Spurred by the reviews I got I have now another chapter here. Short I know. I think most of them will be. The next one or two will be mostly character intro, physically. The rest should come out through the story. I know, I know, it sounds boring but I am a firm believer that first impressions are the most important.

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Caleb was the first to wake. He slowly woke and looked around, trying to figure out where he was. He brought his hand up to his and rubbed his eyes as if to wipe away the grogginess. His mouth and nose were covered by a strip of cloth wrapped all around his head, mostly hidden by the hood he found he was wearing. With a side long look he found it was black along with the strip over the lower half of his face. Pausing for a moment, wondering what was going on, he was suddenly hit by rush of memories: the school, Casey, the machine and the vortex. He sat up then and looked down at himself to find that everything he was dressed in was black. He stared down at his hands wondering what had happened.

"No, no." He thought. "Not hands, hand… Wait, one hand…?" Then as suddenly as the first, but much more vicious, came a second wave of memories. Much more frightening ones of him losing his hand in a fight, all the training as a child, his rebellion and abandoning of the cause and finally and a series of flashes faces, faces he knew all too well, faces of ones he had killed. The realization hit him like a brick wall, ASSASSIN. That's what he was, a cold-blooded killer. No. You're not. Part of him whispered. You gave all that up long ago. But he was too busy screaming in his head to listen, too horrified by the images to realize that his screaming was coming from him out loud too.

His screaming had brought the others awake, and though they gasped and some cried out at the inevitable rush of memories, none were as loud for none of them had killed as many as Caleb and never in cold-blood. They each woke like Caleb wondering first what happened, then hit by the rush of what had happened, and finally by a strange set of memories that they all did not recognize but still seemed familiar to all. It took several minutes for everybody to look around and try to find out where they were. By that time Caleb had calmed down enough to just be rocking back and forth in the balls of his feet with his knees brought up to his chin, sobbing quietly.

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Hope you enjoyed it.