[indent][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/ZTxawPF.png[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/6Yi4gad.png[/img]
[hider][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIyFrb0ZSnE&pp=ygUTYm9yZGVybGluZSBmcmVlbGFuZA%3D%3D[/youtube][/hider][/center][right][h1][color=C67C12]Leon[/color] and [color=f49ac2]Edict[/color][/h1][/right][right][sub][hr][color=C67C12]Mentions:[/color] The Whole Damn Crew | [color=C67C12]Location:[/color] St. Portwell, Oregon: Reclaimed Church Raid[/sub][/right][hr]
[/indent] Leon had a slight warning before all hell broke loose: Thanks to Lelou, his dogged senses were always going to be a cut above normal, even among Adepts. Canines, as he understood, could hear things up to a quarter of a mile away. Maybe without much clarity, but voices existing in the surrounding were well within his range. The group all talking muffled things a bit, so he wasn't sure exactly what he was hearing. Lyss Burns and, of all people who he hadn't expected to see back, Anya Baksh tried to address him. He was totally ignorant of it as his hightened senses provided him with a painfully annoying experience. He was trying to parse out and separate every sound, attempting as hard as humanly possible to focus directly on the door that he and Edict had just come through. Listlessly, his body naturally gravitated through the windows. New scents filled the air; or, not so new? He recognized some, no, [i]most[/i] of them. 

They were fresh in his mind. Something about the mixing of smells was just so visceral that it almost paralyzed Leon. They weren't local scents: He figured after taking the time to sit in that parking lot before trying to rescue Alizee would let him be familiar with them all. He could smell Everleigh, Britney, Linqian; easy picks after he'd been in the car with them. But, Brit wasn't there? Stormy too... But, new people who werent there threw his nose off, and now other smells. He stood at the bay window near the entrance like a scene from an alien movie; the main character is nervous to look out the window and see the horrifying creature staring back, yet compelled to it as if the curiosity couldn't be prevented. So close... The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, curling Leon's stomach as his nose worked overtime trying to square up with what his ears were hearing. 

Shuffling, clicking and clacking of metal. Preparation. He could almost see a shadow against the blinds of the window as Nakala readied the launcher. Then, everything froze. For what seemed like an eternity to Leon, he had the chance to consider that life was a truly funny thing. Edict had just gotten done accusing him of being a federal agent, and now... Now he heard the shuffling of boots scaling the outside wall, the rustling and shuffling of firearms and bullet proof vests, the telltale hiss that a gasmask gave off as you pulled the tab for the filter to start cleaning the air.
[i]It's a fucking raid![/i]
And it was far too late for the revelation. His body tensed as he heard the slow sound of a trigger being pulled. Again, that grinding metal noise as the action pulled forward and drove the firing pin into the primer of whatever casing was in the barrel. It sounded heavy to Leon, probably not a rifle or some other small arm.

All Lady Lelou could do in her own infinitely slower perception of time was scream and writhe in her tiny padded cell within Leon. But his minds eye, shared between the two of them, gave her a constant option to accaust him within micromoments.
[color=a36209][i]"UNLEASH ME OR DIE!"[/i][/color]
He didn't really argue with her. Not as the moments passed by and the light of the explosion coming from outside began to bow the window in toward him. With the half a second he had left, he began the process of letting the seals loosen up for the process of potentially regenerating a great deal of flesh and tissue in case this thing hit him in the face...

Which, it did. As the tear gas canister slammed its way through the window, the trajectory put it in a direct pathway toward Leon's dumb neanderthal forehead. The sound of the knock against the bone cavity was like a drum that punctuated the PRA's door kicking activities. The canister, having bounced off Leon's slanted plate of a skull, completely changed direction as it spiraled up toward the ceiling. It bounced off a rafter, hitting some hanging cloth tapestry which clung to it and forced a near vertical drop. As it clattered to the floor, the canister split slightly, causing pressure to force a second stream of the gas out into the room for a thicker blanketed fog.

Leon, unable to draw forth from Lelou's strength in time, blacked out as his brain rattled harder than any man had ever managed to punch him. For a short moment, pure willpower kept him from falling over flat as he tried his damnedest to force the primary transformation... But it wasn't to be. Like a castle wall crumbling from underneath itself, Leon's legs gave out and he hit the floor like a bag full of sand.

[hr]

Edict was fuming from the interaction outside. Leon had basically bowled over him, [i]the prick,[/i] and now here he was at a meeting he didn't even want to attend in the first place. What was having a network of spies for if he still had to attend these fucking meetings? And now he was buzzing in with those Temple stiffs, no better than Federal behavior as far as he was concerned. Even if he was telling the truth, it was a truth he didn't want to hear about or listen to. [i]Big fucker![/i] Edict smoothed his waistband where the holster of his gun was, trying to calm down as he scanned across the large room. 
He immediately spotted Linqian, who was looking haggard and pissy as usual... But he knew what she was really feeling. It probably wasn't good: Since Leon and he were both supposed to walk back to her new [i]legitimate[/i] car, he figured he'd offer her another bump. Hell, maybe try to get a night out of it for himself, reroute them back to his place as opposed to her going home to be crabby about her brothers and her small life. Vague guilt crept into his heart, and on instinct he hunted around for Britney, who he didn't see. [i]Nothing to be worried about...[/i]

Anya Baksh addressed Leon and him, and while Edict couldn't keep his eye of the Big Guy staring at the windows, he was a bit elated to see another Pink Adept. The connection was rare for him, but the Mistress of Dreams had popped into his own dreams on a rare occasion, always somewhat untouchable. He smiled at her and waved, making sure he kept his sunglasses held up on his forehead by way of his hat.
[color=f49ac2]"Good to see you again, Sis. Did you ever get that email I sent about the uh... The whole [i]'psychic ba-"[/i][/color]
The window smashed as Edict was staring at it. Wholesale, it exploded, shattered, and a metal canister the size of a soda can drove itself so hard against Leon's head that Edict audibly echoed a groan of sympathy toward the Jolly Giant before he crumbled to the floor like a wet paper mache house. His eyes trailed up with the canister as it spewed a colorless mist up toward the ceiling and spattered across the wood and cloth of the upper rafters. Its clamorous fall and subsequent smash off the hard tile floor of the aisle busted the thin metal shell open in a second place, causing more gas than necessary to spew from its guts.

Edict was standing pretty much in range of it when it hit the floor, passing over his eyes and face to almost instantly blind him and force him to his knees with a lack of oxygen. Thankfully, by the time he hit the floor, the little thing was spewing in a different direction than his face, because it probably would've instantly blinded him for good. As he hit the floor, the sunglasses on his forehead slumped down onto his eyes. He instantly began channeling upon himself, focusing several Power Words at once to bolster his mind and block out the neurological receptors to pain. 
His Emotional Field collapsed in on itself several times, each time etching a different portion of the Command String until he was running on just about nothing. He could only vaguely see shapes, but he kept a crystal clear image of the last thing he saw before the door came off its hinges, and he didn't like it. Body armor, guns... His tendrils reached out in real time, no longer caring about who or what he was knocking on. He was looking for friendlies, any clearly recognizable Emotional Fields he could feel. The many tendrils of the Lotus' roots acted as connectors to each and every one who he recognized as a Coven member.

He'd learned a bit of a technique to broadcast subliminal messaging: It worked much better against those without Emotional Fields, but even here he knew the effect would be strong enough that he'd be able to use it as a budget form of telepathy.
Across each and every Coven member, new or old, a set of images were broadcast into their minds. They played out like a moving picture book as the signals scattered across the Fields.
A pink lotus burst forth, with the word "SCATTER" painted across its surface in thick, densely burning flames that quickly consumed the message and left them with one last image: Edict's own point of view, the last things he saw before things went down. The canister hitting Leon's head, flying up into the rafters, hitting the floor... And then something else. The blurry vision of Edict's one hand lashing out and grabbing the canister. The other swipes a lit cigarette lighter through the thick foggy gas on the floor, while the canister flies from his grip up toward the ceiling. 

A violent fireball followed the tear gas, and Edict's illusion broke when he had to refocus himself and make for a senseless sprint toward where he remembered the last window was. He couldn't see, he couldn't smell, and he couldn't breathe: But he couldn't feel any of it. Once he got some fresh air, most of the problems would be manageable, and he'd be able to hit the ground running... All it took was the bomb to give him the chance. He sprinted his numb body toward the edge of the room and smashed himself through the pane of glass full send. Somewhere in the middle of that, the fireball trailing up toward the canister hanging in the middle of the air finally met its own source, and the canister itself exploded into an even bigger and more caustic ball of flames that ate into the spray from before. 
The hanging cloth ignited in a magnificent pattern that happily consumed the old wood rafter beams like a hungry termite demon. Cobwebs, dust of twenty years that the previous owners neglected to clean, errant insulation sticking through the shoddy wood slats: Each little component caught ablaze like tinder in the flame. Within an instant, the entire roof of the church was ablaze with fires that danced across old wood beams and crawled into the walls above. 

Edict wasn't there for that. He only hoped that anyone else able to take advantage of the distraction did the same thing he did and followed his advice. Still, his Command String of Power Words kept him practically blind and numb. He hit the ground outside hard, hair and clothes covered in glass shards and broken wood. He pushed up off the ground into a pile of glass, ripping his numb hands apart without a care as he sprinted toward what looked to his limited sight like a clear opening. There was a dumpster or something to his left, so he tried to avoid it and slipped right.
Next thing he knew, he felt hot lightning in his right ass cheek as two darts zipped through his jeans and made purchase in flesh. Fifty thousand volts of electricity pumped his nervous system and utterly shattered his Command Line. All of a sudden, all the pain rushed back and he hit the ground in a heap.

[color=f49ac2]"Oh, motherfucker! Fucking fucks! Fucking fucking fuck fuck [b]FUCK[/b]"[/color]
Edict's body instinctively curled into the fetal position like a cooked shrimp as his eyes once more burned from the residual chemicals. 
In that moment, he hated every single member of the Sycamore Tree Coven. Every single one of them deserved what was about to happen next, whether they were the rat who sold them out or some freak on a different cult's leash. He thought about the picture that hung over the desk of his office. "Lumber Day". A vast Sycamore tree being chopped down at the base, countless axes burried in its trunk. He wasn't here to get hit like this... And Leon had been the one who convinced him to come today. Convenient, but... He remembered that Kali hadn't been there as he tried to take deep breaths.

He felt hands on his wrists and a boot in his back. So much for the great escape... Wrong fucking window.