Portland

wikipedia:Portland, Oregon is the nearest large city to the south of Ashton. Due to its proximity, there's a lot of crossover between the two cities' cape scenes.

It is most well-known for the site of one of the largest cape-related disasters outside of the Endbringers, due to a suicide attack by a villainous Tinker whose motives remain unknown to this day.

Terrorist Attack

On August 23 2010, a Tinkertech bomb exploded on a bridge over the Willamette River, running through the heart of downtown Portland. Within seconds, a cloud of darkness covered the entire city center. From the outside, citizens and authorities watched in horror as the clouded area began speeding up, a time compression field gone awry. Rescuers found themselves being torn apart as they tried to enter the field, as their bodies could not handle running at different speeds. Portland was forced to watch as their friends and family aged and died within the event horizon what came to be dubbed the "temporal black hole event".

Due to the positioning of the field taking place directly in the river, the time anomaly resulted in mass flooding in the surrounding areas, along with widespread disruption of power and transit. Eventually, however, after hundreds of thousands died in a post-apocalyptic bubble of accelerated time (along with thousands dying from looting and flooding outside), the bubble collapsed with no warning.

To the outside world, only a week had passed. A combination of radiocarbon dating, analysis of the ruins, and outside observations, showed that twenty-seven years had gone by on the inside.

The investigation remarks on the case of one Forrest Branson, one of less than a hundred survivors. He was trapped inside the event horizon with his father, while his twin brother John was outside. John Branson found his brother, one week later, had become a 37-year-old with children of his own. Every survivor has such a story to tell.

Today, reconstruction of the downtown Portland site continues, with rehabilitation ongoing for the victims. The Tinker responsible for the time bomb was killed inside the anomaly shortly after it appeared. His only remains are a set of charred bones, stored in the PRT archives.