[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/YWqLekM.png[/img][/center] [center][h2]The City of Lost Haven[/h2][/center] (Location evident) Outside of the personal world Silence inhabited as the undeniable protagonist of his own story, like so many others before him, the city of Lost Haven had also undergone a period of great turmoil. While there had been nothing close to the devastation the meta-human domes promised and while the meta-humans of Lost Haven had been unusually quiet, the city still shifted. It was uncomfortable. Anyone with half a brain could feel it in the air. People were scared, but they weren’t terrified anymore. That was the problem. When people were terrified they froze, they panicked, they hid. Now that period had passed and their nerve had returned, but the fear remained, and it is human nature to hate what you fear. That hatred, manifest in the growth of movements against the so called meta-human vigilantes, and the cries for legislation and control, was growing more visible day by day. He remembered reading about a protest against a company known as I-tech fairly recently, and there were whispers, rumours abound. The government was mobilising, but with what? That was the question. Oddly, despite his inherent place in the debate, Silence was unperturbed. He somehow felt separate from the so called meta-humans abound in the city. Perhaps it was the belief that his own abilities were somehow purer, carried down through the generations by his family. They were certainly old, and innate. He had not been in any accident, his DNA had not been mutated by outside substance or circumstance, he was born the way he was. Still, it was not the public activity that drew Lekh Antol’s curiosity then. It was what bubbled underneath that drew his attention, as it always had. Crime was on the up and up, and not the Shroud’s crime, though that was certainly booming. From what his sources had gathered, two gangs had gone to war, the Chinese Triad and the Japanese Yakuza. This was not that unusual, even in a city locked up as tight as Lost Haven. The Chinese and the Japanese hated each other with a historical enmity that would probably never be wholly wiped away. What Silence was really interested in was why now? What had driven the gangs to war in such turbulent times, with the Shroud so powerful, lurking like a hungry predator? Silence refused to believe that the bosses of each respective criminal enterprise could be so stupid as to fail to realise the danger of their predicament. Going to war with one another when a threat greater than either of them lurked on their border was like sending an invitation. Take us now. So why? And should they? Take them, that is. Silence tapped the solid oak table at which he sat, nestled in his compact little apartment. He had six different newspapers arranged before him, and two pages of notes that seemed to have been scrawled by two unique hands that were not his own. No laptop though, using the internet would have been too simple and convenient, not to mention difficult when one has a tendency to break tech just by being in proximity to it. It was for that reason his sturdy little phone lay on his sofa-side table a goodly distance from his open dining room/kitchen combo. That was beside the point, anyway, sometimes the old ways were the best. It wasn’t like he could google what the Triad were up to after all. What he could do was read up on what Tome had seen. The teen going on man had a keen eye, Silence had spotted that immediately, and recorded things even when he failed to see their meaning. It was that trait which the criminal valued. All too often he had informants relay to him the meaning of what they’d seen, summarising a week’s worth of surveillance with their half-cocked and often ignorant assumptions. He wanted their eyes, not their brains or what passed for them. Tome it seemed had worked this out when so many others hadn’t. Rake wasn’t so bad either, hers were the second page of notes, but her handwriting was woeful and she was a little too ambitious, prone to making the odd judgement. At least she was [i]sometimes[/i] right. What he did not have in front of him was anything on the girl. Racheli. She’d escaped of course, almost the moment he’d taken his eyes off her she’d been snatched up by that monster that claimed to be a man. Unsurprising really. They lacked the necessary mettle for the line of business. They should have shot her in the head the moment he walked through the door. Still, perhaps he was selling his one-time compatriots short. He had not been privy to the events that unfolded, after all. Perhaps if he had become involved he would have gotten killed by some ability he had yet to see. There was less chance of that now. With time on his side the criminal had researched, watched, learned. He had seen as many powers as anyone and read about the rest, started thinking up strategies to counter them, defeat them if necessary. It was just a mental check-list at that point, but there were a growing number of names upon it. He’d have a contingency for them all if he could. So, his interest had fallen upon the gang war in Lost Haven in absence of any news on Racheli. However his feelers were out, flung wider than ever before. He was looking for other things, things his encounter with a certain Ambassador had opened his eyes to. Magic, artefacts, potions. Things like the healing salve that was so very useful and so very useless at once, sitting on his bedside table. Luck was not with him in that pursuit as of yet either, so the gang war got all his attention, the Triad and the Yakuza must have felt so blessed. He ran one deft hand through his slicked back hair, black now, like his brothers. Perhaps in the wake of what he’d done in the city of Lost Haven his heart would soon be as black as his brothers as well. ----------------------------- His phone buzzed. He had no idea what time it was, as per usual his curtains were shut tight, but he guessed it was sometime in the early morning. He was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, but his brain jumped at the chance to absorb some other stimulus. In truth, he did too. There was only so much he could stand of his own thoughts, sardonic and often cruel as they could be, so despite his fatigue he swung his legs across the side of his bed and jumped up onto his feet. The phone was on the other side of his room, sat upon a desk he rarely used, so he walked over to it and snatched it up. It flickered momentarily as he deftly popped it open and read the message that flashed up in slightly unstable green lettering. [b]Girl Sighted Lost Haven Park Street Marked - Rook[/b] Silence stared at this for a moment, then carefully placed his phone on the desk. He muttered something imperceptible in Polish, then switched to English and nearly smiled. [color=bc8dbf]“I knew that boy had promise.”[/color]