[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/6zc773j.jpg[/img][/center][center][img]http://i.imgur.com/3R5vYYi.png?2[/img][/center][hr][center][color=silver]𝕄: 𝕊𝕖𝕡𝕥. 𝟙𝟜, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘   / /   𝕎𝕚𝕤𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕕, 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕪𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕕   / /   𝕋𝕠𝕨𝕟   / /  ~𝟙𝟠𝟛𝟘[/color][/center][hr]
Bright truck headlights broke the uniform darkness of the night as several APCs turned off the interstate and onto the main road leading towards the remains of Wisford. Five trucks filled with soldiers, paramedics, and emergency relief supplies for injured citizens rumbled carefully to the miraculously intact evacuation team APC parked at the town's edge. Dean had driven them back once the sparks of tension between quite a few of them had abated enough that he could slide into the driver's seat without much notice.

The civilians already present in the APC had been entirely silent on the brief ride to the safety of military backup, doing their best to avoid angering what appeared to them only more of the volatile subnaturals that [i]needed[/i] to be collared and hemmed in, lest absolute anarchy fall upon what remained of civilized society.

As he let the car idle and stepped out, Dean raised his arms in surrender, making sure the soldiers heading into hostile territory wouldn't shoot him on sight for commandeering the APC. He had opened the back doors to allow several of the passengers to exit as well, but didn't urge them. Between the haunted gazes of both civilians and subnatural teenagers, he found it hard to form words without the pressure of danger at his heels. Instead he let them rest in the brief moment of transition. From quiet lives to traumatic memories, the dead and the dying were as much as part of his small life as the unfortunate subnaturals' now--perhaps more, paradoxically, because Dean knew he would never have the potential to become desensitized. He didn't fault the bitter teens who still needed time to realize their childhoods hadn't simply vanished, but had been taken from them in a cruel jest. What teenager before the Slumber [i]hadn't[/i] wanted magical powers? Even now, some still did. 

But this was the reality it led to, because the scales previously tipped in favor of harmonious coexistence couldn't bear the weight of the worldwide disaster and so crumbled. Nothing measured the morality of the populace against the presence of magic now. The rules of society--at least as far as subnaturals were concerned--had given way entirely to martial law, ankle cuffs, and persecution.

And if he had to be brutally honest with himself, Dean felt more comfortable with that state of affairs than letting them run loose.

The arriving soldiers were quick to hold him at gunpoint until the paramedics could determine that the passengers in the back were the right people and then some. Another smaller military APC rounded a nearby corner and approached them, stopping at a distance before the driver's door swung open and revealed Ethan. He waved at them, but didn't make any further comments, turning towards the back doors as paramedics rushed over and began loading the exhausted or unconscious onto stretchers. The group moved with their prone teammates, joining them in one of the trucks while Dean explained himself a short distance away.

At Dean's location, a soldier was contacting a commanding officer and relaying the information: a civilian had taken command of the truck, the original driver was dead, and they were trying to determine at the moment if he was a subnatural or not. Another soldier rubbed at the skin over Dean's right temple, then checked his neck, looking for signs of makeup or other forms of concealment. When it seemed clear enough, they remained in position, just in case the final confirmation from Rosa revealed he was a subnatural after all.

The same soldier contacting command panned the phone's camera across the area, over Dean, and walked towards the back of the truck, gun at the ready the moment Rosa confirmed someone was a subnatural who wasn't accounted for. But everything checked out and three of the APCs drove off into the town, towards any marked survivors while looking for others as well.

Once the all clear was given, the rest of the soldiers were quick to separate the students from the citizens, with the majority of the paramedics crowded towards their own kind. The remaining ones in charge of the subnaturals gave most of them a cursory glance, checking for wounds behind the blood and dirt, but assured in the confirmation that both healers were indeed still alive, so there appeared to be no need to check further. They avoided Kusari entirely, deciding that the immortal girl wasn't worth the attention when the only injury she [i]couldn't[/i] survive would have been blindingly obvious and equally as undeserving of a second look.

Lawrence and Savannah were taken away on stretchers to separate cars, with Christmas, Angelíque, and Hazel joining Lawrence's car along with several soldiers. The unconscious enemy Arbiter, still trussed up, was taken away with Ethan's group.

A quick check of several notes regarding the abilities and the chief paramedic ordered Sander onto the same truck as the other unconscious students just as another medic recommended that Callan be taken with that group as well. Harried medics and well-worn stretchers swiftly moved the superhuman girl towards the truck, with another two soldiers directed to lift Siena onto the familiar canvas and framework before carrying her towards the rest of the injured.

The last person to join that truck's group was Lily, who was deemed unwell enough for at least some concern.

Loaded up with gurneys onto which the unconscious or weakened students were transferred, the truck's doors closed after the last of those requiring further medical attention were assigned and drove off first.

The remaining students were packed into a different truck while soldiers checked the evacuation team's APC for any significant damage or unwanted attachments. It was impossible to prepare for every eventuality when it came to magic, but at the very least they wouldn't be caught unawares because they hadn't tried. 

Civilians were moved onto a fourth truck on standby while a fifth made its winding way into the town towards the location of survivors Kusari had pinged, eyes alert for more on the way.

[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/3R5vYYi.png?2[/img][/center][hr][center][color=silver]𝕄: 𝕊𝕖𝕡𝕥. 𝟙𝟜, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘   / /   𝕌𝕊𝔸ℝ𝕀𝕃ℕ 𝔼𝕒𝕤𝕥   / /   ℂ𝕒𝕞𝕡𝕦𝕤   / /  ~𝟙𝟠𝟛𝟘[/color][/center][hr]
[color f7976a]"Move them to the nearest town with proper accommodations, then take them to Washington. Director's orders,"[/color] Commander Kardos sighed, his communications with the temporary base just finished. They had cuffed the subnaturals found in Wisford and the officers at the base were already starting to pack up, the majority of the soldiers returning to the campus on emergency orders along with Ethan's team, which would be three hours behind on the return, but they needed the reinforcement in case things got worse before they got better.

Kardos's left arm hung uselessly in a sling as he sent the clearance papers to Mr. Greten, the entire process of one-handed typing and clicking far too tedious for his liking. His attached commands directed the secretary to contact the heightened security near Washington that had only grown pricklier at the mention of a subnatural or Dreamcatcher attack in a nearby city. They were not going to enjoy the news that Cat's Cradle had been sighted near Wisford and if the necessary permissions weren't managed prior to the students' arrival, the group was more likely to be gunned down than given a respite. And incendiary retaliation on the students' parts would simply make USARILN East look bad--doubly so if any of the students actually succeeded.

While a frazzled and bruised Mr. Greten rushed back and forth between his office and Rosa's gathering the identification papers and contacting the military forces near and in Washington, D.C. Kardos limped towards the shattered entrance of the administration building, clicking his tongue in irritation at the extensive damage to the building front. The brief, but severe battle had reached just far enough that the administrative buildings and several research buildings had taken enough damage that even their resident magical repairman couldn't handle it all at once. Currently, the boy was focused on rapidly restoring several of the underground passageways leading to and from the containment chambers, including the deeper areas. He had fixed the worst of the damage to the aboveground buildings, but was conserving his energy for the truly important structures.

Hector was currently cleaning up the bodies of both enemies and allies at once, with specific instructions to collect dead soldiers without further destroying the bodies. It was a hard task, considering several of the soldiers had been turned to stone in a cruel imitation of the legendary Medusa's powers. It had failed to work on Hector's eyeless abomination, however, and one of the enemy mages' attempts to shrink the creature down to a more manageable size only partially succeeded. Hector hadn't fought the change in size, letting the mage expend the energy with a feigned resistance until Miranda was the size of a small child and nearly too fast to track. There hadn't been enough time between the mistake and the mage's death for the woman to enlarge the creature again and the remaining mages had no defense against the impervious monster. Two teleported away, fleeing once the battle was no longer to their advantage, leaving behind the parts of thirteen other Aberrations torn asunder by Miranda.

There were cracks and rifts along the cement, and massive craters where explosive impacts had left behind broken soldiers and students. Several of the more capable students had fought back and luckily survived, but with most of their firepower at Wisford the Institute took far more damage than expected. 

There had been attacks on all the Institutes here and there. Isolated incidents and usually easy to contain and eliminate. But an organized attack by mages had, ultimately, required a mage to end, especially when an Aberration girl in a bodysuit had baited out their snipers' locations with a field that appeared to freeze time on anything that entered.

Two other mages had appeared stuck in the field with her as she froze entire waves of bullets and prevented any ranged attacks from connecting. Rosa had suggested unloading even more projectiles into the field, a careful parse of the girl's power revealing certain limitations in the power's effect.

By all accounts, the group caught in the field's temporary safety should have been shredded once the magic faded, but its duration allowed one of the other mages inside the field time to touch one of the bullets with an unhindered arm, arcing a bright blue line between every projectile that touched the field. The third mage took the free period of safety to begin reshaping the immediate area, reconstructing the ground and walls into a far-reaching maze that encompassed the entire campus, though failed to overwrite Template's projected cityspace.

The moment the girl released her field, every bullet disappeared, the compounded effects of the destruction occurring all at once to the objects.

In the safety of the maze and with its creator leading the way and opening passages at will, it was too simple a matter for them to corral the unfortunate soldiers into a compact space and for the Aberration girl to drop from above into the group of disoriented soldiers and freeze them, her body suspended in mid-air while the linker mage reached in and touched the soldier closest to the field's edge, thicker bands of blue connecting the people together.

The effect was slow and inefficient normally and required a suitable amount of victims to truly be worthwhile, but a minute was more than enough damage, especially among six unlucky military recruits. When the field released again, the soldiers appeared to crumble into themselves, bodies dry as sand and just as structurally unstable, leaving only a bundle of clothes and their weapons behind. With legitimate arms dealers harder and harder to come by and almost prohibitively expensive for most without proper government sanction and discounts, the Aberrations were eager to take the weapons, even if their particular abilities didn't compliment the new equipment too well. 

That wasn't their main job anyway, being the distraction, and the sudden explosions that felled two of the security outposts was a sign the main group had found the snipers' nests.

It was supposed to have been going well.

Then the litany of hissing had erupted from the forest and a monster like a woman had grown large enough to dwarf the buildings. It moved like molasses, but boasted enough strength that even the superhuman forces of their group were swatted away like flies. Most powers seemed to roll harmlessly off its shoulders and the only truly appreciable effects relied on external manipulation rather than direct damage.

There was a point to which powers were too strong to risk engagement without knowing how to fight it, and that thing had certainly surpassed that point.

A plan to clutch at that filmy substance that formed its flesh-like dress and freeze it momentarily had succeeded for the duration of the girl's power, but in the time she held it at bay, it had pulled a handful of cement from the ground and crushed the labyrinth constructor with a throw like an afterthought, the maze immediately retracting and the landscape returning to normal in the wake of the Aberration's death. 

Bullets had no effect, and the linker mage had fled once the creature reached down for another scoop of cement.

He didn't get far.

When the girl's field ran out, she didn't get far either.

And then it was short work for Hector, who watched the scene aboveground from the safety of his containment chamber, tracking visuals through glass-black eyes and spinning slowly in his swivel chair, legs kicking back and forth impetuously. He was having fun for once--and who knew that girl could actually stop Miranda. It was impressive. If she hadn't fallen in with the wrong group, Hector thought he'd have wanted to play with her, too.

By the time it was all over, a fourth of the school had been decimated, with all its security outposts down and major security holes all across its perimeter where entire teams of soldiers and patrols had been murdered in the attempted invasion. And it was the most successful one by far, too, timed too conveniently to be coincidence and far too deadly to ignore.

The worry was creased in the furrows of Kardos's brow as he surveyed the shattered buildings on the southeastern side of the school. The attack had decimated most of the sport facilities, as well as the nearby security outposts. The buildings there now lay in ruins, concrete walls had already collapsed on themselves. Collateral damage from the battles between inhuman forces. The track was littered with debris and bodies, smoking vehicles and makeshift barricades marked where the guards had set up their defence perimeter.
 
The hospital had also suffered considerable damage from the initial attack. The buildings were still standing, though it was only a husk of what it once was. Most of the occupants had been evacuated; those that didn’t leave remained buried beneath the crumbled walls.
 
The administrative buildings remained mostly intact, fortunately. A broken window here and there, scorch marks and bullet holes marred the building’s front, but the damage was superficial at most. The same could said to the rest of the buildings on campus.   

[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/3R5vYYi.png?2[/img][/center][hr][center][color=silver]𝕄: 𝕊𝕖𝕡𝕥. 𝟙𝟜, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘   / /   𝕃𝕒 ℙ𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕒, 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕪𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕕   / /   𝕋𝕠𝕨𝕟   / /  ~𝟙𝟡𝟘𝟘[/color][/center][hr]
Meanwhile, Experimental Unit B was transported to the nearby town of La Plata, a larger location than Wisford, but still significantly smaller than the growing city that was Crimen Culpae 1. Stuck in that strange purgatory of not quite irrelevant, but not quite notable either, the town carried itself with an unsure air, several high rises in construction within what the mayor hoped to be the future "financial district" while the majority of the locale spread out in short, squat buildings built too many decades ago and entirely preserved out of sheer indifference to the modernizations around them. Close enough to a major hub of civilization and spared from any notable Dreamcatcher attacks, the town's police force and government-sponsored militia were ill-prepared for the lockdown that had been issued to towns near Wisford. As it was, their defense consisted of several car blockades and rooftop patrols, with what amounted to a ring of human bodies around the perimeter of the town facing Wisford.

Military clearance and communications had arrived just in time for the chief of police to relay that USARILN East's subnaturals and soldiers would be staying at the town for a period of time and that the situation in Wisford had been handled. The announcement was public enough that local stations picked up on the news and spread it among the townsfolk who wavered between a mixture of fear and anticipation. Some resolved to hole up in their homes until the subnaturals had passed through while others leaned over their porch railings, staring down the main road hoping to catch a glimpse without actually interacting.

The media, however, was starved for news in a town where a teenager saving a cat was considered the breaking event of the day and where rehashed news feeds from bigger stories around the world were the only reasons the populace even bothered with the news at all. The station had milked what they could of the Wisford disaster, but with military orders to remain out of the general vicinity of the town, there was little to do but wait until the situation changed. Of course the police chief received a slew of questions from the local news station regarding the Wisford situation and whether the incoming subnaturals had anything to do with the resolution, but he fielded them all with a curt "No comment."

That left them only one recourse which was to wait and follow the military arrivals until they could chance an interview with either an officer or--if they were truly lucky--one of the subnaturals themselves. It was the kind of controversial hit that big city news outlets always had their pick of, and finding one in La Plata was a godsend, so a journalist, a news anchor, and a camera crew followed the military cars from a safe distance, interviewing even the citizens down the street from the motel while they waited for the intimidating military soldiers to settle in.

The mostly uninjured students were placed inside the biggest motel the town could offer, recently requisitioned by USARILN East and promptly emptied of all current inhabitants, much to their chagrin. Each room there housed two single beds and a bathroom facility; however, the students weren’t allocated to specific rooms. The officer in charge of the group wasn't interested in keeping too close a watch on the more obedient students, choosing instead to eye the stream of information coming from USARILN East on his phone and making sure he would be ready to move if the situation changed. So the students were left to sort that out among themselves. The conscious ones, that was. 

In the motel's lobby, a terrified manager and receptionist cowered behind the front desk while the commanding officer addressed the group of students in front of him briefly.

[color f7976a]"If you're leaving the motel, you are to remain within easy access. That means stay on the main roads and don't wander any further than a few blocks. Make sure a soldier knows so someone can keep an eye on your tracker mark if they don't outright escort you. If we can't keep track of your position or you leave without informing one of us, we'll act on the assumption you tried to escape and shoot to kill."[/color]

That done, he left the building, returning to one of the APCs and shouting orders to the nearby soldiers.

The second truck of injured and unconscious students drove three blocks away to the town hospital, passing by a cafe and several restaurants where evening customers watched with wide eyes and bated breath, following the unwieldy truck's progress towards the hospital's ER entrance where each student was fearfully escorted from the emergency room after check ups and placed in their own accommodations in the local hospital: one per room with minimal guard presence among them patrolling the hallway that all the occupied hospital rooms shared. Hazel, however, was restrained by three more suppression cuffs--another on her right ankle, and two more on her wrists, then handcuffed to her bed. Unlike the usual cuff on their ankles with the option of turning suppression on and off, Hazel's were meant for dangerous prisoners. While most mages would have been entirely suppressed under the effects of four, Hazel's power still petered through, though it was a long shot from any of her prior antics. Four guards were stationed in the room at all times, weapons at the ready. If she so much as hinted at aggression, they had orders to kill.

Doctors and nurses were briefed by a soldier concerning the powers of the relevant students, with USARILN East's recommendations in handling each one while soldiers occasionally checked in on the child-sized body bag in the hospital morgue, making sure the dead Savannah was truly 1. her and 2. dead. 

Christmas's unconscious body was carefully rolled from room to room on his bed, the doctors injecting his blood via syringe and needle into all the injured students except Sander, whose notes had carefully and repeatedly warned against large doses of blood, and Hazel, who was under special watch. They did, however, leave one packet of blood for Sander in the room's refrigerator, the nurse handling it nearly throwing the bag as she tried to leave the vicinity of the subnatural within seconds. 

After the first bout of awe at the shimmering, glassy mist that enveloped Angelíque's torso and restored her to full health, the doctors were much more ready to utilize the boy's magic, with or without his permission. None of the soldiers were surprised to hear a request to use the blood on several of the long-term patients in the hospital and after a brief check with the commanding officer, they allowed it so long as the blood was replenished through a transfusion.

Afterwards, the doctors wheeled the healer back to his room and left him hooked up to a blood bag and IV. While the notes confirmed that the boy's blood could take in large volumes quickly and convert them, the hospital staff followed basic blood infusion procedure, fearful of the repercussions should they injure a subnatural--both from the subnatural himself and from the fearsome reputation of USARILN East.
[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/3R5vYYi.png?2[/img][/center][hr]
[hider=OOC Interaction Tags/Notes]
[@VarionusNW] [@Lasrever] [@ERode] [@VampireOracle] [@Zombehs] [@GreenGoat] [@Diggerton] [@banjoanjo] [@Baklava] [@RedDusk] [@Piercing Light] [@Dragonmancer] [@Riffus Maximus] [@Deathmyster] [@Chasers115] [@PapiTan] [@Kyrisse] [@January]

Everyone was moved into a new town. 'Cause shit went down. If you're in the motel, you pick your room with whoever you like. You can also all stay in one room, if you love each other that much, haha. Alternatively, Chris can sleep in the dumpster, too. No one would protest.

You will stay in this town for a little over two days. You have until Sept. 17, 0700 IC to do things. Have another collab hell. 

Info about stuff in town? Ask one of the GMs.

General town climate: unwelcoming. Not outrightly hostile, but definitely unhappy and no one wants you guys here--except the news station. GMs will manage general NPC responses while here and if a player feels they're comfortable enough to take the reins for the rest of scene in order to further some agenda or scene goal, we'll leave it to you.

We may accost certain players in town with the news reporters and one of the GMs may just invade a collab if the situation feels right, or open a reporter post in response to someone else.
[/hider]