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

Waking up in her own bed, all on her own once more, had been the sort of shock that set her heart right back to racing. (She wasn't ready to do it again. Not by herself, not after all of that.) And while running into the vast majority of her friends again had definitely helped, Roxie still hasn't quite managed to settle down quite as well as she'd really prefer.

Her boots are poorly tied and her father's t-shirt, even when knotted at her waist, hangs low at the back and slides off of one shoulder, making her look smaller than she already is. Mostly, she feels like she's waiting for something - fingers absentmindedly unraveling a particularly stubborn knot in her hair and tracking the unfamiliar faces that pace the room - coiled tight and ready to spring into motion.

Reece has absolutely no idea what's going on. He woke up in the Atrium with most of his housemates missing and the Lodge crawling with MACUSA agents. Even Mr. Merrill hadn't had much light to shed on the situation, and Reece thought he had seemed uncharacteristically rattled. But the missing students - that he hadn't even known were missing - have apparently been found, and everyone's accounted for, and that's... good.

But what he's hearing about where they went just doesn't make any sense. Or maybe he just doesn't want it to make sense. He's not sure.

He keeps meaning to flag someone down and ask them what happened, but everyone is looking for somebody, and he doesn't want to get in the way. Finally, he spots a familiar figure among the crowd. He elbows his way through the crowd to get to her.

"Roxie, hey," he says, putting a hand on her shoulder to turn her around. "Are you alright?"

It wouldn't exactly be accurate to say that Roxie jumps out of her skin at the contact. It's more that she goes stock-still, pulling in a quiet hiss of air, her shoulders drawn up and hands frozen where they're tangled at the ends of her hair. To her credit, it only takes her a second before she recognizes his voice and visibly uncoils, letting out a long puff of air.

Then she drops a hand on top of his and turns around, flashing him a smile that's crooked and sheepish.

"If I say yes right now," she asks, fingertips tapping lightly on the backs of his knuckles. "Do you think it'll be convincing?"

"Sorry," he says, mentally wincing at her tense response to being grabbed. Even though he had no way of knowing better, he probably still should have. But her hand's on his before he can pull it back, so he leaves it there, squeezing her shoulder in what he hopes is a reassuring way.

"I'm thinking no," he says, having come to this conclusion fairly quickly. "What happened?"

"It's fine," Roxie replies, hastily reassuring, and readies herself to reign in the mess of nerves and uncertainty - chin up, shoulders back, and smile - but finds that she doesn't really want to. Or maybe she doesn't have to. There's little point in an act if you've already been caught in it. So she sighs instead, blowing her hair from her eyes and lacing her fingers through his.

"I don't know what they told you. Or how much justice I'm going to do to what actually happened. But, c'mon," she admits, before tugging on his hand and pulling him over to an unoccupied couch. When she sits, it's close enough to hook one ankle behind his. "The things in the forest," she starts. "The ones that talk to us? I guess they had a disagreement. One of them stole people from their beds, left them scattered and sleeping all over the woods. Wanted to keep them here."

"I've heard a little bit," Reece says as they sit, although he doesn't try to interrupt her as she speaks. She sits very close to him. In the past he's been careful not to overstep his bounds with her, but she's so casual about it and it's such a comfort what with everything that's going on right now that it barely even registers to him, and he rests a hand on her knee as she speaks.

"I can't believe I slept through all that," he says. "The healers said they couldn't wake us up, but..." The idea of his friends and classmates being kidnapped by some mysterious forest entity while he was comatose doesn't sit well with him. What would he even have done, if he'd been awake? He's not sure, but waking up to realize he'd missed it all is startling even if everyone's okay.

He shakes his head, glances up at the ceiling. "So you just woke up in the woods?" he asks.

"I don't really think you had a choice," Roxie replies, though she isn't precisely certain if that's comforting or unnerving. Or maybe it's both? It feels like a very fine line to traverse at the moment.

"We all woke up in the woods. There was a message and a board full of pictures." She drops her hand over his and, for once, she lets someone keeping her in one place make her feel tethered - held rather than pinned to the ground. "I looked for you. In the woods, on the board. But you weren't there." She pauses, adding a quick: "I'm glad you weren't there."

Which doesn't sound right either. Scheiße. "Not that - You probably would've been better at a lot of the -" She lets out a short, dissatisfied breath through her nose, well aware that she's articulating it poorly. That her words are doing a poor job of arranging themselves. "There were boxes and riddles. And you're more clever than I am by miles."

AFTERMATH & DEPARTURE

Roxie & Reece

Roxie & Reece

Roxie & Reece

Roxie & Reece

Roxie & Reece

Roxie & Reece

Roxie & Reece