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On the tree shaded corner of the Loop Rode and Cinder Bear, uh, Corner is the ivy-covered, brick facade of Trinity Episcopal Church. It's a small church, with a capacity barely more than 80. It has a fantastic ceiling criss-crossed by massive wood timbers, an old organ which the current rector has just spent his own money on refurbishing, and a quaint pulpit made from the prow of a row boat. It's rather dark inside, with the trees of the corner affecting the effect of the stain-glass windows.
Attached is a small parish hall, on the same property is a rather rambling old rectory, and across the street is the old Tower Downs Cemetery.

In the recesses of the Trinity Episcopal Church was a fine office furnished with mahogany and rich leather and walled with book shelves, only one of which was fake. Several of these books folded away to reveal a richly stocked bar. The entire shelf folded away to reveal a hidden room, which was stocked with entirely different things, and housed another entrance into a tunnel to the rectory. But all that was unimportant. We are here to focus on two figures seated in this small, fine office, and the conversation they had.
"Is there anything I can get you, Austin? Hot Cocoa? Tonic?" Father Blood asked the boy, who was nearly of as big a build as the preacher himself. Once Austin was set up with a drink, Blood sat into his own seat and the proceedings began in earnest. "I think, Austin, you should begin with anything you know about what happened today."

"The Lord truly works in mysterious ways." Father Robert Blood had been taking notes throughout the conversation, and had come to several points of interest that he would like to follow through on. "This business of seeing the fight is very interesting, Austin. The flying, I'm certain, we will learn to control simply enough with practice, but this eye thing, that could be your greatest asset, if properly used. I am willing to bet (though, as a man of principle, I never would do such a thing) that you have some sort of second sight skills. I have read of these things happening in the books which the church cannot admit to gathering intel from, they are extraordinary phenomena, and I would very much like to learn more about yours." Father Robert wrote furiously on his legal pad as he said all this. "Now, Austin, the Lord has sent you to me. Clearly for some purpose, as all that He does is with purpose. So I suppose in the interest of finding that purpose I must be entirely candid with you. I am not what you might call an ordinary Episcopalian preacher. I am a soldier of the Anglican Army, a member of an ancient and hidden sect, bred to be the perfect fighting machine. In this way I can help you. I can train you in many ways of the warrior." He took a breath, and looked Austin in the eye. "In return, I will ask you to fight for me, and for my brethren, should our great battle ever reach these shores."

"Calm yourself, my son, and you will be surprised at what you can learn." When Father Blood was about town, he made a decent show of using his cane, so as to keep the element of surprise should he ever need it, he kept up the appearance here in his office now, as well, formulating a way to tempt the young boy to his side. "You see, my young friend, that life as a normal teenager for you is now unattainable. Do not be afraid, for the secret of life as a normal teenager is that it is awful. I thank God every day for saving me from that banality." Father Blood crossed to the bookshelf and removed one of the more ornate bibles. "Your friends in the school will find themselves lost in laziness and boredom for four years." He flipped through the pages to the first of the major prophets. "They are worthless, these former peers are you. For as Isaiah says: "Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."
He closed the heavy book, and looked the boy in the eye "So Austin, would you rather be weak, weary? Or will you follow me and be strong?"

Father Blood had relaxed after giving his spiel, knowing that the boy would come around (for no one, especially of Austin's age, can truly resist the offer of unimaginable power, at least when they know that the offer is for real). He just hadn't expected the boy to come around so extravagantly. "Ah Austin, my child," Father Robert Covington Blood's smile was not as wicked a thing as one might expect, it was, in fact, infectious and did well to mask the man's motives for smiling. For no one could question a smile like his, his smile was simply innocent. "But we don't want to get rid of the pain. Pain, like all sensation, is necessary, and it is one of the most powerful of them all. What we need to do is master the pain. Turn it into a strength, for you, this way whenever your enemies elect to harm you, they will only be making you stronger."

Father Robert Blood had brought all of his own personal feelings under heel in this manner, fear, hatred, pain, sadness, love, happiness, they all made him stronger, storing in him a reservoir of power and will deep inside him. There the reservoir fought to fill the great hole that was growing. He remembered how it was before he had his emotions under control, before he fought the nothingness.

"You wish to behold the wondrous things of The law? The first such wondrous thing is Pain, Austin." Blood's voice assumed the collegiate guest lecturer tone that no one ever dares interrupt until the speaker asks "Any questions?" He continued, "Pain is one of the most incredible things we as Human beings are allowed to feel. There is only one other sensation that can invade the whole body as completely as pain does, and I'm very certain you're too young to have felt that yet."

It had been back when he was under the tutelage of the Fathers School. His tutor, at a young age, had taught him a Hermetic method of memory, a veritable memory palace where he could store and look up everything he ever heard, saw, felt, smelled, or tasted. He had found it in one of the Palace's many rooms. The hole. Curious, he had entered.

"Follow me, Austin" He commanded, pulling back a book and revealing a passage down to the Church's sub catacombs. Here Blood kept his armory, and his training equipment. There was an array of all sorts of combat weapons on one wall, Robert gestured to it. "Choose a weapon. Anything you would like."

"Ah, the quarterstaff. The Japanese called you Bo, the Chinese called you Gun, and you were the 'Grandfather of all Weapons.'" Father Robert Blood made it a point to memorize no fewer than three random facts about every piece on his wall for situations just like this. "A good sturdy weapon. What you have there is rattan, roughly 1.8 meters long, and of uniform thickness, the double headed staff."

At first it was like a helping hand, the hole, a good friend full of recommendations and insight and support. It helped him do things he wouldn't ever dream of doing, for fear of getting caught. He became a vandal, a graffiti artist, a thief. The things he did in there, stuck in the hole in his head, may have seemed strange, sick even, but the feeling afterward was amazing, liberating.

"Of course nowadays, the quarterstaff is mostly favored by those who actually want to pick up a sword or axe but fear to look too juvenile. People perceive the staff to be a more mature weapon. I blame this entirely on Donatello." Blood had one vice, it was cartoons from the late 80s and early 90s. Wait. That's a lie. Blood had all sorts of vices.

The hole grew. The rewards of his lashouts diminished. He had to up the anti. Robert Blood's first living victim had been quite by chance, a rat investigating a dumpster he had been tagging. Unaware of what he was doing at first, Robert had held out some old food nicked from the dumpster in one hand and a loose brick in the other, and quickly discovered a whole new level of the remorseless wave of euphoric calmness and relief.

"What now?" Father Blood echoed the boy's question. "Now I want you to hit me. I want you to feel what it's like to actually hit someone else with one of these." The first blow would come slow, they never took the first blow seriously. And he would block it easily, and teach the kid a quick retaliatory lesson. The second he would allow to land, so long as it was heartfelt. And then the fight would begin.

Robert Blood would begin, starting the next night, to carry scraps of food with him wherever he went at night, and slowly the area's population of feral animals dwindled. And then the domestic animals. Oh how the would fight, throwing away all their grooming and pedigree in view of their Own Personal End.

Father Blood gripped his cane, unworried. The first blow always came slow.

Father Robert Blood turned the rage that Austin's refusal created into a brick and added it to the wall in the back of his mind's palace. One more unfelt emotion acting as a barrier to the ultimate unfeeling. The emptiness waiting behind that wall was more terrifying than Blood could describe, much more terrible than this boy's pain that he was complaining about. But that rage was big, it was tough to turn it to brick, tempting just to feel it and act. The insolence of the tap to the cheek, so great that Blood was too stunned to block and retaliate.

Robert was beginning to see the hole, not just in his memory palace, but it was invading his conscious vision as well. A billowing shape, like a loosely-secured tarpaulin in a thunderstorm, staying at first to the peripheries, but growing, slowly taking up more and more of his visual world. And Robert just knew that if it took over the whole thing, it would be the most terrible thing, like unbearable. But he was powerless to stop it, his appeasements doing less and less to subdue the incredible will of this dark, billowing nothingness. The animals were less and less of a thrill. He would need something more.

"You need to be able to fight, Austin." Father Blood was recovering, had an idea how to make this work, how to make this boy into something. "If you cannot fight, then who will fight your pain? You wish to learn how to fight your pain? Then hit me!" If he couldn't get this boy to hit him, it would all be such a terrible waste. Blood was not a fan of terrible waste.

He had been leaving a coffee shop, when it happened. Leaving a coffee shop, and a beautiful girl passing him on the street, and it happened. The billowing emptiness filled his entire vision, being, soul. Everything went dark, went silent, went numb.

"It is acceptable--nay, necessary at times to strike first, you know. A truly dangerous opponent, if allowed to strike first will not give you the opportunity to strike back, he will descend upon in a fury of blows, and you will only recover in the afterlife." Father Blood allowed a slight grin to pass his lips, as he flicked at the top of his cane, loosening the connection of the sword hidden inside. "Look at me, Austin, I am a truly dangerous opponent."

When Robert had awoken, he was in shackles in a dark room, with no billowing shape in sight. He was almost 16 years old--old enough to realize that he had done something terribly wrong, still young enough to be very afraid. Oddly enough, though he felt a strange calm. He didn't know how long they'd keep him here, where he was, if they would feed him.

Father Blood removed the sword from his cane with a flourish, and charged the boy--who by then had turned to face him as Blood requested. "You're a fool, Aires! Defend yourself!"

But Robert didn't care. He wasn't hungry anyway.
Robert Covington Blood IV was full.

"Good! Gooood!" Blood applauded, making bricks of the pain in his leg, not even a limp showed as he stepped back, appraising his apprentice. "You will make a soldier yet. If you train well. Under my tutelage you will be regimented, your life will be order, structured to learning. You will grow strong, you will thrive." Father Blood took out a pad, and began to scribble on it. "You will begin immediately, with running. You will run nine miles per week, until you are ready to increase that. You will learn tumbling, footwork, feinting, attacking, how to use what's around you as a weapon or a tool. We will focus on one of these skills each day, five days a week. On the other days we will work on flying." His pen flew across the paper with directions for the boy to follow. "You begin now, run, home. Sleep well, tomorrow you begin to train in earnest."

For the first time in a long time, Father Robert Covington Blood IV had something interesting to do. It was quite a new feeling for the priest. It would do a horrible blow to his apathy.