A Dangerous Mystery

Take Glasby City, take it on a cold winter day, or rather late afternoon. The sun begginning to set and glare in everybodies eyes as they walked their way home to their apartments. Take the silent chitter chatter of the people walking on the sidewalk, somehow audible even from within the cars of people stuck in traffic. A horn honked and someone stuck their hand out their window to flip the bird. Ah, lovely Glasby city traffic. 

The sky was a vibrant orange, almost as if threatening to ignite as the sun bore down on everyone underneath it, an occasional cloud was sliced in half by its brilliance as it heroicly tried to offer the Glasby Residents some relief. A fine winter day, cold, but not dull. 

So it was quite a suprise when things became far less dull than they had been.

There was a loud thundering from main street, then a new source of light flashed hideously from the same location, something far greater than the sun, if only for a moment. An explosion, it had been an explosion.

People were shocked to say the least.

A small gathering of students that had just finished their late afternoon classes stood, dumbfounded by the loud sound and bright light. The fireball that was ejected into the sky hadn't lasted much longer than the initial explosion, but the flaming remnants of a truck lay well in view of most of the citizens who had been nearby.

Of the population, which could be no more than a million people, about a quater were within earshot, an eigth within viewing distance, and a half of those people had been on the street.

Someone screamed, which was the catalyst in a series of events that could only be described as pure, unadultered panic. Everyone, save a few morbidly curious and adrenaline junkie individuals began to run, get out of their cars if need be. A large portion of the students had stayed put, watching with intense curiosity at the flaming wreck of the truck.

Although it wasn't the truck itself that had caused the distinct level of panic, but the figure that had emerged from its storage container.

The driver of the truck had only barely managed to escape, thrown from his cab by the explosion, a bright orange hedgehog, or at least the remaisn of one, and had begun crawling his way across the ashpalt in an attempt to get as far away from the inferno as possible, but a foot put an end to his struggle. A being, seemingly made of shadow, surrounded by a ring of light, like an event horizon, planted his dark foot firmly on the hedgehog's back, illiciting an unpleasant crack.

The discourse seeping its way through the population, now flooding their way out of nearby buildings, seemed to be only encouraged by the events that had taken place only 4 years prior at Glasby's sister city of Fenris, and while the mystery of it's collapse was enough to prevent people from questioning, the paranoia of a sudden death jumps to the forefront of the mind when something out of the ordinary happens.

There was no chance for the police to respond in time, nor any way for them to get there, the streets were filled with now empty cars and the hordes of civillians trying to escape was inpregnable, save it be from someone who had been in the crowd prior to the event, or someone with another means of transportation.