“I hate this weather.”

The words slipped from the mouth of a blue-haired man lounged in the backseat of a deceptively normal car travelling from Matissi to Tewen. His face was the picture of absolute boredom as ice-blue eyes stared out of the window at the scenery flying past, seemingly completely oblivious to the discussion behind him.

Except. “No, I don’t have to discuss my reason for hating the weather with you. Yes, I know it’s just a disgusting drizzle. No, I won’t stop answering directly to your thoughts. Yes, I heard every word you guys have been saying for the past god knows how many hours.”

“Mr. Deimos, please try not to antagonize my men.” The tone with which the words were spoken was polite but disapproving all the same. “We’ll be reaching Tewen soon.”

“I have eyes to see for myself and I spent more than enough time in that god forsaken city to know where to look, thank you. And you’re no fun at all. It’s a once in a lifetime’s chance to go out and chop off a lot of heads, or get your own lope off if you’re unlucky or just plain lousy enough, and you guys are making it as dull as a sixteenth century history lesson.” Deimos sighed. “Gods, I miss my partner. And that sh*t-mouthed Momos too.”

The man in charge was perfectly cooperative. “Mr. Momos volunteered to enter Tewen with another team.”

“To prevent us from doing anything fishy, yeah. I heard that part loud and clear. Stop throwing the obvious at me. And yes, I’m in a very bad mood. Which is another very obvious thing.” Deimos rolled his eyes and slumped even further into his seat, muttering. “I really really hate this weather.”

Calm...How can anyone retain calmness? How can anybody pretend they feel nothing just to cast? It takes too much concentration...In the end I may as well simply not have any emotions at all...

Untouched, the beer can remained on the window sill, looming tauntingly at Jonathan’s failed attempts. He had been trying to make it do something...anything...for the past hour. But, his thoughts would not ebb. Flooding his mind in torrents, he was forced to render himself incapable of casting any magic whatsoever. He simply lacked the mental capacity to truly concentrate. Occurrences such as this one were reason enough for him to feel spiteful at magic in general and its vessels through which it flowed, usually successfully at that...

Anger and frustration boiled up inside of Jonathan. His magic never came when he needed its assistance or simply wanted its company. How could he ever plan any sort of attack on anybody? He couldn’t, put simply. Never would he be able to cast magic with any sort of proficiency. Most likely he’d never even become anything or anybody worth having lived a life.

Abruptly taking his mind off of such thoughts as best he could, Jonathan focused on his desk mirror. He lived in a rather run-down apartment, so he took what he could get. The mirror in the bathroom shared by all the tenants was impossible to look through and get a decent reflection, Jonathan soon warded off all thoughts of cleaning it every single time. Instead, he decided to just get a mirror of his own so he could keep his personal hygiene up; whatever the other guys in his apartment thought he didn’t care much about. Or at least he told himself he didn’t care. Despite his claims of uncaring he always seemed to be speaking with someone about all of his troubles, and harassment usually came up somewhere. Jonathan still hadn’t learned to keep his mouth shut after all these years.

Brushing a few strands of his dirty blond hair from his eyes, Jonathan stared unseeing at his portfolio. Light green eyes shone back from the mirror, digging like razors into Jonathan’s thoughts. He could vividly remember his father, the way his eyes used to shine whenever he looked at his son. What sort of corrupt individuals would take a father like that away from a child? It was unjustified and Jonathan would make sure it would be made justified.

The thought of his father still caused painful memories to arise. When death finally came to Erik Izarion, Jonathan knew he had died with the same dignity he had kept throughout his whole life. Standing against the men who had come to their neighborhood, Erik had done his very best to protect his son and wife...But that didn’t matter in the end, for the death of Erik caused greater pain than any wound could have inflicted upon Jonathan or his mother Alicia.

Turning away from his blemished reflection in the mirror, Jonathan tried not to think of his family. The pain it caused him to think of them was unbearable, yet he constantly had them at the front of his mind. One reason was because a cousin of his mother’s had been sending him letters. He didn’t exactly understand what she was trying to tell him, but he wasn’t making too much of an effort to find out. From what had been written, it was sounding more and more like Erik had been a fool, and Alicia hadn’t been killed because of is lack of magical talent or even potential. These ideas would go against everything Jonathan had believed, or thought he believed, for the past thirty-so years. And yet...at the back of his mind he sub-consciously had this thought turning around in his mind; “What’s the difference between what Phoenix and Dragon do? What’s the meaning behind this? Have I followed a lie all my life?”

"Yakuza. Yakuza. Yakuza." The words replayed involuntarily within the confines of the shinobi's mind. He had failed. The level of infiltration was clear. Unmistakable. Two teams of two led the entirety of the operation: Igami and Shisou-resu led a Phoenix Triad infiltration unit. No doubt the organization planned a long-term reconnaissance of the organization's facilities and surrounding environment. Despite Dolos' insistence that Hades' no acted purely to squander a rogue agent, Igami appeared to believe otherwise. The second main infiltration group leaders were none other than Gaidoku and Seishin, whose task lay in limiting and narrowing any external resistance.

No doubt the latter group carried a small number of external cognition suppressors. These devices, while supressing any psychic abilities those within the device's range possessed, theoretically absorbed any stray psychic link from an external source. Thus, while the group could not act openly, they could not be acted upon.

To further complicate matters, upon Raul's suggestion, Dolos ordered Kaito to "house arrest." Despite Igami's failure to release pressing information concerning Hades' tactic, Kaito's accompanying Moros into the Phoenix Triad with Enya's body permitted suspicion of the shinobi as a traitor.

No doubt, Shisou stood at the other end of the door, waiting for Kaito to attempt an escape.

(OOC: I know.... it's not much..... but it's late, and my brain can't "strategize" well under these conditions... I promise I'll have more soon, but for now, I'll leave this nice semi-cliff hanger. Per usual, if anything needs to be altered please let me know.)

It was the nearing the end of his first shift at work. He almost always had the usual two shifts. The first was the usual 9 to 5. Normally that's when someone would leave work and go home to their family. The problem with that was he had no family or home to go back to. Sure, he had a crappy apartment just like every other person in the city but it wasn't exactly comfortable. He'd rather sleep on the bunk beds at work. Wiping his gloved hands over his tired face he took his hand off, looking at it intently. He took the gloves off of his hands, having forgotten he was even wearing them.

He usually wore those gloves during his second shift. The first was always during day time, running various errands and connecting loose ends to various cases that would just be filed, put away and inevitably forgotten. His second shift was actually what woke him up, getting out of the office and into 'the field.' Such was his usual sixteen hour work day in the LAW offices. It was running errands for the boss and doing paperwork during the day. Then his last eight hours of the day was out at night. Of course that was usually nothing more than cleaning up after the Phoenix and Dragon syndicates. Things were changing up a bit though, there was talk of this Yakuza but not much more than rumors. He really thought nothing of it, the cop knew he wouldn't believe it until he saw a dead corpse of one out in some abandoned building or in an alley.

Having removed his gloves and throwing them off on the side of his own little desk, he tilted a folder up, which had several pages of information on top of it. It was yet another 'victim' who miraculously had survived in the hospital after one hell of a beating. He had looked over the guy's file once or twice before. He was probably just some Phoenix punk who saw more than he was supposed to. Whoever meant to take him out must have been in a hurry or did a sloppy job, seeing as the guy was still living.

"Scourge."

He heard his name being called by a gruff voice, from which he heard footsteps behind him getting closer. Turning around in his chair, he looked up at a man somewhere in his fifties who hadn't shaved in a couple weeks. Looked like he hadn't slept since then either. The cop raised an eyebrow as he looked up at the man. "Captain. What's up?"

"We're short on men in the field. That guy your looking at...Adrian whatever."

"Hopper." Scourge replied.

The captain didn't seem to care any. "Those two detectives of ours his crew shot last week...one of them's dead."

Scourge looked away for a moment, his eyes looking down towards the linoleum floor. "...#####."

"Looks like there is justice after all." The middle aged man said, putting his hands in his pants pockets.

The crimson haired man put his arm up on his chair. "Well if that's what you want to call it. Looks to me like he saw something he wasn't supposed to. He got killed right in the middle of Phoenix territory, I highly doubt the Dragons would get in that deep. It's dangerous enough going in there even as LAW."

"Hell yeah, of course its dangerous enough. But your probably right, I need you to go to the hospital and check the guy out. He probably wont talk but...use as much 'convincing' as you see necessary. Come back and you'll have a detective seat waiting for you. You've done good, your better than any normal cop, better than most detectives. Keep it up."

"Thanks captain." Scourge said with a nod and a weak smile. "I'll try and get used to being called detective now. I'll be back in awhile."

Standing up, his boss had already walked away, back into his office. Scourge gave one last peering look into his boss' back before swiping his long, blood red hair out of his eyes with a wave from his head. Picking up a black trenchcoat he put it over his shoulders, placing his hands into his black gloves. He then moved his arms into the sleeves of his coat before making his way to the exit of the relatively large LAW building.

He had joined Phoenix Army simply because it was what his father had done. Jonathan had only been a small boy at the time, so he didn’t understand what it meant for his father to have a phoenix tattooed onto his back. Jonathan only knew that it symbolized the group his father, Erik, was a part of. Seeing his father leave everyday to do things in a nearby neighborhood for this organization seemed like a cool idea to Jonathan. That was, of course, before he found out about all the violence that was involved.

Up until the day his father died, Jonathan always assumed his father had a normal job, one that wasn’t dangerous. But when he found out his dad had always been at risk every day of his life, he admired him all the more for that. He also grew very worried about whether or not he would see his father again. Day after day passed when neither Jonathan nor his mother would hear from Erik. As all families would do, they weren’t sure whether or not Erik was alive, but they could hope he was.

Jonathan admired the courage his father showed, especially when he stood up to the Dragons who came to their neighborhood. The way Erik stood up to them without fear seemed impossible to duplicate, in Jonathan’s eyes. He never thought he could be like his father in that respect, but he had joined Phoenix in the hopes of becoming like his father.

But the real life of a Phoenix soldier was much different than what his perspective was as a young boy. The glamour he thought his father must have had simply hadn’t passed on to him yet. He was beginning to question the difference between Dragon and Phoenix. Was there even a difference? He wasn’t sure, but he wanted to find out. What was it that set them apart from each other? Is all this fighting needless? Jonathan knew what he had signed up for, but even now he began to question the reasons for it.

His mother’s cousin had sent him letters as soon as he was nearing twenty. She contradicted many of his beliefs he held about his family. For one thing, she never doubted his abilities as a mage. Jonathan believed it was his fault for his mother’s death; he believed he was the one to kill her. That was his main reason for not liking to practice magic. Another reasons was because his thoughts were always distracted. He just could not think of nothing for a given amount of time, he was always fretting over some thing or other.

Friends would try and coax him into practicing more often than he did, but Jonathan felt it was a waste of time. He couldn’t even dent a beer can, how could he hope to hurt Dragon soldiers?

Frustrated, Jonathan looked at his window sill. The beer can had fallen down to the ground by the wind, so Jonathan was without a temporary target unless he found something else to experiment with. He supposed he could try and see if he could do something simple like lift his bed, but he doubted he could even do something like that.

I can’t...What if I accidentally did something bad again? How could she know it wasn’t me? She wasn’t there. My mother would have told me if she was sick, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t have lied to me about that, I just can’t see her doing something like that...

Dragons had come to his family’s home. Jonathan tried to protect his mother since, as the remaining male of the household, he felt it his obligation. In the end, his spell backfired and his mother died. Since then he hadn’t felt strong enough to cast magic. He always worried something would go wrong, someone he cared about would die.

Focusing harder, Jonathan tried to clear his mind of all his thoughts. It was difficult for him to do, so he lost heart easily. But, there wasn’t anything better he could think of doing at the moment, so he practiced.

Within the warehouse where much of the LAW business was going on, a meeting was taking place in a secluded room between some high officials. About ten men sat at a round table, papers filed on the table in front of each, along with cups of steaming hot coffee. These men had obviously been up for a while, talking amongst themselves of how they were going to deal with the security around here. They were depending on the two teams to do what they were going to do, but not only had they have to think about the future of Tewen, they also had to take into light the possibility of the teams failing.

One of the gentleman, Sgt. Bixter, a large-looking man with a rough beard, wearing a military hat on top of his head, presses his finger against the table repeatedly as he emphasizes a point in their current conversation. "We were suppose to receive confirmation of their status one hour ago. Surely, something must have happened if they haven't replied then. We went over this. If they broke the calling procedure even once, then we were going to take manners into our own hands. Which means, we're going to have..."

"No!" The powerful strong fist of the commander Lt. Tallen strikes the table. He was a brown-skinned middle aged man with badges all over the front of his suit, showing he was someone of high esteem, so surely he had gotten the man's attention with his objection. "We are not going to strike down those two cities through brute force! This is not Vietnam or World War II. We're not going to nuke or blow up anything else unless it's absolutely necessary! There are too many lives in jeopardy to take such manners!"

"Then what are we going to do," Bixter objects back. "The more we continue to take the pacifist path, the more their forces are going to grow. Soon, they'll have enough power to rival our countries's military. THEN, what are you going to do, huh? You'll regret having taken my advice."

"No. If I would regret it more if I had to take many lives just to stop a bunch of overgrown kids from warring like this."

"Sometimes, Lt. Tallen, you have to sacrifice some lives to save many others."

Standing up from his table, he walks out of the room, exiting himself from the meeting. The room is left in silence as they all look either away or to one another. The highest ranking officer present there was Chief Manson, a tanned think guy who had seen war too long in his eyes, or at least the one that was open. The other, the right one, was patched over, injured long ago. A veteran, basically, of the army, he was a man most respected. He was also well quiet to himself, able to humble any's opinions. Once they were done, he decides to cut into the fray, his tone slow, but strong in vocal.

"Sgt. Bixter is correct. We cannot sit here and allow neither Phoenix or Dragon to grow into more of a threat than they already are. But at the same time, we cannot endanger the lives of the innocent caught within such a destructive era. We will give Lt. Dinguard one more hour. If he does not return a reply to us then..."

Tallen watches his superior with eyes focused on him, listening to his wisdom with open ears. "We will have to execute the next best plan."

One hour, Tallen thought. Damn it, he really hopes Jason made it in time. If not...then this war war going to become a whole lot worse. To think that to end destruction, one had to use it. Such a twist in irony was unbelievable. But Jason...he was determined to prove otherwise. He was determined to prove that peace can be won in other ways. That war was not always the answer. Tallen trusted his friend to that task, including everyone else. And he prayed that Hades would come through in helping them out, too. Hopefully...


In an underground basement within the HQ of the Dragons, a prison area where prisoners were kept in barred cells with energy fields over the front of them to keep any type of person, be it psychic or monster, from escaping. Boron was in one of them, and Shade was in the one across from his. But where was Jason?

The officer was in an interrogation room, his ankles and wrists bounded by steel restrainers as he lied on his back on a horizontal table, a bright light held over his body. The interrogator looked like your skinny, but sadistic doctor. This man was one of little hair on his head, but his eyes through his glasses made him appear very...sick-minded. He couldn't help but grin as he attaches these patches connected to wires across the bare torso of Jason. The officer himself continued to resist against his bonds, but failed.

"What are you going to do," he asks as calmly as he could.

Also in the room was one of the Oracles, Quado. The one who had led Deimos to the higher ups in the first place. With his hands behind his back, he steps up to the side of the LAW officer, quite content with himself. "We're just going to do a little interrogation. Don't mind the devices attached to you. As long as you give us what we want, you won't have to suffer."

"You bastards. Torture me all you want. I'm not going to say a thing."

Quado chuckles. "Oh, you'll speak soon enough. Now, then, let's begin, shall we?"

Swiftly walking through the white halls of the hospital he was stopped by a nurse in front of a patient's room.

"Excuse me but you can't go in there. He's very tired."

A small grin curved across Scourge's face. "Well I'm sure he is. He's had a very busy day. Let me tell you miss, after murdering someone, when I get home I just need to relax with a nice, big cold one, you know?"

"M-Murder!?"

"Yeah. I need to talk with him so you don't mind me." he said, walking to the side of the woman and opening the door into the patient's room.

Closing it behind him, he looked out to the hall, through the clear glass window, though he had to widen the area between two horizontally lined shades. Turning around he walked up to a young man laying in the bed. Standing right beside him, he looked down at the injuries he could see. The man's face was badly beat up, large bruises on his face, a black eye, bloody lip and his right arm was in a cast. Scourge imagined there was most likely many other injuries, probably internal from the beating the Phoenix member got from his own side. The young man opened his eyes, seeing the ominous LAW officer standing over him.

"Who are you?" the man asked warily.

Scourge spoke, recalling from memory. "Adrian Hopper. Twenty three years of age. Height; Five feet, ten inches, weight; approximately 170. Occupation...one self proclaimed badass mother f***er." Scourge placed his right hand to his head, tapping his index finger against the side of the temple. "That's about right, don't you think?"

The man was silent as Scourge casually walked away from the bed, pacing back towards him. "So how have things been...cop killer?"

"Whoa...I didn't kill any cop." he said lightly, apparently unable to speak very well.

"Is that so? Then how do you explain the dead one in the morgue with your bullets in his chest? Another one's in the hospital too. We know you and your possy did it, we have forensic evidence and know for sure you were there at the scene. Face it, you and your buddies are going away for a long, long time."

"It doesn't matter...I'm as good as dead anyway."

Scourge turned his head slightly, looking at the man out of the corner of his eye. "Is that so? Well your alive now. Your breathing fine...seem alive to me."

"Not for long...once they know you've been here they'll come and finish me off." said the man as he shut his eyes, appearing to be in pain.

He nodded his head, smiling as he heard the suspect speak. "Ah yes. Seems your syndicate buddies aren't so fond of you. So tell me, what exactly did you do or see that got them to attack you?"

"The man opened his eyes again, narrowed as he peered at Scourge. "I'm not telling you anything!"

"Oh please." the LAW officer said with a scoffing laugh. "What do you have to lose? Tell me and you can at least be relatively safe in prison. Maybe get you somewhere out of the city, away from Dragon influence. Or...you can die here. So just tell me about it, will ya?"

"No way!"

Scourge sighed, walking away from the man. "You know, stubborness is not a very likable quality." He stood in front of the shades, his back to the man he was interrogating. "I don't care how it gets done. You're going to tell me what I want to hear."

Taking the wand beside the window, he twisted it, closing the shades shut.