Saint Anne's is a hospital in Star City that serves both ordinary patients and supers. Its importance lies in the way it joins the apparently routine world of medical labor to the dangerous, highly technologized society surrounding it: the hospital contains equipment capable of treating superhuman patients, attracts violent confrontations, and provides Isaac Hartson with both employment and access to information about the city’s metas.

Setting and Function

Saint Anne's is not an ordinary hospital. Its staff must accommodate supers as well as normal patients, and the institution therefore possesses exceedingly heavy medical equipment, including scanners, bracers, regenerators, and other tinker-made or megacredit machines. The hospital’s specialized infrastructure makes it a valuable site in Star City’s superhuman ecosystem, but it also exposes the building to threats that would not surround a conventional medical workplace.

The hospital’s secure rooms are designed for the containment or treatment of supervillains. Isaac is sent to move a tinker-made traction frame into one of those rooms, recognizing that someone is being brought in under the hospital’s supervillain-handling procedures. The detail establishes Saint Anne's as a place where emergency medicine, incarceration, and technological risk overlap rather than remain separate functions.

Violence at the Hospital

Saint Anne's becomes the target of a superhuman confrontation witnessed from Isaac’s apartment. Several flying supers battle floating mechanical spheres in the sky, with energy beams cutting blue and white lines through the air. The fight is brief, but one of the spheres leaves the hospital at high speed, showing that the combat was not merely a street clash: the attackers had entered Saint Anne's and obtained whatever they had come for.

Cayleb identifies the technology as related to Professor Mechaniacal’s work, while noting that the attack does not match the inventor’s usual methods. The machines are too loud and the operation too small-scale, suggesting that someone has discovered and used one of Professor Mechaniacal’s stashes. Saint Anne's thus functions as a contested technological space, vulnerable to theft and superhuman escalation even while it continues to operate as a hospital.

Isaac Hartson’s Workplace

For Isaac, Saint Anne's is the source of an unglamorous but strategically useful livelihood. He works as little more than a glorified janitor, moving heavy equipment through the hospital because his supposed strength power allows him to handle expensive machines with unusual finesse. His actual ability is inertia manipulation: he can reduce an object’s resistance to changes in motion, move heavy shells around corners, and avoid damaging walls or people while shifting them.

Isaac’s work is deliberately invisible. He sweeps, mops, polishes, fetches, carries, and transports machinery while keeping his head down. His immediate superior, Mister Graham, is a C-class psychometry super with a near-technopathic talent for protecting scanners, bracers, and regenerators from damage, but he also takes credit for the maintenance department while avoiding blame. Isaac’s low status and Graham’s control over the department leave him with almost nonexistent raises, yet the arrangement gives Isaac latitude to move through the hospital without attracting attention.

That anonymity matters because Isaac is a registered meta whose officially assessed ability appears to be only a simple D-grade strength power. Registration closes employment opportunities, while his apparent lack of a marketable specialty leaves him with little choice but low-level hospital work. Saint Anne's therefore embodies the social conditions surrounding weakly ranked supers: the institution uses Isaac’s ability while overlooking the person who possesses it, and Isaac uses that neglect to observe supers and pursue plans of his own.

Narrative Significance

Saint Anne's connects several scales of the setting. At the personal level, it is Isaac’s workplace and cover, a place where his unusual control over inertia can be mistaken for ordinary strength. At the civic level, it is a hospital serving a population divided between normal humans and supers. At the action level, it is a secure technological site exposed to supervillain raids and aerial combat.

The location’s recurring contrast is between care and coercion. Medical equipment intended to preserve or restore bodies shares space with secure rooms for supervillains, while workers like Isaac maintain the machinery without receiving recognition. Saint Anne's is consequently less a sanctuary removed from Star City’s conflicts than a pressure point within them: a public institution whose life-saving function depends on technologies and social hierarchies that make it vulnerable to the same superhuman power struggles it is meant to manage.