Post by Theloria Shadecloak on Nov 14, 2019 17:58:22 GMT -5
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[break][attr="class","nikki101"]WE’LL RECLAIM OUR DESTINY
[break][attr="class","nikki102"]WE’LL SET OUR FUTURE FREE
[attr="class","nikki109"]December 31st, 25 A.V. [break][break]
1000hrs. [break][break]
”Thanks for coming.” the faunus would start, dressed in her usual black three piece suit and looking more tired than usual. ”For those of you who think the pacing of the classes here is too slow and you can handle actual hunter work, here’s your chance to prove it. This is a voluntary assignment, and anyone who decides that they are not up for it can leave at any point during this briefing. Quite frankly, I’d prefer it if you walked out if you were on the fence. The last thing I want is potentially hundreds of people to die because of indecision on your part, or you deciding that playing hero is more important than other people’s lives.” [break][break]
The trainees had heard nothing about this at this point, so the drop that hundreds of lives were at stake would likely get their attention. This meeting was open only to those students who had passed the midterm initiation and was billed as a huntsman mission briefing similar to the Argus Limited briefing. ”Information shared in this meeting is confidential until the actual mission begins. The fact that it’s being shared at all with you, transparently, shows how dire the situation is to begin with. If you feel like you cannot keep information to yourself, again I encourage you in the interest of keeping people alive to leave this room immediately. If the media catch wind of this and disrupt preparations, it could take another day or two to ship out and over a thousand people could die as a result of that. Believe it or not, causing a thousand or more people to die is a crime and you’d both be expelled and thrown into prison.” [break][break]
There was another pause, then, that lasted for roughly ten seconds as the faunus scanned across the classroom with her cold, green eyes. ”Alright, now that we understand the gravity of the situation, the briefing begins now.” [break][break]
At this point, Shade picked up a remote control from the desk and flipped on the projector that displayed a map across the screen. ”We have received a request for a Village Defense mission from Rochdale, the red dot on our eastern peninsula here.” she said, walking across to point at it. ”It’s a decent sized village of roughly one thousand, six hundred people at its peak and roughly one thousand, two hundred people now. They’ve been a mostly self-sufficient village out there in the middle of nowhere due to good farmland and the coast allowing some decent trade with other cities. We used to send hunters down there about once every six months to clear out infestations of Grimm that came around when requested.” [break][break]
”Due to the blockade and The Fall creating a scarcity of hunters, the Council hasn’t sent a hunter down there in over a year. Truth be told, we just kind of assumed they were overrun at some point and couldn’t spare an airship when we’ve been working to maintain the area covered by the Atlas communications towers here,” she paused, tracing her right index finger across the green circle with its edges around the capital of Mistral and Argus in the northwest. ”People in this area just need to get on their scroll and make a call for assistance. If you’re Rochdale in the middle of nowhere, you have a few options. The first is to use their one functioning airship to try and make the trip over to a major city, which they tried. It was destroyed partway through by a swarm of flying Grimm about four months ago before they got in range to contact anyone. The second option is to send ships, and the third option is to send people overland to try and get somewhere with an airship or a more reliable line of communication. The overland trip has not been heard back from in about three months, but the sea trip landed in the Atlas communication range as of two days ago.” [break][break]
”They have an enormous infestation of Grimm nearby, but have managed to hold out this long due to a strong militia with solid equipment that is now breaking down, strong village defenses that have been thoroughly chipped away at this point, and a strong stockpile of resources for emergencies that is almost entirely eaten through at this point. For the past several months since the enormity of the Grimm infestation was known, the village council has also been drugging their population through their water supply with emotion dampening drugs to try and hold out for longer. This is a deeply controversial decision that has not been made public, and if it is will probably result in enough negative emotions to kill everyone in the city within twenty-four hours.” [break][break]
A click of the remote changed the slide to a drawn overview of Rochdale. The briefing was done in the usual disaffected tone, but there was an unusual tiredness that seeped into the voice of the faunus. It was pretty evident that she didn’t sleep very well the night before, and there was a plastic cup of coffee on the desk that she stopped to take a drink of before she continued. ”The main issue that any rescue attempt has is that the airspace in the region is contested and if we sent a bunch of airships we couldn’t protect… well, we’d just lose all the airships. A Sea Feilong destroyed many of their ships at port removing the possibility of evacuation by sea, and frankly even one of those is enough to take out a half dozen airships easy. The problem with sending smaller aircraft is the reports of hundreds of aerial Grimm like Lancers and Ravagers in the area that would rip apart any smaller transport ship that tried to sail through.” [break][break]
Another pause, and another drink of the coffee. ”The Council’s solution to this issue has been to fit our one airship that we have available in the city for this purpose with armor and have a dedicated force on board comprising of some Mistral Police Department members and a licensed hunter to ensure that it stays in the air. Another one of our airships is coming back in two to three days and can be ready to go within forty-eight hours of arrival as well after being bulked up to survive consistent attacks by lesser Grimm. This leads into the second major issue, actually. It will take eighteen hours to make a safe round trip that fully repairs all the damage sustained the airship sustains to and from the destination, and we can cram maybe a hundred people into the airship itself. We have one available and armored airship for this purpose, and the town has over a thousand people and can be overrun any day now. Hell, it might already be up in flames by the time we get over there.” [break][break]
The slide flipped back to the first image briefly, and Shade’s right index finger traced the green outline again. ”If you’ll note the communication range, you’ll see that we can’t tell them we only have one airship and that they’ll have to pick and choose who to get evacuated, because we are evacuating as many people as we can. The fact of the matter is that even if we do a good job, chances are that half or more of the village population are going to die in the end. If we do a bad job, three fourths of the population will die. If they panic immediately, you will die with them before the airship comes back for a second round because the Grimm will invade immediately. The drugging of the population through its water supply is an extreme step, but say you step off the airship and tell them that after we leave with a hundred survivors. The people rise up and overthrow the council, and then Grimm come and kill you and them the same day. If you have an ethical concern about lying, then don’t come. If you believe that preserving your ego and sense of integrity is worth killing a thousand people, do not come.” [break][break]
A deep breath, then, and another drink of the coffee as she changed the slide back to the drawn village map. ”I’m going to be the huntress in charge of protecting the airship. There is a chance we get swarmed as soon as we land, and if that’s the case we need to keep people from damaging the ship. If the ship gets damaged, we’re just turning around and leaving them to die. That means that all nonlethal methods can be used to keep them from fucking up our ship. If someone shoots at it with a rifle, that doesn’t give you authorization to use lethal force. If someone shoots you, it still doesn’t give you authorization to use lethal force. If you kill a random villager in ‘self-defense’ even though you have aura and were under zero danger in front of the entire village, the negative emotions will kill call the infestation and kill everyone even through the emotion dampeners – dampeners, not nullifiers. Most people there have no aura unlocked whatsoever, so pull punches to be enough to incapacitate but not to rip in half.” [break][break]
”When we drop down, I’m going to call the village council in and let them decide how to handle evacuation procedure. I’m going to present three options, though they can go with a different one if they vote by majority. The first option is to evacuate all children and their primary caregivers in groups of two, which can take anywhere from three to five days depending on the number of children who were killed since The Fall and then after that evacuating the rest of the family units. This would leave the single and the elderly for last but ensures that the children will likely all live with their primary caregivers even if the village falls. The second option is to evacuate entire family units at once, which may be the most politically acceptable option for the village itself and thus least likely to cause negative emotions. This would easily triple the amount of time it takes to evacuate all the children, easily, but might cause less strain on the population if they perceive the selection process to be fair. The third option is a random drawing like a lottery, which would be the choice if the village council is spineless and won’t make a decision. It is also likely that if the third option is picked that at least one member of the village council will demand to go out in the first airship, which we will grant. It’s their decision, ultimately, because the village council has the ability to agitate the entire populace and kill everyone out of spite if they want to. We can’t just piss them off, frankly, because we need them.” [break][break]
The faunus laced her fingers together with her palms facing outward and cracked her knuckles while looking across the room in turn with those tired, cold green eyes. ”Your role, should you choose to accept it, is to go in and try to salvage this dumpster fire of a situation and try and save as many of these people as possible. The Council has authorized us to send a lot of supplies over, so the walls and the turrets and whatever else that needs to be repaired can be. You’ll also be forced to navigate the political situation of the town, because the village council is hiding some really nasty stuff from its citizenry and they can’t know about it until they’re out of the area or the Grimm kill everyone. By all indications, the infestation is too big to tackle head on and the only thing that would happen if we all went there would be everyone in this room would die, and then everyone in the village would die because we never came back and what happened would be obvious.” Knuckles now cracked, hands went behind the back of the faunus as she stepped away from the projected image entirely. [break][break]
”Three teams are requested, each with a lead that can coordinate with the village council if they decide to get involved. One team will be in charge of defending the western gate and wall, which is where the bulk of the attacks are coming from. If and when that wall falls, there will be mass panic. Reports of higher level Grimm like King Taijitu, Death Stalkers, and at least one Sea Feilong were deemed credible given the length of time the infestation has been growing. The infestation has gotten so large, in fact, that it surrounds the city rather than being entirely on the western side. We need a team on the eastern side of the city as well, because if that gate is destroyed there will also be mass panic and then the Grimm will attack immediately afterwards. The third team will be a dedicated floater team, made up of individuals who are fast or have first aid capabilities who will help me conduct evacuations and keep people from swarming the ship when we’re doing pickups and also supporting the first two groups. If the Grimm attack from a weird place that isn’t the eastern or western gate it is this team’s job to deal with it and at least hold out until reinforcements can come.” [break][break]
”The doctor left to provide medical services for a remote village before this request came in, and is also outside of communications range and isn’t due back for another week. Professor Long will be remaining on campus to provide stability, and Professor Van Sange as I’m sure you are all aware has been on Christmas vacation and will be back in two or three days on the airship the Council is going to hijack and use for this mission as well. If the village is still standing by then, he’ll be protecting the second ship and we can almost double the amount of people evacuated in a day. I’m here to answer any other questions you may have, but the ship is leaving tomorrow when the maintenance crews are finished around four in the morning. I wish I could tell you the exact condition of their defenses and village militia, but I can’t. The information we have is months old and unreliable in that regard, so I have no idea if what kind of place we’re dropping into when it comes to how fucked up it is already. What I can tell you, though, is that the people are packed in like sardines inside the village walls and after months of that I can’t imagine they’ll be in the best of moods.” [break][break]
There was always the possibility of forgetting something, especially when one was as sleep-deprived as Shadecloak was at the moment. There would be some present who would chomp at the bit to go out and do a real huntsman mission on behalf of the Council, and there would be others who would have some major ethical concerns with having to lie to people about their chance of survival and keep from them the fact that they are getting drugged by their own village council. Shadecloak hadn’t wanted to tell them at all, quite frankly, but that decision was made at a level above her own because the repercussions of not telling everyone beforehand were deemed too high if one of the students got a bug up their ass and decided to investigate and unveil the plot themselves and doomed everyone in the village to die as a result. [break][break]
This was a hellishly hard mission that in the Vale would have two licensed hunter teams going out to save the village at a minimum, and they would have pushed for three. In Mistral, however, they didn’t have anywhere close to that luxury. The few hunters they had were overworked and mostly out of communication range trying to put out whatever fire they were assigned to that particular day. Whether or not to just let the village die without sending any aid was a proposal that honestly got some traction, but morality won out over cold rationality in that instance and once again it was the first years of Haven that would bear the brunt of the danger. This mission, frankly, could be the second Fall if it went horrifically badly and killed everyone involved. [break][break]
And if it went perfectly, over a thousand lives could be saved. It was days like this where she was glad it wasn’t her place to give anything other than advice to the Council when prompted, because making that decision would have been enormously difficult. The risk was way too high for her tastes, though, especially when the main thing gambled were Haven Academy lives. Expecting first years to pull off a mission that would be hard for licensed hunters in addition to navigating ethical and moral dilemmas at the same time was too tall an order, but it was the one that was given down by the Council and it was her place to carry out their will and not to question it. [break][break]
So she wouldn’t, at least publicly. Sowing that doubt in the minds of trainees going out to potentially die would just increase the chances of that happening by an unknown but unacceptable amount. At the same time, though, she wasn’t going to lie to them and if not, enough people were willing to take that risk personally she had zero problem reporting back to the Headmaster that the number of willing participants was too low for the mission to have even a possibility for success. That might be the best outcome, frankly, because forcing individual trainees to go was absolutely something that could happen but would also cause extreme trust issues down the road and wasn’t something, she thought the Council had stomach for given that the trainees could just move academies out of protest in response. [break][break]
Happy New Years.
[break]1000hrs. [break][break]
”Thanks for coming.” the faunus would start, dressed in her usual black three piece suit and looking more tired than usual. ”For those of you who think the pacing of the classes here is too slow and you can handle actual hunter work, here’s your chance to prove it. This is a voluntary assignment, and anyone who decides that they are not up for it can leave at any point during this briefing. Quite frankly, I’d prefer it if you walked out if you were on the fence. The last thing I want is potentially hundreds of people to die because of indecision on your part, or you deciding that playing hero is more important than other people’s lives.” [break][break]
The trainees had heard nothing about this at this point, so the drop that hundreds of lives were at stake would likely get their attention. This meeting was open only to those students who had passed the midterm initiation and was billed as a huntsman mission briefing similar to the Argus Limited briefing. ”Information shared in this meeting is confidential until the actual mission begins. The fact that it’s being shared at all with you, transparently, shows how dire the situation is to begin with. If you feel like you cannot keep information to yourself, again I encourage you in the interest of keeping people alive to leave this room immediately. If the media catch wind of this and disrupt preparations, it could take another day or two to ship out and over a thousand people could die as a result of that. Believe it or not, causing a thousand or more people to die is a crime and you’d both be expelled and thrown into prison.” [break][break]
There was another pause, then, that lasted for roughly ten seconds as the faunus scanned across the classroom with her cold, green eyes. ”Alright, now that we understand the gravity of the situation, the briefing begins now.” [break][break]
At this point, Shade picked up a remote control from the desk and flipped on the projector that displayed a map across the screen. ”We have received a request for a Village Defense mission from Rochdale, the red dot on our eastern peninsula here.” she said, walking across to point at it. ”It’s a decent sized village of roughly one thousand, six hundred people at its peak and roughly one thousand, two hundred people now. They’ve been a mostly self-sufficient village out there in the middle of nowhere due to good farmland and the coast allowing some decent trade with other cities. We used to send hunters down there about once every six months to clear out infestations of Grimm that came around when requested.” [break][break]
”Due to the blockade and The Fall creating a scarcity of hunters, the Council hasn’t sent a hunter down there in over a year. Truth be told, we just kind of assumed they were overrun at some point and couldn’t spare an airship when we’ve been working to maintain the area covered by the Atlas communications towers here,” she paused, tracing her right index finger across the green circle with its edges around the capital of Mistral and Argus in the northwest. ”People in this area just need to get on their scroll and make a call for assistance. If you’re Rochdale in the middle of nowhere, you have a few options. The first is to use their one functioning airship to try and make the trip over to a major city, which they tried. It was destroyed partway through by a swarm of flying Grimm about four months ago before they got in range to contact anyone. The second option is to send ships, and the third option is to send people overland to try and get somewhere with an airship or a more reliable line of communication. The overland trip has not been heard back from in about three months, but the sea trip landed in the Atlas communication range as of two days ago.” [break][break]
”They have an enormous infestation of Grimm nearby, but have managed to hold out this long due to a strong militia with solid equipment that is now breaking down, strong village defenses that have been thoroughly chipped away at this point, and a strong stockpile of resources for emergencies that is almost entirely eaten through at this point. For the past several months since the enormity of the Grimm infestation was known, the village council has also been drugging their population through their water supply with emotion dampening drugs to try and hold out for longer. This is a deeply controversial decision that has not been made public, and if it is will probably result in enough negative emotions to kill everyone in the city within twenty-four hours.” [break][break]
A click of the remote changed the slide to a drawn overview of Rochdale. The briefing was done in the usual disaffected tone, but there was an unusual tiredness that seeped into the voice of the faunus. It was pretty evident that she didn’t sleep very well the night before, and there was a plastic cup of coffee on the desk that she stopped to take a drink of before she continued. ”The main issue that any rescue attempt has is that the airspace in the region is contested and if we sent a bunch of airships we couldn’t protect… well, we’d just lose all the airships. A Sea Feilong destroyed many of their ships at port removing the possibility of evacuation by sea, and frankly even one of those is enough to take out a half dozen airships easy. The problem with sending smaller aircraft is the reports of hundreds of aerial Grimm like Lancers and Ravagers in the area that would rip apart any smaller transport ship that tried to sail through.” [break][break]
Another pause, and another drink of the coffee. ”The Council’s solution to this issue has been to fit our one airship that we have available in the city for this purpose with armor and have a dedicated force on board comprising of some Mistral Police Department members and a licensed hunter to ensure that it stays in the air. Another one of our airships is coming back in two to three days and can be ready to go within forty-eight hours of arrival as well after being bulked up to survive consistent attacks by lesser Grimm. This leads into the second major issue, actually. It will take eighteen hours to make a safe round trip that fully repairs all the damage sustained the airship sustains to and from the destination, and we can cram maybe a hundred people into the airship itself. We have one available and armored airship for this purpose, and the town has over a thousand people and can be overrun any day now. Hell, it might already be up in flames by the time we get over there.” [break][break]
The slide flipped back to the first image briefly, and Shade’s right index finger traced the green outline again. ”If you’ll note the communication range, you’ll see that we can’t tell them we only have one airship and that they’ll have to pick and choose who to get evacuated, because we are evacuating as many people as we can. The fact of the matter is that even if we do a good job, chances are that half or more of the village population are going to die in the end. If we do a bad job, three fourths of the population will die. If they panic immediately, you will die with them before the airship comes back for a second round because the Grimm will invade immediately. The drugging of the population through its water supply is an extreme step, but say you step off the airship and tell them that after we leave with a hundred survivors. The people rise up and overthrow the council, and then Grimm come and kill you and them the same day. If you have an ethical concern about lying, then don’t come. If you believe that preserving your ego and sense of integrity is worth killing a thousand people, do not come.” [break][break]
A deep breath, then, and another drink of the coffee as she changed the slide back to the drawn village map. ”I’m going to be the huntress in charge of protecting the airship. There is a chance we get swarmed as soon as we land, and if that’s the case we need to keep people from damaging the ship. If the ship gets damaged, we’re just turning around and leaving them to die. That means that all nonlethal methods can be used to keep them from fucking up our ship. If someone shoots at it with a rifle, that doesn’t give you authorization to use lethal force. If someone shoots you, it still doesn’t give you authorization to use lethal force. If you kill a random villager in ‘self-defense’ even though you have aura and were under zero danger in front of the entire village, the negative emotions will kill call the infestation and kill everyone even through the emotion dampeners – dampeners, not nullifiers. Most people there have no aura unlocked whatsoever, so pull punches to be enough to incapacitate but not to rip in half.” [break][break]
”When we drop down, I’m going to call the village council in and let them decide how to handle evacuation procedure. I’m going to present three options, though they can go with a different one if they vote by majority. The first option is to evacuate all children and their primary caregivers in groups of two, which can take anywhere from three to five days depending on the number of children who were killed since The Fall and then after that evacuating the rest of the family units. This would leave the single and the elderly for last but ensures that the children will likely all live with their primary caregivers even if the village falls. The second option is to evacuate entire family units at once, which may be the most politically acceptable option for the village itself and thus least likely to cause negative emotions. This would easily triple the amount of time it takes to evacuate all the children, easily, but might cause less strain on the population if they perceive the selection process to be fair. The third option is a random drawing like a lottery, which would be the choice if the village council is spineless and won’t make a decision. It is also likely that if the third option is picked that at least one member of the village council will demand to go out in the first airship, which we will grant. It’s their decision, ultimately, because the village council has the ability to agitate the entire populace and kill everyone out of spite if they want to. We can’t just piss them off, frankly, because we need them.” [break][break]
The faunus laced her fingers together with her palms facing outward and cracked her knuckles while looking across the room in turn with those tired, cold green eyes. ”Your role, should you choose to accept it, is to go in and try to salvage this dumpster fire of a situation and try and save as many of these people as possible. The Council has authorized us to send a lot of supplies over, so the walls and the turrets and whatever else that needs to be repaired can be. You’ll also be forced to navigate the political situation of the town, because the village council is hiding some really nasty stuff from its citizenry and they can’t know about it until they’re out of the area or the Grimm kill everyone. By all indications, the infestation is too big to tackle head on and the only thing that would happen if we all went there would be everyone in this room would die, and then everyone in the village would die because we never came back and what happened would be obvious.” Knuckles now cracked, hands went behind the back of the faunus as she stepped away from the projected image entirely. [break][break]
”Three teams are requested, each with a lead that can coordinate with the village council if they decide to get involved. One team will be in charge of defending the western gate and wall, which is where the bulk of the attacks are coming from. If and when that wall falls, there will be mass panic. Reports of higher level Grimm like King Taijitu, Death Stalkers, and at least one Sea Feilong were deemed credible given the length of time the infestation has been growing. The infestation has gotten so large, in fact, that it surrounds the city rather than being entirely on the western side. We need a team on the eastern side of the city as well, because if that gate is destroyed there will also be mass panic and then the Grimm will attack immediately afterwards. The third team will be a dedicated floater team, made up of individuals who are fast or have first aid capabilities who will help me conduct evacuations and keep people from swarming the ship when we’re doing pickups and also supporting the first two groups. If the Grimm attack from a weird place that isn’t the eastern or western gate it is this team’s job to deal with it and at least hold out until reinforcements can come.” [break][break]
”The doctor left to provide medical services for a remote village before this request came in, and is also outside of communications range and isn’t due back for another week. Professor Long will be remaining on campus to provide stability, and Professor Van Sange as I’m sure you are all aware has been on Christmas vacation and will be back in two or three days on the airship the Council is going to hijack and use for this mission as well. If the village is still standing by then, he’ll be protecting the second ship and we can almost double the amount of people evacuated in a day. I’m here to answer any other questions you may have, but the ship is leaving tomorrow when the maintenance crews are finished around four in the morning. I wish I could tell you the exact condition of their defenses and village militia, but I can’t. The information we have is months old and unreliable in that regard, so I have no idea if what kind of place we’re dropping into when it comes to how fucked up it is already. What I can tell you, though, is that the people are packed in like sardines inside the village walls and after months of that I can’t imagine they’ll be in the best of moods.” [break][break]
There was always the possibility of forgetting something, especially when one was as sleep-deprived as Shadecloak was at the moment. There would be some present who would chomp at the bit to go out and do a real huntsman mission on behalf of the Council, and there would be others who would have some major ethical concerns with having to lie to people about their chance of survival and keep from them the fact that they are getting drugged by their own village council. Shadecloak hadn’t wanted to tell them at all, quite frankly, but that decision was made at a level above her own because the repercussions of not telling everyone beforehand were deemed too high if one of the students got a bug up their ass and decided to investigate and unveil the plot themselves and doomed everyone in the village to die as a result. [break][break]
This was a hellishly hard mission that in the Vale would have two licensed hunter teams going out to save the village at a minimum, and they would have pushed for three. In Mistral, however, they didn’t have anywhere close to that luxury. The few hunters they had were overworked and mostly out of communication range trying to put out whatever fire they were assigned to that particular day. Whether or not to just let the village die without sending any aid was a proposal that honestly got some traction, but morality won out over cold rationality in that instance and once again it was the first years of Haven that would bear the brunt of the danger. This mission, frankly, could be the second Fall if it went horrifically badly and killed everyone involved. [break][break]
And if it went perfectly, over a thousand lives could be saved. It was days like this where she was glad it wasn’t her place to give anything other than advice to the Council when prompted, because making that decision would have been enormously difficult. The risk was way too high for her tastes, though, especially when the main thing gambled were Haven Academy lives. Expecting first years to pull off a mission that would be hard for licensed hunters in addition to navigating ethical and moral dilemmas at the same time was too tall an order, but it was the one that was given down by the Council and it was her place to carry out their will and not to question it. [break][break]
So she wouldn’t, at least publicly. Sowing that doubt in the minds of trainees going out to potentially die would just increase the chances of that happening by an unknown but unacceptable amount. At the same time, though, she wasn’t going to lie to them and if not, enough people were willing to take that risk personally she had zero problem reporting back to the Headmaster that the number of willing participants was too low for the mission to have even a possibility for success. That might be the best outcome, frankly, because forcing individual trainees to go was absolutely something that could happen but would also cause extreme trust issues down the road and wasn’t something, she thought the Council had stomach for given that the trainees could just move academies out of protest in response. [break][break]
Happy New Years.
[attr="class","nikki103"]3013 words | [attr="class","nikki103"]EVENT | [attr="class","nikki103"]3013 TOTAL WORDS |
NOTES
Notes herePHARAOH LEAP CREATES
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