The Biggest Little City

Today's mission sent us to Reno, where we were to track down an incident near a high school that put four boys in the hospital. Supposedly, an amorphous black mass was seen leaving the scene. This time I was teamed with Fireguard (who seems like kind of an ass), and Ace. Interesting thing about this high school is that incidents of eruption are three times higher than the national norm for the United States. Seemed like it would be interesting, and it was.

We headed over to Reno after stopped to get a snack. First stop was the police station, where we met with the assistant police chief. He told us what they knew so far, which was pretty much that the kids involved were troublemakers, but only minor stuff. The one kid that was still conscious had given a report, but then immediately lawyered up, so we were out of luck there. I had a sneaking suspicion he may have been the nova involved, so we decided to head over to the hospital so I could check it out.

When we got to the hospital, I did notice that there was a nova there, but it turns out it was just a celebrity getting some plastic surgery. One of the boys was just getting out of surgery, and at Fireguard's urging, I got us in to talk to him. His mother was with him, but Ace took her aside. When she was out of the room, Fireguard used his powers to heal the boy, and we were able to talk to him. It seems they were making fun of a boy at their school, Robbie Ellison, when he started to attack them with dark tendrils of energy. Tom didn't have Robbie's address, but he was able to describe the area and the house for us.

Having heard enough from Tom, we headed over to Robbie's house. Unfortunately, he wasn't there. I got in to talk to his parents by saying we were giving him a prize, and they told us Robbie was at school. Off we go!

At the school, they called Robbie to the front office. While we were talking, I noticed there were no less than eight novas in the area! Robbie's teacher reported to the front that he hasn't been in class, and while we were deciding what to do next, Ace told us to follow him, that there was trouble. We ran out towards the football field, where I could detect three novas and a baseline coming on another nova.

It was obvious that a fight was brewing, and we tried to stop it. Robbie was in the center, floating on an inky darkness, while the others were attacking him. The leader of this "gang," a nova in a diamond form, was shouting about how Robbie had killed his brother. After some effort, I managed to dorm down the novas except for the diamond one, and Ace was able to subdue him. We stopped the fight, and after I reported back to base, took them to the office to call their parents.

When we got to the office, the principal called us away from the children to talk, and showed us that the Directive was secretly monitoring the school. I wanted to know why they let Robbie in with the rest of the students after last night's incident, but he assured us they "would handle it" Yeah, right. It was pretty uneventful after that, with us talking to the parents to convince them to register their children with Utopia.

Ace mentioned something afterwards that still stands out to me though. When the Directive showed us their operation, the "principal" said that we should tell Utopia if they tried to expose the Directive's operation at the school, they had enough dirt to put Utopia's social programs back years. What could he have been talking about? Whatever it was, obviously he believed it was true, or he wouldn't have made the threats.