[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/27xik2o.png[/img][/center]
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/X3HEnmq.png[/img][/center][hr][center][color=silver]𝕎𝕖𝕕: 𝕆𝕔𝕥. 𝟟, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘   / /   𝔹𝕒𝕝𝕕 ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝕀𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕕   / /   𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕙𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕖   / /  ~𝟘𝟝𝟚𝟘[/color][/center][hr]
The sea-laden air on the island was colder than inland temperatures at that time of year, when the seasons trudged through their transitions and especially in a downpour. Nathaniel sighed into a palm cupped over his mouth, using the sudden outward breath to cut off another threat of shivering throughout his soaked body. A light sweater was hardly enough for autumn storms and water ran in rivulets down his face. His orb pulsed rhythmically as he walked, suspended over his shoulder while at rest and lagging ever so slightly behind him, like the other six people making up the remainder of the group. Despite the storm, they kept a quick and steady pace, harsh circumstances something all were too familiar with.

Despite his confidence, Nathaniel hardly knew what to make of the mission, having preferred solo work until then with jobs large enough for US dollars instead of Brazilian [i]reais[/i], but small enough to prevent any notable figure from caring. Extortion and racketeering was good pay, until he ran afoul of the Amigos and the “Father” himself in a territorial dispute. The rumors were true that the leader of the Amigos was an Arbiter, but no underground gossip had readied him for the man’s ability to create powers at will. They had fought and the revelation that the Amigos’s leader could only create and use a certain power once was supposed to be gratifying; it only made the fight all the more unpredictable. Nathaniel had given in when darkness had settled around him like a vise, cutting off sounds and light and even the sensations of direction and gravity. He thought death was coming for him, but in the end the Father spared him—to use him, of course, as was the way of the dog-eat-dog world in the favela. 

He didn’t expect a happy end. No one in their line of work did, save for the stupid, and every fight and skirmish he came out of alive only nagged at the back of his mind with the inevitability of defeat and, subsequently, death. Mercy was a child’s fever dream in his country, and he had long outgrown it. Letting Isabelle run off to certain death while they abandoned her for the town’s ferry wasn’t his first time deciding someone’s life and it wouldn’t be the last. And he would keep making the decision to kill until someone stronger killed him instead. None of them would or could articulate it in so many words, but the recklessness of the Amigos wasn’t born from a callous disregard for the context of situations. They were all looking for places to die, and every one of them wanted it on their terms. In their own ways. 

But the game was to never define it so. Never explain the how’s and why’s of apparent insanity from children who had grown up in hell and learned to play with fire hoping for the glory of being consumed by it. Isabelle took her drugs to avoid thinking about that reality. Synthetic nightmares instead of real ones. If she died, it would only end her misery sooner.

The tired thoughts creaked and groaned through his mind on their walk towards the town, a trek that would have been much shorter had their main transportation method not run off to try and save the girl he had a puppy crush on. Even for Nathaniel, stopping the gap-closer’s movements was almost impossible and he hoped Chuck would have the presence of mind to leave if things went wrong at the mansion.

In the distance the lighthouse marked their endpoint, energy supplied by a converter in the form of a particularly useful mage that Zhang kept hidden on the island, providing the location with the required electricity without alerting suspicion. They had thought the capture would be easy once their tracker had identified the mark and his movements, but the sly bastard had eluded them, retreating to the underground caves that spanned a labyrinth beneath the island and collapsing entire areas, solid bedrock turning into sludge and deadly dust at a touch of the converter’s hand. They had lost three to the dust and one to a wave of liquefied rock before Nathaniel called for a retreat. Capturing someone who could convert states of matter on touch was far too deadly when the entire island proved a source of material for the target mage. Capturing him within the cave system was borderline suicide and the Amigos were known for brazen destruction, not stupidity—and certainly not for collapsing an entire cave on themselves. The rest of the group had taken the retreat order well, especially when it wasn’t their lives on the line for failure. 

And that was the Father’s personal mission failed, something Nathaniel would be paying dearly for. But in return they had acquired one of a set of mages that a particular client had paid the Amigos a great deal to procure (legs or not), having caught wind of a strike group ready to deploy to the island. One of the gang’s main investors, the man had enough weight to negotiate with the Father directly. Lose one, gain one, and he could only hope the client’s sway would temper their leader’s wrath.

[hr][center][color=silver]𝕎𝕖𝕕: 𝕆𝕔𝕥. 𝟟, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘   / /   𝔹𝕒𝕝𝕕 ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝕀𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕕   / /   ℤ𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕘'𝕤 𝔼𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕥𝕖   / /  ~𝟘𝟝𝟚𝟘[/color][/center][hr]
[color=f7976a]“Hold your fire!”[/color] an officer barked as a figure stumbled towards the soldiers. Long, blond hair made itself seen in the nick of time: a teenager soaked to the bone emerging from the woods. Gregory staggered forward, arms raised and shivering as widened eyes ogled the weapons in his face. The barrel, 37cm. Total length, 83.75cm.
 
The sudden complication prompted an inward curse from the head butler. Time was running out. He waved to shoo the student into the mansion before a blood-curdling scream pierced the pattering of the rain. Manic cackling accompanied the soldier’s throes.
 
Gregory was too late.
 
Twin whips of red flicked in and out of focus, systematically severing heads and limbs as the source of the whips was rushed around by an electric blue blur. A molten orange beam struck the mansion, hitting a wall below the sniper’s perch before it carved a scorching path towards them. Rendered concrete and tiles proved to be of no resistance to the laser. ‘A hot knife through butter’ was a severe understatement here. Just as the beam destroyed the nest it swerved violently, crackling gunfire forcing the mage’s attack off-path before his blue-haired ally rushed him out of the line of fire.
 
Gregory couldn’t even turn the whole way back to the enemy before the flash of red whipped by his vision. Suddenly his system was seized by agony, blazing sawblades blending his innards followed by a dangerous, unnerving cold. The Aberration plummeted to his side. His hands weakly reached to where his lower body should have been, blood leaking to meet the relentless rain. 267mL per second. Gregory could do nothing but curse the calculation with a furious, wordless whimper. Even with the end in sight, his Stigma was a diligent affliction.
 
The angle of depression of the laser striking the soldiers, 46.8 degrees. The barrel length of the butler’s pistol, 10.2cm. The number of soldiers still standing on this side of the manor, twenty-three. There was some solace in that last number at least. His screams would easily be blanketed by theirs.
 
As his consciousness began fading, a flash on the manor’s roof briefly distracted from the searing pain in his abdomen. Translucent pink cloaked the two figures and, though he could not identify them at first glance, Gregory felt leaden dread sink to the spilled pit of his stomach as carbines pointed skyward. 13.68m above ground. More yelling as soldiers rushed to face the sudden arrivals. But none had the chance to fire before the laser struck once again, collapsing the roof beneath the teleporters’ feet. Blurs of red and blue gratefully seized the opportunity provided by Siena and Brent’s entrance. More and more blood. More screaming. The slaughter went on, though Gregory only caught a few lingering seconds of it before his eyes finally shut, his last thought a prediction from his Stigma about how many minutes of brain activity he had left given current oxygen supply and failing blood flow—5 minutes and 21 seconds.

[hr]
Above the transected Gregory, Brent and Siena fell into the usually locked attic, landing on the broken, smoking timbers of the collapsed roof and tumbling onto the ruined desk and floor, respectively, where rain-smeared folders had spilled their contents out across the floor: dossiers on Unit A, margin notes in careful cursive, an open binder with population charts, demographics, and meaningless numbers interspersed with circles, cross-outs, and question marks. Water swept into the room along with the roof’s cave in, a gutter pipe broken off in an angle that sloshed the remainder of its contents across the floor, catching up the scattered sheets and drenching them entirely.

The room was nothing but a simple bed, desk, and dresser, its occupant clearly not a common presence. But the information wasn’t the sort to take in at the moment, especially not when the laser-scarred floor threatened to collapse underneath the injured duo, groaning ominously with the weight of the roof’s timbers and the heavy damage to the mansion as a whole. 

Another beam of light flashed through in a single shot, fired randomly in a Hail Mary to catch Brent and Siena, though the guess went wide, slicing through the bed in the corner instead of the two students and sending more unkempt sheets of paper fluttering into the air only to be caught by the rain and pummeled back to the ground, water already blotting out the ink.

Siena’s left ankle had twisted from the fall, the muscle there already swelling with the sprain while her left shoulder, having taken the brunt of the impact, had dislocated entirely. Where the humerus was supposed to articulate with the shoulder joint, a stiff, bony bulge protruded instead.

Brent’s raincoat protected him from the lighter cuts and scrapes to the torso, but that was a paltry reassurance in contrast to the heavy bruising on his back and along his spine where he had landed on the desk against the wall, with his lower body unlucky enough to catch the edge of the wooden desk and his upper body sprawled across the floor, nearly upside down. The impact against the wooden edge sparked a sudden flare of agony along the Arbiter’s lower back that quickly faded into a dull, almost numb throbbing. But if he tried to move his legs, he would quickly find out that they would no longer obey.

[hr][center][color=silver]𝕎𝕖𝕕: 𝕆𝕔𝕥. 𝟟, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘   / /   𝔹𝕒𝕝𝕕 ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝕀𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕕   / /   𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕙𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕖   / /  ~𝟘𝟝𝟚𝟘[/color][/center][hr]
In the tunnels, the students who had wisely—or not so wisely—chosen to run away were near the end of the path thanks to the frantic pace set by the seven staff members behind them, leaving the less athletic winded and gasping for breath by the time they reached a set of metal rungs that led up to a trapdoor on the bottom floor of the lighthouse.

White paint flecked off the walls and left behind patches of dark gray concrete along the interior of the lighthouse while various metal barrels and empty tables stood unattended, rusting and aged. The stone floor, however, was swept clean and small utensils and bowls were stashed in a pile within a bucket near the door, still wet from a recent cleaning. The smell of damp earth and rain lingered inside the structure and watery shoeprints led up the winding staircase that spiraled to the lighthouse top. Shoeprints, and droplets of blood, light enough and sparsely enough that the injury seemed only minor.

Outside, the island’s official ferry waited, the old decoration on its hull long washed away by sand and surf. The vessel bobbed rapidly, buffeted by the storm winds and the simmering ocean waves while water streamed off the deck. Despite its lonesome look, the boat was constantly supplied with fuel and ready to use on a moment’s notice, though [i]who[/i] would commandeer it remained to be seen.

[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/3R5vYYi.png?2[/img][/center][hr]
[hider=OOC Notes]
A week deadline. As usual, for any questions refer to the GMs. 
    
Angel is still with Rhohan and very mute + very legless. She is free to be awake, half-awake, or unconscious as her player decides.
    
For the tunnel group, there are four maids and three butlers behind you guys and the Amigos are also quickly approaching the ferry.
[/hider]