Hydra Heart

I

I: Dysentery

The Proctor only told one member of the organization his real name. His family called him Florence Creswell, but that was considered by his peers at school to be a very trashy name, indicative of low social class, much as the name "Brixtynne" might have been eighty years prior. He carried out most of his work alone, so he had enjoyed the opportunity to psych out Vesta. Once she and her team were gone, he was alone in the house again, excepting Ozzy. This was a reminder of a problem that had been worsening for over a decade: The number of total Kit users on the planet was declining, and their Kits were not finding their way back into the Horizon Core's hands.

Why was this happening? Could it be a transition into a new era of SOLE usage already? Perhaps another Horizon Core hideout had some allegiances and was acting upon them. The most dire possibility remained; that the Kits were being destroyed, and were not reincarnating in any way.

Inspired by seeing the Kit users march off into battle, without fear and in open defiance of two authorities, made Florence think, wow, I haven't done very much about the world's problems, have I? He then printed a map of the earth, which, after the recent shifting of continents, needed to be up to the minute. A twenty year old map would bear a vague likeness to the tectonic arrangements of the day, but precision was key for what Florence would do next.

After getting a folder of information from Ozzy and compiling some classified information, he began charting the incidents. On the map of the world, he marked every instance of a Kit user dying wherein their Kit was not recovered, and that's location was unknown. Kits belonging to all kinds of people with a variety of national affiliations had been lost: those of warriors, researchers, librarians, etc.

After compiling the data, he had the map.

From the farthest points on the map, he estimated the radius of an oval, or a circle. At the center of that circle was ocean, supposedly empty. He would go and check for himself.

--

Well, there's a lot of water, Florence thought to himself, surveying the all-consuming blue around him. According to his map and satellite positioning, he had checked most of the viable area for this center of what he was calling the Zone of Vanishment. He turned his boat back to shore, disappointed. He could not find the where, and that meant that the why was still a long ways away.