Indirect

Who: Doc
Where: Newberry mental asylum
When: Evening

Burma was far behind him now, a distant afterthought of swamps, bloodshed, and misery. He'd cut through the sky for hours on end, watching the occasional shimmer of a plane above or below him embarking to destinations Doc could only guess at. And for the whole of the trip? He was praying that his hunch was wrong.

The Enemy had always been too powerful to stop completely; too entrenched, well-funded, too numerous... and oh so persuasive with the people they were the greatest threat to. If they were here? It was going to be the true test of Doc's vow of non-intervention. For all that I've been wrong about before, let me be now, he thought as he dropped from the sky in a smooth arc, his will flexing to blur Doc's form invisibly.

His shoes crunched in the snow as Doc touched down, dispelling his wings and already feeling knots of anxiety form just from his first look at the scene. The whole thing was wrong. Sure, there were tire tracks, foot prints in the snow, but if this had been the revelation the news was citing it as? This spot would still be crawling with workers; police, federal agents, and more. What he saw could account for the rescue workers that had supposedly gotten the trapped kids clear.

Walking in tandem with one set of tracks that led into the hospital, Doc felt like even investigating this was a mistake. If it was his enemy, they would have people who could be watching from afar; scrying or projecting. They could have willworkers who knew the tricks he'd never learned. They could have cloaked watchers just like him... but he had to know.

He stepped into the hospital, sliding his vision to a night spectrum with a thought and scowling at the destruction of the building's interior. Old blood... he mused, walking a hallway past a stain that had to have been a pool of the stuff. And magic? Basic demons couldn't have done so much structural damage; someone in here had been wielding power against their attackers.

Even if there was nothing concrete to go with, the slow search of the place chilled him. Oz had said this was a school trip, the demons couldn't have been local either. This area was far too remote for it to be an isolated pack, some savvy hunter would've caught the trends their survival would mandate. And now? These kids who were some strange breed of unknown? If they were more than human, they'd been watched. Marked for recruitment, Doc mused as he searched, lingering outside the chapel's ruined doorway and noting the burn marks and blood that littered the inside.

He hoped he was wrong. He wanted to be, even if it cheapened the lives lost here. And the half-hour he'd been here didn't give him reason to think otherwise, but he wouldn't believe he was, not with what he'd done in life, not with how close this world was to its' breaking point. They had to do something.

Doc dropped his cloaking effect as he walked back out, stopping in the entryway to light up a cigarette and look around. He couldn't feel anything watching, no pulses of power or ripples across the weave of reality, but it didn't mean he was alone. "No matter how it ends," he murmured to no one, walking outside slowly and readying his wings, "You won't win. Not this time."