Christmas Video of the Day!
Picking a Christmas video for tonight will
seem odd to you after reading our reports – so we’ll pick two instead! This is one of our all-time favorite
Christmas songs, and there’s a new music video out this year with our favorite
a Canella group singing it; so take your pick between it and the original for
the one you like best!
Ethan and Ehlana:
This joint update is an ongoing report that
we’ll add to as we cover the only story of the day – an attack on Cassie,
Michael, Rowen, and Tim by Gwyneth Hathorne – through a group of ‘goons’ that
she’s hired for the job.
We began to sense problems through a
combination of our links with Cassie and foresight starting this morning, but
that only began with feeling unsettled; and built through the day until Cassie
was in real danger by the time she was writing her last exam of the day. That affected our school day; and then we had
to go on to the lab as normal to keep up appearances – and because Mom was away
on the Moms’ Christmas shopping trip anyway.
We made an excuse for leaving the lab early; met up with Dad at the
office; and talked him into a pizzeria pizza dinner that we ordered and then
picked up on the way home from his office.
Mom had been aware of what was going on with Cassie too, but Dad hadn’t
been; so we told him what we knew once we were home and could have the privacy
to do that, and we had to wait for Mom to come home from her trip; since she
couldn’t make any excuses to cut it short.
It was weird and a bit frustrating to be helpless to do anything to help
Cassie; though we didn’t know all that much about what was actually happening
while they were in the middle of that attack.
We could sense that Cassie was okay; knew when she started using her
Magi talents; and could tell when she was in the middle of blasts of extreme
action, but we also foresaw that we were not meant to try and intervene; so we
had to wait and worry – even as we were sure that they’d all be okay and take
care of themselves.
***
Fast-forward a couple of hours; and now we
can report that Cassie and her friends are no longer in danger. Cassie is also not using her Magi powers
anymore, and that’s for the best; since we can sense that she’s exhausted
too. We still don’t have any details,
but they’re on the move. Mom’s home now
too, and has tried to call and message them, but isn’t getting any responses
from them; so the waiting continues until they are able to contact us
again. We’re not worried about that;
since we are sure that Cassie is okay – and she wouldn’t be if she wasn’t sure
that Michael, Tim, and Rowen are safe and well too.
***
Michael just called Mom to advise us that
Cassie’s at home, but unconscious; and that she has injuries that aren’t
healing. Mom’s assured him – and Rowen
and Tim – that Cassie is okay; and confirmed Rowen’s guess that Cassie has
over-done it with the power drain. They’re
going to take care of her now; and then get back in touch with us to tell us
everything about what happened to them.
***
Gwyneth Hathorne and her goons are so going
to end up on Santa’s naughty list!
Okay, they’re all bad guys, so they were
likely already in trouble with the big guy; but they’ve been especially-bad
today!
They kidnapped Michael and Tim from their
townhouse – after breaking and entering so they’d be there when they got
home. The boys went along with them
because another of the bad guys – a sniper – was threatening to shoot Cassie
while in that last exam if they didn’t cooperate. Next up, two more goons – apparently young,
handsome goons – kidnapped Cassie and Rowen – and got them to go along by
threatening to shoot Michael and Tim; and then they all ended up at an old
office building that the bad guys had picked for their planned ‘show’ for their
client.
While they’d cooperated with the bad guys
to that point, when those goons wanted to tie Cassie and Rowen up; that was
more than Cassie was willing to accept – especially since she knew that Michael
and Tim were in the same building with them.
The goons tried to force her to comply by punching Michael very hard;
and things went downhill after that – for the bad guys. We’ll leave the details for what happened
next to Cassie, but she set Michael and Tim free to defend themselves from the
two goons that had been guarding them while Cassie and Rowen proceeded to fight
their way through a bunch of the bad guys until they could get to their
boyfriends. That happened in a series of
fights; there were a couple of vid-chats with the goon boss and Gwyneth –
though Gwyneth only listened in and talked without video and a disguised voice
for obvious reasons.
All four of our heroes were injured, but
Rowen had the worst injuries with a smashed knee, so once they were together
and had that group of bad guys down and out; Cassie healed her friends; and
then they had to make a hasty escape because the goons’ contingency plan for
ensuring the success of their mission was to blow up the building with their
targets inside!
We should be scared by that, but if we’re
honest; the Magi talents that Cassie used to get out of that situation was very
cool. She used time phasing and
phase-shift transmutations in concert to get out of the building with three ‘passengers’
– and did that in under a minute. They
also, apparently, needed to run while in that time-phase for a mile or so to
get on the far side of the nearest building, and even with being that far away
and shielded; the explosion was still very-intense. That explosion wasn’t being covered by our
local news tonight, but it was on the news for Michael, Tim, and Rowen; so we
saw video that was caught of it from about three miles away on a smart phone;
and from the news cameras covering the aftermath. The section of the building that they’d been
in – on the fourth floor – had been pancaked; so it’s a safe bet that the goons
believe that they succeeded – even though they didn’t end up providing Gwyneth
with the entertainment she’d paid them to provide for her.
Cassie, Rowen, Michael, and Tim had to walk
several miles from there to get far-enough back into the city to catch a bus
back to the college – and Cassie’s car; they went home from there; and then
Cassie passed out after having a shower while Michael, Rowen, and Tim were
dealing with their own issues and ordering dinner for four; since none of them
wanted to cook by then – and Cassie had promised Tim that she’d buy dinner
after messing up their dinner-at-home plans by being the ultimate target for
the goon squad.
We’ve covered the news about Michael and
Rowen taking care of Cassie, but we’ll add that they needed to get her dressed
and dress all of her wounds because they weren’t self-healing yet. Ehlana gets credit for the brilliant idea of
the day for suggesting that Michael should cuddle with Cassie tonight and use
an empathy cocoon to help her recover.
We’ll have to wait and see if that works, but we think that it will; and
that’s leading us to other ideas related to healing that we’ll work on for the
future.
For now, that’s all we have on the
story. We hope that Cassie will wake up
in time for her first exam tomorrow, and think that she’ll be okay, but Mom
does have a contingency plan if needed – and she can be there fast too; though
that would be really tough to keep a time phase going for that distance –
especially if she takes a minivan along for the trip. That’d be cool too, but we won’t hope for
that; since it would be very hard to explain how she got from here to there in
minutes instead of hours.
Then again, there won’t be many people who
will find out about this incident at all; so that’s not really an issue anyway.
It’s past-midnight now, so we should get
some sleep. Stay tuned for more news as
we get it tomorrow – and we’ll hope that the next big news story won’t be that
this horrid attack has messed up Cassie’s perfect marks when she really didn’t
need this kind of test to go along with all of those final exams!
This is Ethan and Ehlana Proctor; coming to
you live from what is now our past – and we’re out!
