“They say no man is an island. I don’t believe this to be true. Those islands, however, are barren, desolate wastelands.”

“Poor Destructo Boy is all adrift, those he surrounded himself with all perished, and now as the waves lap at the coast, his shoreline is being eaten away, his state of sanity quickly eroding. And no, I won’t call him ‘Destructo’, because these past few months I have learned what a man is like, and he is most definitely still a boy. Isolation is a terrible thing, it weakens and then destroys us. The child has been isolated due to his own failure, but you, Nero? You stand alone by choice.”

“There you sit in your basement, voyeuristically observing the outside world, the only light you experience being the dull glow of screens showing you an incomplete picture of life. And what do you do with this information? You catalogue, you scheme, then you reach out… With a closed fist. Blackmail, threats, demands of compliance. Nobody gets close. Nobody stands by your side. Nobody gives a fuck about you.”

“I’m sure you like to think yourself a dark cloud, hanging above your targets, ready to rain on their parade… But the funny thing about dark clouds is, in a clear sky, they are inconsequential. A couple moments of shade, maybe 20 seconds of drizzle, then they are gone. You are a single blot in the distance, unaware that you are trying to spit in the face of a gathering storm. You see, I am not alone. I have Gravy Baby, I have the Preservationists, the Corporation, even Zeus! We all have each other’s backs, a whorl of dark clouds that amalgamate into something you can only hope to be.”

“We scorch the sky. We flood all in darkness, and those who don’t know how to swim are destined to drown. And then… A flash. A brief reprieve from blindness, as a fork of electricity strikes those below. The lucky ones get sizzled in a heartbeat, rendered lifeless, reduced to nothing but floating flesh carried by the currents, and the rest? As the lightning is hurled from the obscured heavens, some light returns as the homes and the streets are ablaze, an army of embers that raze the empires of the meek… If you can see through the choking miasma of smoke, a poison gas determined to leave no survivors in this crusade.”

“And where are you? In front of your camera feed, the only secrets you are now privy to are the final words of those you can no longer exploit… And as you hear the water slowly trickle in through your doors and cracking walls, one more flash… And the darkness hits. The power grid down, those bits of plastic, silicon, glass and metal that were your closest facsimiles of friends die too, the power grid down. As you feel the lump in your throat and hope it suffocates you before the waters do, one thought reverberates in that hollow cage you call a skull.”

“I wish I was the storm.”