Julius listened to Mari's tales of her time abroad with a gentle smile; he was glad at least one of them had been able to live for a while before the world turned against them again.

[b]"That sounds wonderful, I'm glad. I wondered a few times about going back to Britain in the last six months; nearly booked a plane ticket and everything."[/b] A sad look crossed his face. [b]"One of the homeless shelters for disowned Empowered was bombed... I couldn't leave the survivors to fend for themselves. Sad thing is I've neatly rounded them up into one place for the authorities to move into a testing facility now. Maybe I should have left well enough alone and gone abroad."[/b] He sighed, following her slowly as she went from room to room and prepared a few beds. The mattresses were cheap but were mostly in decent condition and there were enough beds for two dozen people on this floor; he hadn't heard from Alexis on whether she'd started on the floor above or not and had no inclination to hobble up the steps for now.

[b]"Ali went with Bryan to Britain. He started regressing about two weeks after you left; withdrawals from the drug they forced him to take in the House. Alexis could temporarily relieve the symptoms but he needed proper treatment and there's no way he could get it here. Do you remember Elena, from the British Guardians? She came over to collect him, said they'd look after him properly."[/b] He nodded at his laptop bag. [b]"She gave me a few classified documents as well. MI6 reports on what the situation was over here; that was when I found out about the plan to get rid of me so I got Ali on that plane. She's not suited to combat and we've already been through too much. I managed to phone her two nights ago, told her what was going to happen. She was going to come back but she can really help Bryan's recovery so I managed to convince her to stay away for now."[/b]

When Mari went to change, Julius got his laptop out and put it on the desk. He wiped his glasses clean of rainwater on a microfibre cloth from his bag and tapped a few keys. Soon the CCTV footage from the various cameras in the area, those that still worked anyway, appeared on his screen. As far as the government knew these cameras had stopped working weeks ago and they were too cautious to enter the area to fix them; Alexis had simply redirected the feeds so the apartment block could be used as a safe house for a while.

[b]"So, Mari... did you hear anything from Diego?"[/b] Julius ventured cautiously; for all his intellect he still couldn't work out what the relationship Mari and Diego had was. Over the past six months it had been put under so much pressure it was hard to keep up and he had never been good with the more complex and passionate emotions. [b]"Although I guess if you were abroad you wouldn't have had much contact with anyone back here."[/b]