Plead My Case

"It was a definite you win some, you lose some situation," Angelo admitted. "At that point we weren't really used to relying on existing support structures--" Like the scouts offered, anyway, "but the part of my team who remained outside were able to call in backup and force their way in. The two of us who ended up inside managed to engineer a jailbreak with the help of them and the other students who'd been captured, and we put a stop to the school, hopefully..."

Angelo trailed off. He'd been meaning to say hopefully for good, but there was no point. He knew what had happened in the end now, and he took a second to shake his head.

"They were all freed," he said. "Got a bit messy in the cleanup, but everyone got out." No fatalities. Only some minor injuries.

Finer details. He could do that, even if he didn't have a perfect memory for that sort of thing.

"We heard rumors that people were going missing," Angelo said. "People around our age. We started investigating, and we got a fair amount of evidence of what was happening, but not enough to actually get us in there. Unfortunately, things moved up to a faster time table. My friend's father went missing, which meant we needed to take action before things got even worse. We knew who they took, and the criteria for that, and we used that to set up a situation where we'd be... I guess you'd call it 'highly desirable prey'?"

It sounded weird to describe himself as pray, but that was what had happened.

"In terms of specifics, we checked with the missing people's families, and asked their friends. We noticed the pattern in the disappearances--that they were all skipping school at the time they went missing, and that they all had some amount of history of delinquency--and were able to map out an area the school was getting its students from. Then we skipped class ourselves, making a point of trespassing into an isolated area to draw attention. It actually took longer than we'd like, because we hadn't made the connection that they always went missing alone. We had to split up for them to take us."

He vastly preferred the first question. It was, of all the things they'd done, probably the most directly this-is-something-you-could-do-as-a-scout. They hadn't done all that much investigating near the end, mostly because the world was ending and everyone had better things to do.