In the Keyscore police station, it’s nighttime when Stan Worth exits, bidding his coworkers goodbye. They have a friendly relationship, and Worth even manages to find respect for the officers who’d prefer to sleep on the job. Outside, he gets into his car. His daughter, Camilla, is relaxing on the couch at home after classes at university, but is suddenly startled by Stan’s call.
“Hi, Dad,” she starts. “How was work?”
“Alright today,” he says monotonously. “How was class?”
Stan continues driving down the unusually empty streets as his daughter chatters away about college. These lanes look like they haven’t been driven in years, yet he drives down there casually. They were dark. Empty. Devoid of civilians and somehow dirtier than usual, even by Keyscore standards. He hesitantly pulls his car into the lot of an abandoned building, an area that citizens were unaware was frequently used as a clandestine meeting base.
“I’ll call you back, Camilla,” he says before hanging up.
He had made prior plans to meet Phantom-Venger here, though he couldn’t draw the connection between him and the elusive Mark Phanstrom. Inside, the building smells of neglect, floors missing their walls and dead flies peppering the floor. His watch and phone are rendered useless by the disrupted internet connection, and he reluctantly takes the rickety elevator to the top level.
This floor, though still as decrepit as the other, had functioning lights and a large bulletin board on the wall. Stan shook the nerves from his body as he noticed the familiar Phantom-Venger feverishly typing against the keys of an old computer.
“How’s that thing even working in a building like this?” Stan sighed, recalling his defunct phone.
The Phantom took a moment to continue typing, ignoring his question. When he was finished, he swiveled in his chair.
“It’s about time you showed up,” The Phantom-Venger remarked.
Stan caught a glimpse at the clock on his broken phone, his unusable watch. Had he really been late?
The two discussed the gruesome murder that had occurred the other day at the Bryson House, a scene that had shaken them both to their core as they tried to piece together the meaning of the mysterious symbols scrawled on the wall. Thanks to Phantom-Venger’s shadowy prowess and Stan’s access to confidential police documents, they compare notes about what they know, but trying to identify something as fundamental as a motive was proving difficult.
“Well, we have a name, an identity… now it’s just a matter of digging into that person’s past and seeing if—”
Stan and Phantom-Venger are both silenced by the grating, staticky voice speaking through Stan’s police radio. The words fade in and out: “crazy — lunatic — crowbar — walking around — on high alert — last seen — nowhere to be found —.”
“He could be anywhere,” Phantom-Venger says, cutting through the emerging silence.
The two crimefighters stare at each other for a moment: one in mysterious costume, the other wrecked by another nine-to-five day in his police uniform. Suddenly, a high, frantic scream pierces the air from below. Rushing to the side of the old building, they are greeted by a horrific sight as they peer over the edge:
The so-called maniac was prancing from sidewalk to sidewalk, brutally carving his way through a crowd of horrified citizens as he struck them with his crowbar.
“Who are you?” Phantom-Venger asks, his voice leaning towards malice. He recalled distant, unremarkable nights where he’d encountered crooks before, but hadn’t expected any of them to wear a mask like him.
“He’s escaped to the street,” Stan said. “If we don’t catch him now, we’ll never find him.”
Prowl grabs the man by his ankle, dragging him across the concrete as the man desperately clings to the gravel, yelling for help. But just before he can deliver a fatal blow to his head, Phantom-Venger swoops down from the building, effectively disarming the villain.
Stan scoffed and turned towards the exit. He’d take the elevator and meet him down there. That is, if it worked this time.
“Venger…” Prowl spits, writhing with the same hatred he’d shown Phantom-Venger when they’d met all those years ago. “I am Prowl, and you won’t stop my righteous vengeance!”
“Think again,” Phantom-Venger remarks. Prowl even wore the same costume: a brown trenchcoat, an orange ski mask with black scar details around the eyes, and gaudy purple gloves. A man dressed up as a supervillain, a man playing pretend. “So tacky.”
Prowl lowered his eyes and landed a blow to the Phantom-Venger’s chest, growling and hissing as he failed to stun him and take back his crowbar.
“This city needs to pay, Venger!” he shouted. The crowd of battered civilians had since dissipated, scattering into nearby streets and alleyways to seek refuge. “If not for me, then for Bryson!”
Having heard enough, the vigilante landed a hard kick to Prowl’s chest, sending him backwards, gasping and sputtering. But Prowl was more cunning than his choice of dress might have someone believe. With a swift dodge to the left, Prowl sails over Phantom-Venger’s blows and retrieves his crowbar from behind him, swinging it madly. Stan has made it downstairs, and seeing Phantom-Venger struggle against the maniacal strength of Prowl, he wants to rush across the streets and help.
But he knows he can’t. No one can know he’s secretly aligned himself with Keyscore’s most controversial hero. Instead, he waits.
After a brief but tiring exchange of blows and dodges, Phantom-Venger notices gaps, weaknesses in Prowl’s rehearsed form. As the crowbar narrowly misses his temple, Phantom-Venger takes a step forward and, with a firm hand, strikes Prowl in his neck. The villain collapses into a world of black.
Prowl isn’t sure where he is. He had terrorized the Keyscore streets, fought the Phantom-Venger, and now all there was was blackness and pain and rope squeezing into his joints. Light comes flooding in as the mask is abruptly removed from his face.
“Prowl,” Phantom-Venger begins. “Is that even your real name?”
Stan is positioned closely behind a wall, hidden out of sight but within earshot of the interrogation. Hiding himself like this irritated him to no end, but he knew keeping their association a secret was for the best.
Prowl clenches his jaw and turns away defiantly. But with a simple raise of his fist, he cracks.
“My name is David Tune,” Prowl spits. “But you should be asking me who April Bryson was. You couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to be miserable,” Prowl said, defeated. “How this city will push you around like you’re trash. But not my April. The only light in this blighted world. This place needs to pay for what it’s done.”
Phantom-Venger looks at David with pity, but only for a moment. Stan’s aggravated posture softens out of sight at the sound of David’s revelation. They knew better than anybody the ruthlessness of Keyscore City and all that it took from its inhabitants. More importantly, they knew what it was like to rage against something unmovable, something permanent, something that seemed never to change, no matter how criminals were caught or citizens were victimized.
But Phantom-Venger didn’t let that understanding linger for too long.
“It gives you no right,” he said.
Later that night, Phantom-Venger took the subdued Prowl around the city in search of a discreet place to leave him with the police. Landing behind a dumpster, Phantom Venger prepares to leave, but is spotted by them.
“That’s him!” one of the officers shouts. “That’s the Phantom-Venger! Get him!”
It wasn’t the first time Phantom-Venger was mistaken for a villain, but it always made drop-offs like this difficult. As the crowd of officers charged him, Phantom-Venger acted quickly to escape by turning sharp corners into various alleyways, eventually escaping through a manhole.
“We lost him,” he heard them say from underground.
“Just get whoever the other guy who’s booked. We heard reports of a masked maniac swinging a crowbar. That has to be him,” they said, making their way towards David.
After some time, Phantom-Venger peers from the manhole to check if they’re still there, but returns to the building where Stan waits once he’s sure the officers are gone.
“That guy knows more than he’s letting on,” Stan offers. “You could’ve asked him a lot more questions.”
Phantom-Venger sighed. He wouldn’t tell Stan that he understood Prowl, that he, too, felt his rage at Keyscore City at times, that he knew what it was like to have something you loved taken from you.
Instead, he told Stan that it was all right, that he knew a way to get all the information they needed and then have Prowl put away for good.
David groans as he wakes up in another interrogation room, though this one was far more comfortable than Phantom-Venger’s. An officer unfamiliar to Prowl appears, in uniform and sipping coffee out of a mug in his hands.
“I’m going to give you a chance to see justice done,” Stan says. “Tell me what happened to April before she died.”
David still looked at the officer with hatred reverberating in his eyes, but his shoulders straightened a bit at the mention of his late best friend’s name.
“April…. She worked for some guy named Mr. Stone. Powerful guy, this Mr. Stone. April was always on the straight and narrow; she had a good heart and called him a rat.
Stan interrogates David, asking him anything he knows about April before she died. David explains that she works for a guy named Mr. Stone, who’s said to be a powerful man, and that April called him a rat. I wasn’t there when she was killed, but when I walked past that crime scene that day and saw her there…” David trails off, lost in both memory and grief.
“And then you became Prowl,” Stan said.
Phantom-Venger listens closely to their conversation through a hidden microphone Stan had supplied. He sits unmasked at his shoddy apartment desk, paying close attention to any information David might reveal. Eventually, Mark is startled by the loud ringing of his cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi Mark, it’s Fred. I’ve got good news.”
“Now’s not a good time,” Mark said, rewinding the interrogation audio. Hopefully, he hadn’t missed anything.
“I got you a date!”
Mark is silent for a moment and presses an aggravated palm to his forehead.
“Thanks, Fred, but I really can’t. Too busy.”
“Don’t give me that. We’ve always discussed how you could socialize and get out of the house more. Now you might even find someone special,” the doctor retaliates. “Look. I just want you to get out of the shell you’ve built around yourself. You have a real shot at a life.”
“Alright, Fred,” Mark replies, exasperated.
After the phone call, Mark masks himself and returns to the Bryson house through an unchecked window. Looking around, he notices stacks of papers he hadn’t seen before. Paychecks upon paychecks lay strewn about, all sharing in common one specific address. Later, when he and Stan met at the same abandoned building base, he handed the documents to the officer.
“I know where we can start looking,” Phantom-Venger said, a satisfied look on his face. “The club is called the Dark Cove.”
