The International Tactical Superhuman Defense Agency Headquarters are located in New York City, next to the United Nations. The ITSDA replaced the Security Council, the division of the UN charged with maintaining international peace, and as such have been supplied with the best technology that could be provided by the member countries. The complex has several stories both above and below ground, and thought it looks like a modern building it has been built to the specs of a nuclear bunker in preparation for any straight on assault by the Wave or evil rogue Gifted teams. There are training grounds, libraries, research areas and labs catering to several sciences, living quarters, a fully stocked cafeteria, target ranges, and a weapons vault. These, however, are only the areas basic members and low level officials in their respective governments know about; there are whispered rumors that the true HQ lay beneath the shiny façade that first meets the eye if one has the clearance to unlock its secrets...
This message was last updated by the GM at 23:29, Mon 25 May 2015.

Jill Irvine's eyes wouldn't stop tearing up. C'mon, it had only been thirty-eight hours; she had done this before. Anyway, just a little more digging, just a little more time, and she would be able to grab one of the Hydra's heads.

"That's the funny thing about the Hydra analogy," thought Jill as she downed the last sip of another one of those adolescent, "extreme" energy drinks. In truth, she hated the drinks, but she was tired of being tired and her teeth were already stained brown by the coffee she drank. "No one ever seems to notice that you don't have to keep cutting off heads; the beast's necks can lead you right to its heart."

And that was exactly what she planned to do. If Namidias wouldn't expose himself, she'd have to make one of his villains lead her to him. Namidias, con-man that he was, had certainly taken precautions against this. But you can't prepare for the ITSDA; if there's one thing the Gifted are not, it's predictable.

Just as she was beginning to get lost in thought, her computer chirped. A notification saying that a photo entitled "EtTu_Brute_0079" had been sent over the private ITSDA network flashed up on her screen. She opened the photo with two hasty clicks.

"We've got you, you bastard," said the ITSDA First Response Team Commander, her tone a cocktail of weariness, rage and sadistic delight. "It's over."

The photo depicted a genial looking, middle-aged Brazilian man in a sharp red suit shaking hands with known Namidian terrorist Daniel "Zenith" Kreid in the maddeningly large and ornate lobby of a Chicago office building. A third man stood beside the pair, clad in a leather jacket and an ugly mullet that didn't suit his young face. When she looked closely, she could see nearly microscopic particles of every color hanging in the air beside him... that must be "Ash."

As if that photos wasn't enough, "EtTu_Brute_0080" popped up with a message attached. The photo depicted the trio in a private office, looking over a map of the Windy City that was being projected on a huge monitor. The map was dotted with numbered targets of several different colors. There was a plan here, and it needed to be stopped, now! The brief message sent alongside the photo read "5 Hours."

Jill smashed her thumb into the button hidden in her pocket. Her radio crackled to life.

"Eddie, deliver an announcement. The Wave is plotting to attack Chicago. Prime targets are Zenith, Ash, and... Brazilian President Roman Galvez. Time is limited. Civilian protection is your priority. All necessary force is authorized."

"Yes, ma'am," said Lt. Edward Ren.

Ms. Irvine shuddered at the last five words of her order, but she had to say them. Time was running out, and she had to trust her soldiers to do the right thing. Otherwise, Chicago would be another California, another wasteland drowned beneath the Namidian Wave. And she couldn't have that. No one else needed to lose their homeland, no one else needed to throw their life away chasing Namidias' shadow.

She jumped out of her chair and headed for the elevator down to the ITSDA hangar. Hopefully, she could make it there before the ashes started falling.

He was starting to hit his limits when Sherry, from Denver, came through and gave him some more reserves again, laughing at the black circles under his eyes before he dropped her off in Chicago. The whole process would be easier if he was allowed to dump everybody in one location, but he was being forced into a series of sepearate areas. He understood the prospect of keeping their troops staggered, but some of the places he'd never been to, and establishing connections was a lot harder than it otherwise would have been. But he understood the importance of what he was doing, at least. His quick placement of troops, that otherwise would have taken a couple of hours to get there, was immensely useful, but he was worried about how many people were being pulled out of New York for this. Most of them weren't exactly necessary to the ITSDA's functions here, but they were backup, and if something went wrong here...

He shook his head, ignoring the thoughts, and moved a couple more squadrons before he was told to take a break before he killed himself. It felt like it had been hours since Sherry had come through, even if it had only been 5 minutes at the most, and it was verging on the point of pain to move these people. At least he wasn't the only mode of transport, and others were taking plans or being flown, or flying themselves. He still ranked as one of the fastest methods, and he was moving the more integral people in. Front liners, mission commanders. It really wasn't a huge amount of people, but it was still one of the largest operations Jump had been involved in personally. A woman rushed by, passing him a large glass of water on her way, which he gulped down quickly. He sat still for nearly a minute, meditating quietly and gathering up the last of his reserves before taking his position on the pad and beginning to move more people.

The new room was much better than the old. When Ashley had first arrived at ITSDA headquarters, he had been held underground "for security reasons." Not that he really cared about being under observation, but the room had been so sterile. Its white walls and sparse furnishings left very little by way of stimulation and each day brought more agitation. The white had seemed infinite. Like everything else, really... It did not wave or tremble like the world should; the white had just stood. To the young man, it belied dimension. When the powers that be realized the problem, they brought him markers and coloring books, picture guides to animals and exotic places, books of art. But behind the book was always the white, like a static filling all of his senses. They took away the markers once Boomer, a nickname he had soon garnered among the agents, nurses and scientists, took them to the walls. He got a new room. Different and the same. In truth the only redeeming quality of his first few months at the headquarters was the food, which was delivered regularly from an endless list of options.

---

Ashley had only been in the newest room for a day, he was still investigating it. However, it was already so much better than the previous ones. For one, it had big windows facing east, which caught the sun in the morning. The whole room had sparkled for an hour. The wall paint alternated between a subtle eggshell and a mocha, and the furniture provided a wide variety of wonderful textures: scratchy, cushy, soft, hard, cold, bumpy. There was even a small fern in the corner beside a window. There were agents in the room with him, they sat on the couch, ruffling papers and skimming touch screens. They were polite, but quiet.

Ashley stood in the corner, his face mere inches away from the fern. The plant was not just one green, but a hundred. Each leaf wriggled and waved, each stoma opening and closing. Ashley could hear them and he stood there, mouthing along with them. "Pmop, pmop, pmop." He made the noise for a while. Behind the fern the brown wall giggled, the mocha sloughing off wave after wave. The movement distracted him from the fern. "It's brown all the way down." He said after a moment. He punctuated the thought with another "Pmop."

"What was that?" one of the agents asked, looking up from his papers. "What? It's all brown, I said." Ashley turned to look at the two men. "Honestly, I'm surprised you heard me over that awful alarm on your phone. The vacuum is bad enough." He said, gesturing toward the small Indian man near the bed. The agents look from Boomer, to one another, to an empty (albeit clean) corner near the bed. As he looked at the two and spoke, his head bobbed up and down like he was watching something. "Boomer, no one's alarm..." No sooner had the word alarm escaped his lips than a generic series of beeps issued forth from his partner's cellphone. "It's noon." He said with a smirk, turning off the alarm. "Of course. I'll never get used to that. Ok, which one of us is going to the cafeteria?" He asked holding out a fist, the universal sign for conflict resolution. Without turning around, Ashley interrupted "Rock, paper; scissor, scissor; scissor, rock; paper, rock. Randy, I want miso soup, lemon jello and orange juice." The other agent's smirk widen. "I'll have a quesadilla and a water." Dropping his fist defeatedly, Randy stood. After long glare at the back of Ashley's head, he walked out the door, reciting the order in a mumble.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:17, Mon 23 May 2016.

One month down the line from her first ever warzone, Brianna had recovered rather quickly from the horrors she saw. How fortunate for her that she possessed 2 of the most important things to recover from such a scarring experience; a suite of psycho-therapeutic skills at her disposal and her very own therapist; the guardian angel who saw her thoughts and memories as if they were his own.

Valorum was little more than a voice in Brianna's head at first; the damage he had suffered fighting Destroyer and the nova he sacrificed himself to cripple Deiter with had reduced his physical form to shards. However, with no trouble to be had afterwards, he slowly began recovering his ability to project himself whilst helping Brianna put her mind back in place. How this worked, no-one beyond him could explain, but he swiftly recovered in full.

The nameless soldiers who died, both friend and foe, still haunted the novice agent, and no doubt would remain with her for the rest of her life, but she had other problems to worry about. Awaiting her criminal trial in the Netherlands, she had simply returned to ITSDA Headquarters in New-York, helplessly watching Frank, Black Magic and Vandal leave to be tried; the people who risked their lives to save her and who knows how many others were being treated like criminals, and she wasn't left out.

Having isolated herself since she could find no-one else from Gaultown, not Knight, nor Jill, Whisper, or even Glitch, it wasn't a surprise that Brianna occupied a seat in the corner of the cafeteria by an open window, separate from virtually everyone else in the room, dressed in her usual sterile, white attire and slowly eating a salad, some bread and tomato soup whilst lost in thought, like a forlorn pillar of salt.


...that group a few tables to the left looks nice. They're not loud like the one near the exit, but they're still talking to each other.

...

...it doesn't look like too serious a discussion. Maybe you could slide over and join them.

No thanks.

*sigh* Look, you've been a part of the 'SDA for 2 years and the only person you know in detail is me. It's high time you start making some friends around here.

For the hundredth time, I really don't want to...

And I really don't want to force you, but if I have to, so help me God-

I just...don't want to bother anyone right now.

FINE, but one of these days you're going to need a friend because they don't just materialize out of thin air.
This message was last edited by the player at 19:33, Sun 12 June 2016.

This message was deleted by the player at 03:30, Sun 26 June 2016.

Phoenix Crimson sat upright in his recovery bed, and winced as he put stress on one of his abdominal wounds. He did a quick count and realised that he'd been shot ten times- double digits- which beat his previous record of 'seven bullets survived in one engagement'. His armour had only managed to stop a few of the rounds from dealing serious damage.
Daniels handlers often scolded him for taking too many risks in combat, but the Agents almost self-destructive recklessness had never let him take that advice on board for very long. The worrying truth was that Phoenix didn't really care how much of a beating he took during his missions; and so long as he'd either die heroically, or get patched up afterwards, he was willing to follow his gut instincts into any kind of danger. This time though his instincts had let him down, others had paid the price on his behalf, and he was feeling rather guilty.

He drew his knees close to his chest and sat in uncharacteristically quiet contemplation as he tried to think were it'd all went wrong. On one hand the S.A agent who had taunted him over the police communicator had berated him for acting too late, whereas he had apparently disrupted the AGF's counter-attack plans by leaping into action too early. Both accounts couldn't possibly be correct... could they? The AGF's second assault had been as doomed to fail as their first, right? Phoenix couldn't know. At the time he was certain that he'd acted in the best way, by following orders right up until the lives of innocent hostages had been put in peril, but that clearly hadn't been good enough. Was he right to have taken the risk by striking out first, or should he have continued to stand idly on the sidelines to leave Schwartz Augen to wreck havoc? Neither option seemed particularly appealing.

Crimson did what he always would when faced with a problem that his black-and-white morality couldn't resolve; and wondered what his mentor, Kobaruto, would do in his place.
For one thing Crimson doubted that Kobaruto would have failed so utterly in his duties, and for a second he was certain that Kobaruto would have beaten the tar out of him if Crimson had ever been this sloppy back in his 'Trigram' days. Unsurprisingly, the thoughts didn't improve his mood. He sunk his head between his hands to stifle an involuntary shout of shame.

The worst part of it wasn't that his enemies had escaped, but that his intervention had done nothing to redeem himself in the eyes of the public. Maybe he'd only made the situation worse. He felt a cold shudder run over his body, and doubled over as the unpleasant sensation caused his skin to blacken and peel away once more. He gagged, and tried not to look too closely at the process. That was another thing. What the hell had they drugged him with?! Whatever it was Crimson wasn't a fan, even though the injection was currently saving his life its side effects only added onto his current misery.

He hated this, he tried to force his usual optimism into action but the lack of any kind of silver lining made it difficult to even consider how he might carry on from here... He focused on what could be done to improve the situation instead, but the results were similarly disappointing. All he could do was to continue with media-based damage control, and try harder not to let it blow up in his face so spectacularly in future.

Lying in his recovery bed Phoenix clenched his fists. The action sent stabs of pain shooting from his bicep wound, but he ignored the feeling. He tightened his eyes shut as the corner of his vision began to blur with tears, and he tried to focus his frustrated sense of defeat into something constructive. He would find a way to regain the trust that he's lost.

Isn't that how I made it here in the first place?

...mostly, yes, but still-

"...whenever Gifted work together, things get better for everyone. So this is also part of a pilot program designed to rehabilitate former criminals and give them an optional way out of such criminal work. They will be tracked and rendered powerless if they are violent Gifted."

Brianna looked up from the remainder of her meal to look at a T.V screen embedded in the wall nearby, displaying the very same press conference in Seattle that Meta was addressing. She knew of Mr. Jameson by his reputation of course; a Gifted genius who had made it as a brilliant innovator in today's technological industry. As the press conference further unfolded with Meta speaking of the GTFUnited initiative and bettering security in the wake of the Gaultown incident, the mention of which caused Brianna to shudder, she spotted Frank and Vandal standing among the other people around Mr. Jameson. The sight of those two supporting a project like GTFUnited managed to bring a rare smile to her lips as she watched.

I have more friends than you might think, Val.

*Harrumphs* I mean others. Sure, Frank and Sarah are close to us, but they're on the other side of the country right now. Besides, you can't exactly go wherever you want whilst waiting for your own hearing.

The mention of her upcoming trial did little to dampen Brianna's mood as she finished what remained of her lunch. As she got up to dispose of her dishes, Valorum still prodded at the small flame of optimism within his host;

I can tell what you're thinking, and you really shouldn't get your hopes up. This is an international criminal tribunal you'll be going to. I can stop many things from harming you, but the law isn't one of them.

Maybe, but Frank is the biggest scapegoat I can think of. If he could get out of that courtroom and make it back to the U.S safely, I think my chances are pretty good too.

...that's a good point, actually. If anyone would have been convicted because of Gaul-...that incident...it'd be him...but that doesn't mean we should be complacent.

No, but we can't let it get in the way of our work. There are people who need our help here and now.

True...*sigh* I guess all we can do is keep calm and carry on.

With a small smile of satisfaction, Brianna threw what rubbish she had away and left the cafeteria to continue with her day, her spirits lifted.

----------

Some time later, Brianna was taking one last look at the document on her clipboard before she opened the door to her next patient's room. Having survived around 10 direct gunshots, Phoenix Crimson needed healing only Brianna's gift could provide to get him back on his feet. To her, this man had seen all kinds of trauma recently, and having spent most of her time around wounds or injuries of many varieties, Brianna was expecting to see something bad, bloody, or broken.

However, sliding the door to Crimson's recovery room open and seeing him laying on his bed with his fists clenched and a tear rolling down from the corner of his eye was not the kind of thing she had braced herself for. She was so caught off guard at the sight, when she realized that Crimson hadn't noticed her walk in, she quietly stood in the doorway for a full minute, hands folded respectfully in front of her with the clipboard in her grasp, letting him work through whatever was troubling him for a short while longer. She eventually indicating her presence by gently saying:

"If now's a bad time, I can come by later..."

"Ah!-"
The moment that he knew he was being watched Crimson rolled over and quickly brushed his eyes clear with his uninjured arm. His expression flushed red as he wondered how much Brianna had seen, and how badly he probably looked at the moment. Sitting alone with crippling injuries was one thing, but in front of other people Daniel always wanted to put on a brave face. He resisted the protests of his damaged body as he sat upright in his bed, and offered Brianna a forced smile.
"I wasn't- I mean... now's fine."

Crimson finally recognised who he was talking to. Usually it'd been Sherry who'd put him back together after his more... violent... missions, but he nonetheless knew Brianna from somewhere. He narrowed his eyes quizzically to her for a moment, before he finally remembered her from some of the reports following the Gaultown incident.
"You're Brianna... right? I think I read your documents once..."
The mention of documents stirred his memory again, and he realised that if Brianna was wrapped up in Gaultown that she had plenty of problems of her own. Before she could answer Crimson shot her a concerned look, and spoke out with sincere sympathy.
"What happened is SO unfair!- I'm really sorry about all the crap you've had to deal with!"