Halcyon City
South Burnaby Secondary School
CLAP Program Classroom
Early, Early Morning

South Burnaby High School (Go badgers!) was an old, stately leftover from a prior era. The gothic spires loomed skeletal in the pale early morning light. Some of the chill of the night still remained but the air was already warm in that full, pregnant way that spoke of immense heat to come.

This early the building had only a handful of people and empty halls were eerily silent with the occasional echoed footfall.

The CLAP classroom was in the north wing of the building, and was separate from the rest of the building by storerooms and the assembly room.

The young heroes gathered to discuss what happened. And what was going to happen next.

When Markus got home, Aaron was there, asleep, his breathing long and slow and deep. He wouldn't respond to attempts to wake him and, when Markus left this morning, he was still asleep.

Victoria's father was awake and waiting when she arrived home. She steeled herself for an interrogation and punishment, but he questioned her only perfunctorily (almost apathetically) before letting her go and heading to bed.

Susanna's home was quiet when she got home. Her mother's car was gone and she was not at home. She hadn't returned by this morning.

Alex's room was quiet, but her sleep was broken over and over in the hours that followed and she woke with the feeling of being watched. But nothing came of it.

The next morning the local news was all about the fire. The smoke. The accident. And the team of young Masks seen in and around the area during, but who fled from authorities when asked to explain themselves.

There were a couple of dark, shaky, grainy videos from cell phones showing Payback entering the fiery building, Barghest and Ultion interacting with violent little shadow creatures.

No mention of the soldiers. Or the helicopter.

The quiet room was filled with the question:

What now?

So maybe things could’ve gone a little better last night, and maybe Alex could’ve been a little more forthcoming about the things she knew at the time, but those were all yesterday-Alex’s problems. She’d dragged herself out of bed for the second time in far-too-few hours to make it in for an early morning start, and with about as much coffee as blood running through her veins (and another take-out cup trapped firmly between her palms) Alex was all too intent on getting things started right. Call it the sort of clarity that comes when you push the dial past zero and go from being a walking corpse to ready to fistfight God in a Denny’s parking lot.

She rocked far back in her chair, almost tempting the thing to fall. A sharp sigh escaped her lips.

“I had a visitor last night – before everything went down, I mean. Don’t know what you all remember from that time we took down my old team, but one of them – the invisible-but-not-really guy – decided he was doing me a favour by breaking into my room to play bleeding heart. Guess he thought I’d give him a sympathetic audience now he’d realised I was right all along.”

Alex planted her seat back on the floor with a loud thunk and took a long pull from her cup. For all her bravado, all her show of being unaffected, she still looked someone who’d been kept up fighting literal and metaphorical monsters. She stuck out her chin. “He said my old boss is back. And he’s got a new friend, probably the asshole behind those shadow demons.”

A nonchalant shrug paired with a bitter curl of the lip. “So that’s fun, right?”
This message was last edited by the player at 23:09, Tue 02 May 2023.