Blaze wrote:"Meaningless? We were delivering food to orphans when those demons jumped us! We were fighting them off while the food was delivered! Now I bet they've taken it all!" Jean says angrily, flailing wildly, with much more strength her frame would suggest.
Demons? Food delivery to orphans?
Well... Abel is still sitting overwatch as Alex was supposedly going to distract the demons. If it looks like the demons are going to steal food from poor hungry orphans, perhaps it's time to put the fear of science into those punks...
Blaze wrote:The mother gives a tired, relieved sigh to the doctor. She shows signs of some malnutrition and physical exhaustion, nothing some good meals and bedrest won't fix.
"Yes, but at least it's over..."
The doctor nods, making notes on her datapad. The malnutrition is worrisome, and indicates that circumstances within Muffinville are worse than had been expected. She makes a note that the family should receive a tailored diet at the beginning, to help their bodies readapt to eating a properly balanced diet and ensure they don't suffer complications. Once satisfied that the examination of the mother is complete, she turns to the father. "Last one..."
Blaze wrote:The nuns endure the ride mostly silently, some offering up prayers. When the transport stops, they all step out in a line, keeping heads bowed and lips moving in silent prayers.
The young girl with silver hair notes the behavior of the nuns, and after a moment, simply shrugs. "Very well. Follow me."
Leading the way, she begins to walk deeper into the facility. Four of the guards accompany the nuns, two in the lead with the girl, and two following behind. The halls they walk through seem somewhat grim, the walls made of some kind of well-armored material, interrupted periodically by firewalls to help isolate portions of the facility in case the containment were to be breached. Occasionally they pass through areas that seem more populated, with scientists and soldiers mingling in the halls, laboratories occasionally visible through bulletproof glass. But for the most part, much of the facility seems to be devoted to machinery of some kind.
As they approach the center, they find their path taking them through larger chambers, following catwalks that hang over massive machines. Assuming a minimal amount of sensitivity towards spiritual and magical energies remains in the nuns, despite their exposure to the AFC2 compound, they will start to feel an intense surge of energy in this area. Specifically... beige energy. The Color Isolation and Containment Facility is built over what was once the Sand Academy, after all, and the enormous groundswell of beige energy that the Academy served to contain remains. As the group proceeds deeper and deeper into the facility, the intensity of the energy continues to build... first a faint tingling in the background... then a steady flow... and finally, it begins to feel like an incredible torrent of energy, the nuns feeling rather like pebbles in a rushing river as they're engulfed and surrounded by the flow of energy through the area. While likely lacking any technical knowledge, depending on their sensitivity they may be able to tell that this flow of energy isn't entirely natural -- the beige upwelling from the ground would normally spill outwards over the surrounding community, but instead, the enormous machines the CTC have constructed here keep it contained, focusing it inwards, instead. The machines are constructed as a hollow ring, focusing the intense levels of beige energy onto a single point located at their center -- the heart of the Color Isolation and Containment Facility.
It is here that they find themselves being brought, to a massively armored chamber located within the inner ring of the machines. Eva pauses before a hatchway, a simple control panel with a red and a green light at its side, before she turns to the nuns, a slight smile on her face.
"From what I understand, you are women of faith. Are you prepared to face the challenges that lie within... to come face to face with true divinity?" she asks.
Blaze wrote:As the search broadens, it starts finding hits for a family called the Cadwaladers. In a universe where paranormal activity is an accepted way of life, the Cadwaladers are a historic name. In the Middle Ages, when dealing with paranormal entities was a purely religious field, dealt with with prayers, chants and blessed weapons, Aeron Cadwalader was an alchemist in Great Britain who discovered that certain flowers, herbs and minerals had effects on a ghost that roamed his vegetable garden. He began testing various natural materials on the supernatural, cataloging their effects on different kinds of entities and using this knowledge to exorcise spirits for a fee much cheaper than what the Church offered. They tried to squelch him proclaiming his methods as blasphemous and ineffective, but unfortunately, the printing press had been invented. Aeron was able to get a book printed detailing methods of paranormal defense anyone could do and became very wealthy.
He bought some land, invited his scattered family to live there and join him in his research, hiring mercenaries to test their findings on more dangerous entities, such as vampires and werewolves. Some of these mercenaries married into the family eventually, and martial training became something of a tradition. They invested their considerable capital into the advancement of science, being a big player in the creation of guns, explosives and modern gardening techniques. TO this day, the Cadwaladers are still a wealthy family, with many of them showing up in the military, police, sciences and paranormal investigators.
The reason these facts might show up is because there is a news story from a few years back talking about how the Cadwalader Manor which houses the main family was apparently in an uproar. Rumors of one child fleeing, millions of dollars stolen, nothing concrete and no follow-up story, but it ties in with Blaze's apparent history...
(( "guns, explosives, and modern gardening techniques"!
))
The articles on the Cadwaladers lie within the titantic repositories of data held by the CTC, largely unnoticed and unheeded... until a certain correlation is discovered, a high probability that the child who fled the family correlates closely to the individual known as Blaze, already a person of interest to the CTC, particularly due to Blaze's connection in turn to Jean and Logos. As the search algorithms follow up on the correlation, the significance of the data increases upon discovery of the Cadwaladers historic connection to fighting the paranormal. Were they somehow connected to the incidents in Muffinville? While angels and demons were a bit of a far cry from ghosts, vampires, and werewolves, a hypothesis is speculated -- that somehow the incidents were connected to the Cadwaladers, particularly if Blaze was, in fact, the child who had fled. Those watching over the programs note the development of this hypothesis, and begin searching for more information -- both trying to ascertain more details about Blaze's history, particularly when he started to become noticed within Muffinville, as well as the current status of the Cadwalader family and their philosophies.