Ellisburg incursion

 was a PRT operation following exceptionally unfortunate trigger event.

Prelude
Small town gets a new parahuman, and shortly stops displaying any signs of life.

In late January, the local police started getting reports of pets going missing from backyards.

The next day cell phone towers are attacked.

A number of new villains appeared but the common motive behind their crimes indicated that the local authorities were dealing with one Shifter-type villain.

Ellisburg is quiet not dogs barking no bees buzzing.

Nothing escaped the town, human or otherwise.

Faced with a town that had disappeared off of a map The PRT sent in mixed cape and PRT Squads to try and find the culprit, Jamie Rinke.

They were greeted by an empty town. Just like the residents they realized something too late, where were all the insects.

PRT is unable to get reliable intelligence past few initial days.

Events
Operatives notice the scale of the incident too late.

Toronto capes, that were supposed to provide fire-support, flee the ensuing battle.

Aftermath
Ellisburg quarantined, Jamie Rinke recognized as S-Class threat. Life trajectories of two survivors are deeply altered.

The town was quarantined with all the possibly proper precautions. :RedX: Twenty years of fallout cleanup is better than everyone dying to uberlocasts. It's arguably better than the moral and psychologial hazard of letting Nilbog continue to exist. Wildbow: I find there's a trend, and you definitely see it highlighted in PRT quest, but you see it in arguments like this too. The first mistake people make is forgetting the person involved. Nilbog was a human once, who watched TV and rented movies. He was lonely, odd, but fairly intelligent. He has a sense about nuclear weapons. He knows about armies and all that. Crazy as he becomes, he retains that. That's the first mistake. Forgetting that there's a man there, spending weeks and days with his creations, he loves them, they're his art, his existence. But he has his good moments, and he has his depressive, paranoid moments, where he thinks about how they're dying a little faster every generation, and that there's a very real possibility that people might try to assassinate him, or take his creations away from him by fire, gun, or bomb. He thinks about these things. He dwells on them, and he takes measures. The second mistake that Spacebattlers tend to make, in my estimation, is forgetting about the shards. As Nilbog's content to be passive, you can assume: 1. His shard is broken. 2. His shard is powerful, and it's being utilized to secure Scion/Eden's plans more than it's being used to stress test and evolve anything. 3. Both of the above. So, question. What eventuality is this tightly packed biome of custom-made living things placed there for? Remember the long-term agenda, too. Conflict. What if he's there because the entities wanted something out there to generate chaos in the event that a Bakuda or a US army or a Level 9001 Dauntless annihilated the area and most of the local population? You know what happens if you nuke the site with bunker busters and try to quarantine the site after the fact? People start getting sick. You discover that there's a fuckton of airborne parasites that've been scattered by the bombs, waterborne parasites getting into nearby sites. Stuff that was contained in tougher creations with hard carbon shells, released during/after the fact. Conventional filtration doesn't necessarily work, because the parasites crawl over, through and around, negating the benefit of hazmat and masks and water filtration systems and all that. The people that get sick start changing. They develop into problems that could give many parahumans a run for their money. The PRT has a sense of this. They consider every threat, and they have thinkers and Dragon working to monitor major problem sites. They get a squad of thinkers to check on Nilbog every week or two, and they get responses like "Black!" "Nine!" "Trojan Horses, Director." They think about leaving him alone, and they get a response of "Yellow", "Three" "Poisoned apple trees, sir." from the same three thinkers. They leave him alone, they keep a close eye on him, they have research teams and tinkers work on developing ideas that might get a response from the thinkers that isn't quite so grave, and they keep things quiet, so the public doesn't realize how dangerous that particular situation really is. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles