Gotta love run-down and/or seemingly abandoned warehouses, the always-popular setting for crime- and/or action-related shenanigans in—ahem—“genre” stories. I’ve long considered that Emp’s city secretly features some semi-nefarious interests dedicated to supplying and maintaining the logistical infrastructure necessary for supercrime, such as renting out such warehouses and similar settings for supervillain lairs and the like. Easier, one thinks, for a burnt-out supervillain to make a nice, steady income by renting out a lair’s prime-for-crime real estate to other, more ambitious bad guys than putting his or her butt on the line by tangling with the many, many superheroes of Empowered's unnamed but cape-infested city.

-Adam Warren