So here's the fun of this scenario -- you get to decide where the characters are. ;) Have fun with that. You can improvise what sort of help they had on the run and so forth. Brian was totally out for however long you need him to have been out. 

I don't think our characters knew each other (or well) before it all happened, they just got thrown together in the chaos of the Uprising and the escape.

Oh, and don't sweat the length of my first post -- I tend to do smaller posts in the RP after a big first post. It's just that it's a lot of material to cover in the first post.