Prologue:<br/><br/>Long ago, an ancient benefactor... an advanced group of humans, aliens from a distant world, no one knew for sure, crafted artifacts capable of bending the laws of physics and gifted a handful of tribes through the world an inheritable key to channel that power. Some could manifest superhuman strength, others fertility and eternal health. Some had the power over wind, fire, earth and water. Exactly how many different tribes there were remained a great mystery.<br/><br/>The people of the hedonistic technotopia of Pacifica were the distant descendants of those tribes, who found each other and banded together in the last decade of the 20th century to fight a small war against practitioners of their own magic intent on using it to conquer and enslave. They'd won the war but inherited several million sentients who were the product of their deranged leader's attempt to breed her twisted vision of a foot soldier. Not quite a living weapon, not quite a biological menace, the empathic, all-female Dryads became the most visible symbol of the newly-minted nation, and that's exactly how everyone liked it.<br/><br/>There were others of course, a tribe from an island in the Pacific Ocean from whence the nation got its name, another from the Amazon, one that once called Olympus home, and another from the African jungles. Even the city of Pacifica itself was situated on a long-abandoned site in the middle of the fertile Kansas prairie once home to a now-forgotten indigenous tribe.<br/><br/>But the enclaves were small, limiting the true magic to a few miles at most from their source deep underground. Near each enclave the 'magic' was always there, always usable.<br/><br/>There was another magic, one that cycled every lunar day in the 36 hours surrounding the full moon and affected the entire night side of the planet. It didn't affect every tribe the same way and was that which gave power to the likes of werewolves and other 'creatures of the night'.<br/><br/>June 20th 2020 was the day, five years earlier, that the city's researchers had found a way to permanently activate the artifact and extend its reach to the entire planet. On that day, werewolves, vampires and other creatures of the night began appearing every night, and still other 'magic users' blossomed in the daylight as they reached adulthood. Most people had no idea where their abilities came from, their origins lost to time itself.<br/><br/>That was where the Ministry of Gifted Outreach came in. The obtusely-named Pacifican agency eschewed its formal name, operating out of a handful of world cities under various monikers, but the head office was known only by its Pacifica City address: Whisky 13. Their motto: "snag 'em, tag 'em or bag 'em". A gifted person found in the wild would either be encouraged to join them, be marked and tracked, or be dealt with by whatever means necessary to keep them from being a danger to themselves and others.<br/><br/>I: The Agent and the Pyrokinetic - 3 August 2025, 2200 JST. Tokyo.<br/><br/>Carin Bergen joined the Ministry right out of college. Her parents hailed from the once-isolated enclave deep in the arctic mountains of Scandinavia and each possessed demigod-like abilities to control and become wind (her mother) and water (her father). She'd gotten a blend of both abilities and both their looks. At six feet tall she had more of her mother's height, but she had her father's propensity to have more water weight than her lithe dancer's figure would suggest. Her elemental abilities thus went to keeping her 'curves' in the right places. She had her mother's white-blonde hair and height, and a tiny fraction of her paternal grandmother's curves and sparkling blue eyes.<br/><br/>It wasn't her looks that made her stand out at the Ministry, but her powers. Her ability to control air and water around and in her made her effectively immune to not only every other bit of Pacifican-known 'magic', but physical harm as well. She'd quickly become the Ministry's secret weapon charged with meeting the more hostile or unstable newly-awakened gifted.<br/><br/>That was why she had a knot in her stomach as she looked at the dossier in front of her one last time. For weeks the ministry had been chasing rumors all around Tokyo, Japan, standing out like a sore thumb more often than not. Normally, she'd have left Tokyo to the local office, but several reports of small fires, property damage and several eyewitness reports of a young man unleashing fire from his hands before vanishing seemingly into thin air meant she got the call. A few calls to the local government got her a name to go with the face. Not Japanese, but not quite Western, either. She decided to stake out a restaurant where the man had been seen several times and hope she got lucky. Fortunately for her, she enjoyed udon, as it'd taken a solid week before he'd walked in the door an hour before closing...<br/><br/><a class="username" data-user-id="1319" data-username="@ArchonTsukino" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/1319/">@ArchonTsukino</a>