Anyone who saw Patagonia at the moment could never believe that it was once a disheveled rebel camp, now it was very organized, clean and orderly with well arranged houses, factories and wide streets.
The defense force maintained order and acted as the police force.
This came as a strange shock to some of the refugees who came to Patagonia thinking it was going to be just people lazing about and waiting for the empire to attack. But it turned out that the rebels were far more organized than they had expected.
As usual, there were bound to be some trouble makers , a group of about ten men , serfs who had just escaped an imperial city took their arrival in Patagonia as an opportunity to let loose and enjoy their freedom. They set their sights on a man returning from fishing with young daughter of about ten to twelve years old , they accosted this man , beat him to pulp and tried to force theirselves on the little girl , they would have succeeded if not for a patrolling team that arrived just in time.
Immediately repulsed by the scene that they came across, they jumped in, tackling the men and restraining them. In the process of the restraining process, one of the men tried to attack the soldiers but his head was blown clean off by a shotgun slug.
The headless body of their comrade quickly froze the rapists as they immediately submitted theirselves to be arrested.
By the end of the week those men were executed in the town square, nailed to a cross. Ceaser had decided to bring in the roman custom of crucifixion, it was to deter people who thought that Patagonia was a place without rules where people could do as they liked. It was to send a clear message, follow the rules or suffer the consequences.
This also sent a message to the spies who were obviously in the town and were yet not discovered, the message clearly stated " this is what we do to our people who don't fall in line, imagine what we'll do when we catch you.
This singular act sent the hidden spies into a frenzy, scrambling to send messages to the various lords who had sent them to spy on the Patagonians.
One of such spies was a woman named Tasha, a woman who had been using her charms to extract information from men around Patagonia but couldn't seem to get through the classified stuff like the production of the weapons , cement and furnaces.
The original settlers of Patagonia, before the had received a clear message to watch out in vigilance as some inquiries from the new settlers might be of spies trying to gain information, and to report anyone who asks for classified information as they could be people who had no regard for their freedom.
Children were the ones that followed this to a tee, in his office, he had at least three teenagers writing down reports which was then separated into actionable and non actionable .
People that fell under actionable were placed under heavy surveillance, everything they did and everyone they met were subject to scrutiny. The ones that fell under the non actionable were placed under light surveillance. These people, even though were not proven to be spies still fell under the suspicion.
Tasha had relied too much on her charms and had unfortunately fell into the web of Ceaser as she was immediately placed on the actionable list . All her activities, including when she ate , slept and whoever she met.
The last straw was when she started sleeping with a weapons plant supervisor and started asking for information about the weapons. At first took it as a curious cute girl who wanted to know about the famed weapons that kept defeating the Blackthorn empire but when she started pressing for more, it raised red flags.
You see, Ceaser had made sure that all supervisors and heads of department had gone through counter espionage training where they were taught how to spot a suspicious individual and mislead them.
The supervisor immediately filed a report with his superiors and soon a report had landed on Ceasers desk . After cross checking the name against their list , they found out that this was already a person of interest.
That night, as Tasha was returning from a pub , she was immediately snatched and restrained , losing her ability to fight or scream as a dirty rag was stuffed in her mouth.
She was tied up ,her hands and feet bound , her eyes and ears blocked , a complete sense deprivation.
She felt herself being thrown into a wagon, she felt as it began moving. She had many thoughts as the wagon moved , she asked herself if she had been kidnaped to be sold as a slave or if she had been found out by Ceasers men. During the course of their journey, sometimes she wished that the people who kidnapped her just did it to violate her and that she had not been taken by Ceasers men. But she was confused, she didn't actually know which one was worse and when the feeling of helplessness slowly crept in , she felt fear, a fear of what would happen if the blindfold covering her eyes were removed.
Soon the wagon stopped and Tasha was dragged out and was led into a building that technically shouldn't exist. It was located in an unspecified location deep in the endless forest.
She was thrown into a cold dark and empty cell , her blind folds and all he restraints were taken off only to meet darkness. There was no way for her to see anything, the room had no windows .
The beautiful Tasha was now one of the few unlucky people of this world to witness and experience what a black site is. Here she could scream, cry or even try to escape but it will all be futile.
She stayed in that cell for who knows how long, she couldn't tell or measure time. But after what seemed like forever, the door of her cell finally opened, she struggled but eventually a sack was thrown over her head and she was carried into a much more larger room.
The first thing she saw when the sack was taken off was a boy standing on a podium, his silvery blonde hair partly braided. It was said that he braided his hair every time he won a battle.
Immediately Ceaser cleared his throat,
" Gentlemen, welcome to Shadowcorp, today, we will learn how to extract information from spies."