would no doubt be exceptionally interested in this Daniel Lee character. Probably already had a file on the guy somewhere. That was the problem with the Army: they had files on just about every damn thing. It was finding them that sometimes proved problematical. Whoever he was, Lee was plugged into some serious flows of cash, tech and information. Lee had Dan's fingerprints, knew Dan was moving today to this address, and no doubt knew about QE. You'd need some pretty good juice to know all that. After the video had finished playing on the phones slick surface, the first thing Dan had wanted to do was take it apart to see how it worked, but he was afraid of damaging the internals. Lee had said to bring the phone with him to whatever meeting would be put in place, and the last thing Dan wanted to do was show up with a broken phone and a guilty expression.

Lee's speech about potential and saving millions and all that stuff kept looping through Dans mind, the words measured and calm when they needed to be, the emphasis placed perfectly on all the key points.

"Shit."

Dan rolled over and stared at the floor, hands and forearms draped across the floor, his forehead resting gently on the freshly steam cleaned carpet. He could see his feet lying on the carpet from beneath the bed, angled in towards each other so that he looked pigeon-toed. Thee wasn't a bed in this whole building the he fit on, he suspected as he studied the laces on his sneaks while Lee's speech chased itself in his brain like a puppy pursuing its tail. He drummed his fingers on the carpet and sighed.

He stayed that way for several minutes, then pushed up from the floor and sat once more on the edge of the bed. He looked at the phone. Then he looked at his suit, hanging in the closet. Then back at the phone.

"Shit."

Tomorrow he'd make the call and set up the appointment. Then he'd call the Colonel and let him know what was up. And then? Well, then he'd see about making a difference.