With Jo out - and her date, who Cassie wasn't looking out for, admittedly, but it seems Jo was - Cassie didn't, frankly, have much of a vested interest in the rest of the proceedings. As callous as it seemed, Cassie's life was very much centered around Jo and her protection. Jo was all she had left, and Cassie held onto her with an almost religious fervour. And she'd made sure Jo was safe from the masked men who'd broken in to the school dance. Christ, it wasn't even Jo's school. Cassie had half a mind to think Locke knew this was going to happen and put Jo there for the fun of it. She shook the thought away. Locke valued Cassie's employment enough to not senselessly put Jo - his key bargaining chip - at risk. Hopefully.

She was about to pack up and return home to change and head over to Jo's - '[i]I heard on the news![/i]' was the story she initally thought up, but she realised there weren't any choppers in the air or media presence at all yet, so '[i]police scanner[/i]' or even '[i]how was the da-oh my god![/i]' would have to be good enough - when something happened inside the school. The car she'd seen, but apparently the evening wasn't done with it, and she looked down the scope at exactly the wrong moment; the car exploded and she wrenched her eye away from the sight, swearing as the brightness burnt her eyes. For a second she panicked, but the afterimage faded and she rubbed her eye, still able to see. She looked back. She noticed someone punching out a guard and tipping their hat toward the window, but ignored it. 

Someone - one of the masks, a crappy turtle in baggy clothes - had their hand stretched out toward the car, now smouldering, two burnt figures collapsed on the floor nearby and a third K.O.'d by a lucky brick from the blast. Had they...caused that? A meta working with the gangs? [i]For a given value of 'with'[/i], Cassie thought, taking note that the explosion had taken out exactly three of the intruders and zero students, and had in fact given distraction enough for the students to leave. Still, they'd threatened Jo, and Cassie had at least two more shots lined up. Sure, why not. For Jo. Unwind a bit. 

She knelt and lined up her shot, taking the time she had for this one now that her focus wasn't on frantically covering Jo. The unconcious guard first - crosshairs centred, barrel steady. Cassie breathed in and squeezed the trigger on the exhale - even without her Focus, she'd still taken the initiative to learn a few things about shooting. Boom. Through the window, a clean hole with splintering fractures worming there way outward, and zipping into the lying figure's neck. The body shuddered, and sputtered blood from both the wound and the mouth, and then lay still. [i]One for my baby[/i], she thought, and then lined up again, quicker this time. A bit more merciful, but she needed to at least incapacitate them until she figured out their game. She exhaled again and pulled, and the bullet made another hole that blew out the window this time, and then a second through the lower calf of the guard she suspected to be meta. That ought to stop them from causing any more trouble with...whatever it was they could do. They hit the ground, presumably yelling, and Cassie lifted her rifle up and away. Now was the time to leave.

Cassie head home, discarding her wig and contacts halfway there. She had replacements at her apartment. She didn't want to be Quintain any longer tonight.

Looking back on that night in the coming years - the first night Cassie knew she wasn't alone, the first night she saw the people she would eventually come to know as her closest and most trusted friends and alllies - Cassie often thought that as first impressions went, she'd given her future teammates a spectacularly poor one.