[Viventium Umbra]

Azrail sat in his hospital bed, propped up with pillows. An IV drip was connected to his left arm, constantly administering painkillers. He was still in agony though. With seven broken bones, fifty-two major lacerations, and and two snapped tendons, there was only so much that could be done. Had it not been for Stella's medical drones, he would have died. Azrail thought of t17, the accursed fiend that had put him here, but he took some comfort in the knowledge that they'd been able to get a tracker on it. A small monitor on Azrail's bedside table showed multiple blinking dots moving across a map of Vale. He had watched 7 raids fail to eliminate the monster from his bed before tossing the thing aside. Now he sat in his room, motionless to quell the pain, and waited for the world to make its move.

[Asterisk]

Stella walked into the room. "Hey, got a few visitors here to see you. Want them to come in now?"

[Viventium Umbra]

Azrail looked up at his visitor with a pronounced emptiness in his eyes and simply nodded in reply.

[Asterisk]

Turning around, Stella said out the door, "Alright, you two can go ahead." She then stepped aside as Ophelia and Camellia walked in. Ophelia was wearing a black t-shirt with a grey knit cardigan and blue jeans while Camellia wore a white t-shirt with a red zipper hoodie and blue shorts.

Immediately going up to the bed, Camellia said, "Oh my god Azrail, I'm so glad you're okay. Here, this is a card from me, hope you get better soon!"

From behind her, Ophelia placed a bag on the table next to him and gestured to it. "The General wishes you well. How is your recovery coming along?"

[Viventium Umbra]

"Isn't it funny how people care once you're on your deathbed," Azrail muttered and then leaned over, grimacing in pain, to push some loose papers into a drawer of the bedside table. He then turned to Ophelia, "It'll be..." Azrail paused, as if he were recalling some painful memory from a long time ago. "It'll be five months until I can return to combat," he said, and then added, "Two weeks until I can leave this bed."

[Asterisk]

Ophelia simply said, "I see. Camellia."

Camellia nodded. "Okay." Lightly hugging Azrail, Camellia stood back.

She then said to Azrail, "Azrail Duivel Kind, you've already seen that my abilities far surpass any normal second year at Beacon. As such, I will let you in on a few secrets. I will let you know, I have been in this world far longer than I seem to look. I will let you know, I have a broad network ranging from the deepest reaches of Vale's criminal underground all the way to the council of Remnant. What I won't allow you to know however, is exactly what I do, which is kept even from my daughter Camellia. You don't need to speak as if five months is such a bad thing. For instance, in five months I could help you develop your aura to the level of a seasoned huntsman, which from what I've seen, you could certainly use. So. Long story short, I am making an offer for you, Azrail, to join my household."

"Wait mom, really?" Camellia looked at Ophelia in excitement. "Does dad know about this? Where is he right now anyways?"

"Yes, and yes. He's currently in a meeting with the General, Mr. Beckett, Auntie Astrid, and a few other hunstmen. This will be our last attempt before the General decides to call in QSZR to put down the creature. Have the Canisters been recharged?"

"Yup, 100% and ready to deploy!"

"Good." She turned back to Azrail for an answer.

(QSZR = Strelka's mom's team. Fully seasoned 52-53 year old Atlesian Specialists, all of them world class.)

[Viventium Umbra]

Azrail sat in shocked silence, but his face was not one of joy but unimaginable emotional pain. "I... I...," he tried to respond in some way to the offer he had just been presented, but failed to do more than look like he was about to cry. "My aura isn't weak," he blurted out to try and fill the void. "My aura's perfectly normal and it ripped through it like wet paper. Don't send people after us. Leave us alone and we'll destroy ourselves in due time. We won't live for much longer the way we are, and I don't want you to be dragged down with us," Azrail said, unintentionally switching pronouns mid-sentence. In a way, it was an answer to both propositions, though in typical Azrail fashion, incredibly vague and difficult to decipher.

(1. Azrail doesn't know that, but 2. the statement is still valid (it's got to be read a certain way to make any sense, but as a hint, it draws upon the parallels between Azrail and t17), and 3. Even with your team, trying to kill t17 is incredibly dangerous.)

[Asterisk]

"Us? You're not a part of it just as much as you're not a part of Stella there."

"Ew."

"Be nice. It's just an example. Anyways, while you're deciding, I'll have to hand you over to Ms. Chartreuse for a bit. Ophelia stepped back as Stella scooted her chair forward.

"Right. Since you seem like you know more about it than anyone else, why don't I break out the strategy so you can give us some advice. First step of the plan. Bait out the creature. The General uses her clone semblance, which will start beating at it with a pinata stick. The next step will be for me to use the recently widowed Mrs. Buta, aka, pig, this one with numerous objects like the tracker embedded all over inside it. Explosives. So we'll have the Chupacabra take these explosives back to its homely home and once it munches on them, we put people in position. Boom. Detonate. Now then. Two teams will be on stand-by. The first team, capture or survey, is if the creature's aura is depleted or it has been killed by the explosives. Team AEON consists of Ms. Snowflower, our sniper who's getting closer and closer to the world record for most Goliaths single-handedly slain everyday, Mr. Werner, who can give quite a shock, Ms. Lupin, whom one will have trouble detecting, and Mr. Quake, who is really really good at digging. As for Mr. Steel and Mr. Osilgrin, we're still not 100% certain if they're up for one more hunt. If the creature's aura is somehow not depleted though, that is when our second team comes in. Team QSZR consists of Mr. Ronolve, who can just about shoot apart a skyscraper, Mr. Zvezda, who can drag the creature straight out of the ground, Ms. Brackman, who can dice the creature apart, indestructable armor and all, faster than The General with her vegetables, and Mrs. Harbinger, the useless one. No I'm kidding. She'll find a chink in the armor and land a bullet in there before you can say yippeekiyay."

[Viventium Umbra]

"Us? I said us? how fitting," Azrail replied grimly. He then listened to the plan. "You want my advice? leave us- Leave it alone. It'll bring about its own demise in due time, we all do. By attacking it, you're just begging for something to go wrong," Azrail said. He would have continued, but there was a beep from the monitor on the bedside table. Immediately, the dots for t17 and every cop nearby blinked and vanished. A message flashed on the screen ominously: Signal Lost, Searching For Signal. "Count yourselves lucky," Azrail commented. "Looks like someone's gonna do it for you." He was happy to steer the conversation as far from himself as possible. The crushing weight of his predicament was less painful that way.

[Viventium Umbra]

Before the visitors could respond, they were ushered out of the room in a very hurried manner by some nurses carrying freshly printed documents of what looked to be important nature. "You have to leave now. We're very sorry. It seems Azrail isn't finished with treatment," one of them explained briefly, and in a few moments Azrail was alone again. He peered over the side of his bed with great pain and difficulty to find that one sheet of paper had been dropped on the floor. The words written in big letters at the top confirmed Azrail's suspicions and he groaned.

It was two weeks before any other visitors walked through the door. In those two weeks, many of the wounds on Azrail's back had healed, but his legs were both immobilized in white casts. Azrail remembered when the dots for the police officers had reappeared (after only about ten minutes), but T17 never did. In fact, it seemed as if the creature had disappeared into thin air. In the meantime, Azrail had taken a few tentative tries at using a wheelchair, and now he was using it regularly to get around. But while his body seemed to be healing normally, something didn't seem right with Azrail's mind. It looked like he hadn't slept in a few days, and he seemed constantly paranoid. He muttered under his breath in a very noticeable, and seemed always to be writing. There were hundreds of crumpled up sheets of paper in the garbage bin next to the bedside table (which he was using as a makeshift desk, and on this particular occasion, Azrail had finished adding to that pile. He scrawled out the last sentence, and then put down his pen and reread the whole thing. He nodded, satisfied, and then leaned back in his wheelchair with the paper clutched tightly in his fingers.

[00Mogar]

Kale and Aria stood in the door frame waiting for him to finish writing not wanting to disterb his concentration, she had wanted to visit Azrail the moment she found out but was on mission so when she finally got a chance she ran as fast as her legs would carry her. When she got to the hosputal she even went so far as to shove a crowd of patients out of the way to get to his room, to say the least they where not happy with a faunus just shoving them out of the way and the nurses where less then ecstatic about the fox running behind her.

As Azrail finished reading what he had wrote Kale leaned against the frame and asked "Is that gonna be the next best seller? If it is I have a suggestion on what to call it 'How I fucked up and this fox won't let me down', how does that sound?", from her tone of voice the entire title was a jest and she wasn't being serious.

[Viventium Umbra]

Azrail almost fell out of his chair trying to spin around quickly, immediately hiding the paper behind his back before raising his arms in a panicked, pathetic martial arts stance made all the more sad and scared by that fact that he was stuck sitting down. The fear in his eyes fled, however, when he realized his old friend was standing in the doorway. Azrail let out a sigh of relief and lowered his hands, and then took a moment to process her question. "Kale, it's so good to see a familiar face, and no, it certainly isn't a book. I'm not going to sell it to anyone," he replied finally. He then took the paper back out again and reached for an envelope that had been sitting off to the side of his makeshift desk. Azrail folded the piece of paper and tucked it into the envelope before placing it in his lap.

[00Mogar]

Kale laughed and walked in making sure she shut the door in case someone came looking for her, Aria bolted up to the bed and hopped her front legs onto it nuzzeling into Azrail's side. Kale walked up to the other side of the bed and hugged him letting him know she was there for him before asking "So how did this one happen? I had heard whispers but I want you to tell me the truth of it since you are likely to be the only one who will.", she let him go and tried to hide the sorrow in her eyes  but failed knowing that she wasn't there to help her friend in his greatest time of need.

[Viventium Umbra]

Azrail scratched Aria lightly around the ears and returned the hug as best he could from his position. "Well, technically I'm under oath not to tell, but the police won't be able to do anything to me soon, so their stipulations don't exactly apply to me," Azrail said with a sigh. "You likely won't have heard of it before, but there's a thing called t17 hiding in Vale, and I got obsessed with finding it. Of course, I didn't know much at all about t17 until recently, when I made a fool of myself trying to fight it," he explained, hanging his head. Azrail barely caught the look in Kale's eyes and added, "You should know that I could never blame you for what happened; it was entirely my fault."

[00Mogar]

Kale nodded "I've only heard whispers and rumors all of them saying the same thing... don't find it or it will kill you, but from the looks of it they where only half right.", she sighed "Next time you decide to go on a suicide mission to find this thin I want to know.", she cracked her neck and in a more serious tone said "Cause I want to make sure it pays for what it did to you."