How happy are ya'll with the wiki?

I'm in the process of looking for a different host mostly because all my sites are so slow on shared hosting. And I really want to start using my domains again for real things.

Do you like the way this wiki works? Or would you rather have something a little simpler?

I'm considering moving the wiki from Mediawiki to WordPress (I can hear FL groaning now)...

We WILL NOT lose any information if we change platforms I will write a script to convert from one platform to another.

So now is the time to speak up if you think a change is in need. If you don't like WordPress and it would hinder you to using it then I'm okay with staying with mediawiki but it's so clunky for our use that I feel another system might be better for our use case. But not totally my call here.

High Alert!

Going out to all Atharim in the Moscow Area. Be on the lookout for a reborn god.

One Sebastian Volodin, age 27, brown hair blue eyes, 1.82 m (6 ft), approximately 72.5 kg (160 lbs).

Report any activity to Martin Borovsky. DO NOT ENGAGE! HIGHLY AGGRESSIVE AND DANGEROUS!

Picture to follow:



[[ This goes out to every Atharim in Moscow. Feel free to report here via Text to Martin or incorporate it into your existing thread (can do both). Please PM Martin if you don't post here tho so I can make sure he gets the info IC. Thanks! ]]

[[Sorry couldn't help the reference]]

It was all over the news, but more importantly it was in the CCDPDs vision. A god fought with one of their own officers. This was not a good thing. This was going to be hard to pull from the grips of the mundane, even with a man on the inside it was going to be difficult.

Today, Martin would meet the others. Today Martin would put them out on their missions. Today the Regus could very well join in on their meeting and on their first official hunt. A true god had emerged, there were videos of the man and his abilities. He was just a common thug, no one was going to miss the bastard. No one.

Martin called in all those in the first order of Archangels. They would hunt this god, they would kill him and right the world. He was sure of it, it was their destiny, it was their legacy. It was time to fulfil that and bring the world back into balance.

There were several new faces under his command. He'd sent texts to one Jacinda Cross, an American who came across the great ocean that separated the two worlds and impressed the Regus enough. He hoped she was half of what he expected. A woman as old as him, who'd lived this long, this was no soft woman. And another who crossed the seas, Ichiro Yoshimura, a Japanese samurai who came for the honor he assumed. The rest were all native to Old World European or all within reach of Moscow or the Vatican by land. He trusted those men and women before he trusted those who were separated by the water, particularly the American. She would have much work to do.

Today they would all get a run down on new tech. And plan for the destruction of this one God. He doubted he'd let any of them take this one down, he was first, he intended to hunt this god and kill it, but he'd take all the help he could get.

The Guardian complex was a maze of canals, bridges, streets and signs, and that was only the parking lot. It was a long time before Jensen was finally inside the hospital, but the fire in his veins had not cooled by then.

The whoosh of glass doors opened for him, and the sterile expanse of a hospital lobby loomed ahead. This wasn't his first time in the Guardian. He was brought here the night Jessika found him by his old apartment, the night he first realized he could save a life on the brink. He came by ambulance, or so he was told after the fact, so his view of the emergency room was rather one-sided. Someone bumped into him so hard he stumbled aside. Two men labored by, one was clutching his arm painfully, the other pointing the way to triage.

Jensen unzipped his jacket as he watched their fate. The triage nurse directed them to a station to fill out forms, he assumed. The injured man hung his head, holding his arm close, while his friend did the work. They were in for a long wait as it seemed the entire waiting room was full of the sick and injured.

Nerves crept up his spine. He'd wanted to do this alone, if it would even work. He'd been able to use the Gift for the gravely injured but was unaware if it would work on the ill. He walked through the waiting room, heart sinking as he passed within arm's reach of chair-after-chair of the suffering. His pace slowed as he peered down upon the form of a little boy about four curled up in his mother's lap. He and Jess took Gabe, their oldest, to the ER once with a high fever. Jensen thought he was going to die of fear, but before he could do anything about this poor child, his mother glared and pulled her son closer. Jensen kept going. He needed to be alone, at least at first, with a patient to see if it even worked. He wasn't sure what he was going to imagine would happen, but he knew the waiting room wasn't the place to find out.

He approached the triage nurse. "Excuse me,"
she looked up as he spoke. She looked tired. "I'm here to visit someone,"
he said. She blandly looked down. "What's their name, and are you family?" He didn't know the name of anyone in the ER, and even if he were to venture a random guess, and by coincidence matched someone, he could not claim to be family without lying. "No, I'm not family,"
he said, dejected. She shook her head and didn't even look back up at him. "Nobody gets in," she proclaimed and Jensen's already sunken heart was ready to give up, "Unless they are family, a doctor, or a member of the clergy."

He gasped. The clergy.

"I'm clergy. A pastor."
He said it before there was time to process the claim. How often had he visited members of the church in the hospital? Hundreds. Why hadn't he thought it before? He should have worn different clothes. The nurse's look was skeptical, but Jensen quickly drew out a wallet and showed her some credentials... granted they were woefully out of date, and unlikely to be acknowledged in the CCD.. he hoped they would suffice.

She shrugged, dropped a visitor's pass on the counter, which he gladly scooped up, and spun away to tend to the next person. He hurried off before he could change his mind.

The last encounter with his rogue daughter had not been pleasant. And the drinks he'd had with her boyfriend had been insightful. The best way to hurt the girl and to make her come to him was going to be through that boy.

Giordano didn't take a life easily, he didn't do much of what he did out of natural spite, he just deserved it, so he took it. The Atharim had tailed him his whole life, had removed his parents from him. And then sought to kill him too, just for existing. There might be additional reasons now. And with his own daughter one of them he felt the need to be rid of that torment.

But this girl, this Aria. She was an abomination, worse than he ever was, she was Atharim. He would draw her to him. That was the plan, and the boy in the tattoo shop that lay across the street was the key.

He'd been gone for a few days, Giordano hated waiting, but he didn't the other boy in the shop, he was nothing really. When Aria's boy was alone in the shop Giordano stepped inside, the small bell on the door alerting the occupant to his entrance. Giordano smiled as he pulled both gloves from his hand and stuck them in one pocket. "Hello there." Giordano's right hand slipped into his pocket where he held a small pistol ready to be used as necessary, if the boy didn't listen or caused problems. "I think it's time to close up shop."

Sweat dripped down Jared's face, a few drops falling and hitting the floor. Sierra Leone was a hot and humid climate, but on top of that, Jared had spent time training in his magic. He had a feeling he would need to use it soon.

Jared was tired despite the forced rest. After attempting to sleep, which was difficult as every time he let his mind get quiet he heard the screams of the refugees in Masiaka - screams he likely heard more clearly than his comrades with magic enhanced hearing, Jared went on patrol which was immediately followed by practicing magic.

Jared took a seat in the basement and used a towel to wipe off his face, and as his mind cleared he heard the screams again. He shook his head, willing them away. He could have summoned mana, but he was too tired and just wanted to feel human again for awhile. After a few minutes, he stood and headed to the showers.

He didn't spend much time there, as he hadn't spent much time anywhere in the last couple of days. Anything to distract. He checked a clock as he walked back to his room. It was late and the sun had already set. He knew he should probably sleep, but also knew it would be a long time in coming. He grabbed his wallet and headed to the Mess area.

He didn't get a cup of coffee or even a water. Jared instead just sat down in an uninhabited corner of the room, yawning as he did, and began to see what was happening in the world elsewhere. Jared hadn't been in Sierra Leone long, but felt he needed to escape for a bit. Maybe the short escape would make his rest later come a little more easier.

Jared skipped anything on Sierra Leone, knowing first hand what was happening there. Instead he found other things to keep his time. Some police officer was attacked in Moscow by an "unknown energy weapon." It seemed as if the press was still trying to hide the existence of magic.

He paused on another article, unsure of why he did so. The headline read "Shale Industries to Expand." Jared read the article, familiar with the company that had invented the technology that he was using to read it. Shale Industries was setting up shop in Moscow - it seemed everything revolved around the CCD's capital now.

It wasn't a terribly interesting article, but Jared remained glued to it for awhile. He eyes hovered towards the picture of the young woman - Emily Shale, CEO. He recalled that she had donated something to Sierra Leone in memory of her late parents.

"Probably some rich snob,"
he thought, but still felt guilty for it. There were rich people who cared.

With a sigh he put the wallet down on the table and leaned his head against the wall to stare at the ceiling. Jared wondered if he looked as bad as he felt.

Ascendancy informed her she would be going to a secure facility in Moscow, well at least she got a free trip home once it was said and done with. He stood up with a pause. Aria watched as he left, there was nothing left to do. The effects of the man she'd manipulated were slowly wearing off he was standing again, and Aria could see the fear floating away, but she grinned at him and he balked. Aria smirked. She remained seated with her hands folded.

Another of the guards came in and put the cuffs back on her and she remained where she was. There was no point to trying anything. They were all probably under orders to shoot to kill if she tried anything.

The trip to Moscow was uneventful in and of itself. They landed, she was kept in the dark the whole way. At least it wasn't the classic black bag over the head. But it felt the same regardless. Aria let her senses fly wide, but she couldn't get any real indication of where she was, other than back in Moscow.

Once they'd got to the destination, through corridors that smelled clean and sanitary like a hospital she was eventually dumped into another windowless room. Time became meaningless, no sun, no clocks, it was just emptiness. Except Aria could feel others around her, she felt people disappearing from her senses on and off again throughout the hours. Aria laid on the provided cot and stared at the ceiling pondering the holes in it. Her mind wandering and drifting into oblivion, not sleep, but meditation.

A woman in white came in with a mask and latex gloves and several vials of and a needle. Aria smiled to herself, Nox would hate that. She rolled up her left sleeve and let the woman draw blood. She didn't flinch at the tattoo of the ouroboros and dragons inked there, it made Aria wonder how many people under Ascendancy's employ actually knew about the Atharim.

There was nothing really to do again once the woman left taking other samples as well. Aria lay again on the cot - waiting. Death was still a possibility, but she felt slightly better about her survival at the moment. In an attempt to forgo boredom Aria got up and removed her combat boots, they were still damp from the snow covered walked done only a short time ago. Aria started performing a daily kata routine to keep active and keep from dying of boredom.

In the days after the massacre at the Masiaka refinery-turned-refugee camp, Legion Premiere had been busy. For the Legionnaires on the ground, little had changed, and moods had begun to sour. Rumours spread that Jacques had been aware of what was going to transpire at the refinery, knew that the refugees there would be killed, and that he had done nothing to prevent it, and continued to do nothing to avenge it.

He offered no excuses, no heart-felt speeches to the men under his command. Only a select few would have seen how deeply it had affected him, and even they didn't know the truth of it. He had doctored the entire situation, had counted on the government troops to follow him out of the city. He had planned that they would execute some of the refugees, as a show of control and force. He hadn't planned on the Temne attack.

That had been a miscalculation, a grievous error on his part. So much effort had been put into arranging the extraction of the children, to protect them from the worst of what the Mende troops would do. And instead, he had put them, and men loyal to him, into harms way. Few had survived that mistake, and even then only because of that freelance reporter whom had so foolishly decided to tag along. But so long as he had a job to do, he would not allow himself the right to grieve or be swallowed by self pity.

Legion headquarters staff had been busy over the past five days, starting even before the events at the refugee camp. Plans had been set into place. Objectives and targets had been carefully selected and deliberated over. The company had been quietly rewritten from the ground up. It had gone unnoticed thus far, but they were no longer referred to publicly as Legion Premiere, but rather simply as 'the Legion.' No more allusions to being a private security company. All contracts of that flavour had been handed off, and the every Legionnaire not serving in Sierra Leone, or part of the relief convoy, waited at the company headquarters in Morocco.

Jacques had kept both himself, and his people, busy. Some meager understanding had been made with the Interim President General Wallace-Johnson in the wake of the refugee camp massacre. Legionnaires moved in small groups around the city, encouraging some semblance of normality, although they had no official control or influence. The government's soldiers had all but replaced the city police, and what little remained of the city's emergency responders, fire fighters and paramedics and the like, were barely able to operate with a half dozen military members breathing down their necks.

City infrastructure was stretched beyond its limits; with the city over flowing with refugees, there was a huge strain on the electrical grid, the city's ability to produce potable water. With the airport and ports under military blockade, and with the ongoing conflict and raids by bandits and rebels, there was no influx of food to the city. The reserves were near depleted, and rationing was already strictly enforced. Public executions had been carried out by the military on undesirables who were caught hoarding food. Those undesirables were, of course, Temne refugees. And if the military didn't get them, then riots and looters did.

Of course, along side dealing with those hoarding food, Interim-President General Wallace-Johnson's loyal forces, and those members of the elected government that had thrown in with his camp, also tended to seize property. Exotic cars, money, belongings. Imagined or real insults were answered with theft and murder. Temne or Mende didn't matter.

The flow of refugees into the city also brought with it news and rumours of what was happening beyond the relative safety of the military cordon. Of soldiers-turned bandits in the east, near the border of Liberia, whom had met little to no resistance in their raping and pillaging. Of the growing number of attacks by Guinean warlords into Sierra Leone; much of the north-east border was over run already, and many of the smaller communities there had been razed to the ground, women and children taken, men killed and boys turned to child soldiers.

And the rumours of the return of Ebola to the region. It had festered for decades, quietly, in what had once been Guinea, but it had reared its ugly head once more. A team of volunteer doctors in Kamakwie, Sierra Leone, had reportedly confirmed the presence of the disease in a group of villagers that had fled to the city to escape the Guineans. Two days later, Warlord ShakeSpear's forces took the city and executed the doctors.

Then there were news reports of suicide bombers and drive-by shootings in Egypt, linked to religious extremists oozing out of the CCD. A rebirth of the extremist violence that had dominated the late 20th/early 21st century.

Jacques had been working behind the scenes even before the trip to the refugee camp. Contacting people of interest around the city; police department heads, city workers, even so far as a carefully disguised message to the military commander tasked to guarding the international airport.

His talks with the police, those loyal to the people, not the pay check, had proven fruitful. That morning, nearly two thirds of the city's police force had staged a walk out. One that was little felt, as the military had assumed most of their duties already. The military garrison of the international airport sat ready; they were those that the General hadn't trusted to support him, so he had left them away from the brunt of the action, where they wouldn't have been forced to make a decision. Jacques had convinced their officers to remain exactly where they were, and not get involved with what was to come.

The city workers; the plumbers and electricians and heavy equipment operators that made a city run, had been the easiest to sway of all. They had led a simple life, one that they wished to see return. As stood, the city was dying under the pressure and lack of government interest in their departments. Them, bolstered with skilled refugees that Jacques' Legionnaires had been encouraged to identify for rebuilding purposes, would allow him to take control of the city's infrastructure. Power and telecommunications to be exact.

All that remained was for the Interim President General Wallace-Johnson to make his next move.

In Drayson's line of work, there was no shortage of paperwork. Requests for his personal seal of approval on an emergency acquisition or expense request. Warrants for arrests, searches, surveillance. Updates on cases of interest he was tracking; internal investigations, politicians or the social elite, serial killers, domestic terrorists. And of course the investigations of task force Domovoi. The serial rapist, and the more recent case, which had involved the task force's own ace-in-the-hole, Officer Sarkozy in the Izmailovsky Market. That had caused quite the uproar.

Among all the things that required his attention, there were two Voluntary Release memos that had somehow made it all the way to his desk. Two officers, both with years of experience and few, if any, black marks on their records, had put in the memos within days of each other. They were a few months old already, and had likely been purposefully bogged down in the system in an attempt by their leadership to keep the officers on the force. It was a detestable passive-aggressive way of making such requests disappear, hoping the member would either have a change of heart, or just loose hope and accept that they weren't getting out.

The curious thing of the two memos was the reasons for the members wanting to release from the CDPS. They were from different precincts, and by all indications did not directly know each other. Their requests were days apart, but both sited the same reason. Both members sought to move to Africa. Morocco, to be exact. To join that security company that had been so boldly emblazoned on the headlines in the opening days of that violent rebellion in DV months ago.

He was aware of their ongoing involvement in Sierra Leone, and of their CEO's public address that had followed the start of the civil war there. In the end, he could find no reason to deny the two officers' requests, and gave them his approval before forwarding them back to their respective chains of command.

As for the attack at the market...a talk with Officer Sarkozy was in order. Domovoi was slow to gain traction on the investigation, despite how public a scene it had been. Even that old market had security cameras, and there had been plenty of witnesses. Domovoi had no shortage of resources at their disposal, and should have been able to at least identify the culprit by now.

He sipped at a mug of terrible office coffee, then set it carefully aside to keep it clear of his terminal, and sat back. He had been forced to leave Victoria on rather short notice in light of that incident, rushing to the scene to oversee the deployment of Domovoi and how well it worked. He hadn't been disappointed at the time, but thus far there had seemed to be a lack of progress in the case.

There was also the matter of the recent release of Artair Nevin, the head bodyguard of Privilege Alkaev's son, Rurik. Drayson had personally arrested the man when the fellow had been foolish enough to draw a weapon on him on Rurik's orders. The man's trial hadn't even begun yet, but he had been released on some drummed up technicality. Perhaps it was time he gave the Alkaev's another reminder of why they were supposed to be more careful about their rampant corruption. It was to be expected, and generally ignored, by law enforcement, and even he was willing to turn a blind eye. But they kept being sloppy about it.

Ayden still hadn't worked up the nerve to call the girl about meeting up with Nox at some point to talk. As much as the girl had brought Connor back to her, she hated her for it too. She'd call her someday soon. She promised herself that, but more importantly she had promised Emily she'd check on something for her. Emily didn't really know what Nox was, but she believed Ayden when she told her friend he was dangerous.

But she also had other things to worry about. Ayden had done as Emily suggested, she'd put in her resume into the pool at Shale International, specific to the Moscow division starting up. Head of Security didn't exactly seem her game after been an assassin, but she also had a very different outlook on things than most others.

Ayden hated lying to Emily, but her resume was full of bullshit that was tied to her new persona. Things that explained what she'd been doing her whole life. All lies, well mostly, there were some half truths. But Ayden hadn't planned on working for a real business firm with proper business attire, that was what today's journey to the open air market was for. She could probably find better things at the mall, but the idea of walking through the market again creating a new identity for a real purpose it had its appeal. She'd come full circle - from assassin for hire to a working woman about to get married. The idea itself terrified her, but she loved Connor.

The market was crowded despite the winter chill in the morning air. Ayden walked down the street browsing each stall. Stopping when a piece of jewelry or belt caught her fancy. She'd find something she liked.