Voltini

Voltini
Player: Ghostrix
Origin:	Mutant
Archetype:	Dominator
Security Level:	50+
Server:	Confidential
Personal Data
Real Name:	Valaria Voltini
Known Aliases:	Volt
Species:	Mutant
Age:	18
Height:	4 ft.
Weight:	'
Eye Color:	'
Hair Color:	'
Biographical Data
Nationality:	'
Occupation:	'
Place of Birth:	'
Base of Operations:	'
Marital Status:	'
Known Relatives:	'
Known Powers
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Known Abilities
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Equipment
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I grew up knowing two things: the smell of salt on cheap whiskey, and the sound of my last name spoken like a promise and a threat.

Voltini.

In Port Oakes, that word opened doors and closed mouths. The Family owned the docks, the streets, and us. My parents ran a waterfront bar that never slept—peeling paint, humming neon, and a floor that was always just a little sticky. The sign outside said Voltini’s, but everyone knew it for what it really was: a place where cash got washed and secrets got wrung out like bar rags.

I learned to pour drinks before I learned to ride a bike. I knew which regulars liked their whiskey neat and which ones liked it with a side of information. Money passed in envelopes, favors passed in glances, and I passed bottles down the bar, pretending I didn’t hear anything that could get us all killed.

The first time I realized I was wrong inside, the sky was black as old motor oil. There was a storm rolling in off the water, thick and mean. I remember standing in the alley, taking out the trash, when the air went heavy. I tasted metal—sharp, bitter—like biting your tongue hard enough to bleed. A second later, the streetlight above me flickered, buzzed, and popped out.

I flinched. The light came back on.

My heart hammered. I could feel something in my chest, like a swarm of bees trapped inside my ribs. I pressed my palms against the dumpster to steady myself, and a little blue spark jumped from my fingers to the metal. Just a snap, like static. But it was enough.

I ran back inside and told my mother. She didn’t look up from the register.

“Nerves,” she said. “Storm’s got you spooked. Go wipe the tables.”

So I did what every good Voltini did: I shut up and went back to work.

But it kept happening. Before storms, before fights, whenever I got scared or angry, the air would taste like pennies. My fingertips would tingle. Streetlights would flicker when I walked by. Radios crackled when I was close. Once, in the middle of an argument with my father, every bulb in the bar dimmed at the same time and then flared too bright.

They both saw it.

My father’s jaw tightened. My mother crossed herself, just a flicker of the hand, like she didn’t want anyone—even God—to notice.

“Nerves,” he repeated. “You’re fine. You stay behind the counter, you hear? No trouble. You don’t go near the docks unless we say.”

I heard what he didn’t say. The Family doesn’t like surprises.

So I stayed behind the counter. I stacked glasses and counted tips and pretended I didn’t feel the static under my skin. I watched the men in dark suits come and go, watched the ledgers move from hand to hand. I watched my parents’ eyes every time a new envelope came in light.

The night it all went bad, the bar was too quiet.

No shouting, no dice slamming on tables, no greasy laughter clinging to the smoke. Just low murmurs, the clink of ice in glasses, and my father’s voice a little too loud, a little too cheerful as he poured drinks for men who weren’t regulars.

They wore masks. Not Halloween masks, not cheap plastic. Black cloth, featureless, with only the eyes showing. Professional. Cold.

I felt the storm before I saw it. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the metal taste was there, sharp on my tongue. My fingers twitched around a bottle of rum. The neon sign outside the window stuttered.

“Go to the back,” my mother whispered. Her hand was shaking on my arm.

“I can help—”

“Now, Valeria.”

I’d heard that tone before, the one that meant shut up or die. I stepped through the swinging door into the stockroom but kept it cracked open just enough to see.

One of the masked men laid a ledger on the bar. My father flipped through it, his face going pale. Another man set a small black case down and opened it. I couldn’t see inside, but I saw my mother’s hand clutch at the crucifix around her neck.

“The shipment vanished,” one of them said. His voice was smooth, detached. “Product, gone. Money, gone. That’s a problem.”

“I’ll fix it,” my father said. “Just—just give me—”

“The Family has been generous,” the man interrupted. “But generosity has limits. You know the terms.”

Collateral.

I knew that word. I’d heard it whispered about other people. People who had daughters. Sons. Brothers.

My stomach dropped.

“Please,” my mother said. “She’s just a girl.”

My name hadn’t been spoken yet, but it was hanging in the air like a noose.

“What’s her name?” the man asked.

My father’s silence was worse than any shout.

The storm inside me surged. My heartbeat roared in my ears, and the neon outside blew out with a sharp snap. The room plunged into darkness except for the dim light from the stocked beer fridge behind me.

The masked man chuckled softly. “Cute.”

The door slammed open. More men. And behind them, a figure I knew only from overheard conversations and hushed curses.

Dr. Aeon.

He didn’t wear a mask. He wore a lab coat too clean for a place like Port Oakes, goggles pushed up on a mess of hair, and a grin that was almost hungry.

“So,” he said, clapping his hands once. “Where’s my new project?”

My mother looked toward the stockroom door.

That was all it took.

They dragged me out, my nails scratching uselessly at the wood. The lights overhead flickered like they didn’t know whether to live or die. I felt the power rising, a static tide climbing my spine, building at the base of my skull.

“Don’t,” my father said hoarsely. To me, or to them, I don’t know.

Dr. Aeon studied me like I was something he’d ordered from a catalog and wasn’t sure he liked the color of. He reached out, grabbed my chin, turned my face side to side.

“Hmm. Young. Healthy. And the readings we got from her neighborhood… very promising.” He snapped his fingers. “Yes. She’ll do nicely. The Family will have its energy solution. And you, my dear, will be famous. In certain circles.”

I spat in his face.

He laughed, delighted. “Excellent spirit. We’ll see if it conducts.”

They didn’t take money that night. They took me.

The lab was somewhere in the Rogue Isles—underground, humming, smelling like ozone and disinfectant. They strapped me into machines that hummed and buzzed and whispered terrible things in digital beeps. Needles slid into my veins. Metal clamps bit into my wrists and ankles. Cables ran from my skin to consoles that watched every tremor.

“You’ve had this in you your whole life,” Dr. Aeon cooed, pacing around me. “Raw, unrefined potential. The Family was sitting on a gold mine and didn’t even know it. But I do. And I’m going to make you shine.”

He threw switches.

The first jolt was like being set on fire from the inside out. Every nerve lit up. I tried to scream, but my jaw locked, my muscles seizing. The second jolt went deeper, digging into the place where that buzzing, tingling thing had lived in me since childhood.

He wasn’t just shocking me. He was poking at the storm.

Day blurred into night. Or night blurred into more night; I couldn’t see the sky, so time stopped meaning anything. There were injections, thick and cold, sliding into my veins. There were currents that crawled across my skin like electric insects. There were charts and readouts and Dr. Aeon’s voice, thrilled and curious.

“Look at that spike… fascinating. Again.”

With every “again,” something inside me pushed back harder.

The metal taste never left. It coated my tongue, seeped into my teeth. My fingertips burned even when there were no wires on them. I started to see arcs of light under my eyelids when I blinked.

“Your nervous system is extraordinary,” he said once, leaning over me. “You were born for this, you know. All I’m doing is helping you become what you were meant to be.”

No. What I was meant to be had been behind a bar, wiping down counters, pretending I belonged to the Family and not to myself. This—this was theft. Of my body, my future, my name.

One day—maybe day, maybe night—the storm stopped resisting.

It started answering.

He turned the dial up. The machines whined. My back arched, every muscle taut. But beneath the pain, there was something else: a thread of control. A sense that if I just reached for it, I could grab hold of the current instead of letting it tear through me.

I imagined the bar back in Port Oakes. The clink of glasses. My father’s heavy footsteps. My mother’s soft hum when she thought no one was listening. The neon sign outside: Voltini’s, flickering blue and white over the dark water.

Volt.

The word pulsed in my mind like a heartbeat.

Dr. Aeon leaned in to adjust a clamp on my wrist. His goggles reflected my face—sweat-soaked, eyes wide, little arcs of blue dancing in the whites.

“Almost there,” he murmured. “Just a bit more.”

The next jolt came.

This time, I grabbed it.

I didn’t let the electricity pass through me. I held onto it, curled my fingers around it, dragged it into the center of myself and twisted. Pain turned into pressure, into heat, into a bright, wild surge that felt like finally taking a full breath after years of suffocating.

The restraints were metal.

Metal conducts.

The energy roared outward.

Bolts burst from my skin, white-blue and blinding. The restraints on my wrists and ankles glowed, then softened, then melted, the smell of burning rubber and scorched metal filling the air. Consoles exploded in showers of sparks. Alarms shrieked. Lights blew out one by one like panicked fireflies.

Dr. Aeon flew backward, crashing into a bank of monitors. His laughter, high and delighted, echoed even over the chaos.

“Yes! Yes! Beautiful!”

I tore myself free, stumbling off the table. My legs shook. My hands crackled with residual charge, little arcs skipping from fingertip to fingertip. The room was a ruin of smoke and flickering red emergency lights.

Guards rushed in. I didn’t know what I was doing. Instinct did.

They raised guns. I raised my hands.

The storm answered me.

The bolts that jumped from my fingers weren’t clean, controlled lines. They were wild, branching lashes of lightning that turned guns into twisted metal and men into screaming silhouettes on the floor. The recoil knocked me back a step, but I stayed standing.

For the first time since they’d taken me, I wasn’t strapped down.

I ran.

The lab was a maze of corridors and doors that locked too slow. Sirens howled. Overhead, a recorded voice droned about containment breaches and protocol. I blew out cameras with angry sparks, shorted keypads with a touch. Every time fear clawed at my throat, the metal taste on my tongue sharpened and the lights around me stuttered.

Finally, I found a cargo bay.

Crates were stacked high, stamped with symbols from places I’d only ever heard of in smuggled conversations. Isles. Crey. Arachnos. Port Oakes. Paragon City.

Paragon.

I didn’t know why that name felt like a lifeline. Maybe because I’d heard it spat by Family men in the bar, the way they said “heroes” like it was a curse. Maybe because it was far. Maybe because it wasn’t here.

Shouts echoed down the hall behind me. I didn’t have time to be smart. I yanked open the nearest crate marked for export to Paragon City. It was half full of equipment—parts, wires, things with warning labels in three languages. I squeezed myself into the space, pulled the lid down, and let the darkness swallow me.

I heard the crate being moved. Felt the jolt as it was loaded. The hum of engines. The long, sickening sway of travel. I slept in fits, dreaming of lightning and neon signs and my mother’s voice calling my name in a place I might never see again.

When the crate finally cracked open, fresh air hit me like another shock.

Paragon City.

The skyline cut into the sky, all glass and steel and bright, impossible light. Hovercars drifted overhead. Distant, I heard the thrum of flight, the boom of something crashing, the murmur of crowds that didn’t sound afraid to be outside.

I crawled out of the crate, limbs stiff, clothes singed, hair wild. People stared. Some backed away. Some raised phones. A kid pointed at me and whispered, “Is she a hero?”

I looked at my hands. The skin was still marked where the restraints had been, faint red circles. When I flexed my fingers, tiny arcs of blue jumped between them.

I could have hidden. I could have found a bar not unlike my parents’, washed glasses in the background, pretended I was no one.

But I’d been someone’s property my whole life. The Family’s girl. Aeon’s project. Collateral.

Never again.

“Name?” a cop asked me gently, trying to decide if I was a threat or just another lost stray in a city full of capes.

I thought of the neon sign. Of the storm. Of the power that had finally chosen me as much as I’d chosen it.

“Voltini,” I said first, because it was mine even if it was tainted. Then I shook my head. “Volt. Just… call me Volt.”

He wrote it down.

That was the first time I saw it, printed in ink instead of etched in fear.

Volt.

Now my base is a cramped room in Kings Row, a floor above a closed-down factory, the walls humming faintly because I can’t quite keep the charge out of the wiring. I work with people who wear masks by choice, not because someone told them to. I patrol streets where the bad guys don’t own every cop, every dock, every breath.

They try, of course. Crey, Arachnos, the Family’s reach creeping even here. I’ve seen Dr. Aeon’s name in stolen files, felt his eyes on me in the way certain tech seems a little too eager to respond to my touch. I know he’s still out there, still playing with power like it’s a toy.

Someday, I’ll go back to Port Oakes. I’ll walk into my parents’ bar—if it’s still standing—and see what’s left of the people who traded me to save themselves. I don’t know yet what I’ll say to them. I don’t know if forgiveness is in me, or if all I’ve got is lightning.

What I do know is this:

No one owns me now.

Not the Family. Not Aeon. Not the storm in my blood.

I am Volt, the spark that got away.

And in Paragon City, that’s enough to start a fire.