It wasn't too long before things started to settle, the large herd of vagrants reduced to a mere 20, if even that. The [b]crystal[/b] was surrounded by red specks. The whole room began to quake suddenly, and the specks of light began to encircle those that remained in the room.

Red stared blankly at the scene before him. He didn't understand what was going on, and the whole situation had stunned him. Before he could think on it too much, the lights entered his body. His wrist started to burn where it had been struck, and he reached to grab it, only to find something cold and solid over it. Hesitantly, he looked down. He slowly moved his right hand from his wrist, revealing a [b]bracelet[/b]. "What... The hell is this...?" He mumbled. The [b]bracelet[/b] was pearl colored with two gems in the sides, one black, one a pale green. "What the hell is this!?"

Again, he didn't have time to think on this before something interrupted. A small army of men wearing all black and gas masks entered the room from somewhere. There was something dangerous about them, and the assault rifles they each carried didn't help matters. Several of them reached for their hips, throwing a canister from them. The canisters started to emit a white gas into the room, and at that point, a memory came to Red.

[i]Those canisters... THOSE CANISTERS![/i] Red struggled against his shackles. He remembered now. These men, the canisters, the white gas. Whoever these men in the [b]black masks[/b] were, they were the ones who had taken him from [b]Alpha[/b]. Before Red could do anything else, though, he found himself succumbing to the gas, fading back into blackness.

~~~~~

Red awoke once more with a splitting headache. Once he'd gotten his bearings, he looked around. He appeared to be in a prison cell, and not a very private one at that. There was one granite wall with a toilet set to it, and the other 3 walls were made up exclusively of steel bars. Looking around, he could see that about half the people who'd been in the room when the strange men gassed them were there, and he was sure the other half were in a similar place. In the cells next to him were an old man and a man in a duster who'd not yet awoken, and across the hall he could see the gunblader from the ferry and the guard he'd seen that morning.