Circles Within Circles

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Scene Title	Circles Within Circles
Synopsis	Round and round and round we go… how much should people be told?
Date	January 16, 2009

Elisabeth's Apartment at Dorchester Towers

Why is it always in the darkest hours of the night that you feel the sickest when you're ill, that the new baby cries the loudest, that the ghosts come back to haunt you? Is it merely because it's the deepest part of the night? Or is it that it's the only part of the day that humans finally stop moving around and finally sit still to allow the inner self to explore everything it's experienced in the day? The old saying is that it's always darkest before the dawn, that you'll always hit the lowest point before you bounce back.

As she sits curled up on her couch, a steaming mug of chocolate in her hand, Elisabeth is forced to wonder if she's hit bottom yet. She started all this with the best of intentions. How the hell did it go so wrong?

The list of events that resulted in this clusterfuck seems endless. The school explosion started it all….. but no, if she's honest, that's not right. The Bomb started it all. It exposed the Evolved to the public eye and suddenly there was this wave of Evolved crime. When we were all forced to hide, it was like even criminals didn't use their abilities that much for fear of being thought freaks. Then it was the norm that powers existed and suddenly it was okay to use powers.

Heh. Yeah, the norm. Sure. Two years of keeping her head down showed her that people with powers might be far more widespread than anyone ever imagined, but it's unlikely that we'll ever be any kind of 'norm'. Going back to the force only underlined it. For every criminal she stops, there are at least three people on the street who make snide comments about Evolved cops. Because the assumption is that the entire SCOUT squad is Evolved — happens to be not true, but Judah Demsky and Kaydence Damaris are the only exceptions, so far as she knows.

And now all this. A freakin' save-the-world plot running amok and somehow Elisabeth has found herself smack dab in the middle of it because they chose her school to blow up. Oh, sure… she'd been nearly to the point of going back to the force anyway. Norton was right; she wasn't happy as a teacher. She wasn't happy with her life. Being a cop is all she ever wanted to be, much to her mother's chagrin.

She hadn't thought she was naive, but looking back on it…. yeah. Naive doesn't cover it. She'd had no idea how bad it would be, going back to the force as an Evolved officer. She'd thought she knew, but … not a clue. The backbiting in the locker room, that she can handle. The bitching and muttering in the halls about how she slept her way into a plum assignment? That she can handle too; it's not the first time people have made that assumption about her. It's the fact that she isn't sure how far to trust her fellow cops, that she's forced to hide what she's doing from them, that gets to her. Well, and the threats.

Will's going to bring her into his office. She's certain of that. He's sitting on the report of what happened during the Sanders arrest, one of the hardest arrests she's ever made because of the Niki persona, trying to decide what to say to her. She can see it in his expression whenever he acknowledges her presence in a room. And what he says to her and how he says it may well decide, permanently, whether she has a career left. And truth be told…. what she's doing with Phoenix is more immediate and more intense a problem than anything she deals with as a cop, but…. she doesn't want to leave the force again.

So now it comes down to choices. How much to tell Will. How much to tell Darius. She's going to have to talk to them both. And it's going to be hard. She's got information that could throw the city into chaos. If she tells Will about the bombs… but what choice does she have in that? She knows about a major threat to public safety. If she says nothing and they blow… hundreds or thousands could die. And it tips off Volken that we're onto him, of course. So is that the catalyst that makes him launch his attack? Are the bombs in the prophecy dream exploding because they're on a timer, or are they exploding because we screwed with them? She's not high enough pay grade to make these decisions… and yet she's going to have to, because there *is* no one else to make them.

So what to tell Will? And what to tell Darius? And how to stop Volken? And how to save the world? And how to stay a cop? And how best to help everyone? Her mind goes round and round and round ….