#castleevent

The letter came to Steve's office in an unmarked manilla envelope, no postage and all that was written on it was "Deliver to Castle Academy" via rubber stamped letters. There was nothing otherwise unusual about it. Even if the smiling man delivering it seemed jumpier than the usual delivery person.

Inside was a single sheet of standard 20 pound, white, copy paper printed with a short note center aligned, double spaced. In the bottom of the envelope was Peter Parker's student ID and a strangely blue glowing pendant. The note reads simply:

To whom it may concern:

We have taken custody of one of your students. His ID card and the inclosed trinket should serve to verify his identity.

Our demands are simple.

Gather all of your freak students and teachers and leave at once.

Or we'll start getting rid of you ourselves.

Starting with this one.

Three delivery people moved about campus, carrying various sized packages. One woman. Two men. Some of the packages were legit, actual deliveries that needed to be made, but the delivery people weren't. The uniforms were borrowed from a friendly associate who worked for one of the courier companies.

She knew little more than they were working on a plan to get rid of the festering eyesore of a freak training ground, something she supported whole-heartedly. Everyone knew they were just training the next generation of destructive monsters to kill normal, law-abiding humans and destroy their hard-earned lives. Giving them the uniforms was a tiny price to pay to keep them away from her and her family. She had children to think of after all.

The special disks in their protective sleeves seemed warmer than usual as they rested in the delivery people's pockets. The Trask Industries representative had assured them that they'd render any freak's inhuman abilities null and void. They were also supposed to render an electrical charge to knock the subject unconscious, but the saps carried in their other pocket proved that they weren't trusting too much.

Now they just needed a proper subject.

The man with blindingly white teeth smiled as he spotted a slender boy with tousled hair and a skateboard under one arm crossing the campus and tapped his phone to signal the others. A kid would be much easier to handle than one of the professors. He could see his ponytailed compatriot changing direction to follow the boy as he headed towards the building the woman on their team had entered earlier.

Deliveries to - and from - the campus were so common, no one ever thought anything of seeing someone in the grey jumpsuit or light blue button down over dark blue pants uniform of the two most popular courier companies. Every day, ten or twenty, some times more, visits could be counted if someone wanted to try - not that anyone did. Letters, boxes with care packages and forgotten sweaters, the occasional lumpy bag from the rare student who insisted on mailing their laundry home. As soon as someone's eyes hit the uniform, it didn't matter what they were carrying, they were as invisible as Sue Storm.

The man jogging up the steps of the main dorm with a box under his arm was one of those delivery men. He held the door open for a female student with grin, his gold earring glinting in the sun. She thanked him absently, only half aware of who was helping her as she walked past him. The same thing happened more than a dozen times as he made his way across campus.

The basement room was unfinished, a bare bulb hanging over the rickty green vinyl and steel card table the only light. A beat up sofa covered in torn corduroy, stuffing spilling out of the tears, sat against the wall near some old industrial shelving, but none of the people in the room were sitting on it. They all clustered around the table, pouring over the roughly sketched layout of C.A.S.T.L.E. Academy's buildings spread out across it's peeling surface.

"There's no way we're gonna be able to hold one of the teachers," said a man, shorter than the others, his shoulder length hair slicked back in a pony tail, revealing a gold ring glinting in the ear. "We'll have to grab one of the kids. Might make the freaks take us more seriously."

"As long as those disks we got from Trask Industries work like they're supposed to, we'll be able to hold any of the freaks," the woman standing beside him said, pushing back a strand of dark hair. "All we need to do is get one and then make it clear either that disgusting excuse for a school goes-"