In Madrid, Spain, it’s already daybreak and the newly built facility which houses the Oleander Syndicate has been very busy and popular as of late. In one month, it has recruited more than a thousand students and employed more than a hundred instructors. The sudden publicity has been an overnight success due to its famous and infamous reputations.

The facility is built like a private Ivy League research university, with about 5,600 undergraduate students and nearly 10,850 postgraduate students studying abroad.

The new facility is organized into eleven separate academic units with campuses throughout the Madrid metropolitan area: its 209-acre (85 ha) main campus is approximately 3 miles (5 km) northwest of Madrid; the business school and athletics facilities, including sports Stadium, are located across an urban neighborhood of Madrid.

Most of the success was not by the Grandmaster himself, but by the middle-aged woman with a stylized dirty blonde bob cut who always wore a royal blue sweater with a long satin skirt named Olivia Quinten.

Olivia Quinten is the 7th Duchess of Devonshire and has many ties to royal families both in Spain and England. Out of the five who make up the inner circle of the Oleander Syndicate, she is the only personable one and makes friends very quickly. She acts and a liaison in many affairs in the syndicate since she is the single one people actually trusts…

And Olivia was indeed hard at work as well, administering much paperwork. She oversaw the working agreement with the Oleander Syndicate and the Interpol. Something that her grandmaster wanted for quite some time now, but with the Syndicate being famous as it is, this was the perfect opportunity to be on board with Interpol.

As her grandmaster made her the representative for the University between this agreement, Interpol sent their own. One person who brought promise and dread from this fragile alliance, Miles Renfield.

Indeed, Senior Inspector Miles Renfield was a surefire choice knowing her history with the Oleander Syndicate and their former faculty. However, she wouldn’t be as bias as they would all have feared.

Not a spring chicken herself, only being 35 years of age, the Swedish-born Senior Inspector Miles Renfield has been a significant help building a division around Demonology and Netheral-related cases. The Superintendent and many others have a lot of faith in her skill and choices, they let her handle the talks with the Oleander Syndicate.

Miles knocked on the door and let herself in Olivia’s office, carrying her touchpad. Olivia straightened out her dress as she got up and shook the hand of the slender platinum blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman.

“Senior Inspector Renfield, how are you this afternoon?” Olivia greeted.

“Splendid, considering,” Miles answered as she sat down in one of the empty chairs in front of Olivia.

“So, I see you have all the information,” Olivia probed.

“I have compiled all of the information I have received, yes,” Miles confirmed, reading off her touchpad and going through her documents. “I have ordered and done full medical evaluations on all of the candidates that you have selected. They have all passed their medicals and bloodwork. The physical assessment was entirely comfortable for them, as well. Ayeka, of course, received high marks.”

“That doesn’t surprise me there,” Olivia added.

“Afterward, we had them test out their power levels and skills and evaluated on their progress. With some restraint, I don’t see why not they could use these powers in the field,” Miles checked, but that wasn’t the evaluations Olivia was worried about.

“And the psych screenings?”

“I was hand-selected by the high officials of Interpol, to carry out the psychiatric screenings of all of them. Although they had a personal physician to handle their traumas for so many years, it is quite imperative to have a second opinion when it comes to not only mental health but health in general,” Miles emphasized, speaking to Olivia face-to-face.

Olivia sat back in her chair and let out a deep breath, “what did you find?”

“The good news is all of them have been battle-hardened to their grandmaster’s liking,” Miles praised. “No signs of psychological damage on the surface…”

“But?” Olivia contradicted.

“There are reasons why they failed miserably five years ago. It’s not the point that they are extremely different, the point is they have been unable to complement or even comprehend their own abilities with each other. Honestly, they all despise each other. I’m surprised it took them this long for everything to unravel the way it did.”

“Yes, they had their bad days. But it has always been this way,” Olivia concurred.

“This was just more than one bad day or even several. As a licensed psychiatrist, I do believe the Oleander Syndicate, and many of their faculty enabled this behavior beyond the point where it was second nature for them to be sexually assaulted and to brutalize one another. Moreover so, to hate one another. There is no real trust between anyone around here, only dissension.”

“I get it! They have a lot of personal issues with each other. You would too if you had to deal with something like this, a never-ending struggle of power that you have to keep balanced for so many years,” Olivia exhaustingly admitted.

“You mean the never-ending struggle of power your grandmaster and the Angel of Death had a huge part in creating,” Miles counterpointed.

“Individually?” Olivia changed the subject as Miles ran down the list.

“For starters, Kayla hasn’t actually spoken to her husband and her children in months out of guilt. Ryoko’s alcoholism and sex addiction have become extremely severe due to her own personal and professional issues. Ayeka is the only one who is keeping a leveled head while taking over as den mother and of course… Natalia was pronounced dead with no evidence of proof, only to return unannounced with no plausible explanation, and it has affected everyone here. Including you.”

“Of course, it has,” Olivia agreed.

“Not in a way, it has affected you. Sadly, some people in your own group are happy that she was dead. Or in this case, pronounced dead which is indeed very unsettling. It just shows what kind of person Natalia really was,” Miles scrutinized.

“Natalia was… a woman with so many problems in her life. It was like the world was weighing down on her shoulders. She had a lot of anger and a lot of inner pain. She thought to solve problems with violence. It was the only way to settle things back then, with everyone…” Olivia defended her subordinate.

“And did it work?” Miles questioned.

“You tell me, you’re the psychiatrist,” Olivia challenged as Miles nodded in agreement.

“Yes. If it were up to me, I would have denied them any kind of clearance and to go on any form of mission under the Interpol banner or any banner,” Miles evaluated.

“However,” Olivia baited.

“It is not up to me. It is up to my boss. Whether you all have a chance to redeem yourselves, it’s pretty much slim to none. I would not be surprised if they cleared them just to watch them fail. It has happened before. Many, many times. I’m not here to threaten you. I am just here to give you a warning,” Miles cited as she reached into her satchel and gave her a manila folder stacked with papers. “Be careful, the whole world is against you.”

With those parting words, Miles left the office. Inside the manila folder was certificated to show all three of the four women have cleared all their evaluations and are ready to work immediately. However, Natalia remains incomplete. Even though Olivia knows why…