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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arwink" data-source="post: 2126718" data-attributes="member: 2292">Gators Under Gary, Part OneEveryone spends a few days in the hospital, slowly recovering from the experience at the rest stop.  No one says anything about what happened, and as the physical wounds heal people drift away one by one.  Ammie eventually makes it out to Sid’s ranch.  She spends a week riding horses, eating good food and relaxing as best she can.  When her boyfriend Dayne suggests she seems a little more…intent…in her even training sessions, something inside her seems to break.  She dumps Dayne, borrows Sid’s phone, and puts in the call to Hoffman. Nick goes back to the ATF, returns to his case files.  At the end of the third day he opens the rattiest file in his cabinet, looking at the notes from his second investogation with the force.  The clear typed script with the official statement of his apprehension of a drug runner inside a burning building, the hand-written notes about what really happened.  It isn’t until a couple of his co-worker start making jokes about “Mouldy” DeLatre loosing it again that he picks up the phone.  Twenty-four hours later he’s been removed from the ATF and hired by the Institute as a civilian adviser.Zac doesn’t even get out of the hospital. He's been badly hurt, so he's still recovering when the others leave.  He makes the call only a few hours after they gone, late in the evening, burning with the realization that he’s actually seen a demon and has the chance to see more.  The three of them meet again at orientation, working their way through with a small crowd of potential agents that just don't seem to understand what they're signing up for.  The first lecture is like a bad episode of the X-files, with a balding researcher quietly explaining that the Truth is Out there.  Most of the new recruits sit in wide-eyed amazement.  After the terrors of Exit 23, the fuzzy voodoo dolls and blurred photographs of aliens he’s showing don’t do much to impress Ammie, Nick or Zac.  They cluster together, the only people who comprehend the truth in a room full of true believers.The next day the training starts, a daily routine of hand-to-hand drills, firearm drills, lectures on conspiracies and the supernatural, interview techniques.  All the things that could be useful in the field, accompanied by routine exposure to phenomena that hardened the recruits to the new reality they had to acknowledge.In the middle of their second week of training, Zac disappears.  When Ammie asks one of their instructors what happened, he quietly point out that Zac showed promise.  He’s now in an advanced program that will develop his potential.  Seven hours later, Ammie and Nick are summoned to the office of Richard Patterson, Chicago Section Chief for the Institute.  He waves them into his office, pointing at a pair of soft leather chairs in front of his desk.“Patterson,” he says gruffly.  “Call me sir.  Just finished reading your file.  Says you took down a Harriken, kept a small crowd of people alive.  Not bad, not bad at all.  Of course, by all rights, you should be dead.“Why do people keeep telling us that,” Ammie mutters.  Paterson shrugs.“Because it’s true.  Usually we show up after these things and there’s nothing but a few smears of blood on the wall.  Keeping two-dozen people alive is something of a feat.  That’s why we’ve fast-tracked you.  We’re going to send you out into a small town called Gary, get you to look into rumors of alligators in their sewers.”</blockquote>

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