Jessica Bridges forced a smile onto her face as she walked up to the only occupied table in her section, a man that had been there, tapping away at a laptop for the past three hours. He'd started off with a pretty hefty dinner order, but coffee had been his poison of choice for the past two and a half hours. He took a refill with a smile on his face, and Jessica walked back behind the counter and checked her phone, 2:07 AM January 2nd, her shift ended at two, and she wished the man would finish his business and leave. "This is the second time in the past week and a half that I've had to deal with this." She thought. The last guy had dropped a fifty on the table as he walked out. This was a different guy though, the last one looked agitated and tired, he was nice to her, but looked really rough, this guy was charming but he'd outstayed his welcome regardless. Jessica started to text her boyfriend that she would be home soon when she heard a laptop close, "Finally", she thought as she sat up with excitement. Her happiness rapidly descended into dread, then even faster, to ash as a wall of flame rivaling the heat of the underworld itself incinerated the diner and everything else within 2 city blocks. Jacob Kergin reached under his booth pulled out a case and packed his laptop inside of it. He flipped his table into the fire beside him and rose with a smile on his face. "The age of the Dragons is upon us" Jacob laughed. It had taken a while, but he was finally able to trace an echo from the energy spike in Atlanta to a small village in southern Italy. He was just about to get started on what he figured would be a long journey when he heard a shuffling noise behind him. Jacob turned and saw a homeless man standing in fear behind a half melted metal barrel. Jacob frowned, the chance of someone being immune to magic was low, very low, somewhere in the range of one in a billion or more. Then he laughed and called to the man "You may no know it you poor sod, but you have got to be in the top 10 luckiest men alive." Jacob turned away as the hobo struggled to eek out a response and set off on his way, the remainder of his now sputtering flames splitting in his wake. Jacob walked out a smoldering back alley into the blaring noise of the local emergency response vehicles. He watched as fire trucks battled the intense flames that clung to the buildings at the edge of his ground zero in a desperate attempt to keep the fire from spreading. No one paid him any attention as he climbed into an old car parked on the side of the street, hot wired it and drove away. He wondered how long it would be before some terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attack, not that it mattered. "They will know the truth soon enough" He mumbled through a scowl.
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