Okay, deadline's passed and if anyone's still working on posts, just hold them until after this next update, which should be coming out within 48 hours (or whenever my coffee supply runs out and I post without thinking).
I would usually allow posting after the deadline in the case of GM update delays, but since we have potential (and noticeable) location changes happening to certain characters, I'd prefer to have everyone hold and edit without worries rather than post while the update details are hammered out.
He can disperse blood into the air around him. Radius 10m. The area of effect shimmers in white, glassy mist and simply walking through and breathing in the iron tang of blood will apply the regenerative effect. Lingering in the field for even longer acts as increasing the dosage and will compound the speed of healing (a quick dash through the field will take care of uncomfortable nicks and scrapes; 1-2 minutes will repair deeper cuts; roughly 4-5 minutes will heal more severe injuries [deep puncture wound, etc.]; 10 minutes and counting for extreme damage/dismemberment).
This method requires much more blood loss than direct consumption (he can't control how far the spread is) and, once deactivated, the remaining blood in the air does not return to him.
Renard--or Benediction, as everyone outside of his fellow Precursors called him these days--tapped a polished, black oxford impatiently against the parquet flooring of the Director's office. The administrative building had looked as modern and clean-cut as the rest of campus from the outside, but the Director's interior decor taste clearly veered towards the traditional.
Her office was a circular room jutting out above the building, ringed by a surrounding corridor paneled with large windows. The building segment was both her workplace and an entire floor for herself. And he could see why she needed the space.
Sweeping half of the office's inner wall was a curving screen displaying a gridless blueprint of the entire research facility-cum-school, the white lines thin and precise against a smooth, dark surface. On the screen were a myriad of green dots, with several (he counted about 20 or 21 at a cursory glance) dots marked in eye-catching red.
Her desk was two separated halves of a hollow circle, one half facing the screen, the other half facing the opposite direction, positioned to look towards two white velvet sofas lined in parallel, facing each other. Both semicircular halves of the desk boasted stacks of paper at varying heights, all neatly annotated with colored Post-It flags. Surprisingly mundane given the scale of what she had access to.
The opposite wall had vectorized decals of stylized trees to form a green-hued forest centered around a six-foot image of Hephaestus's dual stag horns signature. He mused at the artistry of the decoration, vaguely surprised the infamous Director Zhang had any notion of muted colors and composition. It seemed out of place in the otherwise pragmatic office.
Nearing afternoon, pale September sunlight seeped into the room from large windows, washing down the ivory walls to a clinical white. Tired of standing, Renard slumped into a sofa, his six bodyguards collecting around him. He shouldn't really be somewhere so targetable, but at the mention of Menagerie attacking, there was little choice but to come himself on the off-chance that it actually had been his former teammate. The variety of powers that existed offered the chance that Simeon could still be alive, as much as Renard doubted it.
The Director herself was still occupied elsewhere, despite calling him out of the safe room they had set up for him in the basement of the administrative building. Her balding secretary had allowed him through with equal measures of awe and terror and Renard now waited as patiently as he could manage for someone in his position.
Most people didn't keep borderline-Jesus waiting.
Not that his power was quite so simple. Powerful, certainly, and with a visual effect equivalent to the healing often seen in video games, but simple? No. Not by a long shot.
Within a short period of time, it was easier for him to heal up many injuries at once, instead of flicking his power on and off, left and right constantly on every nick and scrape. Vincent had explained to an irate Julia before that constantly healing everything was similar to turning on a computer just to type one letter into a text document and then turning it off. It wasn't an efficient use of Renard's powers, and it would only tire him in the long run. Media outlets had derided his haughty behavior on the battlefield, but of course he'd take care of serious injuries without waiting. The Precursors just rarely took any serious injuries where the media could see.
Beyond the rough hour of leeway in cherry picking his heals, the further the time difference between injuries accrued and his healing determined how draining it was for him to fix the person or creature in question. And to defy the permanence of death, his limit was two days.
And a week of debilitating exhaustion where his powers soundly failed to work.
He had tried pushing it, had tried urging his power to do more and recover faster, but it hadn't budged in that aspect. Where his barriers were once weak, he had made them nearly impervious; where he had once struggled to heal day-old lacerations, he could now heal stage four cancer; where his range was once a paltry 10 meters, he could now repair injuries within several hundred meters, so long as he had visuals on the target. But the one thing that would not change was the resurrection.
Youth, stupidity, and arrogance on his part had cost Simeon his life five years ago. In his bid for glory, Renard had dramatically resurrected a government official, recently dead in the wake of hulking monstrosities that had decimated the small island where the man had been vacationing. A truly unfortunate tale whose ending he had agreed to rewrite for the government's interests and for his publicity stunt.
The Precursors had never lost a fight. Had never even taken severe damage at that point. And between the amount of suppression and power Vincent, Timmy, and Annie could lay down coupled with Julia's shared invulnerability, there was little to worry about.
Or so he had thought.
He shouldn't have done it so publicly.
The power thief subnatural known only by the code name "Bogeyman" attacked several days later, hunting for Simeon with a puppet form that resembled a headless female torso on a grisly gown of human limbs, eyes, and mouths.
An ambush.
The sortied team had just fought off another of Dreamcatcher's larger terrors in an isolated section of Northern Canada. Their guards had been down. They had been tired. It was a calculated attack. All the reasons in the world, but not a single one had stopped the monstrosity from tearing through the remnants of Simeon's creations and crushing him underfoot. Vincent didn't have the time to lift something large enough to bury it, and it had still crawled dangerously fast even under Timmy's gravity fields. Annie's attacks had barely fazed it.
Julia had moved to pick up Simeon, but she hadn't thought the creature would grab her and, failing to crush her in its hand, shove her into the ground instead, heaping ice and dirt above her with its movements. She couldn't get close enough to Simeon. Couldn't extend her power to save him. Vincent had shorn away as much of the ground around her as he could, even pulling on her clothes to get her closer, but they had been too slow. They hadn't accounted for the durability of the creature. The way it seemed to heal and recover in ways that built up resistances to powers that could hurt it.
Simeon's body was barely recognizable as human within seconds.
As if that was its only purpose, the monster had disintegrated, leaving them as quickly as it had come.
Even then, they could have fixed it. Should have been able to. Renard was the fail-safe, after all. But they hadn't counted on their fail-safe, hundreds of miles away, to have failed as well.
And so he had traded Simeon for a few good words in cyberspace.
When the word had reached him that "Menagerie" was attacking USARILN East, he had insisted on going there. Either another resurrector existed or Bogeyman had stolen the dead Precursor's power, too.
Knowing Simeon, unless mind control was involved, Renard doubted the gentle young man would have attacked a school full of children for any reason. To make matters worse, Bogeyman had been disturbingly quiet for past the few years as well, instead of his usual M.O. of showing up suddenly with puppets wielding the powers of recently deceased subnaturals--usually ones that were powerful enough to warrant Precursor attention in the past--and destroying a particular site or locale. In his wake, the trend appeared to be more X's awakening.
If they hadn't caught the tail end of a fight between Cat's Cradle and one of Bogeyman's puppets before, Renard would have assumed the two parties were working in tandem.
The Director had mistaken the power for that of Menagerie's, and he supposed with what she knew it was a sensible conclusion. He had come looking for a body to revive and interrogate, if need be, only to find out that she had completely obliterated it with Sem's new weapon. Irritating. And so damn convenient for her case.
If her overwhelming (and rather exaggerated, in Renard's opinion) distaste for subnaturals wasn't famous countrywide, he would have suspected her of actually working with Bogeyman. As it is, the entire situation seemed to be a massive misunderstanding. They had been complacent with Bogeyman, taking his lack of action in the years following Simeon's death as some kind of indication that he targeted only the Precursors and that they could simply hide away their more vulnerable members--Sem, in particular. Now, though, they would have to refocus their efforts on hunting him down, among all the other duties the Precursors were required to handle constantly.
Then there was the potential matter of public distrust now that news of the attack had leaked from the Death and Taxes forum--something the Director had immediately shut down at the DoD's command. She had enjoyed keeping an eye on the more social aspects of her research subjects, but that, unfortunately, had to end. Of course they had reamed her for the mistake in preemptively and publicly announcing Menagerie as the perpetrator, but when she claimed to have seen the Precursor herself, they had quickly ended the conversation.
Now he was here, ready to revive his teammate if even a handful of flesh remained, ready to make up for his mistake five years ago. Only to hear from the Director herself that there was nothing left to bring back.
So she had directed him to the hospital on his arrival, urging him to heal her select group of 'promising students.'
He doubted her faith in them. They had looked more like promising letdowns, but he had humored her all the same. No need to start arguments with a Director known to shoot first and ask questions later--especially not now that she had Sem's latest weapon. That was another aspect that bothered Renard. How had Sem even managed to--
The door clicked open behind him and the crisp sound of heels tapping against the floor pulled him sharply out of his thoughts.
"Director Zhang," he greeted her, standing up slowly.
"My apologies for keeping you waiting," she took a seat at her desk, motioning for him to sit back down.
When she offered no further explanation, Renard glanced to the side in annoyance before taking a seat again.
"Tell me you didn't call me out here just to heal some minor injuries on a group of students who don't matter in the least," he clicked his tongue, leaning back against the soft velvet of the sofa.
"I hadn't expected you to come in place of a heavy hitter," she shuffled through several sheets of paper on her desk, adding colored flags to certain pages.
"Your rising star seemed to have handled the situation just fine."
"He's not in any condition to continue fighting. Wasn't in the first place. Neither is his team."
"So ask Sem to make the rest of them equipment as well," Renard examined the skin on the back of his hand as he spoke. Dry from the cold. Peeling ever so slightly. If he could fix that with his magic, he would.
"I intend to, but not for my 'rising star's' team." She tapped the stack of papers in her hand against the desk, aligning them and putting them aside carefully before pulling three thick sheets of lined stationery paper from a drawer below the desk. "And I believe the last set of requests were backlogged while Hephaestus produced more of the containment material."
He grunted in response.
"He's running short on supply, isn't he?"
Scarlet eyes narrowed in her direction as she said it.
"What makes you say that?"
"Just a guess," the Director picked through the pens jutting out diagonally from the rosewood pen stand on her desk, finally selecting a metallic ballpoint pen. "Shipments have been steadily decreasing."
"...What did you call me here for?" Renard tilted his head at her, eyes fixed on the rapid movement of her writing hand.
"I don't suppose you could be convinced to revive one of the two students who died yesterday?"
"No."
"Not even if I told you my new projects could become stronger than any Precursor?"
"Definitely no."
She smiled, pen still moving across the paper.
"Very well. You can head back to the Pentagon now. Let them know the situation was resolved quite neatly by the new students here."
"You mean your crystal manipulator."
"Officially? He only provided marginal help from the side. The majority of the battle was handled relatively well by the new students. I would say they're already proving their worth."
"...What are you planning? And why are you letting me know?"
"Because you're the only one we know who can fix an otherwise permanent mistake. If I call on you again to help them, I'll expect you to respond."
"You're resting a lot of hopes on me like I have the time to care about your personal favorites."
"You'll make the time, Benediction. I just thought it would be polite to let you know beforehand."
"I think you're forgetting that the USARILNs are just glorified prisons and you're just a glorified prison warden. Don't overstep your role, Director," he enunciated the last word distinctly before sweeping out of the room in a rush of guards and rapid steps.
Director Zhang didn't bother watching him leave, turning back to the three letters she was writing to the families of the deceased subnaturals. The soldiers would get military funerals and other officials would work with volunteers and law enforcement to notify their next of kin, but she couldn't, with respect to her position, devote a team to handling notifications of death for subnaturals. Word would spread. Her reputation would be ruined.
So she used more indirect lines, sending them anonymously through trustworthy contacts, all vetted by Fredric. Frequently.
And that was the extent of her current authority. It would have to do.
She abused the same template frequently--sincerely regret, killed in action, deepest condolences, necessary sacrifices--but at the very least she would see to it personally. As far as she could tell from outside contacts, the consensus was that a subnatural from campus sent the death notifications in secret, defying the Director herself and risking punishment. For the families that appreciated it, it was some paltry amount of much-needed closure. For the families that couldn't be bothered to care, it was just more spam mail.
Either way, it helped her cope with the decisions she made. It would have to do.
Brent Roless and Emma Halwell. The Director noted the two names, her usually busy procedure paused in contemplation at the latest series of events. She had sent Fedric to take care of the aftermath, but wondered at what Clark had truly wanted to do. How the USARILNs took care of subnatural corpses was generally confidential information, but certain solutions came to mind even without administrative knowledge--subnaturals weren't given graves or burials so it stood to reason that the bodies were either cremated or disposed of with methods to circumvent something like a corpse landfill--or Bogeyman.
It just so happened that her method empowered a particular student's pet at the same time.
Appalling, perhaps, but at least the bodies went to better use than ashes and maggot fodder.
She hadn't thought Clark minded the process so much that he would attempt to expose it--indeed, his impromptu tour of the containment chambers had seemed mostly pointless to her: the students knew the rooms existed, so that wasn't a secret to be revealed. They also knew Hector existed. The only true revelation had been the disposal of the recent corpses. And the disappearance of the marks on the dead bodies, which had certainly persisted. Until a certain point.
But even that could be explained away with a number of lies. The body disposal was shocking, but certainly not something worth incurring her wrath over if any student bothered to put thought into the potential ways the USARILNs could dump the dead.
So what had Clark been after?
The Stigma-eating subnatural had been showing signs of strain for the longest time, but she had believed him smarter than that. Smarter than the idiot who had shown two new and unsuspecting students a small fragment of the horrors that the Institute kept in check.
Now he was allowed to remain in Hector's containment chamber, since the room had already been modified enough to accommodate more regular needs. Soon enough, it would be further adjusted for two occupants, since Clark's body often required more careful upkeep. She wouldn't be allowing Clark out of the underground room for some time, given his behavior.
He hadn't taken the news well when Benediction admitted that Clark's condition wasn't one that could be healed--by the Precursor's power at least.
"It's not actually damage," the powerful subnatural had clarified. "Not to my power, at least."
And so the boy had watched as his last hope had shrugged and walked away.
She had expected self-harm or crippling depression. Had ordered the guards to treat him with utmost care and only to use force if he would hurt himself.
How that had backfired.
Now the placement with Hector was dual-purposed. Clark's movements would be restricted and if his condition progressed rapidly and without warning, Hector could handle him.
It wasn't an ideal situation. Without Clark, she would have to dispose of the 20 X's she kept underground. Their chances of progressing as successfully as Hector had--while remaining sane--were too low to risk the uncontrollable destruction some of them could cause, especially the ones that wouldn't die to normal means.
Hector had lied when he had claimed no memory of the moment he became an Animus, but his otherwise "helpful" behaviors convinced the Director that he was worth keeping around. Having an Animus under her control was something of an achievement, even if she couldn't publicly share it just yet and even if she had to expend far more resources and warm bodies to make sure Hector remained under her control.
Kardos had suggested torture, to get the answer out of the boy, but that would only incite him to turn Miranda against the Institute and they'd be forced to kill him before he could be forced to answer.
Hephaestus's gun was an option, but one she'd prefer to withhold for now. Its effects needed further testing and she didn't need to accidentally kill one of the rare Animi that could loosely be considered "on their side."
An impasse, then.
One she would find some way to deal with at a more convenient time, when there weren't transfer students to manage and sheer chaos to keep in check.
The Director's computer screen drowned in browser tabs displaying the latest headlines from different media outlets, all variations of "Precursor attacks USARILN East" with subtitles in shades of "What does this mean for the future of subnatural and human relations?"
She wasn't surprised that the government had run with the story of "Precursor rebellion" rather than admit they had been lying for the past five years--it always came down to petty politics in the end, even if the implications that they couldn't control their main team was, arguably, worse than the confession that they had lost a Precursor five years ago to poor planning.
On her current tab: a news report about protests breaking out across college campuses in defense of subnatural civil rights, decrying the summary execution of a Precursor known only to be endearingly kind. A photograph of bright-eyed men and women with Band-Aids across their right temples and cross-shaped tape or adhesives over the base of their throats accompanied a long article about the latest fashion trend in defiance of the law banning any "indistinguishable" attempt to imitate the markings of subnaturals.
After Wallace v. United States, a Supreme Court case that had decided the extent to which the law applied as far as "indistinguishable markings" were allowed, the court had ruled in favor of the plaintiff, allowing the young man's pink face paint as "distinguishable enough from established features found on lusus naturae."
That had set the precedent for several ways of circumventing the law, and now it was common knowledge that people couldn't be arrested for silly tape and adhesive gauze. Stare decisis applied for almost all cases involving the face and throat markings, with only permanent tattoos and careful replication of the markings grounds for punishable offense.
And so the world had turned, ever so slightly. The divide was blurred enough that protests were cropping up more and more frequently lately, and with the Precursor team the most obvious source of recent salvation, the initial hatred and distrust of subnaturals had simmered down to suspicious ambivalence.
Before the fear-stricken public could demand the genocide of all subnaturals held in the USARILNs in the wake of news about a rebelling Precursor, they needed to see an alternative solution--needed to see more potential "heroes" than just the weary ten. It was a way to dampen the uproar: losing one "good guy" when the world only had ten official ones to spare was worthy of mass hysteria. But what if there were more designated "good guys"? Enough to show the growing public interest in subnatural rights that there was something more to subnaturals than just dangerous monsters to lock up and murder. Something to work with.
It was a small turning point, but Zhang had never failed to strike while the iron was hot, especially not now that a group of exceptions had fallen so cleanly into her hands. She would use them until there was nothing left, and if they survived it all, perhaps the world could move past the dead end war it was currently fighting.
"You're not serious," Kleinfelder laughed loudly in her ear, the sound crystal clear and incredibly infuriating through her bluetooth headset.
"This is quite a proposal, Director Zhang. You might be jumping the gun here." Scoval, in a rare moment of agreement with Kleinfelder.
"A Precursor has rebelled. If there was a gun to jump, I'd consider this right on time."
"You don't really think I'm going to agree to this, do you?" Kleinfelder howled with laughter again and it took her every ounce of willpower she had not to cut him off. She had to humor him this time.
"Relying on just one team of subnaturals has cost us too much over the past few years. Officially sanctioning other teams under USARILN supervision would significantly alleviate the burden on the Precursors," she replied smoothly, the rebuttal prepared and practiced.
"What burden on the Precursors? They've been fine. Haven't failed anything yet. Sparrow just needs to keep them in the air forever and there's no way they'd lose. That screw up with Garrote was a one-time thing," the damn man dismissed the issue like he was talking about a minor itch.
She should have known. USARILN West faced measly threats and was overloaded with borderline useless subnaturals--the ones who got the shortest straws in Dreamcatcher's lottery. Abilities that couldn't even be put to use for utility purposes outside of some sad comedy routine.
"Even if Sparrow kept them 'in the air forever,' they can't be in every place that needs help at once, and this past year--"
"You're proposing an entire paradigm shift, Director Zhang. If a Precursor would rebel, what's stopping your 'officially sanctioned subnatural team' from doing the same?"
"Nothing. But I'm looking towards the future, Director Scoval," Zhang's hands slid over her desk towards the top right drawer, where her colored contacts lay in neat rows of circular, plastic packages. She flicked open a new pack, sliding the contacts onto her eyes, "And all three of us know this can't continue indefinitely."
"Oh? Care to explain your reasoning, Director?" There was a clinking of glass against glass on Scoval's end, a rustle of clothing, and the heavy creak of a sturdy chair. His voice was a touch louder when he next spoke. "If you want our consent to submit the plan to the DOD, you'll need to provide us with harder figures than the loose logic we've been dancing on for the past half hour."
"I could have my secretary forward you the number of students we've lost in just this past year compared to previous years. I could bring up the increasingly powerful monsters stirring all around the world and their rising frequency. I could point at the constant threats posed by the several category fours that persistently escape death to recover and resume attacking their respective territories.
And this is all without counting casualties from rogue subnaturals. Cat's Cradle. The Senators. Amigos. ...Fracture.
...You wanted harder figures? Look at the number of people we've lost ever since the Slumber. Over two billion dead in the span of ten years. And it's only getting worse. Kleinfelder would deny the Earth is round just to spite me, but even he can't disagree that the monsters have been slowly gaining the advantage. Their sheer numbers have been thinned down over the years, but the remaining creatures are the most tenacious."
"And you think officially sanctioning a team of teenagers under your command is going to change any of that?" Kleinfelder's scoff was a hair away from touching on a nerve.
"It would help more than holding back and sending out subnaturals only as a last resort. Use them as a first resort. We have the strongest weapons in our hands and the world is too prejudiced to see the logic in completely utilizing them. Don't kid yourself, Kleinfelder. We can't cuff every damn subnatural--and not only because some of them have powers that prevent it. There's a boiling point to everything, even with the relative freedom we give them at the USARILNs."
"If I didn't know better, I'd accuse you of planning this entire surprise attack for the express purpose of elevating yourself," a chuckle as Kleinfelder ignored her reasoning once again.
"I'm certainly taking advantage of the ramifications, but any half-wit could figure that out."
Kleinfelder's laugh stopped at that and he continued in a low voice.
"You want my approval, lady? Then tone down the attitude. You're asking us to use the freaks as...what...first responders? Fucking law enforcement when things go wrong? It's bad enough we have to rely so heavily on the ten original monsters, but you want to start ingratiating them with society, too? Where the hell does it end, then? Kadabra doing construction work with his powers next? Newton terraforming for new residential plots?"
Zhang paused at the thought of the almighty Precursors performing mundane tasks, surprise in the wide-eyed look she directed at the massive tracking screen on her office's wall. She stared at something beyond that, her gaze unfocused.
"Director Zhang?" Scoval's gruff voice reminded her that she had some rhetorical questions to deal with.
She took a breath.
"My apologies, Director Kleinfelder. That was out of line."
The stunned silence gave her the chance to try again.
"I am asking for my fellow Directors' agreement in establishing the USARILNs as more than just prisons for subnaturals. They can be used for more than just wasting resources in indefinite detention with smatterings of use as emergencies declare. The Institutes themselves can be more, but we have to start somewhere. I am willing to lay my position on the line to test what may be. If anything goes wrong, full responsibility lies with USARILN East.
The recent emergency has only provoked public apprehension and the belief that all subnaturals are not to be trusted, now that a tried-and-true Precursor has turned.
If we do not act to counter this while opinions have yet to cement, we lose our only means of effectively combating the creatures. The world will eventually call for their deaths or more permanent restrictions and in the face of mob mentality we will lose. So far we have staved off a two-front war with both subnaturals and Dreamcatcher's monsters by not pushing the subnaturals to a breaking point. But if the situation escalates to where they have nothing left to lose....
You imply that I'm suggesting a potentially harmful paradigm shift, but the far-reaching consequences of inaction here will prove infinitely more destructive.
I know you hate me, Director Kleinfelder, but just this once look past me and listen to what I'm saying. I don't want this world to go to hell any more than you do."
The two of them remained quiet for some time, and she heard the clinking of glass on Scoval's end again. The sound of liquid pouring. Kleinfelder crinkled something that sounded like a foil wrapper.
"You know, even if we agree that won't stop the DOD from shutting the idea down if they don't like it," Kleinfelder finally spoke after some time, his mouth full. "But I guess that's your hard work down the drain, not mine."
Scoval gulped down another mouthful of his drink.
"We'll send the paperwork over to you, Director Zhang," he clarified Kleinfelder's skewed admission of agreement before continuing, "I assume you have a group in mind for this already?"
A ten-page report from Kardos sat beside the Director's computer when she arrived in her office that morning, reviewing in brief the powers and capabilities of the 17 students who had been sent to the battlefield on their first day, as well as an addendum on several others.
She flipped through the notes and charts, taking them more as snapshots in time for the relevant students. Some took years to develop more adept use and control of their powers and some managed it within weeks. It all varied so heavily on factors as unquantifiable as innate talent and the type of power granted that most of the USARILN researchers had stopped extrapolating too far into the future.
There was only so much control they could exert over how the students progressed. That much was abundantly clear in the heavily sedated students belowground.
When she placed the set of papers back down, something caught beneath the tenth page, preventing the pages from lying flat against the table. On the other side were several Post-It notes covered in carefully spaced, meticulously even handwriting. Two of them curled forward at the corners--the reason the report had seemed to prop itself upward at the center. She peeled off the notes, reading them in the descending order originally set by Commander Kardos.
"All that being said, Director, if you would be so kind as to take into consideration a more personal note: if Ms. Schurβs ramblings are to be believed, these students would be considered too dangerous to live by the Department of Defense. Ms. Schur has noted marked development of their powers in ways no other recorded subnatural has achieved before, and this from just one successful encounter.
Unless different measures are put in place to ensure they do not become targets of nationwide terror, I cannot foresee a lasting future for them, even under USARILN Eastβs relative protection.
My recommendation to form a government-sanctioned team stands if you are at all interested in preserving this group for future use."
A soft beeping from her phone alerted her to a message from the team in charge of keeping an eye on Death and Taxes. The administrators had moved the forum to a private chatroom instead, weeding out much of the original members and holding on to only a core group, clearly to avoid any further shutdowns from rapidly spreading news. Further, the scope of participants was now limited to USARILN East--a decision in line with the emergency.
Small movements, for now.
She turned back to the Post-It notes, face unreadable as she stared at the last message.
"Mr. Francisco found something per your orders. Another subnatural was interfering with his ability, but he managed to glean a recurring phrase: 'Unravel the dreams from their vessels. Call down Utopia beyond the sky.' "
How was he meant to just go back to his room with everything going on?
The September night air stung slightly as Aaron tread through the arboretum. The occasional rustling from the trees spooked him from time to time but he had convinced himself that the local wildlife was just very active at night. His gaming devices had been left back at the suite. Between all the grinding and exploring, there wasn't enough room to just think.
Angel was agitated as of late, despite the cheery dinner she had invited her team to. He'd only known the singer for a few days but he could see that it was a gradual descent. There was more and more anger bubbling under the surface every time they'd meet. Sometimes it came out in minor eruptions, like yesterday. But even if she lashed out at him, she was a friend. A friend he couldn't help but worry about.
He kicked a conifer cone away from his feet, trying to brainstorm ways to... He wasn't quite sure what he needed to do. Help Angel feel better? Try to keep his team from falling further apart? Move on from the death of his roommate?
A clockwork set of shifting armor plates connected by thin framing at the gaps hovered nearby as he fiddled aimlessly with the control panel floating along with him. Something to combat the fog in his own mind as he sifted through the avalanche of emotions and delayed reactions of the past few days. He had been ruminating on his battlefield mistakes, coming to terms with the necessity of preparation and forethought his power required and testing the limits of his constructs.
So far, a set of steampunk armor seemed to be a decent idea prior to a fight, though with the suppression cuffs on he couldn't quite get as many plates of armor up as he would like. One set to put on without needing further control, and it would provide him enough protection to focus on deterring threats with a second clockwork construct.
If he could make bigger things, Aaron would have considered a clockwork creation that could double as a roving, miniature bunker for him to command his drones from. He had a plethora of ways to utilize his creatures--he just needed to make sure he could manage the controls all at once, which shone light on the possibility that perhaps someone else could take command of a console. He had never tried the idea, but resolved to test at a later date.
His steps grew more agitated the more time he had to his thoughts, and his fiddling with the control panel of the hollow armor suit increased in response, the wires holding the breastplate in place shifting the piece up and down haphazardly and tugging on the entire frame of the torso section. A thin fog rolled at his ankles. The nights at East weren't like his town. They were windier, for one thing, more clouded than anything his town would ever go through. Much foggier now too. And there was none of that constant, infernal rustling.
Before he knew it, Aaron could see the distant city lights at the edge of the arboretum. He stared, transfixed by a memory of better times.
"We could help you go out there...freely," a velvety voice crooned.
Aaron jumped away, the clockwork creation latching onto his body with a few quick taps on the panel as he spun to meet the source of the voice. His instincts hadn't failed him this time. Within seconds, Aaron's upper body was encased in a golden suit of mechanical armour. His bulky, plated fists were brought up in a rough battle stance.
In front of him stood a man in dark, form-fitting body armour, tall and lithe. Dozens of throwing knives were strapped in belts crossing the stranger's chest. In twin holsters on the man's waist were two hatchets, the one on the right considerably larger than its counterpart. But his most striking features were the black and gold checkered mask on his face, and the dark X on his throat. The fog swirled around them, thickening as if responding to the incoming fight.
He was definitely an enemy. With a determined shout and a quick depression of one of the control panel buttons, Aaron surged forward, his fists flying forward from a combination of his own action and the rockets attached to the wrists of the armour. He was far from a trained combatant but hopefully the enhancements of the clockwork would provide him with enough speed to nail this guy.
Unfortunately not. The enemy was impossibly acrobatic, twisting and tumbling through the air as he dodged Aaron's blows with an effortless grace. And all the while the trickster seemed to be chuckling. Aaron felt rage flare up and he put more zeal into his swings. The one-sided duel continued a few moments more until a sharp pain in his thigh brought the student to the ground. The man had thrown a knife at him, catching flesh in the gaps of the leg plates. As he fell, more knives embedded themselves into his calves and sides, expertly thrown to wedge where armor didn't protect him. Aaron cried out in agony, reaching for the control panel to send the clockwork construct towards the man by itself, even as he realized the thin, wire frame supporting the construct's main body wouldn't yield any solid attacks. Another knife skewered his palm. With no options left, he attempted to crawl away.
"Th-there's someone here!" he coughed feebly, hoping, begging that whoever managed the suppression cuffs' controls would hear his pleas, "Aaron Erikson! Please help me, I'm in the--"
A different person stepped out from the shadows and blocked his passage. It was a woman in her mid-twenties with thick fog billowing out from underneath her deep red cloak. The black X seemed to be more pronounced in the moonlight that glanced across her pale throat. Her expression was solemn. Before he could say anything to her, Aaron was roughly kicked onto his back with a knife to his throat.
"Get rid of the machinery, child. Or I push a little harder."
The knife sunk deeper to support the threat, enough to draw a thin line of blood. Aaron didn't dare nod. The golden armour dissipated, drawing a wide smile from his attacker. The man addressed his partner, examining his new catch as he spoke.
"The boy is far too fresh to get any decent readings. But I believe Linus will be able to wring something out of him. Eventually."
The eyes behind the mask held a menacing glint as they gazed at Aaron's cuff. With his spare hand the stranger fiddled with a small hatchet. He turned to the woman and for the briefest moment Aaron thought he saw a minute tattoo printed on the back of the man's left auricle: a broken circle ringed by disconnected lines from which several arching tendrils spread. The longest of the tendrils hung downward, scooping towards the junction where the bottom of the outer ear cartilage met the thin flesh of the scalp.
"Hold him down, dear, there's just one more precaution we need to take."
Aaron's screams went unheard in the unnatural fog. The only noise heard by the guards was the screeching of a cuff alarm ten minutes later, the alarm of a suppression cuff attached to a cleanly severed foot.
A large expanse of barren earth with clear marks of destruction left over in the form of craters and large gouges in the ground spanned almost the length of USARILN East. Stranger patches of ground had consolidated into unnatural sludge or glassy-smooth terrain. Amidst all this, the half-ruined buildings and people milling around seemed out of place.
Very out of place.
Where a crater should have continued or a mark should have extended, the large chunk of a partial city seemed to overlay itself like a bad cut-and-paste across reality: a fake city that covered almost the entire area designated as the βviolent release zone.β Students with permission wandered in at will, the cuffs automatically announcing their temporary deactivation. Due to the unique circumstances surrounding what was Ground Zero, students who wished to regularly visit were required to fill out specfic forms for frequent, unsupervised access. The guards couldn't be arsed to escort a black X everytime their stigma started bothering them.
The recreation of the town section replicated a moment in the aftermath of destruction, frozen in a groundhog day loop of time. Blank street signs and unlabeled cars lay scattered and broken across the shattered asphalt while the torn and mangled bodies of people littered the roads of what seemed to be the business section of an unknown metropolis. Survivors stained with blood and dirt shambled in circles, never exceeding the barrier of their unreal existences.
In the center of it all was a large tower constructed from impossibilityβit twisted and turned as a rough spiral, winding upwards in fragments of city and people towards a large, circular platform high above the looping city section. A black-haired girl with a prominent X across her throat sat rigidly there, staring into nothingness with wide brown eyes, unblinking. The small and short-lived hype around her had led the media to calling her Template, because a copy of her was found directly below the unreal tower, lower body crushed by a truck that had fallen to its side, the X on her throat the telling sign of what she was.
Sparse information had accompanied her captureβif capture was the right word for it. One of USARILN Westβs teams had found the strange projection of five or so city blocks and had βapprehendedβ the subnatural without issue. When the ghostly body moved, the projection disappeared, leaving behind only the ruined real body preserved in the moment of its death and the apparition beside it. The problem with tracking had quickly become apparent, however. Every reset at 24 hours within the projection, along with resetting all changes, removed the cuff placed on the main bodyβcomplete disappearance, and the specter form wasnβt tangible.
Then people had started leaving personal effects in the field and lost those, too, when the reset occurred around them. It was fortunate, then, that the reset never seemed to harm living things, buildings and humans snapping into corporeality only when nothing living was within the space they occupied on recreation.
Compounding the ease of maintenance, the girlβs ghost never moved as long as the main body wasnβt taken beyond the field of effect, but Kleinfelder had decided not to risk any issues at his little piece of subnatural paradise and had sent the possible tracking risk to Zhang, who had quickly found a use for her as a more visceral way for the usual fare of violent students to release their unhealthy frustrations.
The initial plan had been to simply kill her, as the tracking issue proved more trouble than she was worth. But killing a ghost was something they were still trying to figure out. Complete obliteration of the main body had done nothing, and it had simply been recreated once the reset ran its course. The ghost body seemingly took damage from nothing, though certain powers had caused it and the surrounding projection to temporarily disappear, only for it to reappear some time later despite what they had considered total annihilation.
Somewhere to her, there was a trick to figure out, but Zhang had stopped wasting resources on that when it seemed to placate the more unstable subnaturals.
The ghost girl hadnβt moved much in five years, though the occasional accident here and there had forced personnel to move the projectionβs center back squarely onto Ground Zero. With her, they had to resort to the old-fashioned ways of tracking something: staring at it in shifts. The guards on that particular duty essentially watched grass grow.
Now, Template was more or less a fixture at USARILN East, though her nickname was a bit less known. βGround Zero ghostβ was the more common moniker among the veteran students.
But his nosebleed was spiteful, and he swiped at the dripping blood. The door crashed against its frame and the house reverberated with the impact. A lock clicked into place--only from the outside.
He woke up in a panic again, the strain of the new, hostile environment dredging up nightmares that sloughed memories off like layers of sludge. Christmas waited until his heart stopped threatening to beat out of his chest before getting up.
Returning to the hospital after Sander had effected something of a rescue had not been his first choice, but when the other option was to remain in the same room as Sander, the hospital and their cold doctors now seemed more appealing--in a complete reversal of his sentiments from before. If there was one thing Christmas feared more than dying, it would be the justified resentment of people who understood him.
A Band-Aid around his right index finger was the only evidence that he had almost given in to the temptation of 'friends' again and Christmas slipped the adhesive bandage off his finger, examining briefly the fine, red line that remained of the wound. Too many ways to run away from himself and he knew the bad end there in shocks of heat and bruises blooming on his skin.
Too easy to tell himself this was okay as long as he could rely on someone.
The hospital hallway was chillier than the room he had been directed to and Christmas looked for someone to point him towards a bathroom. Most of the hospital staff were gone at this time of night and he wandered through the well-lit hallways, avoiding the darkened corridors. Perhaps it was better that he remain in the hospital building. If he reassessed it properly, he could just spend the rest of his days here, relatively safe from the dangers of the outside world until they decided he was no longer useful.
That might be a better fate than dying on the battlefield.
It bothered him that he couldn't definitively pin that onto his mental billboard. Might be. Several guards on patrol threw him suspicious glances, but curfew seemed more relaxed in the hospital building, something Christmas was infinitely grateful for. He wasn't sure if he could avoid using the bathroom until six in the morning.
The humming of hospital machinery and some distant footsteps almost drowned out the raised voices coming from an adjacent hallway. Closer, he could distinguish several voices--loud, with occasional stops where they seemed to be waiting on a quieter response.
For a moment, he almost considered just going somewhere else and not involving himself in that mess, but he really needed to use the bathroom and there wasn't anyone else in sight. Had he remembered the way towards the lobby, he would have gone that way, but the signs pointing towards different wards and stairwells were more confusing than helpful. He'd just ask and quickly run away, he decided.
"W-well, if it isn't Mr. Francisco. Late night for you?" the short, balding Dr. Patterson greeted the subnatural staff member's sudden appearance in the bathroom at almost five in the morning. He had just entered a bathroom stall when the sound of movement against the stall door had made him turn around. To the man's credit, he composed himself quickly, refusing to be cowed by the Director's left hand.
Looming over the stall door, four red eyes peered at him from within a crest shaped black mask with four large horns. The two longest and centermost horns partially followed the curve of the man's crown, extending backwards and parallel to his scalp before curling forward at the tips several inches past the back of his head. The lower two horns weakly imitated the same form, flanking the sides of the head. Finger-length spikes jutted out from the temple on either side, along with two smaller spikes spaced out along the masseter. The face of the mask split at fine, rigid edges along the vertical center, cordoning off into three horizontally layered sections in the shape of shallow V's that contoured around the profile of the head. At an angle, the layering of the partitions would give the vertical junction down the center of the mask a sharp protrusion. Further down, the mask tapered sharply past the chin, dipping towards the Adam's apple in a vague hook. The structure of the mask very losely followed the contours of Fredric's cheekbones and brow, with the four faintly glowing red eyes lining up in parallel, vertical pairs, positioned in the pointed, angled recesses forming the illusion of pitch-black sclera below the first and second V's--roughly where the man's eyes and cheeks would be.
"Hey there, Dr. Fatterson!" Fredric's smile behind the mask was practically audible as he drummed his fingers along the top of the door. It remained a wonder how the mysterious mask failed to muffle his voice to any degree as he spoke. "Whatcha doin'?" he asked, cocking his head to the side as he ignored the question.
"I was...it's quite obvious, isn't it?" the doctor blinked away his instinctive trepidation at the sight of the mask, ignoring the slight against his surname. He had seen Fredric's power before. It wasn't dangerous. He kept telling himself that.
"Not that, silly," he responded, with slightly less pep. "What are you doing with our new healer?"
"I...I'm not quite sure what you mean, exactly."
Fredric chuckled. "You wanna try answering that again, Doc?"
"I'm quite sure I don't know what you mean," the man tried again, more firmly this time.
"What? You don't trust me, Dr. P?" He sounded offended. "I thought we were friends."
"Please get to your point, Mr. Francisco. Benediction may be around, but he hasn't deigned to heal anyone other than the Director's select group. We're all still very busy. Unlike you," he couldn't help trying to take the subnatural down a notch, not only because Fredric was literally talking down to him. Over a bathroom stall, no less.
"Not as busy as you would've been without young Mr. Halvost, though. Right?" Fredric ventured with that infernal smile in his voice again.
The doctor didn't respond.
The mask faded away, revealing Fredric's freckled face, beaming down at him triumphantly. "Bingo!" The smile faded next, "Now why don't we start from the top?"
"You have no idea how difficult this is without a healer subnatural. Don't pretend like this isn't beneficial," Dr. Patterson spoke through gritted teeth.
"Don't get so defensive, Doc. I heard dodging questions leads to hair loss. Look, I'll make things really simple for you and your follicles--" the mask appeared on his face again, "I don't see Mr. Halvost back here unless he's got a reason to be and you don't see me coming back and asking questions. Deal?"
"Then you'll be glad to know he came back of his own volition earlier," the man ran a hand nervously through his thinning hair at Fredric's repeated jabs. "Clearly he wants to be here."
Fredric was silent for a moment. Exhaling slowly as the red pinpricks of light on his mask narrowed. "Is that so?" he said slowly. "Well then, Dr. Patterson, I'm sure you wouldn't mind taking a brief walk with me?"
"I have to get back to the patients--"
"Oh, please, Dr. Patterson. You always have time for me. Step out of the stall now, if you wouldn't mind." He stepped away from the door, tapping his foot rhythmically as he waited.
The doctor considered refusing. Considered just saying "No" and seeing what Fredric Francisco would do about it, consequences be damned, but he wasn't keen on Fredric ordering a nearby guard to break the stall door down, and he definitely wasn't keen on the Director herself getting involved because one of her doctors was busy cowering in a bathroom stall. It was an unwritten rule that Rosa Schur and Fredric Francisco had free rein of the place, to a certain extent. But that extent was, without a doubt, much higher than the regular staff members.
Furious, but holding his tongue, the man slid the stall door's lock open and stepped outside.
"Make this quick," he spat.
"Of course, amigo!" Fredric grinned, gesturing for him to leave first.
Dr. Patterson grudgingly ambled out of the bathroom, doing his best to keep discomfort and hatred off his face long enough to get Fredric out of his hair--or lack thereof. To be frank, he hated the smug bastard, and a little niggle in the back of his mind told him Fredric was 100% aware of this, even if the subnatural had never directly asked the question. Why else would one of the Director's advisors choose a bathroom stall at five in the morning to harass him? And he still needed to take his shit.
In his irritation, the good doctor nearly ran into someone just around the corner. Like speaking of the devil itself.
The surprised healer boy in question was standing in front of him, stammering out an apology and looking like he was ready to flee.
Fredric's mask, a good head and half taller than the doctor, popped out from around the corner at the sound of his voice. "Hey! Just the kid I wanted to see!" he chimed energetically as his body followed, lingering just behind the doctor as he rested a hand on the man's shoulder.
Christmas jumped, shouted, and stumbled several steps backwards at the sight of the black, horned mask with vicious, red points of light where eyes and cheeks should have been.
As the cherry on top, he lost his balance and fell onto his ass where another yelp of pain resounded through the otherwise deserted hallway. He had needed to go to the bathroom, but that could wait until night stalkers with four-eyed masks weren't prowling the corridors of the hospital.
"Whoops!" the mask faded away and Fredric's face appeared with a sympathetic grimace, "Sorry about that, kiddo. You're our super duper new healer, aren't you?"
The "super duper new healer" slid a bit further away, nodding fearfully in response. He wasn't sure if the "super duper" part applied to him, but "new healer" was close enough.
Fredric frowned, his eyebrows knitting together in a wounded sort of expression. He crouched down and held out his hand, offering to help the youth up. "You're not scared of my silly mask, are you?" he smiled warmly, just before the mask reappeared. "Name's Fredric. You can call me Freddy. Can I ask you a quick question?"
Christmas nodded again, words still not ready to form on his lips. He took the proferred hand only because he was distinctly afraid of what this particular subnatural could do to him if he didn't. It seemed most of his decisions lately were just ways of avoiding other consequences.
"Why are you here?"
"B-bathroom...?"
Fredric paused for a moment before laughing quietly to himself. "I should really stop asking vague questions around the bathroom, huh?" he chuckled, sliding his hands into the pockets of his trench coat, "Why are you here at the hospital?"
"I--" the doctor in front of Freddy was glaring daggers at him, and Christmas had no idea what he had done wrong, but between the red eyes and the angry doctor, he decided not offending Freddy was more important. "I was...helping?"
"Because you wanted to?"
Christmas stared at the four unblinking red lights. When he finally answered, it was with a duck of his head and a barely perceptible "No."
"Oh, is that right? Then stop wandering around in here and go back to your room. Shoo. And if the doctors give you trouble--" he handed him a plain black business card from his pocket. The name 'Fredric Francisco', followed by a phone number, was printed in white type-writer font. On the back were four red diamonds, aligning in the same pattern as the lights on his mask. "Please don't hesitate to give me a call."
"Oh--I--uh, thank you," he took the card automatically, caught up in the tall man's pacing.
Fredric returned his hand to Dr. Patterson's shoulder, "Now, if you'll excuse us-- the doctor and I are going to finish taking our walk. Have a nice night, Mr. Halvost!"
With a quick gulp, Christmas waited until the pair had turned a corner before pocketing the card. It occurred to him then that Freddy had already known his name.
He shivered in the aftermath of the strange encounter, bathroom urges temporarily forgotten. When the sounds of footsteps and Freddy's smooth (and vaguely sinister) chuckles had faded, he at last ventured into the bathroom, taking care of business there before returning to the hospital room they had set aside for him. He'd return to the suite later, he decided, figuring he could hide out somewhere not-the-suite for a while to sort out his almost instinctive reliance on others.
Even conscious of it, he was too easily caught up in someone else's stride and before he knew it, they were friends, and he'd belatedly realize this wasn't what he'd signed up for--the expectations of connections, and guilt, and confessions, and consequences he never wanted to deal with.
Because the cowardly tendencies overshadowed everything else, people never realized how unbearably selfish he was until it was too late.
The registrar's office was as classy a building as the rest of campus, but Christmas didn't remain to admire it. He had added several more things to the request form: Lawrence's book Meditations, which he had left in the military truck prior to the battle, and Lawrence's jacket, which had been removed by the hospital staff, presumably, since he hadn't found it despite a general search around the original room he had woken up in. The former he requested sent to his room and the latter to Lawrence, wherever he was.
The rough results of the battle he had gleaned from excited chatter around the campus and the quiet conversations among the hospital staff. It had, apparently, been a total victory, but he could hardly rejoice in that. He couldn't remember most of it. And apparently the Benediction had healed some people in the hospital.
An hour after hearing it, he pieced together why he was completely healed. And then he stopped thinking about it, turning his thoughts elsewhere to dodge the incoming panic that a Precursor had come for the group of students. Too much to think about. Ramifications that extended too far.
It was tempting to return to the suite and tuck himself into bed for another quiet session of aimless daydreaming on his Vita, but he refrained. He had been lucky enough to not encounter anyone on the brief stop to pick up his tests and forms and he wasn't about to try his luck more often than he could help it.
That left the question of what to do for the rest of the day. After the emergency, the terrifying Director had been surprisingly unobtrusive--entirely absent, actually. He thumbed his sleeve in thought, the battery-dead Vita clutched in his other hand. Previous classmates had sketched in giggles and rumors rough renditions of how things worked for subnaturals while he had been one of them, but it had never seemed like anything he cared about. Never would be his problem, right? So he had simply tuned it out and focused instead on the in-class work assigned.
The bulk of everything he didn't want to think about revolved around the crumbling world and the magical humans, so being here, at what was effectively the heart of the chaos, felt like a nightmare he was just having trouble waking from. In the glimmers of moments where his mind wandered too far into its own depths, he distinctly understood his new status as a "subnatural," but the thoughts stopped there, refusing to go any further. He knew--faintly, like something on the periphery of his vision that he wouldn't acknowledge--what was at the back of his mind, even deeper than the fear and panic. Scared of it--his own shadow.
He would have chanced a trip to town for some essentials, but had absolutely no clue how to navigate his new home, map or not. Resigned to just the campus and the locations he had somewhat explored, Christmas whiled away the hours peering into buildings that seemed open to the public, watching other students head into and out of certain rooms with books and bags in hand. Almost a regular school, if you didn't look at the guards patrolling with their weapons at the ready, the cuffs on the students' ankles, and the disturbing lack of students on such a large campus.
Eventually, he parked himself at a corner table in the dining hall, a light plate of food in front of him as he willed himself to pretend like everything was okay if he closed one eye, tilted his head, and maybe turned off the lights. It helped that a nearby table drowned out his churning thoughts with excited chatter about Benediction. Settling into the familiar rhythm of surrounding background noise, he ended up staring out the window for hours, lost in dreams about better different days.
As night fell, Christmas remained in the dining hall for as long as he comfortably could before the dearth of people made him aware of the mostly empty space. His plate had remained largely untouched, and he finished the cold food before wandering out. He considered sneaking into the suite and going straight to bed, but the thought that he might encounter Sander awake made him veer straight for the hospital building instead.
When a nurse asked him what he was there for, Christmas had stammered out a series of noises that failed to form proper excuses. Eventually, he settled on a bumbling request to just sleep in the hospital for a(nother) night, if that was okay. She had asked for his ID and he had produced Freddy's card with his ID behind it. At the sight of the card, the nurse had laughed sheepishly and shown him to an empty room.
In the lingering smell of antiseptics and body odor still clinging to the room despite a freshly prepared bed and polished floor, Christmas reluctantly fell asleep.
The sun was bright here. Its light gleamed from every surface, searing into his retinas. So he closed his eyes, walking forward with his hands held in front of him, palms patting empty air.
Another hand gripped his, and he knew the heat and width of it. The shape of those fingers.
The strike of that fist.
'You can go straight to hell.'
Agreement from his lips, but he had forgotten the words. He only remembered to keep his eyes closed while the blows rained and the voice struck.
Christmas jolted back into reality, body still frozen in sleep paralysis and for a second he almost panicked again. It took long moments of gasping through the aftermath of a nightmare before he finally looked around the room, eyes straining to catch the details.
A hospital room, but the last thing he remembered was the prickling grass and smell of dirt as the end of a blue ribbon fluttered in his vision.
The ceiling held his attention for a long time as he floated in a fog of his own thoughts. He turned his head to the right, relieved to feel the familiar knot of the ribbon against his head. Proof that even he could do something right.
Memories surfaced in the fog, and he breathed out in a long exhale, slipping quickly into another train of thought.
Did we win...?
He sat up stiffly, amazed to find himself hale and hearty, cold sweat and nightmare aside. It wasn't something he had the mind to ponder then, and confusion gave way to reluctant resignation. Things beyond his control. Terrors he didn't want to feel every time he tried to really think about everything. So he shoved the potential circumstances of his health into that landfill of things he didn't want to think about. The thought had felt like it extended too far into too many dark places about the who and the why and the--
Wasted on me.
Frightening to be of worth at all. He could fear even that.
Swallowing a clunky, lumbering dread that threatened to spill his worst thoughts across his consciousness, Christmas found a distraction in the ragged state of his clothes.
He reached for the ribbon immediately, pulling on the tail end to undo the knot. There were small nicks in the length of the heavy muslin fabric that made up the thin ribbon and Christmas rubbed the cuts between his thumb and forefinger wistfully, knowing there was no way to restore the ribbon to its former state unless someone had a power to repair objects.
Bits of dirt and blood marred the cornflower blue of the cloth and he looked around for a sink or bathroom so he could try washing it. Finding none in sight, he tied the ribbon back into his hair, the motion fluid from years of repetition.
If the rumors about this place were to be believed, he had basically gone to hell--as requested.
And there was that silly hope that somehow being stuck here evened it out. But he already knew things didn't work like that.
The thought that he could easily find something sharp to stab into his neck surprised him. When had he convinced himself that there was only one way of fixing things? Just another series of 'bad ends' to avoid.
He regretted a bit the lack of injuries. For all that he couldn't tolerate pain, it had felt mostly appropriate. If he got what he deserved, then it wouldn't get worse. It was what he told himself every time.
'You can go straight to hell.'
But hadn't he already been there from the start?
His stomach hurt reflexively as a seeping discomfort spread from the depths of his mind, threatening to become something more. Christmas squeezed his eyes shut and laid back down, curling into himself as he waited for the ugly sensation to pass. By the time it faded away, he had lost himself in that torpor of thought again and sleep swallowed him without protest.
Commander Kardos had cleared his notes from her desk by the time she returned, the meticulously organized sheets of paper tucked under an arm as he waited for her leave to depart for his own office. Director Zhang waved him away, eyes on her own pile of paperwork Greten had sorted for her. The USARILN West transfers.
No doubt Kleinfelder had sent her the worst of the students he could pass off as reasonably battle-worthy. And she'd have the distinct pleasure of dealing with every single one of them on top of all the issues plaguing her Institute, least of all the 20 subnaturals they kept sedated underground.
Hector had been recently returned to his chamber after his little tantrum as well, and when Miranda was solid enough to be of use again, she'd have him clean up the dead monsters mucking up the underground hallway. The boy's carrion-eating creature could regain its strength and she wouldn't have to waste resources attempting to rid herself of five hallways' worth of monsters with varying resistances to normal disposal methods.
If the creatures had lasted longer than a week before dissipating, she would have sent them to the same bunker with the Primordial for study. But a copycat puppet using Menagerie's power wasn't worth the effort. The government already had plenty of information on the real Menagerie's power.
So she had murdered the perpetrator herself. With Hephaestus's experimental weapon, she could do that. "The Dreambreaker," he had called it--a prototype gun that could temporarily disrupt a mage's connection to the source behind their powers. He had only created one, and she had been the one chosen to test the weapon. How fortuitous, then, that such a perfect opportunity had fallen into her lap so soon after its arrival.
Then the universe threw its punchline and the weapon had only partially worked on the intruder--a sign that either the prototype was a failure or there was more to the matter than simply Dreamcatcher working in the background. Something she'd have to let the crafter know in yet another report to fill out.
The first report would have to be sent to the Department of Defense, detailing the particulars of the incident. And her oh so unfortunate mistake in announcing Menagerie as the perpetrator. Yes, quite an unfortunate mistake.
It had, of course, been intentional.
And they certainly couldn't blame her for making the assumption. It wasn't like the USARILN directors were supposed to know the truth. Her reliable source was the only reason she had been made aware.
And now the Death and Taxes forum was aflame with speculation and panic. The news would leak across the USARILNs and stir events just enough. A Precursor rebelling. True or not, it was sensational. Any attempt to correct the issue afterwards would simply look like a cover-up. And so things would begin to spin. She could only hope she was ready for what she had started.
Between revealing Menagerie's death five years ago and revealing the top secret existence of the elusive subnatural code-named "Bogeyman," she wondered how exactly the government planned on handling the chaos she had innocently unleashed upon them. When the news inevitably leaked to the public, she would either cement her position or lose it entirely. Right now, those odds were 50/50. And she had every intention of changing that.
But not now. Now she needed rest and relaxation to prepare for the storm on the horizon.
In the fight against Bogeyman's puppet, she had fired two shots, each one strong enough to rumble through a good portion of the facility, denting even the material beneath the walls. Two quakes, and there wasn't a body left to dispose of. Just the remains of soldiers and monsters that died fighting.
Naturally, the event had tired her out. Even if the exhaustion seemed exaggerated.
The Director rubbed her temples slowly, willing the headache to go away. There was too much to handle at the moment and she couldn't afford to waste the time dealing with something as bothersome as an exertion headache.
If only events had been kind enough to oblige.
"When I said these new kids were different, I didn't mean they could be deployed immediately!" Rosa's voice cut through the quiet humming of the room's computers and the muted thrumming noise of Hephaestus's control cube.
The Director looked up at the staff member standing in the open doorway of her expansive office, a fretting Greten in the background trying to persuade the excitable woman to leave. Rosa's power was in full effect, the lines so thick around her eyes they almost looked like a half-mask.
"You wanted to see them in combat and combat came to us. Two birds with one stone. And now you're here angrily shouting at me because you hate that this method yielded results."
Director Zhang stared placidly at the other woman, knowing that this close Rosa's power could catch every little nuance of exhaustion and irritation--among other things--on display both physically and mentally.
"We lost two of them! And Bradley and Joseph!"
"You're the only one who bothers remembering the names of the faceless."
"Where is this going to lead? How many are you going to kill for your goals?"
"As many as I need to. You included if this pointless argument doesn't end now."
Rosa crossed her arms, staring at the Director with both her eyes and her power.
"This isn't different, you know."
"...I know I don't have a choice. They have to be stronger and we can't waste time coddling them anymore. Time and again we've seen real combat strengthen powers. It's effective. It works. For an entire year, we watched Lawrence Ellison, and only twice did you see the trails of power expand. So tell me I'm wrong. Tell me forcing them here didn't work. Look, Rosa, and you tell me it didn't work."
Rosa breathed in, trembling as she looked at something far above them, seeing something that was and wasn't there. She had felt it moments ago, but now she looked, and it seemed even more prominent. More present than it had ever been before.
"It worked," she whispered. "Beyond belief."
The Director's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"
"I said they were different," her eyes tracked something rapidly across her vision "because I've never seen something like this before."
A long, wide truck rolled at a leisurely pace towards the decimated battlefield, filled with soldiers now freed from guarding the underground containment chambers. Behind that, a large tow truck followed.
"Suppression module: on," the cuff's automated voice announced as the new trucks came to a stop.
20 soldiers stepped quickly out of the truck after it pulled to a stop, several of them surrounding the dragon while the others pulled out stretchers from within the vehicle and loaded the dead bodies onto one of the original three trucks. Several more were assisting the sickened soldiers and the last four headed towards Shane's group, weapons aimed at the veteran subnatural as waves of light blue hexagons continued rolling off his mist-wrapped body.
With a half-hearted smile, Shane raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender.
A moment later, he released the hold on his magic and, consequently, the buffer of the armaments. The crystals around him dispersed soundlessly.
Before even a second had passed, Shane collapsed with a choking gasp, unconscious before he even hit the floor.
The soldiers continued aiming at his prone form, eyeing the mist around his torso suspiciously. When it seemed like nothing more was happening, two of them picked him up carefully and took him towards the longer truck that had recently arrived.
One of the remaining two looked down at the injured girl and the unconscious blonde boy, motioning for several of the other soldiers to move them as well.
With their weapons trained on the students, they didn't seem concerned that many of the kids were injured or potentially dying. Fair trade for the subnaturals' lack of concern over their dead comrades.
When the injured had been moved into the larger truck, the soldiers ordered the rest of the students inside with quick shouts of "In!" and pointed guns. Similar orders echoed at Chris, who was ushered at gunpoint onto the platform of the tow truck and bound with chains made of that same transparent material so often encountered at the Institute.
Within the main vehicle were several paramedics at the ready, armed with basic medical supplies and empty gurneys. Several of the soldiers spoke with two of the paramedics--a young man and woman pulling on gloves in a corner. They nodded at the soldiers and picked up several white boxes, heading out to help the four poisoned guards. Separately. Away from the subnaturals.
The injured students were transferred from the stretchers to the gurneys lined tightly against the walls of the truck and, once everyone had filed in, the larger truck moved out with the tow truck following close behind, leaving the rest of the soldiers to return in the three smaller trucks.
With the exceptions of Chris, who was taken to a separate wing on the ground floor of the hospital, and Shane, who was wheeled to a different floor, the new students were all shoved, prodded, and thrust into the same long room Gregory occupied, recently cleared for the new arrivals at the Director's order. The nurses and doctors quickly set to work checking on injuries and cleaning them out, while uninjured students were left to wait in what looked like a entertainment corner of flatscreens, comic books, and video games. Several of the soldiers marked the foot of Christmas's and Lilianna's beds with blue tape and the hospital staff focused on the two of them first, hooking Christmas up to an IV drip before sending interns off to get information on the healers.
While that happened, the same soldiers cuffed Sander's hands and legs together with the suppression cuffs from before, dimming the surge of his powers and locking down movement enough to give them ample response time should he prove himself more trouble than he was worth.
Before long, the hapless interns returned with several folders of information and one of the doctors quickly scanned through the pages before ordering a blood transfusion for Christmas.
Normal procedure went out the window when they hooked up five bags of blood to several veins along Christmas's body, and it wasn't long before a nurse withdrew some of Christmas's blood into a syringe and quickly injected it into Lilianna without a word of warning or acknowledgement.
The effect was immediate. The shimmering glow around Lilianna's body indicated the transfer had been quick enough and the slow repair of the girl's injuries meant there was significantly less work for the staff. With sighs of relief passing through the crowd of medical professionals, they settled back into a more relaxed routine, caring superficially for several of the worse injuries and making sure particularly threatening wounds were clean and bandaged.
When most of the preparations were complete, several of the doctors discussed waiting periods before withdrawing more of the healing blood and it was decided, based upon the notes provided, that several hours would be sufficient.
That done, they left the room of subnaturals to their own devices, assigning one nurse--Alissa--to watch both Christmas and Lilianna. She was the same nurse who had taken pity on Gregory before and when she noticed him in the room, she offered a quick wave and an apologetic look, inclining her head gently at the poor boy's condition after having just left the hospital several hours ago.
She might have even said something, if Benediction hadn't passed through the room in a flock of guards.
Dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, slacks, and polished dress shoes, the Precursor's bored expression didn't change as his ruby eyes flicked from student to student.
A scoff. A quick glance at his watch. A roll of his eyes.
He waved a bright hand through the air, lighting up the entire room in an array of white pinpricks of light that healed the students' injuries completely, disintegrating even the IV needles in their arms. The tubes of blood and IV fluids leaked out onto the glossy sheet vinyl floor in his wake, but if the Precursor noticed, he didn't care.
With a stifled yawn, the closest thing the world had to a benevolent god walked out of the room, exiting through the door on the other side while patting his hair and clothes to make sure the flight over hadn't mussed anything important.
Within minutes, Alissa had called for a doctor, but news that Benediction had arrived was already on everyone's tongues.
"You're all cleared to go," a female doctor with black hair in a bob cut and a gratingly sweet voice announced to the room before walking briskly in the direction Benediction had gone.
Alissa remained, cleaning up the mess Benediction had left behind.
1. Week-long timer is back. Time skip coming up. Three days. You may write events up until Sept. 7, 2020: 0900.
2. Anyone who's actually turned in their exams/requisition sheets will have it considered in the coming update.
3. DnT forums are completely gone. Any character who checks during this time period will only find an error page.
4. Anyone wishing to interact with NPCs (instead of your fellow players for some reason) should let me know when, since NPCs will be found in different locations depending on day and time. We'll collab for those interactions.
5. School grounds and surrounding town are completely free to explore. Let me know where you'd like to head in town and I'll give you the general atmosphere of the place. If players do wander into town/certain parts of the school, I may throw some small events around and offer collabs.
6. Chris has no injuries on transforming back and everyone's too busy flocking to Benediction to care when he leaves the hospital, though a few eyebrows might raise that he's walking out naked, so try clothes, but no pressure.
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Jing
