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Once Becky was safely in the hands of True North and Kimber had done all she needed to do at her old homestead, Young Freedom's members young and old crowded aboard the regional jet flight from Thunder Bay to Detroit. Though Sharl could easily have emailed himself straight to the DPD mainframe and searched as he would, he made a point to stay on the plane with his colleagues. He was acutely aware of how alone he was out here, so far from the few people in Freedom City he did know, and the last thing he wanted to do was alienate the people who were supposed to be on his team. He was here to be part of the real world, to make connections and alliances that would give him the tools he needed to protect Tronik; hell, he was here to have adventures in this wide-open alien world! This wasn't the time to get into stupid arguments with his friends. So while the others socialized, he took the opportunity to crack open his laptop to connect to the local satellite network (carefully using a tightly-focused IR signal that wouldn't interfere with the plane's own navigation) to research their target: Koshiro McMillan of Detroit, Michigan, and the city itself in the process. Detroit had once been a center of petroleum-based industry that had fallen on hard times, and looking at his laptop screen, it looked like things hadn't gotten any better. Freedom City was sparse enough, but a city like Freedom that had lost so many of its people was a strange thought to contemplate. There must be so much to explore! When his search came up with something, or rather, something that was nothing, Sharl said "Hmm...it says Koshiro McMillan's record has been sealed by the order of a judge. So I don't know. What kind of things would cause someone to be held in a juvenile detention facility?" he asked, pointing to the address on his computer that matched where they'd been told to go.

The growing group of young metahumans and aliens found the flight to Canada considerably less eventful than the one to India, but their reception was equally less warm. There was no one to greet the four teenagers as they disembarked at Thunder Bay International Airport after a brief stop over on the west coast, walking through the long corridors of shopping establishments before finding a local map and a set of hastily scrawled directions left for them at the information desk. The path marked for them in ballpoint pen left the city and traveled northward, into what looked like a wooded area. The desk attendant's sunny smile flickered briefly as she glanced at the location of the broad X indicating the route's destination, but she was evidently too polite to say anything unbidden. At the bottom of the written direction, on a page that had clearly been torn out of a journal, the scratchy penmanship finished, DON'T stray into the woods. And thanks. --DS

After the excitement of their last flight, the final leg to India was likely a terrible anticlimax...but boring isn't always a bad thing. Still, after nearly ten hours of peanuts, recycled air, and terrible movies the rest of the passengers certainly looked like they were ready to be on the ground and stretching their legs. That plus a little more time to get through security and claim whatever luggage they'd brought and a plane's worth of tourists and natives were stepping out into a warm but overcast Mumbai summer day. The city was busy and streets were even busier, but as fortune had it the collective of heroic envoys didn't have very far to go: right there at the sidewalk stood a tall, dour-looking man in a button-up shirt and what could only have been his daughter. Both were standing almost unnaturally still, like metal rods against the shifting tide of the crowd, but they were clearly watching the groups leaving the airport. The daughter, an attractive teenage girl in fairly conservative clothes, was holding a sign that read only: CLAREMONT.

Another school year had finished, but at Claremont Academy, attention had already turned to the coming semester. The private school, secretly specializing in teenagers with superhuman abilities and the starting place for many new heroes, was looking at one of its largest groups of new enrollees ever in the coming year, leaving Headmaster Duncan Summers with a few logistical challenges even before they arrived. A number of the school's most accomplished students had graduated, but in the process a few of their younger peers had proven themselves to be trustworthy and able leaders. It was thus that Eve Martel and Corbin Hughes were assigned a most unusual extracurricular assignment. Summers tasked the pair with picking up four new students before the new school year, traveling across the globe to gather them together. Luckily, the first of the would-be-Claremonters was already in Freedom City, and was to be found at the Lab in Hanover. Inside the lobby of the expansive center for experimentation and learning, a well groomed man in a sharply professional outfit manned the desk, scanning a number of monitors in front of him and greeting new arrivals. The headmaster had been somewhat vague about the abilities of any of the students Eve and Corbin would be retrieving, supposedly as a matter of privacy and security, but the remainder of Young Freedom got the distinct impression that the entire trip was also something of a test for all involved. Of course, when Summers was involved most things were. Now that they were there, the telepath and ringbearer had little to go on besides an unusual name: Sharl Tulink.