Denver, Colorado wasn't usually a very busy place. Sure, it was a decent-sized city, but according to a number of the inhabitants (mostly anti-social teenagers), nothing really happened there.
But then one day, something did, and people did not like it.
It was one of the most powerful and successful terrorist attacks in living memory and part of a wide network of such attacks, though it surprisingly directly harmed almost nobody while crashing a city bus with a school bus and a large number of innocent civilians just living their lives while being right next to that innocent intersection. Another odd part of this was that no known terrorist organizations stepped up to take the credit, and credit there would be for such an attack orchestrated world-wide. A large number of people ended up in comas from those incidents, leaving a lot of people in public healthcare when there were so few other specific injuries.
Perhaps that was the point?
For some, the comas didn't last long. Four or five days on the earliest amongst those awake once more, and for awhile many of them began finding even the most commonplace things as odd in some respect or other. Eventually, they all readjusted to their lives, though one particularly empty-faced man took a little more convincing than most.
But some didn't wake up so quickly. As time went on and people began to wonder, should they pull the plug on life support (sometimes pre-empting the physicians by a full month or two), a small group of scientists and medical doctors came forward, members of The Research Institute for the Somnastic and Awoken a few hours north of Denver for the local Sleepers as some began to call them, claimed to have a special treatment set to wake up the poor people sooner rather than later, and was stated as willing to put up every single cost down to the last penny, no need for healthcare.
And they held up their end of the bargain, money-wise. Treatment was a little more shaky, but after the first three woke up and numerous others also showed promising signs of improvement, they were given the benefit of the doubt (despite a number of rabble-rousers and unaffiliated paranoid conspiracy theorists claiming Illuminati and other odd theories Secret World-Order). A few of their patients disappeared only a few days after that. They released a press statement saying simply, "They woke up, but we weren't there to help them, so they left on their own, assuming the worst. That is all." Before going on to say that they would reprimand those supposedly on duty and tighten security all around.
Those "sleepiest" lasted for over three months after the year mark.
And included in those were an odd collection of three, only one of which had had many, if any, visitors.
A short blonde with six marks where shrapnel from the buses collision had left scars.
A dark-haired boy with evidence of a broken bone or three, long since healed.
And a young girl with hair just recently dyed pink.