gooseberryhigh | AFTERMATH & DEPARTURE

AFTERMATH & DEPARTURE

Mr. Merrill, still half-asleep, hikes up the hill to Azurcrest to run the last middle-of-the-night headcount. Inconvenience turns to fear as he discovers that half of his students are missing, and the other are in a sleep so deep he can't rouse them.

The unresponsive students are taken to the atrium for Healer Mufferaw to tend to, and Agent Larke is already contacting the MACUSA. The government descends on the school, with Aurors and Hitwizards to lead search parties. They head out immediately to scour the woods for the missing students. Heads of House confer with one another and the agents about the emergency, and decide parents need to be informed about the situation immediately.

There's no sign of any missing students for hours. Furthermore, there's no response from the apparently comatose children in the lodge. Not until 7:14 AM, anyway. The students that weren't taken begin to stir, and within minutes Agent Larke bursts in, clearly having ran all the way there. She announces that the missing students have been found, and are being escorted to the lodge.

Agent Larke had been organizing a new search party when Ivy Templeton stumbled out of their cabin, still half-asleep. It was discovered that inside the cabins, all the missing students had mysteriously reappeared in their beds.

All of the missing students are taken to the lodge by Aurors and Hitwizards, and a thorough headcount is done. Meanwhile, emergency Healers and Healer Mufferaw do thorough checks. The MACUSA representatives interview all the students individually. Students are only in the lodge for about an hour and a half before the order comes down: evacuate students and staff. Students are to be released to their families immediately. Personal belongings will be delivered to their homes at a later date.

The school buses are familiar, but the mood of the bus ride home after summer break isn't quite the same. They don't deliver students to their doorsteps or international stops, but to a staging area in Logan, hidden from Muggle eyes, where countless fearful relatives wait to take their children home.

HOW THIS WORKS:

All dreamers have been rescued. All rescuers have reunited with their friends.

The seven students who took part in the Finding the Heart adventure also wake up at the same time. To their friends, it will seem like they disappeared for 15 minutes max before everyone wakes up. To the seven students, it will seem like they were gone for hours.

Everyone will wake up after 7:14 AM. Ideally, they all wake up at the same time, but if you'd like to put it a bit later for dramatic purposes, you may.

Your character will be picked up at a staging area in Logan by a legal guardian, or escorted by a MACUSA agent to pre-arranged international transportation. If your character has only Muggle relatives, MACUSA will transport them to and from home.

If you are a rescuer or dreamer:
- You will wake up in your own bed, unless for some reason you want your character to wake up in someone else's bed. e.g. Gabi can wake up in the Ribbonfin soph girls' cabin, or she can wake up in the Ebonhide soph boys' cabin with Bash and Wyatt, since she was with them.
- You will keep all injuries you incurred during the event. However, you will not have any traces of ghost blood on you! Or ghost viscera of any kind.
- You will be wearing what you had on when the event ended, i.e. your pajamas and the clothing given to you by Brother. If you gave something away to another student during the event, e.g. a jacket, that other character will be wearing it instead.
- You will have all objects you started the event with, i.e. things in your pockets, unless you dropped them or gave away those items to an NPC. Then they're gone forever, sorry!
- You will not have any objects you picked up during the course of the event. This includes rocks, twigs, and personal items like Diego's crucifix, Sy's captain's badge, etc. All that stuff was imaginary! Those objects still exist in the real world.

If you are a non-participant:
- You will wake up on a cot in the Atrium. Please assume you are decently dressed. You will see Healers checking on other students, and government Aurors guarding the room. Your Head of House will tell you that you were moved here for observation because you were discovered in a state of deep sleep and no one could wake you. If you ask about your other friends, your teacher will admit that they've gone missing and the MACUSA is here to find them.
- Mere minutes after you've woken up, you will all hear from the Aurors that the other students have been found in their cabins.
- You have no memory of your roommates leaving the cabin, or being moved to the Atrium. You slept straight through the night. You did not have any dreams.

» MORNING: You wake up. You're in, well, a bed. It may or may not be your own, and the people you were with when you were in the other world may be with you.

» AFTERMATH: As soon as the staff realize that all the missing students have been found, everyone is promptly escorted to the lodge. Campus is crawling with MACUSA presence, and hitwizards and Aurors alike lead the students to the lodge. Everyone is looked over by emergency healers, and give quick statements to the authorities.

» BUSES: Understandably, everyone's families are impatient to get their children back. Students are hurried onto buses to be taken to a relay point outside of the anti-apparition zone, where their families will be to take them home.

» OOC - QUESTIONS, COMMENTS & CONCERNS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"D'you think they're--" Lucas starts to say to Essie, wondering about the friends they haven't reconnected with, yet. But he loses his train of thought when a particularly gruff-looking auror walks right past them. He gawks, obviously awed and a little bit intimidated, inching a bit closer to his much smaller, much braver companion. Gosh, the lodge sure is crowded.

Once he has to crane his neck to follow the auror's path, his attention snaps away and he scans the sea of people in search of a particular set of faces. "They've got to be okay, right?"

Generally speaking, Bash isn't really the sort of person who lacks the words necessary to properly express himself. If anything, he usually has too many of them. But his interview had pretty much been a disaster - he'd been fidgety and nervous, wringing his hands together in the absence of Gabi's and just waiting to be finished.

He's been waiting to find people, not participate in a tell-all. Or even a tell-a-brief-and-annotated-version-of-shit.

"Oh, thank fuck," he breathes when he spots a familiar set of curls some distance away (sparing a quick second to wince, shoulders up around his ears, and mutter an apology to the man still standing behind him) before he's cutting his way through the crowd a bit too hastily. "GUYS!"

Standing on her tiptoes, Pippa is doing her best impression of a meerkat as she scans the crowd for familiar faces. She won't rest until she's seen all 39 and reassured herself that the other sophomores are okay, but right now she's looking for a few faces in particular. Just as her chest is starting to get uncomfortably tight with anxiety, a yell cuts through the background noise. Pippa knows the sound of that voice. "Bash? Bash!" Whirling in the direction the shout came from, she spots him pushing towards --

"ESSIE!!!"

(And others, too, but Essie is the one who disappeared in front of them, and hearing that she woke up safely isn't the same as seeing her in person.)

With a cry of relief, Pippa hurtles towards her friends.

Despite her strong sense that everyone was okay, or even better, hearing directly from Diego, it was nothing in comparison to actually seeing them. From the moment they'd started wading through all the adults, Essie had been on the look out for Mina, Diego, Pippa, Bash, and Wyatt. She hears Bash's voice first, but it's soon joined by Pippa's, and no one is going to stop her from shoving her way through the crowd to get to her best friend. (See ya, Lucas!)

"PIPPA!!!"

Her arms are around Pippa, holding her close, as soon as the other girl is in reach.

If Pippa thought she was all cried out, she was wrong. She presses her face against her shoulder to blot her tears, since there's no way she's letting go of Essie. "You're okay. We're okay." She sounds faintly disbelieving. Now that it's over she doesn't have to be strong or optimistic, and she can allow herself to admit that deep down she was afraid they wouldn't succeed.

Pippa exhales shakily, and it turns into a laugh even though she's still crying. "I was so scared when you just -- you just disappeared, Essie, and we didn't know -- where did you go?"

Even if she'd had no control over being suddenly pulled away, Essie still feels a twinge of guilt, knowing all too well how devastating it must have been for Pippa. She gives her best friend a tight squeeze and an apologetic smile; it's the best she has to offer right now. The fact they'll be pulled away from each other in a few hours anyway isn't something she wants to think about. "We were in the mines that Zach told us about. Zach was there, and so were Calvin and Micah," she recalls, unfortunately not the best suited narrator for giving all the details. Hopefully Zach would fill everyone in later. "And we found Brother's heart and it was like a weird rock, but he has it now, so it's over."

"And I think you were right about the ghosts," she smiles at Pippa and then all of their friends, hoping she can fill them somehow with the same sense of relief that she's been feeling, despite the hell they'd all been through. "I think they're at peace now. And he knew how brave we'd all been."

AFTERMATH & DEPARTURE

CHOO CHOO BABYTRAIN (SEARCH PARTY & ALL PERMUTATIONS, RESCUEES)

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CHOO CHOO BABYTRAIN (SEARCH PARTY & ALL PERMUTATIONS, RESCUEES)

CHOO CHOO BABYTRAIN (SEARCH PARTY & ALL PERMUTATIONS, RESCUEES)

CHOO CHOO BABYTRAIN (SEARCH PARTY & ALL PERMUTATIONS, RESCUEES)

CHOO CHOO BABYTRAIN (SEARCH PARTY & ALL PERMUTATIONS, RESCUEES)