Chapter Text
From A Hero's Memoir: The Annotated Journals of Luke Castellan:
Shortly after 10:15, all three of Nick Scratch’s plans failed catastrophically and in quick succession.
First, three (human) police officers entered from the trailing car. As per Plan A, Nick had already masked both his and my presence with Mist-based multi-layer perception filters. As he would later explain to me, the first layer, a basic perception filter, made it difficult for normal humans to look directly at us. The second layer, a significantly more complicated working, acted on the parts of the human brain that compiled and sorted visual input, preventing anyone who did look at us from forming a mental image of what we looked like. The third blocked the visual cortex from passing on any such image to the visual memory, preventing anyone who managed to look at us from remembering our appearance at a later time or connecting it to other information (such as a wanted poster).
The presence of three officers instead of two, while unexpected and unusual, did not in itself constitute a failure of Plan A. That two were wearing Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police badges and the third an NYPD logo was even more so – but inter-departmental operations were not entirely unknown.
The two MTA officers passed over us without stopping. The third, a tall, tawny man with dark hair and startlingly blue eyes, ignored me entirely, locked onto Nick, and immediately drew his handgun.
I would learn more of then-NYPD Lieutenant John Hunter – 32 years old, Iroquois and Russian descent, formerly of the USMC, qualified shaman, and legacy of more gods than he could name – in the months and years to come. At this time, his presence marked the catastrophic failure of Plan A.
Almost simultaneously, the forward door opened to admit six large persons in battered, dirty labor gear. The leading worker looked up, saw Hunter, made a noise that should not have been possible with human vocal equipment, and contorted its face and forearms. Hunter, his fellow officers, and Nick looked over just in time to see the skin on its face and hands rupture from the inside, revealing articulated mouthparts and elongated arms ending in serrated claws the size of kitchen knives. The passengers started to panic as the other five shed their own disguises.
The entrance of three Lesser Appalachian Ogres, two Red-Ringed Dracenae, and one Northeastern Skinwalker, undetected and uncontained, marked the catastrophic failure of Plan B.
The two mortal MTA officers blanched. Hunter swore loudly and turned away from Nick to aim at the monsters. Nick and I exchanged glances and switched to Plan C.
Nick pulled a small metal cylinder out of his coat and threw it onto the floor. I reached up and pulled the emergency stop. As the train jerked to an abrupt halt, the stun grenade detonated, and the chaos already emerging in the car accelerated beyond all hope of management, we forced the doors, jumped the fence, and bolted across the field away from the tracks.
Thirty-six very exciting seconds later, the car was covered in blood and filled with slowly clearing smoke, the Ogres and Dracenae were dust, the more durable Skinwalker was in several slowly-disintegrating pieces both inside and outside the train, and Hunter was reloading his gun. The MTA officers were outside the car, attempting to corral the crowd of panicking civilians off the other tracks. Nick and I were most of a kilometer away from the train and still accelerating inland.
By the standards of our later works, plans A and B were fragile things - a necessary consequence of the circumstances. We were in an enclosed space with an unknown quantity of unknown opponents approaching from multiple directions; general plan failure and chaos was likely if not inevitable. Thus, Plan C, our getaway contingency, started with the assumption that everything had already gone wrong. Where plans A and B relied on external elements moving in specific (if likely) patterns, and aimed to manage the imminent chaos, plan C relied only on our own well-tested core strengths of creating as much chaos as possible and running away.
With a roar, Hunter tore through the side of the train, hit the ground running, and began to quickly close the gap.
This marked the catastrophic failure of Plan C.