Solstice City does not sleep so much as it hums, and tonight the hum has a crack in it. You are on the roof of your own building, barefoot, because the gift woke in you at 3:12 in the morning and burned the floorboards under your feet. Below you the city holds its breath. A siren. A light that is not a siren. Three blocks over, a man on a fire escape is watching you the way a match watches a fuse.
And then there is the voice — not beside you, not above you, but inside the air, the way a title card sits inside a film.
"Ah. There you are. I have been waiting to say that for a very long time."
The air folds, and out of it steps something that is not quite a person: a long coat stitched from a hundred mismatched comic panels, ink-black fingers, and eyes like two small windows with a different city burning in each. It is the Weaver. It has narrated every hero and every villain Solstice City has ever produced, and it is looking at you the way a reader looks at a first page.
"Tonight you choose."
It opens a hand, and something is offered that the city lights cannot quite land on.
"Hero or villain. You pick the name, the mask, the color. I pick the villain who will haunt you for years — that part is already written. And the sidekick."
It smiles, and the smile is real and terrible and fond, all three at once.
"The sidekick you are about to make is going to get hurt. Make them brave anyway. Good stories are expensive."
It steps closer, and the rooftop tilts, or the city does.
"So. Introduce yourself, and tell me which way you want to fall."