[center][h1][color=7adc6f]Kestrel[/color][/h1][/center]

In the week she had spent trying to get to grips with her powers, nothing seemed stranger to Kestrel now than hearing about what should be a ghost robbing the Precious Metal Vault. Thundercloud was dead, after all. He had to be. When the virus decimated the superhero population everyone mourned and no one expected the virus to have been selective about who it took.

And yet there it was. Kestrel bolted upright on her couch when the news broke. She turned up the volume on the TV as the murmurs of other concerned students filled the corridor outside of her dorm room. Was this a nightmare? Her sleep had been disturbed since the meteor fell but this felt all too vivid. She watched intently as news anchors argued over how this could be happening, interspersed with helicopter footage that didn't show much of anything beyond the initial encounter the authorities had with an armed force storming the building and the briefest glimpse of a rotund man dressed like a thunder cloud.

She stared at the TV and her mind filled with static. All the superheroes were dead. The supervillains, or at least [i]this[/i] supervillain, was not. Thundercloud was no joke and a handful of beat cops didn't stand a chance against him. As far as Kestrel knew, she was the only other person with superpowers right now. New, fledgling, barely explored superpowers but superpowers all the same. The feeling of responsibility crushed her, the voices of her parents in her head telling her not to go crushed her even more. But they were several hundred miles away and safe, Lafayette Financial Tower was 10 minutes away from her dorm, 5 if she ran fast. She had to go.

Pushing her way out through the corridor took some effort but once she was out and wriggled her grey jacket on, Kestrel ran straight for the tower. She was never exceptionally athletic but the faster her heart pounded the more grateful she was for never skipping physical education. The closer she got to the building the more precarious her run became. Crowds of people were either forming or fleeing, local bars overflowed with people piling inside for safety or just to watch what was happening on the news.

Lafayette Financial Tower loomed over her. The same crushing feeling kept eating away at her but it was far too late to back out now. She would never forgive herself. A cursory glance at the entrance of the building revealed that the local authorities were still locked in a standoff with the Storm Troopers. With any luck, the rest of Thundercloud's force would be down in the vault and not in the lobby and with that haphazardly formed plan she ventured forth. She pushed her way through the crowd that formed in the surrounding area and put up the hood on her jacket. The crowd was large enough to have spilled over near the side of the building, she figured that without attracting too much attention she could make it from the edge of the crowd to the side entrance into the lobby with a very brisk walk in just a few seconds. No one would notice her while they were too busy watching the main performance and even if they did she doubted that they would call out to her.

And she did just that. In what felt like one swift move she broke away from the crowd, made her way towards the door and entered the lobby, expecting to find it empty or patrolled by one of Thundercloud's lackeys. Instead she witnessed the man himself. A man in a jumpsuit that inexplicably did not burst at the seams, gorging on chips. While she concealed herself behind a pillar, her eyes quickly darted to the sight of another young woman who looked as though she had arrived just moments before. The [color=00aeef]"Oh no."[/color] she uttered told Kestrel enough to go on, and she quietly conjured a vest of energy beneath her clothes.