Gemma was sure that she’d only been outside for about ten minutes total since arriving in Vladivostok, and already she was freezing her ass off. Though she’d been living in Massachusetts for the better part of the last decade, and Massachusetts winters were nothing to sneeze at (so she was told), she was a Floridian at heart, and there was no farther cry from the sunny beaches of Florida than the steely skies of eastern Russia. The Siva-Cup, at least, was warm and familiar, and though the Cyrillic characters on the localized coffee company’s logo were a constant reminder that she was a long way from home, the atmosphere wasn’t altogether that different. The machines whirred and whizzed over the counter, conversations murmured, soft music played. Twain chatted, Zesiro listened (or at least pretended to), and Icarus… sat there and looked intimidating, as was his way.

“Ever been to Tahiti?” she remarked wryly to Twain, sipping her caramel latte. She couldn’t imagine Russia being anyone’s favorite. Even the Russians didn’t seem to like it too much. Twain was well traveled as the leader of their little group; certainly he’d been somewhere better than this vast land of icecaps and bears. Then again, the enthusiasm that he radiated told her that Twain’s favorite place was where he currently was, as long as something interesting was happening there. The disappearance of MOON, though tragic, definitely qualified as interesting. 

Twain placed four pictures down on the table as he briefed them. Gemma leaned in, looking at the smiling faces of the other agents. Though she wasn’t the youngest in MERCY she was by far the newest, and she could almost feel all eyes on her. It was her first big mission after all. Though she’d been working almost a year with these three, handling disappearing agents in Russia was pretty new territory. When Twain dropped the fifth picture on the table, Gemma snatched it up, nearly knocking over Icarus’ frappe in the process. Could who they were looking for hold a clue to their movements before they disappeared? She didn’t recognize the person in the picture. Twain had stopped talking, so she looked up to get an answer from him. “Well? Who is it?”

As soon as she asked, a tingling began at the crown of her head. A feeling something like anxiety or dread twisted in her gut, and the photo fell from her fingers to the table. The tingling shivered down her spine, leaving an ache in her head; her heart rate picked up. The dread meant something dark was happening; the tingling signaled radiation, but the headache was new. Her right arm erupted in pins and needles, as numb as if she’d slept on it. That was also new, and distinctly unpleasant.

The feeling in her stomach extended to what felt like outside of her—she had a location. But she was all turned around; she hadn’t gotten used to the magnetic quirks of the area yet, so she flopped her useless right arm in the general direction of the feeling so she could keep track of it, knocking over her latte in the process, covering the photo of the person MOON was looking for in sticky caramel. 

“Shit, sorry!” she managed, trying to right the cup with her good hand. Then, leaning in and lowering her voice, she continued, “Something really big just happened, that way.” She twitched her arm, splayed out across the table, pointing... North? Northeast? “Don’t know a distance, don’t even really know a direction, but it’s bad.”