A Whateley Universe Story

Misguided Genius

by

Bek D Corbin

 

Part Two

 

“Okay, what IS this?” Mordecai Shearer demanded the next morning at breakfast, shoving his tablet into Tyler’s face.

“It looks like a shot of Hex Kitten giving me a kiss,” Tyler said, barely giving the shot a glance.

“When did this happen?”

“Yesterday, right after Glyn and I arm-wrestled the Hellion sisters into sharing the reward with her and us.”

Shearer looked at the image. “And you didn’t say anything about it?”

“Why would I?” Tyler looked at Shearer askance, “She was just thanking me for helping her get a bigger slice of the reward than that sleaze Freed would have let her have.”

“That doesn’t look like a ‘thank you’ kiss,” Mordecai noted, looking at the lip-lock displayed on his tablet.

“Well, she was still pretty revved up from all the action,” Tyler hedged.

“Aw, c’mon, how’re we supposed to build up fangirl bases if you’re hogging the Media attention snogging hot chicks?” Shearer complained.

Tyler was framing a firm but reasonable reply, when Linda Havoc came in, cutting off the conversation. Her carrot-red hair was now flame red, the exact same shade as the Hellion sisters’ hair. She noted the reaction in the room and picked out a breakfast for herself with an air of ‘give me a reason to go totally postal on your ass, and I’ll take it’.

But Tom Chase walked over and asked with a smartass smirk on his face, “So what’s this, Linds? You’re angling to be adopted as the third Hellion sister? hmmm… ‘Heloise Hellion’ has a nice ring to it.”

“I ‘borrowed’ that fire-proofing hair shampoo that the one with the pageboy was pushing,” Linda said with a dangerously flat voice.

“How was I supposed to know that it resulted in that cheap-ass phony shade of red?”

Tom looked like he was working up a remark that probably would have gotten his face slapped- if he was lucky- when he was saved by his mother entering the room. She started to say something, paused when Linda’s new shade of red registered, and then she wisely decided to let it be. “♪Good morning, Wunderkinder!♪” she greeted them cheerily. Looking around, she noted the groups clustered around laptops, with binders, paper-bound books regarding Patent Law and Virtual Intelligence Personal Assistants of various avatars juggling tables of data. “I note that you’ve seen the benefits of cooperating in your efforts to become the next Bill Gates. But! In the meantime, we have the next challenge for our six rookies.”

“Greco-Roman Wrestling?” Glynis said with a pervy grin. “In the nuuuddeee…”

“GOOD IDEA!” Izzy and Clare seconded the notion.

“Yeah, but I’m not in the running,” Tom Chase said. “So, what’s the point?”

Dr. Chase, having years of experience dealing with adolescents and geniuses - and adolescent geniuses- gave this folderol just enough leeway and then stopped it cold. “OUR CHALLENGE,” she said sternly, but not over-loudly, “will not involve a Build Challenge this time. We’ve done that, and you’ve all shown that you’re technically proficient. Even you, Mordecai.

“Today’s challenge will be a Puzzle Chase. You will each be given a different clue to a location in the Greater Los Angeles area and a vehicle to get there with. Following another team will cost you points. When you get there, you will find a series of clues. You may remove ONE clue from each relay, so the last team in line only has a single clue. There will be a list of clues at the entry to the location, which will lead to a challenge in the location, which will lead to another list, which will give you clues to the next location, and so on. Each location will be different; in one you may have to find a list of items and assemble them to get your next clue. In another, you may have to meet a set of mini-challenges and so on. The point here is to find out how well you think under stress. Without machine guns going off.

“And while I doubt that any of you would cheat, just remember there will be cameras on you, should you get… over-enthusiastic.”

The partner selection process was simplified by the fact that Tom Tsung, Mordecai and Tank each had driving licenses, while Geoff, Mike and (obviously) Heike didn’t. So Dr. Chase handed Tom, Mordecai and Tank colored balls, and had the other three draw balls from a sack. With a little hemming and hawing, Tom Tsung wound up with Heike as his partner, Mordecai had Mike Kung, and Tank had Geoff.

The three teams prepped for their mission as Ms. Santoya, her film crew and the veteran Wiz Kids drove off to prep the first two locations. Ms. Santoya was very keen on her crew handling the cameras for this segment, as she wasn’t very happy with the footage they got at the Hawthorne mall. As the vans cleared the pier, a familiar red Chevy Corvette drove up. “Hiii, Tyyyllleeerrr…” Holly and Hayley called out from the front seats. This time they were going for the ‘Doublemint Twins’ look, rocking identical Kelly Green leather driving jackets, matching leather jeans (with suspicious utility belts) and t-shirts (with ‘action images’ of themselves)

“Misses Hellion, you’ve arrived at an awkward time,” Dr. Chase greeted them with the kind of tight rigid smile that says, ‘WTF do you think you’re doing on my turf, bitch?’

“Oh, are we interrupting something?” Hayley asked ingenuously.

“Yes,” Dr. Chase said with the ring of a vault door slamming close.

“Don’t mind us,” Holly breezed as she slithered up to Tyler. “Last night, I was thinking about you, and I had an absolute brainstorm!” She held up a contraption made primarily of tubing, with a slightly curved container at one end and something that looked like a forearm-and-hand splint at the other. “It occurred to me that with your electromagnetic charge, you could provide both the electrolytic catalyst and the motive impulse to-”

“It’s a tactical sprayer,” Hayley cut her sister off ruthlessly. At Holly’s miffed squeak, Hayley amended, “It’s a very effective tactical sprayer, with a nasty possible selection of acids, antipersonnel agents-”

“Excuse me, but did you say ‘acids’?” Dr. Chase said coldly as she stepped up. Using her amazing power of Guardian Status, Dr. Chase nixed both the acids and the antipersonnel spray as dangerous, saying that it stepped up the sprayer from a tactical aid into a full-fledged weapon. The incendiary and the cryogenic compounds were both rejected on the same grounds. And so on until the tactical sprayers options were limited to an adhesive, a fire retardant and a lubricant.

“But that barely scratches the surface of that this design can do!” Holly wailed.

“As long as it doesn’t fit the definition of ‘reckless endangerment’,” Dr. Chase said primly.

“Well then!” Hayley said chipperly, “That clears the decks for MY effort.” With a smug smirk, she produced a set of wrap-around eyeglasses that were only spared the ‘Cyclops Visor’ stigma by the absence of a gold-tone frame or red crystal eyepiece. Instead, the frame was white plastic, and the eyepiece was mirrored. “It’s a Tactical Visor, with Infrared and Ultraviolet filter, Telescopic Magnification at x124, Flare Suppression, a targeting interface, Thermograph recognition, and a radar display.” Getting up on her tippy-toes, Hayley slipped the visor onto Tyler’s face.

Tyler stood there for a moment and then said, “I feel that I should be playing ‘edgy’ 80’s New Wave music.”

“VERY Nice,” Dr. Chase said tone of a governess cracking the whip, “now, as we said we ARE in the middle of something, and No you don’t need to know what it is.”

Hayley and Holly pouted, walked back to their car (working the tight fit of those jeans as they did) and drove off. “They’ve got something up their sleeves,” Mike Kung said cynically.

“Good Lord knows, they’ve got something in those pants,” Shearer sighed.

“Tyler-” Dr. Chase started with a weary voice.

“Tell me something to do that won’t blow up in our faces, and I’ll do it,” Ty cut her off. Dr. Chase started to say something, then a realization visibly hit her and she locked. She nodded at Tyler and shot her a finger, conceding the point.

They killed the hour-plus, waiting for Santoya to call, having the third camera team, which had stayed behind and would follow the car that seemed most interesting, set up the cameras and lighting for the ‘Reading of the Challenge’ segment. That segment had Dr. Chase reading off to the six contenders (and by ‘serendipitous extension’ the viewing audience) that there were six challenges, but each team only had to face three of them.

They would each take an envelope that had a clue to one of the challenges. If they couldn’t figure out the clue, that was their hard luck, but she had confidence that they’d figure them out. Then they’d drive to the place the clue suggested, where they’d find another clue to the challenge that place held. When they overcame that challenge, they’d get another clue to one of the two second level locations, and from there to the third and final locale.

Two of the teams would compete for the clue at one of the second level locations, though the first ones there would have an advantage. All three teams would compete at the sole third level location.

And like the Build/Race and the Zombie Hunt before, while coming in first was a factor, the true point of the exercise was to gauge how well the boys reacted to, adapted to and applied themselves to unexpected situations. Exceptional, brilliant efforts that still led to a last place might be better for them than a mediocre canned answer that got them First Place by a fluke.

With that, Chase placed envelopes, one yellow, one blue and one red, on a camp chair, and gestured for the boys to come and pick. Tom Tsung, Heikie, Tank and Geoff came over and closely examined the three envelopes. But Mordecai just snatched the yellow envelope and dashed to the Range Rover closest to the exit, letting Mike catch up as he turned the key in the ignition. “How did you know to take THAT envelope?” Mike asked, all-too aware of the visual (and audio) pickup in the car.

“It doesn’t matter!” Mordecai said as he sped out of the parking lot. “Chase wouldn’t load the initial challenge, either for the hard or the easy. Look, the advantage to being the bridge guy between the Humanities and the Hard Sciences is that you get training in both mindsets. One of the holy grails of Cultural Anthropology is finding archetypes in legends, and one of the ur-legends that almost every culture has is The Riddle Contest. And one of the hardest riddles that also pop up almost everywhere is the Riddle without an Answer. The entire point of Chase putting the clues into different colored envelopes was to see if we’d waste time trying to figure out a riddle that has no answer. Remember? The riddle is IN the envelope, not the envelope itself.”

Mike opened the envelope and said sourly, “Score one for you. It’s typed up, and there’s a key. Let’s see:

⦁ The key to your future is in the past

⦁ Or at least an old vision of the distant past

⦁ If you don’t want to REX your chances

⦁ Decide what you’ll yabba-dabba-do.

Mike crossed his eyes with confusion. “WHAT?”

Mordecai let out a snort and slowed the car as he pointed at one of the billboards along the route. It was a lurid portrait of several dinosaurs and ‘modern day’ tourists interacting that had more in common with 1950s movies than actual science. It advertised ‘DINO WORLD! Travel back in TIME for an adventure for the entire family!’

“Oh- kaayyy…” Mike drawled, “I can see the bit about the old vision of the distant past… and ‘Rex’ refers to Tyrannosaurus Rex, but… ‘yabba dabba do’? What’s THAT supposed to mean?”

“The Flintstones?” Mordecai groaned. “Let me guess- you had a Tiger Mom who didn’t let you watch old cartoons, and insisted that you get a DEGREE.” Mike flustered at that, but Mordecai waved it aside. “I’m guessing that it’s a crappy old theme park that’s been shut down for years, so the Foundation could rent it cheap for a day. Odds are that all we’ll have to do is look for anything that doesn’t have an inch of dust on it.”

“But isn’t that a little convenient?” Mike complained. “That a sign for that specific location is right on the way from the pier into LA?”

“WHY do you think Chase and Santoya chose that location in the first place?” Mordecai asked rhetorically. “There were two other signs for cheap-ass tourist trap theme parks along this stretch. They probably had the same PR firm, who got that stretch as part of some package deal. Those signs are probably why Chase decided on those locations. Hell, probably the whole theme park angle. This is to see how sharp we are on situational awareness.”

Mike looked at the key. “This is only one key, probably to the front gate; there would have to be a mass of keys for the rest of the park. That means that the Wiz Kids, or some of the Wiz Kids, have the rest of the keys. While Tyler and Glynnis were off with the Hellion sisters, Tom Chase, Logan, Linda, Isobel and a few of the technical staff went off for a few hours without any big fanfare. They must have done- or been doing for days- the preliminary work, and now each of the sites has a team of Wiz Kids and a few adults operating the park from a control center.”

“Okay, that makes sense from the briefing,” Mordecai agreed. “It’s pretty obvious when you think about it. But never hurts to know what you’re going to be dealing with.” Mordecai shot Mike a look. “Well? Aren’t you going to go online and look it up?”

“Why? Do you think there’s anything important on it online?”

“Yes! The Address! We don’t know where it IS!”

“Splash-a-Rama?” Heike bleated with incomprehension. “How do you get ‘splash-a-rama’ from that gibberish? And what’s a ‘splash-a-rama?”

Tom Tsung (he avoided all ‘three’ jokes) chewed it over and decided to pare down his answer for simplicity. “I get ‘Splash-A-Rama’, because it was on one of the billboards we passed on the way out from the dock. Obviously a clue to get the ball rolling. And ‘Splash-A-Rama’ was a water park franchise with 5 or 6 outlets across the nation, oh, roughly 10 or so years ago. They had a good reputation for being a very good afternoon out and not being hard on your wallet, either at the front gate or at the concession stands.”

“Then why did they go out of business?” Heike asked.

“It turned out that the reason they could afford to run such great operations, pay their people well, and still make a profit was that all of their outlets were fronts for high-end spas for supervillains. The supervils paid top dollar for R&R, medical recovery stays, various esoteric medical procedures, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some money laundering wasn’t involved. They were doing a great business, both on the legit and illegal sides, when one of their franchises got busted big time. A lot of nasty rolled out of the closet, and all of the parks got confiscated on the RICO laws- er, RICO stands for the ‘Racketeer Influenced Corporate Organizations’ Act, which means that the government can confiscate the property of companies that knowingly do business with supervillains, terrorists and organized crime.”

“So, there are going to be supervillains there?”

“er- NO, Heike. There won’t be any supervillains anywhere near there.”

“But there HAVE to be supervillains! Everyone knows that there are supervillains everywhere in America!”

“NO, there won’t be any supervillains at this water park.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“’Republic Studios Tour’?” Geoff read off the smartphone. “Y’mean Chase managed to hire the place that does the ‘Jaws’ ride thing for the entire day?”

“NO, that’s Universal Studios Tours™,” Tank said as he pulled onto the highway. “Republic Studio Tours is…” Tank thought it over intently for a bit, “Well, let me put it this way: Chase can hire out the entire park for this for a whole day, and not put a dent in the budget.”

“Any notion as to whut they’re gonna throw at us?”

“Well, given that it’s Republic Studios, I’m just hoping that they’re not going to throw Vampire Student Mutant Stewardess Sex Ninjas at us.”

“SEZ YOU!”

Dino World

Not realizing that he was echoing a classic line from Bette Davis, Mike Kung looked around Dino World and said, “What a dump.”

“Yeah,” Mordecai said as he took the manila envelope from the post just inside the front gate. “I’ll lay you odds that this was the kind of place that just barely kept going by changing themes every five years or so, slapping a new coat of paint and images on the same old equipment, hoping the suckers wouldn’t notice. They just happened to be doing the ‘dinosaur’ thing when the banks finally caught up with them. Or the IRS. Or the SEC. Or maybe Hanna-Barbera’s copyright lawyers.”

“What does it say?” Mike asked, looking at the envelope.

Mordecai opened the envelope and read, “’They say that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. But you can’t afford to. Out of the frying pan, but not into the fire. You have Three out of Five chances’.”

“Okay, Mister ‘trained in both mindsets’, what do you make of that?”

As Shearer chewed that over, there was a sound of a revving engine, and an odd figure sped onto the scene. It was a fiberglass figurine patterned after the velociraptor dinosaur. At least the Jurassic Park movie version. It had lurid green and dark red stripes- and a pair of steel-belted radial tires where its legs should be. In its outstretched arms- or at least forelegs- was a football-sized ‘Easter Egg’ with frilly decorations centered about a large red numeral 1.

“Okay, there’s the egg,” Mordecai said. “Now where’s the frying pan?”

As if on cue (and quite likely WAS on cue), a 3 story tall ‘volcano’ suddenly started to ‘erupt’- or at least spew out smoke with nylon streamers for flames, and a recording of an eruption sounded.

“Okay, it’s not too much of an ass-pull to say that the challenge is to keep the ‘raptor’ from dropping the egg into the *ahem!* volcano.”

“Well, it shouldn’t be THAT hard,” Mike said with a confident smile.

“WITHOUT breaking the egg,” Mordecai finished.

“How tough do you think that egg IS?”

“We can’t afford to assume that it’s any tougher than that drone handling it absolutely needs it to be.”

Mike nodded at this, and again, as if on cue, the ‘raptor’ gave a honk and sped off in the general direction of the ‘volcano’.

Splash-A-Rama

“Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!” Heike read off.

“To see if you’re really the best

A cut above the rest

Take your measure

Find the Treasure

And bring up the sunken chest.”

“Limericks,” Tom winced. “BAD limericks.”

“And there’s a sequence of numbers, no explanation,” Heike continued. “What does it mean?”

“It’s a test of our ingenuity, right?” Tom said, squatting beside Heike to get a look at the paper. “There’s a treasure chest, right? So, somewhere in this park, there’s a treasure chest that we have to ‘bring up’. As it’s a water park, that could get very…. wet. But where?” Tom looked around the bewildering tangle of structures and buildings.

“’Take your measure’,” Heike said significantly. Then he pointed to a platform set up high, where there was- a surveyor’s level.

Republic Studios

“As much as I hate to agree with you,” Geoff said looking around the shabby studio lot, “this place is a dump.”

“What do you expect from a studio that not only made ‘Chainsaw Nymphomaniacs’ but FIVE sequels to it?” Tank sneered.

“AND ‘Chainsaw Nymphomaniacs vs. Vampire Ninja Sex Kittens’!”

As Tank gave him the cold gelid eye, Geoff wheeled up to the ‘greeter’ fiberglass ‘cowboy’ figure, which had a slip of paper in its hand. “‘Saddle Up, Pardners!’” he read off, “‘Welcome to Rio Bravo!’

“If you want to ride with the Magnificent Seven, and not be sent on the first Stagecoach out of town, you’re going to have to hitch up your Blazing Saddles and save My Darling Clementine. Show some True Grit, because this is How the West Was Won.

“You have to beat The Wild Bunch before High Noon if you want to find out if you’re Good, Bad, or just Ugly.” Geoff looked at Tank and summed up his reaction with, “HAH?”

Tank took the two gunbelts from the ‘greeter’s’ other hand. “Somehow, I don’t think that Mahatma Gandhi-style Passive Resistance is the key to resolving this.”

The second that both Tank and Geoff had their gunbelts strapped around their waists, the swinging doors to the saloon burst open, and two flats with images of an old Western ‘Bad Guy’ and a ‘School Marm’ trundled out on low-slung motorized casters. Other flats displaying various figures and characters from old Western movies popped out of recesses around the length of the ‘street’ and then pulled back. “It’s a ‘Hogan’s Alley,” Tank said, drawing his gun. While shaped like an old-time ‘Peacemaker’, the ‘gun’ was clearly a laser tag unit, rigged with a noise-maker and a recoil emulator system. “We’ll get points for shooting the ‘bad guys’, but we’ll be penalized for shooting ‘good guys’ and ‘bystanders’.”

A flat with a picture of a dog trundled in front of them, and was promptly covered in red as paintball pellets pelted it. “And in this Alley, the bad guys shoot BACK.”

“Yer missing the point, Pardner!” Geoff whooped in a broad ‘Texas’ accent that was as bad as most Americans’ ‘Scots brogue’. “The point is we gotta RESCUE THE SCHOOL MARM!” And with a whoop and gun held high, he shoved off, pushing his wheelchair with one hand.

Dino World

Mike and Mordecai managed to snag a second egg (actually the third egg; they accidentally broke the second) through the simple expedient of draping one of the Moto-Raptor’s hairpin turns with rope. As the construct struggled to cope with this, Mike leapt in to pull the ‘raptor’ (more like a replica deinonychus) off balance and Mordecai snatched the ‘egg’ from its claws. “Well, that’s ONE!” Mordecai said with a broad grin as he put the ‘egg’ in his knapsack and hung it high, where it wouldn’t *ahem!* ‘accidentally break’. He doubted that the veteran Wiz Kids would deliberately sabotage him and Mike, but he was hep enough to the intricacies of Academic politics to know that there might be something going on behind the scenes that they had no way of knowing about.

Then on their right and well behind them, there was another honk. Turning around they spotted another moto-raptor with another egg. It honked again, spun around and started to move. But before it could peel out on its tires, a dark streak zipped past the wheeled construct, and suddenly its claws were empty.

The moto-raptor spun around and stopped dead, pointing at a sleek girl in a gray cat-eared hoodie over a dark bodysuit. With a blur, the girl was right next to Mike and Mordecai, holding the egg. “Is Tyler Collier here?” she asked, “Look, I’m not trying to hijack your shoot or anything but-” She was cut off as there was a white blur, and her hands were empty. Following the white blur, the three spotted a lithe girl of their age with fiery red hair in a white minidress and thigh-high boots with motorized speedskates. In other words, Hayley Hellion. Hayley stuck out her tongue at Hex Kitten and sped off. With a sputter of rage, Hex Kitten was after Hayley. Mike and Mordecai shared a pained cringe of frustration and ran after them, hoping to figure something out on the fly.

“That’s right, Ty,” Glynis radioed to Rockhound, “two of your girlfriends- Hex Kitten and either Hayley or Holly- no, I’m not sure which. If you can’t keep track of them, then why should I? Anyway, Hex Kitten asked for you, and then the Redhead in Question showed up. She snaffled the egg from Hex Kitten, and now they’re racing about playing Keep-away.

“No, don’t fly here. That would only encourage this sort of thing, especially if word of it got out. We don’t want fangirls cluttering up our shoots any more than they already do. Mind you, Tom-1 wouldn’t mind. That’s Tommy Chase, dear. There’s no way he’d be second to Tom-3.”

“I’ve always thought of him as Number Two, anyway,” Linda sniffed.

“Anyway, Hex Kitten is here to try and talk to you,” Glynis continued. “DO something about that, would you, Ty? And the Hellion? From what I’m seeing, she’s doing it out of pure contrarian competitiveness.”

“Yes, the Hellions do seem to rank high on that,” Linda the pot called the Hellions’ kettle black.

“Mordecai and Mike Kung are scampering about, trying to figure out how to put a damper on it. I’d whistle an end to all of this, but let’s face it; this is a far, far better challenge for these two than the Raptor Racers we kludged together.”

“Besides, it’s Killer TV,” Linda smirked.

“Too ‘Lennox’, dear,” Glynis said primly.

Splash-A-Rama

Tom Tsung waited until Heike managed to get up the ladder to the surveyor’s platform. He knew that Heike was at an age when being able to keep up was important to his developing ego. And God knows, the squirt had a lot of ego to hurt. Then Tom hurried up the ladder before Heike did everything and went onto the next stage without him. And sure enough, Heike was furiously working the surveyor’s level.

“Y’know, you don’t have to get the exact precise coordinate,” Tom pointed out. “Just a general idea as to where the next part is.”

“Then why include them?”

As Heike rattled off his (admittedly first-rate) calculations, Tom pulled out a pair of folding field glasses from his utility belt and checked out the destination. Finally, Heike had his complete figures and looked to where there was a platform maybe 300 yards away. “Okay, there’s a ladder going down,” Heikie said. “But how are we supposed to get there?”

Tom picked up what appeared to be a set of bicycle handlebars from a selection of dissimilar parts littering the platform. He affixed a set of rollers to the ‘handlebars’ and set it on a cable that was strung next to the platform, turning it into a zipline. “Climb aboard,” Tom said.

Republic Studios

Tyler set the mike in its cradle with a sigh. “Wow,” she said flatly. “I finally have a love life. So howcome I’m not having more fun?”

“What’s the matter?” Izzy asked as she tried to keep track of the surprisingly agile and unpredictable Geoff, who was doing a wonderful job of distracting the ‘bad guys’. Tank had an easier field, but he didn’t have Geoff’s devious streak.

“Hex Kitten showed up at Dino World, and one of the Hellion sisters also showed up, and now they’re complicating the challenge for Mike and Mordecai.”

“Why did they go to Dino World?” Tom Chase wondered aloud.

“From what Glynis said, Hex Kitten was asking for me,” Ty said. “She and the Hellion sisters probably followed Mike and Mordecai, figuring that I’d be wherever they went.”

“NOT the point,” Izzy said sharply, quickly widening the scope of the camera’s coverage. “The real point is: ONE of the Hellions is at Dino World- where’s the OTHER one?”

Tom and Tyler shared a look of horrified realization. “Get on the phone and call Clare and Loogie at Splash-a-Rama,” Tyler said briskly. “Tell them that Holly may be there, looking for me. er, Tell CLARE to talk to her, if she’s there; having Loogie do it would be an invitation to disaster.” She sat down at one of the laptops and started scanning the camera sites.

“Why do you think that it’s Holly?” Tom asked over challenging folded arms. “What if she’s hiding, hoping to jump you by surprise? And what are you doing?”

“It’s Holly, because Glynis said that her redhead was zipping around, playing keep-away with one of the eggs, trying to get Hex Kitten’s goat. Hayley is the one with the power skates, Holly is the one with the flight rig. And I’m checking camera shots.”

“Again, what if she’s hiding?”

“Tom, getting their picture taken is the Hellions’ entire point in doing this,” Tyler pointed out.

“At long last, some humility,” Tom sighed, ignoring Izzy’s rolling eyes. “But if she’s looking for a photo op, why are you doing a comparison scan?”

“At that thing with Precision and his goons, Holly let slip that, besides her High Energy studies, she’s a huge Telecommunications wonk,” Tyler informed him.

“Oh?” Izzy grunted with equal parts curiosity and territoriality.

“If Holly’s as good as she says she is,” Tyler said, “spoofing our Wi-Fi would be child’s play for her. Exactly what she’ll DO with that? I lack data.”

Tom stood there silently for a moment, his lips parted for a snide comment. But it struck him that Tyler’s deductions were spot-on, and her worries about what Holly Hellion might be up to were just as valid. And Tyler’s efforts to stop Holly would absolve her of any blame, while his just standing around, doing nothing in a crisis would paint Tom as the bad guy. And he didn’t need that. He started up a laptop and started reviewing the Action Log of their ‘Air Traffic Control’ for their aerial drones. If Holly Hellion was using a flying rig, she’d probably come in from above and directly access their Wi-Fi antennas, which the ATC system would note.

“Hey, just because one of them is at Dino World-” Tyler objected.

“Let’s assume that their intelligence eclipses their common sense, a fair guess given the way they acted at the race,” Tom snarked. “If one of them was at Dino World and the other one was there too, then she’d have shown herself. Since she hasn’t, she’s either at Splash-a-Rama or here. And while Splash-a-Rama offers some interesting potentials with her dripping wet, we’re not there. So let’s check the feeds until we find her, or we’re sure she’s not here.”

Tyler hated to give Tom the point, but he could be reasonable- when it was to his advantage. Leaving Tom to run the remote control paintball guns for the challenge, Tyler and Izzy started checking the cameras.

“I have unexplained high levels of energy use on Factory Road,” Izzy announced.

“I have a pattern of cameras showing 10 AM shadows and it’s 2 PM,” Tyler said.

“I have multiple suppressed reports for flight patterns on Sorority Row,” Tom reported.

“Ten o’clock was when we came in and helped the contractors finish the preparations,” Tyler said. “So, what have they been doing all this time?”

“Too many variables without concrete evidence,” Izzy said.

“Izzy, shut down the Challenge and tell those two to get to the front gate,” Tyler said. “Tom, phone your mother. Tell her that I’m going in for an eyeball examination, but I’m not going to engage anyone without her okay.”

“You’re making a lot of command decisions here, Collier,” Tom said stiffly.

“Get the rookies to safety, get instructions, and get better intel,” Tyler countered. “You got a better idea? Or at least something that won’t get us sued by someone?”

Tom beetled his brow and let out an aggravated grunt. But he pulled out his phone to contact his mother. Fighting to suppress a victorious smirk, Tyler picked up her harness and headed out of the control room.

The thing that gnawed at Tyler as she strapped on her flying rig was the timing. If Holly had followed Geoff and Tank, then she got there shortly after they did, about a half hour ago. But then, why were so many of the camera shots showing 10 AM shadows? The Foundation engineers who’d done the real work had been wiring the ‘studio’ for days- had the Hellions found out about that somehow? What game were they playing? So far it had been a rather straightforward- if prolonged- bit of photo-bombing for publicity, using their alleged attraction to Tyler as an excuse.

And that really rankled Tyler. It was far from the first time that some girl had tried to use him for 15 seconds of fame. And she was a girl now- shouldn’t she be immune to that bullshit now? But there was still that needy, pathetic, affection-starved part of Tyler that still wanted a cute girl to like him. And there was the nagging fact that Tyler was objectively physically attractive now…

Tyler shoved all of that aside as she attained the altitude that the drones used. “Zebra, this is Rockhound. Feed me the location of the greatest ATC- er-FUCK!” Stupid Radio Silence side effect! She touched down on the studio’s water tower, dropped her field and tried again. “Zebra, this is Rockhound. Comms with altitude a no-go. I’m on the water tower. Can you-”

[Finally!] Izzy came back [Look, Tank and Mr. Wheels are heading for Sorority Row at high speed]

“Why’d you do that?”

[We didn’t] Izzy said significantly [Very much didn’t]

“Crap.” That meant that Tank and Geoff were being herded into some kind of trap. All the Wiz Kids knew how that worked: get one or two under wraps, point a gun at their heads, and the superbrains are supposed to fold like a pair of deuces. The problem was that that was SO not the Hellions’ style. At least not Holly or Hayley’s style. Tyler had no idea what Helen Hellion’s style was like. That meant there was an unknown factor at play, one that would explain the 10 o’clock shadows and the ATC spoofing, when Holly wouldn’t have known where to go. “Okay, the general location of the ATC interference- is that near Slasher Street?”

[It is, good call; they’re heading in that direction now] Izzy said.

“Have you contacted Momma Bear?”

[She says that Clare and Loogie have their hands full at Splash-a-Rama, but it’s nothing carrot-topped, so go with your guess that it’s Holly. Go in, but do NOT engage, either physically or verbally. You said that you were only going to eyeball it, so DO that.]

Splash-A-Rama

“I thought you said that there weren’t going to be any supervillains!” Heike yipped as the grungy looking punk zipped past him, barely clipping the kid.

“Obnoxious, yes,” Tom said as he just barely managed to dodge another incoming inline skater trying to score on him. “Supervillains, No. They’re just skate punks who’re using this park as their private run.”

“But Dr. Chase rented the park for the day!” Heike argued.

“Yeah, but tell them that,” Tom said, jerking a thumb at a sample of the graffiti that the park was peppered with. “The way they see it we’re crashing their digs.”

“Maybe this is part of the challenge?” Heike offered.

“Weeellll… I doubt it,” Tom hedged. “But it couldn’t hurt to treat it like a challenge.”

“GOOD!” and Heike charged out into the scrimmage, tripping up a bunch of skatepunks as he ran.

“Heike!” Tom yelled, horrified.

“What? Is He? Doing?” Logan asked, watching the boy genius dodge among the skaters.

“Merde,” Clare muttered, “the little fool doesn’t really understand that he can get hurt or even killed doing that! What does he think he’s doing?” Clare paused blank-faced and turned to Logan. “Don’t tell Dr. Chase I said that.”

Logan started frantically typing at his laptop. “What are you doing?” Clare asked.

“I’m re-initializing the automatic challenges and hazards we shut down when Izzy told us that Holly Hellion might be on-site. They’re not physically dangerous, but they’re uncomfortable- and more to the point, embarrassing- enough that they might get these clowns to back off.”

Clare looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Loogie, that’s cold-blooded, ruthless and down-right mean. Keep up the good work.”

Dino World

Hex Kitten zipped around a corner and hid behind a construction pylon to get some breath. This was one advantage that power skates had over her innate power. The Hellion’s skates operated off a battery, so the redheaded ditz didn’t get tired, just switched over to another battery. Not that Macy would ever admit it to the carrot-brained bitch.

And where was Tyler? Why couldn’t she get a straight answer out of anyone?

Then, just as she was gearing up to figure out her next move, a white streak whizzed by, and suddenly her hands were empty.

Hayley Hellion skidded to a stop maybe 15 meters away, held the ‘egg’ on high tauntingly and gave Hex Kitten a juicy razzberry. Just as Macy was about to rise to the Hellion’s bait, one of the Wiz Kid wannabes came down out of nowhere on a bungie cord and snatched the egg out of Hayley’s hand.

As Hayley and Hex Kitten both took a second to wrap their heads around this, the boom that Mordecai was dangling from pivoted away from their position. Both the girls started to react, but their path was barred as a huge ‘T-Rex’ construct wheeled to block that and ‘roared’ through a tinny PA speaker. They both turned to take another, more roundabout route, but that path was also blocked, this time by three ‘raptors’, that beeped at them.

“OH- kaaayyy…” Linda admitted, “I did not see that coming.”

“Still, a very good show,” Glynis gave the rookies their due. “They have three eggs, and there was nothing in the mission statement against doubling the moto-dinos. So, let’s give them their Scooby- snack.”

Mike helped Mordecai get down from the bungie cord, and they shared a high-five. “Okay, what do we do now?” Mike asked, looking around.

No doubt in response to this very question, a dog-sized purple ‘dinosaur’ rolled up and let out a yammering ‘bark’ from its speaker. Taped to its tan ‘snout’ was an envelope.

“No wonder they shut this dump down,” Mordecai sneered as he walked over and tore the envelope from the construct’s ‘mouth’. “There’s skating the edge and there’s flat-out copyright infringement.”

Accepting the keys in the envelope, Mordecai read the piece of paper:

“The Final Frontier.

“This is the voyage of the Wiz Kids candidates.

“Your Two-Hour Mission (if we’re lucky): to seek out new tactics and strategies.

“To boldly go, where thousands have gone before.”

“And yet again, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mike said.

With a broad smirk, Mordecai accessed his smartphone. After a few minutes, he showed Mike a listing saying that the Downtown LA theme park ‘The Space Experience’ would be closed at the end of the summer for repairs and upgrades. The three-month down time was listed as starting one month earlier. “Hey, there are only so many abandoned theme parks in LA,” Mordecai pointed out. “But there are a bunch that are just squeaking by.”

“And appearing on the Wiz Kids show couldn’t hurt a third-rate attraction’s draw,” Mike jeered.

“That too,” Mordecai agreed with a nod.

Splash-A-Rama

“Okay, that’s apparently our target,” Tom said, indicating the ‘treasure chest’ that was at the bottom of a deep tank that had been ‘Mermaid Island’ when the park was open.

“How are we supposed to get it?” Heiki asked, tilting his head sideways to get a different perspective of the challenge.

“Figuring that out is sort of the entire point of this,” Tom pointed out.

“There must be a winch around here somewhere,” Heike said, looking around.

“First, while there probably is a winch around here… somewhere,” Tom allowed, “getting it here would take hours. Second, bringing it here would only give those punks ideas.” Tom paused to stomp down hard on the leading edge of one of the skater’s boards, sending the aforementioned punk flying. “Third, it’s hardly the kind of brilliant solution they’re looking for.”

Heike raised the fire extinguisher he’d found and sprayed it on the front of another incoming skatepunk, causing him to crash. “The power’s on. Maybe we could rig a solenoid and bring it up using magnetism on the iron binding.”

Tom caught another skater and threw him into yet another skater, fazing both of them. “Not enough iron in the bands. That is, if it really IS iron.”

Heike made an ‘I understand’ noise. Then he slung his yoyo, which he’d been innocently bouncing, around the legs of a passing skate punk. “We could build some drones to dive down and get it.”

“I haven’t seen anything that we could kludge into a drone,” Tom said as he caught two skaters on the fly and leveraged them into each other. “Besides, we don’t really have the time to build and test them.”

“There’s an air compressor over there. How about we rig a bubble blower and use that to get it to the top?” Heike absently flexed a power cable, shocking the skate punk he’d sprayed with the fire extinguisher, who was going for a second try.

“Nice idea, but that’s way too dense to affect with brute force air.” Tom negligently lifted a power cable with his foot, tripping another skater.

“Well, what if we threw together a diving bell and used the air compressor to pump air into it?” Heike flashed the next approaching skater with his smartphone, causing him to careen into the side of the tank.

“Same problem as the winch, which we’ll need to get the bell down there and back up again,” Tom pointed out as he picked up one of the skatepunks struggling to get to his feet. Tom spun him upside down, thumped his helmeted head on the pavement a couple of times, and set him right-side up again, though dazed- and possibly concussed.

“How about we-” Heike paused to spray some skatepunks, who hadn’t gotten the idea yet and were charging at them en mass, with a power water hose. The punks went down in a heap. Heike looked at the sprayer, and a wide wicked grin crossed his face.

“I cannot believe that worked,” Logan croaked as he watched the directed water jets move the chest from the bottom of the tank and push it to the edge of the deck.

“I told you that we should have put some ballast in that chest,” Clare said. “Well, it’s a valid solution. Not one that we foresaw, but isn’t that for the best?”

“You’re not going to say, ‘It will make for killer TV’, are you?”

“Please! Still, call Mama Bear and tell her that we’re heading for the next site.” She turned to the Site Engineer and his technicians. “I’ll call LAPD and have them pick up the punks. You guys can sweep up the mess have they’ve finished here.”

The Site Engineer shrugged. “Meh. We’re gettin’ paid for the whole day.”

Tom pulled the chest securely onto the deck next to the tank. Heike was about to try to open the large iron lock, when it simply popped open on its own. Heike opened the chest and made a surprised noise. “A TOY?” He pulled out a plastic orca just large enough to hold with both hands.

“No,” Tom took the figure. “It’s a clue.” He pointed at the side of the toy, which had ‘Sea Whirl’ printed on the side in blue.

Republic Studios

One of the things that most civilians don’t realize about super-powers is that every power has its downsides. Super-strength means occasionally breaking things you didn’t want to. Super-speed often means that you travel faster than you can safely react. And Flying? Flying makes you very obvious and a sitting duck. Tyler was reduced to flitting from tree to overhang to whatever cover was in flitting distance. Fortunately, Tank and Geoff were traveling in overlapping bounds, which slowed them down.

Unfortunately, they had due cause to. They were still being shot at with paintgun pellets. Tyler silently made a personal note to herself to not volunteer for the cleanup crew. Maybe she could leverage Tom Chase into getting stuck with that. Worse was the fact that they’d shut down the RC guns and the mobile figures. That meant that someone else was in control of the pellet guns and figures. And that in turn suggested that that someone was herding Tank and Geoff into a trap. With any luck, just to be used as hostages.

The School Marm and Bad Guy figures had stopped, and Tank was looking around, ‘six-gun’ at ready, while Geoff was gearing up for a quick strike on the figures. Which suggested a trap. And from Tyler’s elevated vantage point, that trap was: well above their heads, suspended from a boom, was a strutwork cage, the sort that could be dropped on a target without injuring them. As a rule, uninjured hostages were preferable to injured ones- the threat of hurting them was a lot more credible.

Tyler’s first reflex was to neutralize the threat at its source and either destroy the cage, or at least prevent the boom from pivoting the cage over Tank and Geoff. But even as she was figuring out which was the better option, the boom swung out and the cage dropped.

Tyler zipped down between Geoff and Tank, and boosted her protective sphere out as far as it would go. This forced Tank and Geoff- especially Geoff in his chair- out from under the cage. But it didn’t repel the cage as Tyler had hoped. “AT LAST!” exulted a voice from out of sight. “I have you exactly where I want you.”

A man wearing a rather stock ‘supervillain’ outfit of a Kelly Green tunic that looked like it was made of chainmail, with a dark green hooded cape, boots, gauntlets and utility belt. Curving lighter green horns topped the hood, and a brass ‘devil’ buckle clasped the belt. In his left hand he held a heavy pistol that looked like it came from the Jack Kirby™ collection, and in his right, a utilitarian remote of some sort. “BWAH-HA-HA-HAH, we meet again!”

“Have we… MET?”

“What? You don’t recognize your Greatest Enemy?”

“You’re Craig Honaker from high school?”

“NO! I am the GREEN DEVIL!” he copped a pose, the hand with the remote set akimbo, the other with the blaster held high.

Tyler counted off her fingers, eyes screwed up skyward, visibly going through a mental Rolodex of antagonists. “Green Devil, Green Devil, Green Devil… nnnooo… Of the twenty- that I can remember- supervillains I’ve run into, none of them were ‘devils’, let alone a green one.”

“What, don’t you think of us as friends, after all this time?”

“Dude, I just told you- I don’t think we’ve ever met before. Who ARE you?”

“Are we really all that different, you and I?” the ‘Green Devil’ said unsurely.

“Well, you’re still talking in a Tenor range, so YEAH, we’re that different,” Tyler shot back.

“You have no idea what you’re up against,” the Devil said defensively.

“Finally, something I can agree on, Jack.” Tyler gripped the bars of the cage, heaved and managed to tip it over, freeing herself.

“BWAH-HA-HA- HAH!” the Green Devil laughed loudly, obviously shaken. “Did you think that I didn’t anticipate that?” He cued the remote, and a boom brought over Holly Hellion bound spread-eagle on a metal frame with very thick shackles, and gagged over her furious objections. Though she still managed to keep a hold on the smartphone in her hand. The boom settled the capture frame, which had an ominous reservoir right over Holly’s head, on the ground near the Green Devil. “Every seeming defeat was merely part of my larger master plan!”

“Master plan?” Tyler scoffed. “To film a Bondage and Discipline video?” Then something seemed to occur to Tyler. “Did Tom Chase put you up to this?” she looked around and spotted the remote video drones hovering over the area. “Cowboy? Are you punking me?”

The Green Devil waved his remote at Tyler. “My victory was assured from the moment you…”

“YOUR victory?” came from the sidelines, followed closely by a larger, more powerful looking man in a more serious version of the ‘Green Devil’s’ suit, with more actual armor, a hard helmet with gold-tone eyepieces and a pair of gold horns, and a built-up pair of gauntlets that suggested some kind of weapons system. “Dammit, Harvey, the entire point of you dressing up as a supervillain was that it was supposed to be another supervillain! As in _not me_! I didn’t want anyone knowing that I was in Southern California. But after this?” He gestured at the flying cameras following all of it, “I might as well put it on a billboard on Highway 101!”

The (real) Green Devil snatched the remote from Harvey’s hand, keyed a sequence and pointed the remote at Holly, releasing her. “My apologies, Miss Hellion. Do give my best regards to your father, the doctor. Oh, and a piece of advice, should you decide to go into the business-” he snarled at Harvey, “Never hire an executive assistant with a degree in Communications…”

Then he punched another sequence into the remote. “What did you just do?” Tyler asked, having way too much experience with supervillains to be chill.

“As a matter of routine, I planted six explosive packs, complete with incendiaries, at various points around the studio,” the Green Devil said with an evil grin. “Mostly to convince the rental agent to give me that ridiculously large deposit back. I’ve programmed them to explode in a half hour. So, you can either try and capture me, or you can defuse those bombs. And trust me, I’ll make sure that any battle will take longer than a half-hour. Mind you, no one should get injured in the explosions. But I assure you, each pack will cause at least 100 thousand dollars’ worth of damage- more if the incendiaries cause fires. And you just know the sleazebags who run this dump will jack up the estimates of the damages by at least 1000%.”

“But we’ll have proof that you caused the explosions!” Tyler objected.

“Who do you honestly think that a bunch of C-list Hollywood sharks will try to sue?” the Devil quirked a cocky grin. “A Supervillain? Or a multi-billion dollar foundation with a reputation that’s already a little shaky?”

Grabbing Harvey by the collar of his cape, the Green Devil turned to leave. Negligently, he tossed a square of paper back over his shoulder. “The placements of the explosives are on this map. I suggest that you get the lead out, kid.”

Tyler started for the Green Devil, but Holly stopped her. “He probably has an RC trigger built into that remote,” she pointed out. “Hey, it’s what I’d do in his place.”

Tyler gave her an ‘oh right- supervillain kid’ look, but took the point. “Okay, there’s no way that LAPD can respond in time to take care of it,” Tyler grumped. “And just me running around doing it would be stupid. Holly, you said that you’re into explosives? How are you at disarming them?”

“Oh Daddy made a point of teaching us how to disarm explosives, traps, hostage rigs and like that as a matter of principle.”

“Then why didn’t you escape from that capture frame?”

“I was working on it!” Holly huffed. “That’s a very solid frame, and whatever is in that reservoir has a mercury switch trigger for it.”

“How about you guys, Tank? Geoff? You know anything about disarming explosives?”

“I know just enough about them to know that there’s a weird counter-intuitive anti-hack logic to them,” Tank said. “And I never had a reason to learn how that logic works.”

“And I know just enough about demolitions to know that they’d be placed high enough that people wouldn’t spot them,” Geoff said. “I could climb up to do it, but I’d be in a position where I could either cut the wires or I could hold on, but I couldn’t do both.”

“Crap. Izzy, what about the Site Engineer?”

[He says his contract prohibits him from doing that kind of dangerous work] Izzy said back. [Something about a conflict with the stuntmen’s union]

“Crap,” Tyler snarled. “Holly, are you willing to defuse half of those bombs?”

Holly gave Tyler a minxish smirk, took a picture of the map with her phone and said, “What do you think?” Then she pulled herself up to Ty and gave her a deep kiss. She broke the kiss and said roguishly, “I’ll take the bombs on the south side of the studio.” Holly managed to pull off an ‘oh yeah, I’m hawt and I know it’ swagger as she lifted off with her flying rig.

Tyler watched her fly off, visibly trying to figure out how to handle the train wreck anyone could hear chugging down the tracks. Tyler let out a martyred sigh and said, “Get to the Front Gate, the challenge is over.” Then she sped off at top speed.

“SHIT,” Tank grumbled. “All that, and we don’t get any credit for this part of the challenge.

“Sez you,” Geoff gloated. He reached around to the back of his wheelchair and pulled out the ‘School Marm’ figure- conspicuously clean of any red paintball splatter. With wide smile Tank offered Geoff a raised fist to bump.

Tyler raced to the framework supporting the ‘alpine mountain’ background flat and looked for the demo pack. It wasn’t up that high, probably relying on the mass over higher portions of the flat to do as much damage as possible, but it was still over 20 feet high. Tyler started to rise up to get at the packet, when she was splattered by paintballs.

“Tom…” Izzy asked aghast, “What are you DOING?”

“Just having a little fun, Iz,” Tom chance said as he directed the remote controlled paintball guns to splatter Tyler.

“TOM, she’s trying to disarm a bunch of BOMBS! We only have 25 minutes!”

“What? You thought that Green Devil yoyo was telling the truth?” Tom scoffed. “That’s classic supervillain mindfuck, ‘ooohhh… time bombs set to go off…’ That’s just so we won’t try to follow him. Those packets are phonies. Besides, even if they are real and they are primed to go off, Tyler’s fast enough that she should get all of them in time. I’m not slowing her down that much. I’m just reminding her that this isn’t the ‘Tyler Collier show’.”

“Tom, you DO realize that when she finishes disarming those things, she’s gonna be PIS- er, where’d she go?”

“What?” Tom turned back to the monitor and checked the image. “Where’d she go?”

“That was MY question,” Izzy snipped. “Ah, she’s at the second bomb- and she’s leaving.”

“How’d she disarm it so fast?” Tom wondered, checking bomb sites #3, #4, #5 and #6 in quick succession, barely catching a glimpse of Tyler just as she left. “WHAT? She’s done already? HOW?”

“That’s NOT what you should be worried about, Tom,” Izzy said with a certain smug satisfaction.

“What is?”

*crash!* The door to the control shed came flying in, torn off its hinges. Tyler Collier marched through the door, the blood in her eyes curiously matching the red paint that splattered her clothing, hair and face. “That is.”

“aahhh… TY… aaahhh… honest the paintgun target acquisition system latched onto you ‘cause you were moving so fast and-” Tom furiously spun as many excuses as his fertile imagination could produce, as Tyler stalked into the shed. Tyler said nothing as she marched in, but ignored Tom and took his trademark lariat from its hook on the wall. With an evil gleam in her eye and a sinister smile, Tyler snapped the rope between her hands and advanced on Tom Chase.

“Not that I object that much to what you’re doing,” Izzy said as Tyler strung up Tom Chase by his ankles with his own rope, “but shouldn’t you be- y’know, switching off the bombs?”

“I don’t need to,” Ty said as she picked up a rapidfire paintball gun. “The Green Devil said that he primed the bombs to go off in 30 minutes, but the LED timer readouts were set for 3,000 minutes. That’s five days and two hours, give or take the five or so minutes I wasted checking each of the bombs.”

“LED readouts?” Izzy repeated, “I thought they only did that in the movies. Why would a supervillain tell the bomb squad how much time they had?”

“Izzy, we’re IN a movie studio?” Tyler pointed out. “The Green Devil probably used prop gear from the studio, just because it was there. And the entire reason that I even tried to disarm them was that there wasn’t time for LAPD’s bomb squad to get here. But five days and two hours? Even at rush hour, LAPD has more than enough time. So, our disarming them would be an unnecessary risk and interfering with evidence.”

“Your lawyer would be so proud,” Tom snarked from his position upside down, trying to reach up to free himself and not having a lot of luck. “Fun’s fun- now get me down.”

Tyler just gave Tom an evil grin and proceeded to pelt him with paintball rounds. Then Izzy stopped Tyler. Looking at her smartphone, Izzy said, “Geoff and Tank have brought the School Marm to the front gate. They’ve finished the challenge.”

Tyler nodded and put the paintball gun down. “Okay, give them the next clue. Tell Mama Bear that I’m heading to the Space Experience to help them get ready. You get to Sea Whirl as quick as you can. We can leave John Wayne here,” Tyler jerked a thumb at Tom, “to clean up.” With that she lifted off. Izzy sighed at being left behind that way, but saw the logic.

“You can cut me down any time now, Iz,” Tom whined.

A wide evil grin spread across Izzy’s face. She picked up the paintball gun, swapped out the hopper and enjoyed splattering Tom with more pellets.

Tank and Geoff were looking around for their next clue as Holly Hellion dropped next to them. “You’re done disarming the bombs?” Tank asked.

“Didn’t need to,” Holly said. “I was trying to use my smartphone to get out of that capture frame, so I was able to leech the Green Devil’s command frequency. I just moved the decimal point placement two places right in the timer sequence. There are usually software safeguards against changing the actual time, but not the decimal point. So, LAPD has five days and change to get here. Don’t tell them, or they’ll just keep delaying and forget about it.”

“Then what took you so long?”

“I hadda check the bombs,” Holly replied. “Bombs don’t always log off when they’re told to.”

‘And you had to be filmed flying around heroically disarming them,’ Tank thought sourly to himself. “How do you know he won’t set them off by remote control, once the half hour is up?”

“Nah, I knew that he wouldn’t detonate them remotely,” Holly scoffed. “The Green Devil has a reputation as an operator, someone who knows how things are done. And if I learned anything from Daddy, it’s that operators are very big on ‘Keep your promises AND your threats’.

“Besides, he’d only have pulled that gag with Harvey if he was pulling out his operation here, whatever it was, and there was a last minute hitch. And there’s always a last minute hitch. And he wouldn’t have shown himself if Harvey wasn’t the very last loose thread. Once Harvey was secure, the Green Devil would want to be as low profile as he could. As it is, he’s just one more thing for Police Intelligence to keep track of; if he set off those bombs, he’d be very high profile- especially if anyone was killed. There’d be cops, superheroes, reporters, all looking for him, and every lowlife in LA would be trying to get a little edge by selling him out.”

Then another flat, this one of a stock ‘old prospector’ character ala Gabby Hayes, trundled up. Taped to a hand was an envelope. Geoff pulled the envelope from the flat and opened it. “The Final Frontier,” he read off. “This is the voyage of the Wiz Kids candidates-”

There was a flash of light as Holly snapped a picture of the page with her smartphone. “Thanks!” she said chipper grin as she rose into the air with her flying rig.

Looking up after her as Holly disappeared into the sky, Tank said, “Y’know, I think this challenge just got more complicated.”

Sea Whirl

“Okay, this is new,” Tom said as he pulled the car up in front of ‘Sea Whirl’ in Costa Mesa. In pointed contrast to the shabby graffiti-riddled negligent disrepair of ‘Splash-A-Rama’, Sea Whirl was clean, well-kept, appealing- and there was a nasty picket line out front.

As they got out of the car, Heike asked, “Are these supervillains?”

“Worse,” Tom groaned, “They’re Social Justice Warriors.” He pointed at the signs that some of them carried, bearing the images of killer whales. “They’re probably Animal Rights activists.” On the other hand, several of them were wearing baggy killer whale costumes, so Heike’s question wasn’t that far out in left field.

As Tom presented his Quest Foundation ID to the security guards, Heike asked, “What are they so upset about?”

“They think the park’s gonna do something to Kala, the star of the killer whale show,” the senior-more security guard said as he checked Heike’s ID on the radio.

“You have a killer whale in there?” Heike asked, bright-eyed.

“Nah, they moved all the animals to one of the Quest Foundation’s animal rehab complexes on the coast,” the junior security guard said. “They’re trying to figure which of the whales, dolphins, seals and like that can be reintroduced to the wild. It’s a lot more complicated than people think.”

“Aw, crap,” the senior guard groaned as Santoya’s camera crew got out with their gear. The ‘Whale Liberators’ reacted by storming the cameras, shouting various buzzwords and slogans. “And I just got them calmed down enough to where they might get bored and leave in a few hours….”

Having confirmed that Heike was, against all odds, a Fellow at the Quest Foundation, the senior guard had his men hold the line as he let Heike and Tom through the gate, just in case one of the ‘Whale Liberators’ turned around at an awkward moment.

The Space Experience

The contrast with the remoteness and shoddiness of Dino World was killer. But then, so was the contrast between the tall, sleek, organic appearing ‘Space Age’ building that housed ‘The Space Experience’ and the rest of Los Angeles’ Jewelry District, which was a showplace of Pre- WWII architecture.

Mike and Mordecai parked their car, checked out the dissonance, and strolled up to the three security guards at the front gate to the building. “I wonder why they built the park here?” Mike mentioned.

“They didn’t,” said the oldest of the three guards in the tones of answering a Frequently Asked Question. “This building was built on the lot where two old buildings had been wrecked in a fire, about, oh, 20 or so years ago. Some big Japanese company put up this building as some sort of mega-conceptual ‘retail locus’- basically a really big mall, like those aint dropping like flies- and it tanked. Hard. It closed after a year, and it was empty for a couple of years. Then some Sci-Fi convention used it for their convention and it was a big hit. After that, it basically evolved into a theme park that’s pretty much an ongoing sci-fi convention with a side order of showcase for High Tech and video game companies. It aint Disneyland, but they’re making money.”

“Great, you’re here,” Tyler said as Linda and Glynis bustled into the control room in the ‘tower’ of the complex.

“Well, we can’t all get here as the crow flies,” Linda said snippily as she slipped a headset on. Then she stopped cold. “What happened to you?” she asked, indicating the splotches of red all over Tyler.

“Ask your boyfriend,” Ty snarled. “Izzy’s heading over to Sea Whirl to back up Loogie and Clare, and Quickdraw McGraw is staying at Republic Studios to clean up the mess- if he knows what’s good for him. Mike and Mordecai are at the front gate, but I told the security guards to stall them for a bit, so you could get here. They’re using a little local color.” Speaking into her own headset, Tyler said, “Okay, Dude, they’re here; you can let them in.”

The guard wrapped up his story and matter-of-factly unchained the front gate, but only opened one of the double-doors in the imposing gateway. Unlike most malls, which are designed around a cross formed by two major avenues with stores and booths lining the two lanes, the ‘Space Experience’ building was designed around a huge oval central atrium that rose up eight stories to the constellation-spangled roof high above. The interior was dark, but then, theatrically, one light after another turned on, spotlighting one exhibit after another. The place was designed with an equal sprinkling of Hard Science and Pop Culture Sci-Fi, with the large open area of the atrium displaying Romulan Birds of Prey and Battlestar Galactica vipers next to RKK Energiya capsules and NASA LEMs.

“What do we do if one of them tries swinging around on those props on wires?”

“We give them a Darwin Award, and the selection gets that much easier.”

There was a large padded caged area in the center of the atrium floor with a sign proclaimed it as an ‘Anti-Gravity Chamber’- with a qualifying addendum that the ‘anti-gravity’ was just a powerful upwards-set fan to replicate the effects of anti-gravity. Then there was a buzzing noise, and from around the far side of the chamber a figure trundled into view. Despite the obvious fan-base setting, Mordecai reeled slightly at the sight of a ‘Dalek’ from the various BBC ‘Dr. Who’ TV programs. There was an envelope taped to the end of the Dalek’s ‘plunger’. He gingerly took the envelope and opened it. “Let’s see… ‘10’ next to a sketch of what looks like the bottom of a rocket with a number ‘10’ on the side. Then ‘9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 LIFTOFF!’” Mordecai looked at Mike quizzically.

With a smug look, Mike pointed at what appeared to be the finned bottom parts of two small rockets, one red, and one blue. He then pointed upwards to a figure of the moon suspended eight stories above them, with two hefty rings fixed to its bottom, and a red silk ‘arrow’ attached to its bottom, pointing at the rings.

“Okay, we have to find all ten pieces of the ‘rocket’, assemble it at the launch pad, and get it up to that hook.” Then the Dalek started rambling off, ‘EX-TER-MIN-ATE!’, and the other Daleks around the building started the grating chorus. The ‘cannon’ let off a blast, and a red dye soaked beanbag shot out, missing them and leaving a big red splotch on one of the walls. “And we gotta do it without getting blasted.”

Sea Whirl

“Something’s wrong…” Heike said as he watched the killer whale in the tank swim around idly the transparent-walled tank.

Tom Tsung carefully looked at the whale as it passed, and then re-read the note that was left for them at the entrance. “’Free Willy’… yada, yada, yada…” Then the penny dropped. “Got it!”

“Free Willy?” Heike asked uncertainly.

“’Free Willy’ is an old movie about a bunch of people who rescue a killer whale from a theme park like this and free it to the open sea. In real life, it’s a LOT more complicated than that. But I figured out what’s off about that whale- it’s some sort of lifelike robot or android… if the term ‘android’ applies to a synthetic cetacean. Our challenge is to get that plastic whale from this tank in the Nautilus Pavilion to the Bayside Amphitheater.”

“That’s a long way,” Heike noted, his brain obviously too busy to devote that much thought to eloquence.

“Hey, it’s supposed to be hard,” Tom said. “It also explains why they’re using a robotic copy: orcas are WAY too delicate to subject Kala to whatever we’d come up with. And hey; sh-er, stuff happens. This way, if we drop it, the worst that happens is it gets a few dings. And we get dinged points.”

“Hokay, but how do we get that from here to there?”

Tom worked that over for a bit. “Okay, they wouldn’t have made it so realistic- and I gotta wonder where they got it from- if they didn’t expect us to treat it like a real living Orca. So we can’t just drag the fool thing there by its tail with a truck. We’ll have to make sure that its skin stays wet, its lungs aren’t crushed by the lack of water buoyancy and it can breathe and all that.”

Tom and Heike started brainstorming. After a few minutes, there was a commotion at the gate. A few moments later, a redheaded girl zipped into the park up to them. “Is Tyler here? What’s going on?” she looked around.

Tom was framing a firm but polite ‘get out of here, this is complicated enough as it is’ response, when there was another commotion at the gate, and the ‘Whale Liberators’ stormed past the guards and up to the tank.

Tom cringed at trying to get anything done with these yoyos mixing everything up, when a flash of inspiration came to him. “THANK GOD! You’re just in time!”

The Space Experience

While it rankled Mike’s neatnik sensibilities, Mordecai convinced him that the best way to get past the ‘Daleks’ was to get them to expend their paint pellet ammunition- splatting up the mall something fierce in the process. “AND the best way to do that is to climb to the very top of the mall and find where the ‘rocket’ segments are,” Mordecai said.

Mike nodded. “Odds are that the last segment is hidden in the hardest place to find. But what’s to keep the Daleks from resupplying?”

“Well, the simplest- and cheapest- way of reloading the Daleks is to have them go to a restocking station. So we follow one of the Daleks to wherever it’s restock station is and disable it. Oh, and we don’t use the ‘Anti-Gravity’ thing to get to the next floor.”

“Right,” Mike admitted, “that’s the first thing they’d think of, and there’s probably some kind of trap built into it.”

“BUT it would make for a great way of getting rid of Daleks.” Mike thought about it for a moment and nodded.

They crouched behind their cover, waited for their opening and-

-a white blur flew between them and the three Daleks opened fire. “FUCK!” Holly Hellion yelped. “This suit is ruined!”

Mordecai said to Mike, “May the Force be with you,” and shoved him to the edge. As Mordecai bolted for the next bit of cover, Mike jumped up on a counter, jumped, grabbed the edge of the next floor and pulled himself up and over.

As the boys did this, Holly yelled, “At least tell me if this stuff stains or not!”

“Okay, we’re supposed to be testing Mike and Mordecai. You can stop splatting Holly,” Tyler said sourly as Glynis and Linda eagerly did just that.

Holly wasn’t happy about getting her chic white outfit splatted, especially after she’d managed to keep it clean getting in. She was even less happy about the way the two new guys were using her as a shield from the ‘Dalek’ things. Then one of the ‘energy cannons’ zapped her. Okay, it only dazzled her, but she reflexively froze and the two new guys picked her up. Then they used her as an anti-splatter buffer as they made their way up to the next level. There, Mike shielded his eyes against another ‘energy cannon’ dazzle and charged the ‘Dalek’. Mordecai let Holly down and rushed to the ‘energy cannon’. He fiddled with the wiring, and used the ‘energy blasts’ to overload the optics of the reinforcement ‘Daleks’.

As Geoff and Tank used Holly as a shield, back in the control room, Tyler said, “I am so torn on this one. I mean it’s not really cheating, and it is clever and effective use of the environment.”

“Save the recordings,” Glynis said. “I’m sure there is a market for images like this.” Tyler locked up at this crass- if pragmatic- angle.

“Aw, MAN!” Linda groaned, “The other two newbies are here, and I just finished moving the Daleks up the ramps!”

“Who is it?” Glynis asked.

“Tank and Geoff,” Tyler answered. “And watch out for Geoff- Tank is an athlete, but Geoff is a lot sneakier.”

“In a wheelchair?” Glynis bleated.

“That was Izzy and Tom’s reaction. Hmph- Geoff’s geeking out over the Farscape exhibits.” Then Ty reacted to something in her headphone. “Wait a minute, the guards at the entrance say that a speedster just rushed past them. Nothing violent, and it was too fast for them to get a good look, but if Hayley just showed up-”

“No such luck loverboy,” Linda sneered. “It’s Hex Kitten.”

“How did she find her way here?” Tyler wondered. “Holly might tell Hayley, but how would Hex Kitten know where to go? And what does she want?”

“Well, from what she said at Dino World, she’s looking to talk to you,” Linda reminded Tyler. “But it looks like she hasn’t quite picked up on how to tell Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum apart.” Linda hit the sound pickup to hear Hex Kitten bickering with Holly. Linda switched off the sound just as Hex Kitten was saying, [Aaannddd… clean up! You’re embarrassing everyone!]

Tyler let out a groan and asked, “Okay, what do we do about them?”

“Let them make fools of themselves!” Linda said pertly. “It adds another level of difficulty to the challenge, and you can’t buy comedy relief like this!”

Tank snagged the #3 piece for the Red Rocket, did a few moves to avoid Mordecai and Mike, and handed off the segment to Geoff, who started speeding off with it. But Hex Kitten zipped up, snatched the segment and zipped off with it. Geoff stopped, stifled a snarl, and then tilted his head back and roared, “KHAAANNN!!”

Hex Kitten zoomed over to Mordecai and said, “If you tell me where Tyler is, I’ll give you this… whatever it is.”

“Oh NO, you do NOT!” Holly huffed and snatched the stage from Hex Kitten. Then she lifted off and played keep-away with it.

“Oh, THIS again,” Glynis sneered.

“Same game, different player,” Linda noted.

“Hah?” Tyler grunted.

“Replay of what Hex Kitten pulled on the other one,” Linda said. “She seems to want to talk to you very badly.”

“BUT, enabling this poor behavior by rewarding it is poor form,” Glynis said primly. “AFTER the challenge, do have words with that girl.”

Mordecai had no intention of cutting a deal with ‘Hex Kitten’ or the redhead. He remembered DinoWorld all-too-well. Even if either party dealt with him squarely, the other would snatch the section away from him out of spite.

Well, you don’t get over in these kinds of situations by letting other people set the terms. He went to the edge of the mezzanine and crawled up the outside of the galleria, avoiding Daleks, Tank & Geoff, and screwball girls with superpowers alike. If section #2 of the Blue rocket was on the 2nd floor, it struck Mordecai that section #2 of the Red rocket would be on the 9th floor. And even if he was wrong about Red #2 being on the 9th floor, it was almost a certainty that someone put something- possibly multiple somethings- on the point most difficult to get at.

“Howcome we didn’t see this coming?” Linda asked as the newbie crawled out from their camera’s arc of vision.

“He’s a rock climber,” Glynis replied, “So it’s pretty obvious that he would have taken this route.”

“Obvious- in retrospect,” Tyler added.

“But you’re right,” Glynis sighed, “we should have seen something like this.”

“So he’s unpredictable,” Tyler said. “Exactly how this a bad thing?”

Tank found himself wishing that the was still partnered up with Heike. The Kid was small but smart, and he seemed to be a dab hand at sneaking around in tight spaces. And he was a team player. Geoff was fast and sneaky, but he was a maverick, constantly going off on his own. And he kept stopping to gush over this bit of Dr. Who memorabilia or that Red Dwarf prop. Which tended to leave Tank marooned by himself after Geoff had zipped off on one of his wild stunts. Like he was at the moment. Three Daleks had targeted him and were herding him into a tight space. But then one of the end Daleks ran out of ammo. It stopped short, did a 180 and left, presumably to restock. Tank may not have been the reflexive wild card that Geoff was, but he knew when to take advantage of an unexpected opening. He bolted out of the crossfire and jumped over the Viper fighter from the original Battlestar Galactica . He weaved around a line of five Cylons (same show) and tripped over-

-Jeezus frickin’ Krist, it was the Blue rocket’s #2 section!

Pausing for a moment, Tank tried to sketch out a layout for that floor. He briefly wasted time regretting that he didn’t have a rope or bungie cord, but then realized that he and Geoff hadn’t agreed on whether they’d build the Red or the Blue rocket- but then, why would they limit themselves that way? No, don’t over-complicate it, just get the section to the launch pad- either they had their first piece, or the Blue team would waste time looking for it. He picked up the up the section, and it occurred to Tank that he didn’t have to move it, he could just leave it here and get in touch with Geoff, and decide between the two of them and- -and Mike Kung sprang out of left field and snatched the section out of his hands. Mike took the barest of pauses to get his balance back and kipped up to the next level. Tank canted his head back, balled up his fists and roared, “KHAAANNN!!”

Geoff was running his arms off, trying to get away from Mordecai and Mike, while not making himself a target for the Daleks. He hated that his wheelchair limited him in any way. But the only way to get up or down from that level was through the inclined ramps on their side. But Mordecai and Mike (M&M? There might be a good jibe in that) knew that, and would use that against him, and probably find a way of using him to distract the Daleks. Why not? It’s what he’d do in their situation.

Geoff did a quick-stop, spin and sprint to confuse the Daleks’ targeting systems, which would have ruined a display of Firefly props, when he saw that he’d been herded into a crossfire. Geoff’s mind went into a blur, like someone had thrown Physics, Tactics, Psychology, and every sneer that prick Derek MacInnes used back in Secondary School into a blender and set it on frappe. He was willing himself to find a genius solution to the problem- preferably one that didn’t have his chair as a major factor- when his wheelchair zipped out of his niche. It evaded the paintball packets and zoomed up the ramp, all without him doing anything.

Then his chair stopped and spun around. “Where’s Tyler?” Hex Kitten said, glaring into his face. “I can’t keep just running around looking for her. Where is TYLER?”

“Oh, you’re one of those birds who’re sniffing around after nano-brains,” Geoff sniffed.

“Don’t give me any grief, Haggis-breath,” Hex Kitten growled. “I got enough of that in that stupid ‘Dino World’ theme park. Now, this is important, and it doesn’t involve you.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Geoff said puckishly.

Recognizing the Star Wars reference, “Hex Kitten shot back, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” With that, she spun Geoff around again and zipped him up three floors and came to a jerking stop.

“WOO!” Geoff whooped, “Do that again!”

Hex Kitten grumped and snarled into Geoff’s face, “Where? Is? Tyler?”

Geoff wasn’t sure what Hex Kitten’s deal was- mutant, dynamorph, power gem, whatever- but he was sure that she wasn’t in any mood for games. “She’s in the control room, driving the Dalek’s and energy cannons and whatever else they haven’t thrown at us yet.”

“shit,” Hex Kitten hissed with disgust. “And I can’t get through that stupid phone tree…”

“It’s intentional,” Geoff said. “You wouldn’t believe the hoops I had to jump through to get a steady connection with my mum.” Hex Kitten growled and started to turn. “ah, While yer here, would you mind running me up a level or two? The Daleks don’t seem to be able to track you very well and-”

“And?” Hex Kitten shot back. “Why don’t you stay here? I stopped here because it’s a perfect connection point. Everyone and everything trying to get anywhere else will pass through or by here. You could jump the carrot-top or the two guys and they pass through here and get the stacks they collected. And why tote all the stacks around? As I understand the rules of this game, you’re not committed to one rocket or the other, so keep both of them until you choose. Stash them here until you have enough to win. And if you get stacks for the other rocket, then you’re keeping the other guys from winning.” With that, Hex Kitten zoomed off.

‘I thought _we_ were supposed to be the geniuses,’ Geoff grumped to himself.

As she touched down, the thing that really torked Holly off was that she didn’t even want to BE there. Holly knew that this was another of the Wiz Kids’ elimination contests, but she wasn’t sure what the exact terms were. The thick drums that they were trotting around seemed to be the center of it all, but the gist of the whole thing eluded her. She wasn’t really that interested, but she needed an excuse to be there and be filmed. That was Hayley and their mother’s idea. Personally, Holly would have left it with her star turn at the Republic Studio, especially what with getting that kiss from Tyler. But Mom insisted that they get as much exposure as they could, the old ‘it doesn’t matter what they say about you, as long as they spell your name right’ chestnut. Still, Holly wished she could find something to wipe off the red tracking paint. As she looked around for rag or a scrap of paper, Holly suddenly became aware that several Daleks were positioning themselves around her. They were probably expecting her to lift up, which would have made her an easy target. So she vectored her flight rig’s power into pushing her forward as she ran, adding thrust to her already augmented running speed. But the Daleks shot at her with paint packets, so she didn’t notice one of the drones shove a crate into her path. Holly tripped over the crate and went sprawling, the flight pack adding force to the tumble. The result banged Holly somewhat, but completely knocked the flight rig’s appendages out of alignment. “GOTCHA, Bitch,” Linda gloated.

Hex Kitten’s experience- not as a thief, but as a Stolen Property Recovery operative (which was quite legal)- helped her spot the overhead cameras and avoid them. Well, she had tried waving to the cameras to get Tyler’s attention, but that almost got her splatted. Well, if waving didn’t do the job, Hex Kitten would just run along all the levels until she spotted the door to the control room. Okay, Logic stated that the control room would be at the very top, but that experience had shown her that Security Designers often mixed things up as to trip up intruders trying to use logic.

Hex Kitten zipped from one cover to another. Then figuring that she’d either confused the gunners or she was just wasting her time, she bolted for the ramp to the next level. Unfortunately for her, she was so busy trying to spot Daleks that she didn’t see a pair of posts rise up with a sheet of transparent plastic hung between them. She hit the plastic at top speed and the force of her collision caused the plastic to first stretch and then contract, wrapping her tightly.

“Well, we got another one,” Glynis said with a detached air. “Not a good day for your girlfriends, Ty.”

“We did design that thing so she can breathe, didn’t we?” Tyler asked.

“Well, we weren’t expecting the noobs to move that fast-” Linda hedged.

“Wait, what’s she doing?” Glynis cut Linda off.

“She’s spinning herself against a stretch of carpet,” Tyler said, watching intently.

“What, she’s trying to build up a static charge?” Linda asked rhetorically. “But the snare is made of plastic, it shouldn’t-”

“It worked,” Tyler said bluntly. Hex Kitten was able to unwrap herself from the plastic cocoon and sped up the ramp to the next level.

“Damn, a perfectly good solution wasted on a non-contestant,” Glynis pouted.

“I still say that shouldn’t have worked!” Linda snapped.

While the others were relying on speed and evasiveness, Mike Kung went with stealth. As the saying went, ‘when everyone else zigs, zag’. As he sneaked around the third level, Mike mentally cataloged the exhibits in case he needed a secure venue of escape. Then he saw something that clashed drastically with the now obsolete ‘state of the art’ technology of the 1960s- a sturdy chair of the style of the Ming period, with crude bamboo rockets strapped to the sides. It was a nod to Wan Hu (actually named Tao Deng-dao), the early Ming period official who was said to be the first man to attempt to ascend to the Heavens with rockets.

It was simultaneously so out of place, yet so completely in keeping with the theme of the park that Mike was sure that the Wiz Kids would use it to hide one of the sections. The fact that there was an unobtrusive camera watching the chair helped. Mike carefully walked up to the chair, made a respectful bow to the long dead proto-astronaut (whether he actually existed or not) and examined the chair. Yes! One of the Red sections was hidden under the chair. Very carefully as not to damage the exhibit (fake or not, it was a respectful tribute to the ancient scientist), Mike slid the section out from under the chair. He hefted the section in his arms and paused to think where Mordecai was. They’d have to decide whether to assemble the Red or the Blue rocket, and what they’d do with this section if they went with the red. Then Tank burst out of cover, barely escaping the Daleks on his trail. Catching Mike flat-footed, Tank snatched the section out of his hands without breaking stride and was quickly out of sight.

Mike was barely able to throw his head back and bellow, “KHAANN!!” before ducking to avoid the paintball pellets.

Tank tucked the section of the red rocket under his arm and charged for the ramp. He had to get the section to Geoff. It was weighted just enough to be a drag if you carried it too long, but not enough to drop on someone’s foot and break it. So Geoff was the logical person to carry the section. That is if they decided to collect the red rocket instead of the blue one. They really should have decided as soon as they knew what the conditions of this challenge were. Tank had built up a decent head of steam, when someone changed the rules- again. He hit a stretch of floor when his foot slipped out from under him. Tank fell face-first and dropped the rocket section. But neither he nor the section stopped. They both slid at an alarming rate, especially when the mezzanine turned to the ramp, but Tank and the section didn’t. Tank rolled himself so he hit the railing with his feet, not his head. This caused him to tumble over the railing. Tank frantically scrambled to latch onto the rail, but succeeded in grabbing the rocket section.

Tank hung there uncertainly for a moment. Reflexively he calculated the weights and angles and leverage involved in getting back to that level. He quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the effort or risk, especially when he was trying to get down to the next level anyway. He awkwardly brought up his feet, settled the section onto them and slid the section over the railing on the lower level. Then he carefully leveraged his legs and then the rest of him back onto the mezzanine. He almost tripped over the rocket section. When he was safe on his pins, Tank picked up the section and did some broken-field running. But one of the ‘energy cannons’ dazzled him, and he tripped over something. He went sprawling and- “HEY!”

Tank shook the sparkles out of his eyes, and he discovered that he’d tripped over Geoff, who had tucked himself away in a niche that was in a blind spot for the cameras. “Get OFF me!” Geoff demanded. “Oh, you got one of the red pieces.”

“Yeah,” Tank said as he pulled himself together. “We gotta decide whether we’re gonna build the red rocket or the blue. Hey, why are you here? I mean, why aren’t you out there looking for more of the pieces?”

“Because this is the perfect crossroads for the building. Both Tyler’s girlfriends and the other team will have to come past here.” From there Geoff proceeded to ruthlessly claim credit for Hex Kitten’s advice, both as regards the ‘crossroads’ aspect and holding onto each piece, so they could assemble whichever rocket they completed first. “That Hellion bird will probably run herself ragged trying to get as many pieces as she can. What are the odds we can finesse her into doing the heavy lifting for us?”

“Never tell me the odds,” Tank shot back at him.

Mordecai painstakingly leveraged himself over the banister onto the mezzanine, greatly hampered by the weight of three rocket sections. Sections that were very hard to keep a grip on, and were absolute murder on his balance. As he swung one leg over the banister, the sections shifted, making him scramble to re-secure them. That caused him to lose his balance, making him slide off the banister. And he was on the sixth level.

A pair of hands came out of left field, latched onto his arm and dragged him over the railing onto a secure footing. Mordecai lay on the carpet, breathing heavily, as much from the exertion of carrying those sections while he was climbing the exterior, as from the fear of his near-fall. “Thanks, Mike,” he rasped. “I’m hella lucky you were here.”

“In my experience there’s no such thing as luck,” a high-pitched Southern California accented voice asked. Mordecai jerked his head up. Instead of Mike Kung’s athletic presence, the voice belonged to a lithe girl in a gray cat-eared hoodie with ‘cats- eye’ sunglasses covering most of her face. “Do you have any idea of how to get to the Control Room for this Trekkie shrine?”

Mordecai stood up, paused to get his breath and admitted that he didn’t have any idea.

“Nuts,” Hex Kitten said disgustedly. Then, as Mordecai stooped to pick the sections up. “Why are you lugging those things around? It would be stupid for them to be lugging those pieces around with them. So just find wherever they’re stashing their pieces, let them get as many as they can once you find the stash, and then cop them all.” Mordecai stopped cold and a blank look of realization melted down his face. “Still, thanks!” Hex Kitten zipped off.

Mordecai stood there, not sure if he’d get in more trouble if he took Hex Kitten’s advice, or if he failed to take advantage of a good idea when it was dropped in his lap.

“Aw CRAP,” Linda said disgustedly when her energy cannon failed to dazzle Hex Kitten as she zoomed away from where Mordecai stood, staring after her. “There’s something wrong with the power array for the 6th floor.”

“You take care of it,” Glynis said as she concentrated of keeping Holly Hellion jumping. “I have my hands full.”

“Ditto,” Tyler said as she sent a squad of Daleks that had just been re-stocked with paint packets out to form a phalanx just past the rise of the ramp up to level 8.

Linda grumped, but couldn’t argue with them. With her luck, there was a short in the wiring that the technicians overlooked, but her ass would be in the wringer if it started a fire. Grabbing her smartphone, she trudged down the not-quite-secret staircase down to the 6th floor. While not a certified electrician, Linda was familiar enough about wiring to follow the power cord to a ‘store’ that had been closed off with sheets of particle board.

Oh, that just screamed ‘diligent commitment to quality’. </sarcasm>

Linda powered up her phone to send Glynis and Tyler a shot of the slipshod work that the technicians had no doubt left. They may have been technicians, but they were Union technicians; it never hurt to have visual proof on an accusation.

But when Linda opened the door to the store, instead of a couple of slackers trying to pass off some shoddy work, she found six people, four men and two women, dressed as technicians, but they were kicking back idly watching a section of the wall. The paneling had been torn off, and a rough hole had been torn in what Linda took as the exterior wall of the building. The mysterious power drain was explained by an industrial laser that was cutting the mortar from between the bricks of the wall of the adjacent building. The four ‘technicians’ froze as they wrapped their heads around the fact that they’d been rumbled. There was that frozen moment as everyone realized that there was no use in either side trying to bluff the other.

With two flicks of her thumb, Linda switched her phone from the main panel to the Emergency Alarm and hit the big red ‘OMG!’ button. The smartphone let out an ear-rattling siren and the platen started an eye-numbing strobe of light as the phone itself sent an emergency alert, along with Linda’s last few minutes of input, to Tyler and Glynis in the control room.

Sea Whirl

“Oh-KAY, that’s impressive,” Izzy admitted. As she watched the ‘Whale Liberators’ guide the orca replica over the repurposed inflated ‘slip’n slide’ (or whatever the proper term was) chutes from its original tank to the tank in the Nautilus Pavilion, other activists kept the mock whale well-watered. Tom Tsung and Heike switched off between providing technical advice and keeping the ‘Liberators’ too busy to notice the flaws in Tom’s story.

“Who knew that he had a degree in Social Engineering?” Clare asked rhetorically.

“Is getting other people to resolve the challenge for you kosher?” Logan asked.

“Well, there’s nothing in the challenge instructions against it,” Izzy said. “And it IS an excellent example of turning an obstacle into an advantage.”

“If you ask me, having an adorable 10-year-old shilling for you is an unfair advantage,” Logan grumped.

“Like anyone could stop the squirt,” Clare said with a wry half-smile.

“Well, by hook or by crook, they made it,” Izzy said as the animatronic whale was lifted by water from fire hoses from the chutes, over the edge and into the tank at the Nautilus Pavilion. “Clare, tell the guards to pass along the clue, so we can get out of here before the Righteous Indignation Addicts wise up to the fact that Tom and Heike did a number on them.”

Cautiously not attracting the attention of the celebrating activists (or Hayley Hellion), Tom Tsung pocketed the message and inconspicuously made for the exit along with Heike. Waiting until they were back in the car and out of the parking lot, Heike asked, “So, what does it say?”

Waiting for a red light, Tom read the instructions:

“It’s True! It’s True! The Crown has made it clear!

The Once and Future King Commands!

The Matter of Britain must be decided!

Puissant Knights, draw the Sword from the Stone

and seek the blessing of the Lady of the Lake!

Sally forth to the Round Table, and Quest for the Holy Grail!”

“And what is all THAT supposed to mean?”

“It’s made up of references to King Arthur,” Tom explained. “The Once and Future King was one of Arthur’s epithets, and ‘the Matter of Britain’ is an umbrella term for the legends and stories that generally revolve around King Arthur, like the Round Table, the Lady of the Lake, the Sword in the Stone and the Holy Grail.” Heike gave Tom an odd look, so he added, “My Dad loves Arthurian stuff. I’m lucky he didn’t name me Lancelot.”

Heike gave a shrug and started tapping furiously at his smartphone. A few minutes later, he had a news article about King Arthur’s Castle®, claiming that the theme park was undergoing mysterious ‘renovations’, and gave the ‘castle’s’ address in Glendale.

The Space Experience

As overconfident and confrontational as her upbringing had made her, Linda still wasn’t daft enough to think that she could take on six aggressors by herself. Especially when one of those aggressors was well over six feet tall and by a rough eyeball estimate probably weighed in the neighborhood of 250 pounds, none of it flab. Using the smartphone’s siren for as much cover it could provide, Linda bolted for the door and shut it behind her. For what little that slowed the six intruders down; Linda had barely gotten six feet when something blew a hole in the door. A few seconds later, the big man who had Linda so worried burst through the particle board door like it was a bead curtain.

“Ooohhh… crap,” Glynis gulped as she saw the big man followed by the other five come through the ruined door with a timing that suggested an unfortunate level of discipline. Also, the big man and one of the two women had put on overbuilt gauntlets, which was worrying. The other woman and one of the men had produced rods that suggested weapons of some sort. And one of the men had put on a helmet

“Call 911!” Tyler snapped as tore her headset off. “Then inform Dr. Chase! Inform them both that this is definitely a Code Kent, precise nature unclear.” Tyler started to turn to the door, but then realized that they had multiple minors on site who were in clear and present danger. She put the headset to her mouth and announced: “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! This is NOT part of the challenge! There are multiple dangerous intruders on the 6th level! Evacuate the building IMMEDIATELY! All contestants, stop competing immediately and LEAVE! Hex Kitten, find Geoff- he’s the guy in the wheelchair- and get him to safety PRONTO! Holly, do NOT try to take these guys on, they are out of our league!”

Tyler’s orders were clear, reasonable and responsible.

So, naturally, nobody listened to her.

Well, Linda sprinted to the edge of the mezzanine and broad-jumped off the banister to the ‘Anti-Gravity’ vortex, which was prudent and responsible- but only for her. She allowed herself to fall to the bottom of the exhibit, and was promptly wrapped up in gauze tape. Which had the benefit of keeping Linda out of any further misadventures for a while.

Of course, it can be argued that Tyler undermined her own orders by running at top speed down the rear staircase to the 6th floor. The mysterious six had secured an area just outside the short corridor to their ‘store’. Glynis was obviously hard at work, as two ‘energy cannons’ and four ‘Daleks’ were busily dazzling and splattering the intruders. The woman with the overbuilt gauntlets was the only one aloft, so Tyler decided to take her on first. That only got her blasted by the guy with the rod strapped to his forearm. Not hard enough to physically injure Tyler, but enough to faze her, leaving her wide open. She managed to dodge the ‘whip’ that came from the rod the other woman was holding, but that left her open for the big guy with the gloves. The big man got her in a hold and chucked her at the railing, with no effort made to aim for the ‘anti-gravity’ exhibit.

“How did we get here?” Hex Kitten asked, looking around. Not realizing that the Daleks and energy cannons wouldn’t be targeting her, Hex Kitten had powered Geoff around the galleries of the mall without paying a lot of attention to where they were going. Honestly, she’d been trying to get the guy in the chair out of the mall, like Tyler said. But somehow, they’d managed to go UP three floors instead of down. And now they were in clear sight of the six intruders, and she couldn’t react in time as the big man threw Tyler over the railing.

Of course, Hex Kitten knew that Tyler could fly, which the big man apparently didn’t. Hopefully, Tyler would remember that before she hit the ground. On pure reflex Hex Kitten electro-blasted the guy with the blaster-thing, since it at least looked like a weapon, and she had no idea what these people could do. Gee, in the Comics, supervillains always announce themselves, give their names, powers and back stories. Seized by the realization that these yahoos were playing for keeps, Hex Kitten grabbed hold of the wheelchair and made tracks. She was two levels down before she realized that the chair was empty. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Holly furiously shed the harness of her trashed flying rig. Orders or no orders, she knew that the action was down on the sixth floor, and without the flight rig, she just knew that by the time she got there, the fighting would be over. But then someone came up behind them and lifted Holly up. “The exit is DOWN, Gorgeous,” Mordecai Shearer purred into Holly’s face.

“Hey, I can do this myself,” Holly insisted, oddly unmoved by a guy who would have caused her to have a hormone meltdown only a year ago.

“Now, now,” Shearer tutted, “Our orders are clear- we have to clear the stage so the bad guys- whoever they are- can’t grab us and use us as hostages. Seriously, do you want that lovely outfit to get all splattered? er, MORE splattered?”

“I have to get down there! I’m missing the fight!” Holly argued.

“Your focus defines your reality,” Shearer responded cryptically.

Clearly channeling old swashbuckler heroes like Errol Flynn and Tyrone Powers, Shearer leveraged Holly over the edge of the railing, following himself, and gingerly moving down the exterior. Then Tyler shot out of the 6th floor mezzanine. She dropped a story, and then caught herself in midair. With a visible snarl of anger, she gathered herself and flew back into what Shearer took as the fray.

With a puckish expression, Holly said to Shearer, “Someone has to save our skins.” She detached herself from Mordecai’s grip and dropped two floors, catching the banister. With grace and ease, she swung onto the 6th floor and followed Tyler into the fight.

‘Hey, it always works in the movies,’ Mordecai thought to himself.

Holly charged in as Tyler was grappling with a woman dressed as a technician, who was floating in the air. Five more technicians were trying to take tactical possession of a stairway going up. Holly wasn’t sure what was going on, but her gut reaction was them going up those stairs- which was mostly likely where the control room was- was not a good idea. On the (usually valid) preconception that the largest guy on any super-squad was most likely the brick- and usually the most effective- Holly decided to go after that one from the rear. And sheer surprise got her a position of advantage. She grabbed him by the back and lifted him over her head, where besides being unable to get any leverage, the hunk of beef would act as a shield in case any of the intruders had ranged weapons.

But one of the other supervillains (like baselines could pitch Tyler over the edge like that) jumped over the staircase rail and ‘tagged’ the big ox. And he turned into an exact copy of the ox, landing with a thump. “It’s a trap!” Holly yelped.

Mordecai was torn: on one hand, leaving was both the sensible thing to do and it was following orders. On the other hand, the entire point of this was to see if he had the grit and adaptability to travel with the Wiz Kids and handle the outrageous incidents they found themselves in. So the better option was to try and handle this in a way that painted him in a heroic light.

Besides, this might be the real point of the exercise.

While most of the exhibits were impressive, Mordecai doubted that most of them were that durable. On the other hand, the rocket section he’d been trying to get to the base was solid, durable and heavy. Being wary of the opposition spotting him, Mordecai hefted the section, swung it to build up momentum and threw it at the back of the big man’s knee, where it would do the most.

But the second the section left his hand, one of the ‘technicians’, running at superhuman speed, plucked it out of the air and redirected it into the small of Holly Hellion’s back. While it didn’t break her back- or even hurt her that much, Mordecai realized that he’d just totally blow any chance he might have had with Holly Hellion. “KHAAANNN!!”

Holly had been wondering how to get in on the ‘Star Wars Quote’ riff. But she wasn’t quite thinking about that as the big man (at least one of them) added a nasty kick at the jaw to the pain in her back. Still, she accidentally made her contribution when she croaked out, “Help me Tyler! You’re my Only Hope!”

With an internal cringe that she was going to have to enable Holly’s bad judgement- again- Tyler chucked the gravity fluxing woman into the guy with the tricked out blaster on his forearm. With that much cover, Tyler swooped down and flew Holly away from the identical brutes. But just as Tyler was rising up out of reach, the woman with the whip lashed out and hit her squarely on the left biceps.

PAIN!

Tyler let out a shriek of agony and dropped, hitting hard. The echoes of the scream rattled throughout the mall, and even stopped the supervillains for a moment. “Geez, V,” the shooter gasped, “what did you DO to her?”

The whipmistress said with a sadistic grin, “I dunno. Let’s see what a second dose will do.”

The whipmistress cocked her whip for that ‘second dose’, when Hex Kitten zoomed out of left field and body-blocked her into the shooter. Hex Kitten then tried to remove Tyler from the fight, but the big man (or his clone, she wasn’t sure, even later), intercepted her and threw her forcefully into Holly. As the two girls regained their feet, Holly asked, “I’m open to suggestions- any ideas on how we can take him out?”

“How?” Hex Kitten asked back. “He’s more ribeye steak than man.”

But then Tyler struggled to her feet, hunched over, clutching her wounded biceps with her other hand, a snarl of incandescent fury on her face. “Oh Christ,” Tank gulped. “I think she’s gone over to the dark side.”

The pain shattered Tyler’s concentration, and the THX came roaring out of the brass bottle than Ty had for it in her mind.

THX Tyler’s first response to the situation was to analyze the situation. Despite the big man’s bulk, there was no sign that his strength was innate. Besides, the brick’s stance wasn’t that of a man who relied on pure mechanical force for his strength. He had a stance that was normal for a man of his frame, but not that of a man who had to brace his frame for massive stress. The built-up gloves were suggestive, as were the gravity fluxer’s gloves, the speedster’s helmet, the shooter’s forearm assembly and the whip-bitch’s lash. But the sixth man, who’d duplicated first the brute and then the speedster, had no obvious power focus. Which while it downgraded the chances that they were all focus-users, didn’t completely dismiss it. Then Tyler noticed the belt over the brute’s technician overalls. It was a metal-mesh ‘web belt’ with an oversized buckle. This team was savvy enough to sneak in and try a silent robbery. Why compromise their disguises with an unnecessary giveaway like that belt?

Answer: it’s not unnecessary. Each of the supervillains had a similar belt, so Occam’s Razor posits that their powers come from those belts, most likely the buckle.

Deftly ducking under the brute’s haymaker, Tyler finessed the speedster into ramming into the big man. With that, Tyler examined as many of the supervillain’s buckles as he could. The buckles were decorated with the symbols of astrological signs. The brick had Taurus. The speedster had Ares. The whip-bitch had Scorpio. The shooter had Sagittarius. He recalled that the mimic had Gemini, and the gravity fluxer had Cancer. It took a second that she couldn’t afford to recall that people born under the sign of Cancer were also called ‘Moonchild’; an obvious reference to the effect the moon had on the tides, and from there to gravity. The other five symbols had clear reference to the wearer’s powers. There was no reason to compromise their disguises with such indicia. The chance that the supervillains’ powers were anchored in those belts rose exponentially.

The speedster was the greatest wild card in the melee. The mimic had more options, but those options would ironically slow him down as he decided which to use. Sheer bloody-mindedness put the whip-bitch second on the priority list, and the shooter at third. The gravity fluxer would foul up her teammates as much as she would the Wiz Kids, but as the number of her teammates shrank, that factor would shrink as well, so she was fourth. That put the mimic at fifth. Ironically, the most directly effective of the opposition, the brick, was more useful as a shield than he was dangerous.

Tyler used Holly’s Tactical Sprayer for the first time. First she sprayed the lubricant under the brick’s feet to make him less effective as a combatant and more useful as a shield. Then she sprayed some fire retardant into the speedster’s face, and then some glue onto the shooter’s firing array.

Tyler feinted her way into the speedster’s immediate range. His reflex was to get out of her reach, where she controlled the fight. But as he sped off, he accidentally plowed into a Dalek that was sent into his line of escape. “These are NOT the droids you’re looking for!” Tank jeered.

Tyler zipped over to the speedster and unbuckled the belt. She left the not-such-a-speedster-anymore to Tank’s tender mercies, and then tossed the belt to Geoff. Geoff, in case you were wondering, was clutching the back of a Dalek that he’d coopted, as Hex Kitten was in control of his chair. Suddenly Geoff’s Dalek, which was already far nimbler that most people would credit, zipped off, making full rounds of the levels, until he returned. “This is just… KEWL!” Geoff declared with a wide grin.

Tyler then zipped inside the whip-bitch’s area of effect, and gave her a most ungentlemanly punch to the stomach. The brick managed to get his footing back and turned to protect his teammate. But Mike Kung, avoiding the lubricant, stepped in and used the brick’s own force against him, using an array of Northern style moves to slam the brick into the shooter. After four such moves, Mordecai drawled snidely, “That’s right, perpetuate the stereotype…”

After an instep crushing stomp, Tyler tore the Scorpio belt from the whip-bitch- who now was just a bitch. She looked around, and clearly grasping for straws, sneered into Tyler’s face, “Strike me down; I shall become more powerful than you could imagine.”

Tyler paused, giving her a ‘what are you TALKING about?’ glower.

“What, only good guys are allowed to make pop culture references?” she said. “I don’t think that Shakespeare wrote anything that would fit here.”

Between them, Mike and Tom Tsung frog-marched the shooter to the edge of the mezzanine and threw him into the anti-gravity exhibit. The shooter let off a couple of wild unaimed shots until he settled at the bottom. Where he was wrapped up in gauze tape- and thus was completely at Linda Havoc’s tender mercies.

After disarming the whip-mistress of her belt- and a few totally uncalled-for blows to the face-, Tyler flew up to the gravity fluxer’s level. The woman was trying to figure out if she should try some completely unexpected reversal ploy, or just fly off. Tyler made the decision for her with a punch to her stomach and a couple of open-handed slaps. As she reeled from that, Tyler relieved her of her power belt, thus relieving Ty of any further ungentlemanly behavior.

Tyler handed off the gravity fluxer’s belt to Tank. Then Geoff zoomed up to Tank in his wheelchair (with Hex Kitten being dragged behind, clutching onto the handles. “Here!” Geoff handed Tank a handful of Red Rocket sections. Hex Kitten managed to let go, and Geoff sped off again, bringing two more handfuls of sections, for the entire ten sections. “Go for it!”

Tank got Geoff’s point and hopped to the banister, dropped to the floor and placed the sections in their proper order on the rod of the base. Then he gravity-jumped up to the target ring, taking the ‘rocket’ along with him. Tank then clipped the rocket onto the ring, for the win for the challenge.

“You were supposed to shut down the competition!” Tyler snapped, willing herself to break out of the THX mindstate.

“Oy, we got all the berks,” Geoff defended his side. “So we just stormed a lead on the competition.”

“NO, we only got five, people! There were Six!” Tyler said, looking around, searching for something. “There’s one more, and from the sign on his buckle and the way he copied the speedster and the brick, I’d say he’s a Mimic. Your move made it impossible to know where he got to. So buddy up and look for a doppleganger. Hex Kitten-”

“Hey, I have a name,” HK said peevishly.

“Which is?”

Hex Kitten paused and said warily, “Macy. Macy Heald.”

“Macy, you’re the one here most likely for the doppleganger to copy, with your super-speeding and power shifting,” Tyler said. “So stay by me-”

“No! Don’t do it! He’s trying to get you alone so he can take you hostage!” a voice that was almost exactly like Tyler’s interrupted. Then a near- identical version of Tyler, down to the cargo pants, came around a corner.

“Oh crap, this,” Mike Kung groaned. “Just what we don’t want. None of us know Tyler well enough to question them.”

“Not a problem,” Mordecai smugged. Turning to the twin Tylers, he said, “Q: what metamorphic rock is formed when sandstone is subjected to heat and pressure after a couple of million years?”

“Quartzite,” the Tyler on the left said with a wry half-smile.

Mordecai turned to the Tyler on the right and asked, “And Travertine, Tufa, Coquina and Chalk are all varieties of what basic mineral?”

That ‘Tyler’ locked up, but the Tyler on the Left answered immediately (and smugly), “Limestone.”

Shearer grinned and said to Mike, “The benefit of a rounded education.”

The bogus Tyler didn’t bother to try and defend himself. He sped off almost immediately. Well, he tried to speed off, but Holly clotheslined him. As the doppleganger reeled, Hex Kit- er, Macy Heald tore the belt off him.

“Good job, Holly, He- er, Macy,” Tyler said. Then looking up at the cameras, she said, “Glyn, call Momma Bear and tell her to delay the last challenge. We gotta call the Cops and hand these crooks over and make a statement. We can let the rookies go once the Blues show up, but we still gotta wait for the Cops to do that.”

“Tyler?” Macy asked pleadingly, “I gotta talk to you, REAL BAD.”

“There’s a problem there, Macy,” Tyler said. “Oh, and for everyone, Police Procedure says we can’t talk about this among ourselves while we wait for LAPD to get here.”

“Tyler, I can’t stay here,” Macy whined through a wince. “I’m in a real tight spot, and I NEED to talk to you.”

Tyler let out a groan of frustration, and said, “Okay, it’s not like I can hold you. And LAPD can contact you through your lawyer, Freed.”

“ah, Freed’s one’a the things I gotta talk to you about,” Macy said, unconsciously holding her hands in a pleading posture.

Tyler let out an annoyed grunt and fished a card out of her wallet. Writing something on the card, she handed it to Macy, telling her, “Okay, this is a Quest Foundation contact card. This extension will get you past the crank filter. Macy, this is very important: DON’T HAND THIS OUT.”

Macy took the card with an elated chirp and seized Tyler by the arms as she gave Ty a big kiss. A kiss that Tyler broke by giving out a squeal of pain as Macy gripped her by the biceps that the whip-mistress had stung.

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as though thousands of fangirls cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” Glynis said to herself as she watched this on the monitor.

Holly looked at this aghast, balled up her fists and yelled, “KHAAANNN!!”

Everyone broke and stared at Holly. “What?” she pouted. “Everyone else got one.”

Glynis ‘forgot’ to tell LAPD that the supervillains had already been captured, so SWAT showed up after only 5 minutes. Wasn’t that convenient? The four contestants were given permission to leave, on the condition that they provide the detectives with statements ASAP. The Hellion sisters were told that they were under not allowed to leave until the paperwork was done.

King Arthur’s Castle

“What’s the matter with your arm?” Dr. Chase asked Tyler as she entered the control room at the Arthurian theme park. Tyler’s left arm was in a sling.

“Glynis told you about the supervillains? They were trying to pull a ‘Red Headed League’ style break-in of a jewelers in the next building over. They snuck in as technicians and were about to breach the jeweler’s vault with a utility laser. A bunch of power gem users called the ‘Ill-Starred’. Go figure. Anyway, one of them called ‘Venomous’ according to LAPD, lived up to her name and zotzed me with her power whip. The paramedics insisted that they treat the wound and put my arm in this sling.”

“How bad is it?” ‘Mama Bear’ asked.

“It STINGS!” Tyler said defensively. ‘Okay, my left hand is a little stiff.”

“You ARE going to have that looked at by a doctor,” Dr. Chase said warningly.

“Do things like this happen a lot?” Santoya asked.

“More often than I like to think about,” Dr. Chase said with a weary sigh. “And they always insist that they’re just fine. Even the girls, who you’d think would know better.”

“I’m FINE!” Tyler insisted. “If anything, we’re going to have more of a problem keeping Tom Tsung from geeking out over the power gems.”

“Power Gems are Tsung’s special hobbyhorse,” Dr. Chase reminded Santoya.

“Speaking of Tom-3, have he and Heike worked out how to get out of Sea Whirl?” Tyler asked, obviously trying to shift the conversation off the topic of her arm.

“They got through that a half hour ago,” Dr. Chase answered, filing the matter of Tyler’s arm under ‘bring up- no drag up with a derrick- later’. “Since the Space Experience crew was held up by necessary Police procedure, we kept them out of the castle for 10 minutes. But they still solved their problem first - you’re going to have to see the footage, it’s amazing- so we’ll let them in, and give them a head start.”

Tom Tsung got a buzz on his smartphone, so he and Heike weren’t completely taken by surprise when the two wooden great doors to the patently artificial ‘castle’ swung open to the sound of a (recorded) chorale. Tom and Heike stepped through the doors and found an illuminated scroll on podium, lit from above. Cautiously, Tom walked up to the scroll and read:

⦁ Avalon’s Lord wakes with a sip from the cup of Grace

⦁ Learned Seer thirsts for the secrets of Time and Space

⦁ Torrent and Tide both witness the Lady’s vigil

⦁ Ascend to the greatest height and present the sacred sigil

⦁ Retreat to the Earth’s bosom and secure the prize blessed

⦁ All and None guide the young knights’ quest

“Avalon’s Lord- wouldn’t that be King Arthur?” Heike asked.

“Questionable,” Tom said musing over the scroll. “Classically Arthur was taken to Avalon, but there’s nothing that says he rules there. But it’s close enough for reality TV. The ‘Learned Seer’ is probably Merlin. ‘Torrent and Tide’ suggest the Lady of the Lake-”

“This place has a lake?”

“We’ll find out. ‘Ascend to the greatest height- well, unless this ‘quest’ involves going up into the Sierras, it probably means the highest part of that tower we saw.”

“Then the ‘Earth’s bosom’ probably means the dungeon. This place does have a dungeon, doesn’t it?”

“What kind of cheap Hollywood tourist-trap castle doesn’t have a dungeon?” Tom asked rhetorically. “The thing that worries me is the last one: ‘All and None guide the young knights’ quest’. The rest suggest that we have to find ‘King Arthur’ and ‘Merlin’ and ‘the Lady of the Lake’ and present the grail- whatever that is- to them, and then find our way up to the highest accessible part of the castle’s ‘tower’ and then the dungeon. That would be ‘all; but where does ‘none’ fit in?”

“But first we have to find the Grail,” Heike pointed out. “Once we find the Grail, then clues should present themselves. Unfortunately, finding the Grail at all is an epic quest unto itself; only Parsifal was pure enough to behold the Grail.”

“This is Los Angeles,” Tom pointed out. “Purity is not a consideration. Intellectual Property Law maybe, but not purity.” Then he moved past the podium and said, “Well, no time to waste. Let’s see if the park’s map lists a ‘Grail Alcove’ or anything.

Looking at the map, which suggested five floors including the basement/ dungeon, Heike commented, “I’ve been to Castle Muiderslot in the Netherlands; it doesn’t look anything like this.

“Castle Muilderslot had to hold off invaders and sieges and catapult barrages,” Tom muttered, “All this place has to do is attract gullible tourists and separate them from their cash. How they do that, I’m not entirely sure- or interested at all. I just hope that it doesn’t involve that ‘choose wisely’ shtick from ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’.

“Okay, let’s get this started before Mr. Tsung wiseasses us into a Defamation lawsuit from our gracious hosts,” Santoya said primly. She pointed a finger at one of her production assistants, who started manipulating controls.

There was the sound of another ‘heavenly choir’ and a light shown down on a feminine- or at least female style- figure. The figure was of a ‘fairytale princess’ with a long flowing pink gown, long golden hair, a doll-like face- and ‘she’ was carrying a golden (or at least gold tone) goblet. “Okay, that’s the grail,” Heike said, “so, do we just take the grail, or petition the, ah, ‘grail maiden’ for the grail or…”

Tom let out a weary sigh, “It doesn’t matter. I’m not a huge Grail scholar- and the literature on the Holy Grail is a thing unto itself, beyond even Arthuriana- and neither are you. We can start off by asking the ‘maiden’ questions, but to be honest, all I really expect it’ll do is avoid the ‘you could have just asked’ kick in the teeth.”

Tom girded his loins and, feeling more than a trifle silly, asked the figurine, “Greetings, Grail Maiden. We come in quest for the Holy Grail.” Despite himself, Tom wondered if there was some appropriate protocol for requesting a sacred treasure.

The ‘Grail Maiden’ didn’t move but a patently artificial voice intoned, “What is your quest?”

“To find the Holy Grail,” Tom stated, a feeling of uncertain familiarity nagging at him.

“Who do you serve?”

“aaahhh… the Quest Foundation.”

“And what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?”

Tom stopped cold, painfully aware that he’d walked right into that.

“The airspeed of an unladen African swallow?” Santoya asked Dr. Chase.

“It’s a Monty Python reference,” Dr. Chase said with a wicked grin.

“I didn’t vet that,” Santoya said flatly.

“And who says you had to?” Dr. Chase arched an imperious brow at her.

Tom locked up at the 'airspeed' question and the overhead light cut off. The 'Grail Maiden' turned and sped off with the grail. Tom cut off a curse and dashed after the drone. Heike looked around and casually strolled about the 'castle's' lobby, idly checking out the theme park map.

There was a Great Hall, an Armory, a Chapel, Battlements, a Kitchen, a Library, a Feasting Hall, a Solarium, and a Bailey. Heike briefly wondered how the 'Castle' made money. That is, if it was making money. If its owners were renting the place out to the Foundation, they may be desperate for operating capital.

Then there was a lot of noise coming from the solarium. Heike wondered, 'are solar panels theme appropriate?'

Strolling into the solarium, Heike found Tom furiously dodging a tall semi-anthroform construct in the shape of a chivalric knight. Though instead of legs, the construct's base was an inverted cone that suggested that under the 'skirt', it moved around on wheels. The 'knight' was swinging a sword-like baton at Tom in wide arcs. On the other side of the 'knight' was the 'grail maiden', holding the 'grail'.

As it swung it's 'sword', the 'knight blasted Tom as:

[Thou sulphorous venomous shabbaroon!

[Thou puking low-born gollumpus!

[Thou fiesome vole-fondling rapscallion!

[Thou fly-speckled filth-shoveling pillock!

[Thou raggedy spittle-dripping tatterdemalion!

[Thou thrawn nancy-knocking nigmenog!

[Thou fewmet-spattered currish cockalorum!]

Heike briefly wondered whether the drone had an archaic insults generator or just a list of quaint invective. He watched the scenario for a bit and then simply walked up, ducking under the swinging sword, and opened a hatch in the knight's 'skirt'. He flipped a switch and the drone powered down, drooping sadly. Heike said to a heavily breathing Tom, “It was obviously programmed to not hit anyone, just swing and block the passage. American Lawyers.”

"WHAT?" Santoya sputtered. "All that work, and it's over just like THAT?"

"The kids don't even get auditioned unless they're geniuses," Dr. Chase reminded Santoya. "Get used to it."

Heike didn't have as much luck with the next obstacle, an 'Evil Wizard', also based on a conical tread-skirt. This one didn't have an insult-generator as the knight had. It let out low mumbling gibberish as it raised its arms and let out arcs of electricity that created blinding flashes of light. Heike doubted that the electric jolts were powerful enough to harm, but he didn't want to find out. Besides, he might get penalized points for allowing himself to get 'shocked'.

Just as Heike was rubbing the stars from his eyes after getting flashed, Tom walked up with a short length of cabling. Tom touched the ends of the cable to the electrodes on the 'Wizard's' hands just as it was counting down its 'spell', causing a short circuit.

The Wizard slumped and after a brief pause, the 'grail maiden' skittered off.

"What?" Santoya yipped. "Again? C'mon, we gotta think of something to stretch this out! We can't give the viewers just a taste of action and leave it at that!"

"Not my problem," Dr. Chase said smugly.

"No, don't wait for me!" Geoff yelled as he furiously pushed his wheelchair up the inconveniently placed Disabled Access ramp. Tank just gave him a 'yeah, right' look and shoved the Scots boy up the ramp.

Geoff grumped at Tank, but took control of his chair back and made all due haste through the wooden double doors of the main gate. They stopped to read the simple poem on the scroll and were mulling it over when there was a crash. "They started without us?" Tank asked wryly.

"Wouldn't you?"

Together Geoff and Tank hurried to the solarium, which had little in common with the solariums of real castles. Like anything in this ‘castle’ was historically accurate. Tom Tsung and Heike were trying to get to a vaguely feminine remote drone that was holding something that might pass for a grail in a 6th Grade play. But they were kept from that by a large tubular construct, maybe 10 feet so long, with four supports that were more grounding struts than legs, a large vaguely draconic ‘head’ and a pair of purely ornamental wings. The 'dragon' was nimbler than its size might suggest, twisting and writhing in a way that made its next move uncertain. When Geoff and Tank moved into the solarium, the dragon looked at them and gave off an ear-rattling roar.

Over Tank's objections, Geoff scooted into the dragon's area of movement and proceeded to confuse the construct with his unpredictable- and very off the bipedal norm- moves. Tom and Heike took advantage of this to get past the dragon. The 'Grail Maiden' zipped off with the two in close pursuit. But Tank stood there for a long moment, carefully analyzing the dragon's structure and movement. Then he confidently strode forward and jumped onto one of the dragon's legs, boosted himself up to the 'hip' joint, and did something that caused the dragon to lock up and tip over. Tank hopped off as the construct came crashing down. Geoff glowered at him and muttered, "Showoff."

"Not everything is complicated," Tank said smugly.

The Grail Maiden skittered over to a curving stairwell and somehow zipped up the stair to the next flight. Tank took control of Geoff's wheelchair (something that Geoff hated with a passion) and jammed it into a slot on the inside of the stairs. "Disability Assist," Tank explained brusquely as the chair ascended the stairs.

In a flat sarcastic tone, Geoff muttered, "I feel so accomodated and empowered."

Mike Kung and Mordecai Shearer pulled up in front of 'King Arthur's Castle and got out. Taking note of the two Quest Foundation cars already pulled up in front, Mordecai said, "I told you not to get into that argument with that cop."

Mike grumped and focused on getting inside. His reaction to the poem was, "WHAT?"

"What, it's King Arthur," Mordecai said. Their conversation was cut off by the spine-chilling sounds of eerie moaning. The lights in the lobby dimmed and five classic 'sheet ghosts' came wafting in. Mike and Mordecai tried to get aroud them, but the 'spooks' did a tangled dance around them. They started to weave in and around the two, and Mordecai almost got a hand snared by the fabric of the 'spook'. He managed to pull out of it, but the spooks cut him off from Mike and concentrated on him. One of the spooks spread its 'cloak' wide and looked like it was going to wrap him up-

-but then it burst into flames. It flittered around like a bat on cocaine, but fell the floor, where it burned into ashes around an odd metal frame.

Both Mike and Mordecai made confused 'what?' noises and looked around. They didn't have to look very hard. Three women- actually two women in their mid-20s and a teenage girl stalked up to them. They all wore dark outfits around tunics with white piping held together by belts with buckles of capital letters. The leader, one of the two women, had snow-white hair pulled back in a high ponytail, with a letter 'I' on her buckle. The other woman had dark hair so long it reached past her bottom, and had a letter 'D' on her buckle. The girl had shaggy dark, almost black hair with purple highlghts, and a letter 'S' on her buckle. They all carried tall black walking sticks, more like slender staffs. The tall blonde stalked over to Mike and Mordecai with the two brunettes bracing her. "Okay, we don't have time for any bullshit," the blonde grated out. "Where's the control room?"

"Who the hell are these three?" Santoya asked.

"Whoever they are, they're not on the guest list," Tyler said as she started to stand.

"Sit. Down," Dr. Chase said gruffly as she put a hand on Tyler's shoulder and forced her back down onto her chair. "They've already proven that they have extraordinary capacities; very sophisticated weaponry, if not innate powers. You going down there would only escalate things, and more than likely only aggravate that arm."

"But they-"

"So far all they've shown us is that they have a bad attitude problem," Dr. Chase said sternly, not taking her hand off Tyler's shoulder. "If that's all they have, the guys will take care of them. If it's more..." Dr. Chase took out her phone and hit a speed-dial. "I know someone who'll know who and what they are, and should have a remedy."

"Chase?" Santoya cut in, "Just a reminder? They're asking about the control room? As in US?"

"You get used to these things."

"Oh, Come ON, I gotta do something," Tyler pleaded. "I mean, look at this!" She waved a hand at the monitor. The three strangers were throwing around odd energies at the Wiz Kid candidates. The woman with the long dark hair was affecting Mike and Mordecai, who'd just wandered into the mess. But her powers seemed to affect the kids' senses or perceptions, possibly their mind-states. Effective and embarrassing, but not physically damaging. The blonde with the funky ponytail was very physical, throwing around jagged daggers of ice at Tank and Geoff, with occasional bursts of fire. But Geoff was playing serious hob on her targeting with his insane wheelchair moves. And Tank was making the most of his own moves. The girl of the group was throwing around streams of electricity at Tom-3 and Heike, but she wasn't doing it with the enthusiasm of the other two and missed. A lot.

"Get used to it, Ty," Dr. Chase said as she directed 'goblin' drones against the 'witches'. The 'goblins', like the other 'theme drones' of the 'castle' couldn't make any real attacks, but they could distract, decoy, block, trip or occasionally grapple opponents. Which was all that the Foundation's lawyers would allow. The goblins were useless against the 'Electrician', a major distraction for the 'Ice Queen', but were very effective against the Mentalist. "This is what it's like on the other side of the cameras. We do what we can, but it's down to the kids on ground to do the sane thing and get to safety." Heike tried to kitbash a restraint against the 'electrician' and failed. "Or not," Dr. Chase sighed.

"Back Off!" Tank roared as he pulled Heike away from the Electrician. "I don't wanna have to hurt you, but we are geniuses! We will find a way to screw you right up!"

"Yeah?" sneered the Electrician. "If yer such geniuses, maybe you can get this stupid collar off'a my neck!"

"I take that as a challenge!" Geoff scooted up behind the electrician and knocked her off her feet and into his lap. Before she could react, he fiddled with the electronic collar and removed it.

"Sunnuvabitch!" the girl gasped. She threw her arms around Geoff and gave him a big kiss. Geoff reacted with a big goofy grin and a boggled expression.

"Okay, that's a step up," Tyler said, watching as the Electrician turned on her former companions. "But all it's really doing is escalating the violence." The Electrician used her 'lightning' to gather the big 'Ogre' drones around the remaining 'witches' as to trap them.

The Ice Queen froze the 'ogres' in place and shattered them.

"Not to worry," Dr. Chase said. "I called it in, and an appropriate response is being fielded.

Ms. Santoya had nothing to say. She was working the cameras for better effect.

"Stormy, you traitor!" the Ice Queen screamed, "I'll shatter you for this!"

'Stormy' was about to respond, when a dark spiral appeared on the floor. Three women stepped out of the spiral. This second trio could have been the first trio's older, more sophisticated sisters. They also wore matching color-coded outfits with wide-brimmed hats, close-fitting jackets, matching pants and low-heeled shoes. The white-haired one wore pale blue with white trim, the black-haired one wore black with purple trim, and the dark-haired one wore dark blue with yellow trim. The white-haired one wore a jeweled 'snowflake' design belt buckle. The black-haired one wore a jewled cuff on her left hand. The dark-haired one carried a jeweled 'Aladdin's Lamp' on her hip. They all wore slightly clunky sunglasses and carried slender black staffs with jeweled tips.

"SAMANTHA!" the dark-haired one snapped with exasperation, "You're 26! WHY are you still fixated with a cartoon for 10-to-14 year olds that hasn't aired in five years? Even Iginio Straffi has moved on! GROW UP!"

"Stormy! You Traitor!" 'Samantha' snarled.

"Whoa," the other 'Stormy' huffed, "Deja Vu all over again!"

The woman with the jeweled buckle stepped forward and said, "Honaker, if you're still shilling for Dr. Macabre, there's no way your parents can grease your way out of this."

"It would be NICE to have a CHOICE!" Honaker snarled (she did that a lot) "ICE! COFFIN!" She cradled her hands before her and created a cloudy ball of sheer cold between them. When the ball was fully formed, she thrust it at her counterpart.

The woman raised her hand, stopping the ball in mid-flight. "Don't you ever come up with any new tricks, Icy?" She negligently sent the ball back at Icy. The ball exploded around her, encasing her in (what else?) a coffin of ice.

"oh. crap," Icy's sole remaining partisan gasped.

The white-haired woman pointedly counted to 10. Then she swaggered over to 'Samantha/Icy', forming a large dark claw around her right hand. When she stopped in front of Icy's 'Coffin', she formed a knife hand with the claw and expertly struck the 'coffin'. The irregular chunk of ice split perfectly in two, revealing 'Samantha'. She was curled up, eyes wide and teeth chattering, clearly on the verge of hypothermia. The victor leaned over, lowered her glasses and puckishly said, "You know, you wouldn't have this happen, if you studied, instead of rage-quitting and hitting the reset button."

The D-Buckle witch was visibly looking for an exit. Then her counterpart popped up from her own shadow and said, "_boo_". The D-buckle witch let out a yip and scrambled away in panic. A black cat seemed to coalesce out of pure shadow, crawled up on her chest, looked down and gave the woman a grumpy look eerily similar to the woman's rival.

"And what about YOU?" the older 'Stormy' asked the younger, as arcs of lightning playing about her fist.

"She's cool!" Geoff frantically assured her. Grinning in near panic, he held up the collar he'd disengaged. "SEE? Complaince Collar! I got it off! We're all good!" The younger 'Stormy', also grinning in fear, pointed at the collar.

Gwen stood down and said, "Let me guess- Dr. Macabre?"

The younger 'Stormy' nodded with a whimper.

"And Frick and Frack have been dragging you around doing errands for him?"

"Yeah," the girl said. "We were supposed to break in and steal a bunch of these drones. HOW we were supposed to do that?" she rolled her eyes upward, spread her arms futilely and gave a loud 'who knows?' sigh.

"Wow," Tank said to Geoff, who was in no hurry to get the pretty girl off his lap, "We're three supervillains for three." They tapped fists smugly.

"WAT?" Heike yipped, "You got to fight supervillains? And I DIDN'T?"

Barely restrained outrage on his face, Heike stomped over to the 'Grail Maiden' drone. He grated out the request for the grail and grumbled his way through the recital. When the drone asked, 'what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow, he stated, "38 kilometers per hour."

As Heike smugly gloated, Tom-3 asked, "You know what the airspeed of an unladen swallow is?"

"Doesn't everybody?"

But gaining the grail was only half of the challenge. Not moving 'Stormy' from his lap, Geoff zipped past Heike, snagging the grail as he went. That set off a briske game of keepaway, as the Wiz Kids didn't know what to do once they got the grail.

All except Tom Tsung. He stood there, visibly going through something in his mind. Then he casually strolled over to the podium, nimbly dodging the frantically scrambling Wiz Kids. He studied the poem trying to frame what was nagging at him. 'All and None guide the young knights' quest'?

Then a visible 'aha!' moment blossomed on his face. With a smug smirk he strolled to a strategic position. When Tank rush past with the grail, Tom grabbed it and hauled mass into the chapel. There, he placed the grail on the altar. A sound-clip of a 'heavenly choir' played, and a slight shone down from above.

'Challenge Complete!' Dr. Chase announced on the PA system.

A hatch in the altar swung open, revealing a stack of what appeared to be parchments. Tom picked up one. "What is it?" Mike asked, looking over his shoulder.

"It's a gift certificate for one large, any combination ice cream dish from Fosselman's Ice Cream Shop in Glendora," Tom said. Then, realizing what he had, Tom picked up another parchment. Then he physically picked up Heike by the waist and hurried out the door. Getting in their car, Tom said, "Science is all well and good, Adventures are great, but we're talking Ice Cream!" Heike picked up immediately and urged him to drive.

At the mention of Fosselman's, Tyler stood up with an expectant grin on his face. But Dr. Chase set a heavy hand on her shoulder. "YOU are going to see a doctor."

Tyler sat back in the hospital bed, fighting a scowl as each second ticked away with hospital rates digging ever deeper into her bank account. Then there was a timid voice at the door. “Tyler?”

Tyler turned to see a very worried looking girl with long chocolate brown hair, delicate features and two big gray- and very scared looking- eyes. “He-er Macy?”

“Did I come at a bad time?” she asked.

“ah, No… besides the obvious, I’m just waiting for Dr. Chase to reject the latest suggestion for unnecessary- and very expensive- tests.”

“You got messed up that bad?”

“No, but the hospital has very optimistic profits projections to justify,” Tyler pointed out. Macy made a confused face and a ‘huh?’ noise. ‘Look, doctors may order tests and operations and medications and all that, but Hospital Administrators really run these joints. They don’t care about patients or families, ‘cause their work is mostly with budgets and spreadsheets and all that. So, the more money they bring in, the better they look to the boards that hire and fire. So they come down on the doctors to order as many expensive whatevers as the patients’ Health Care plan will pay for. And the Quest Foundation has a very generous health plan. So the Administrators have brought out the heavy dredging equipment, especially since everything that exceeds our Health Plan’s budget, they can charge me directly, since I’m a millionaire. I think the Hospital Administrator here is trying to figure out whether to stay in Palm Springs for his vacay, or upgrade to Cabo San Lucas.”

Macy made a ‘oh, sorry to bother you’ noise and started to turn. “NO!” Tyler stopped her. “I’m not doing anything more important than sulking, so you’re not really imposing. So, you need to talk to me about something?”

Macy nodded furiously, started to babble and made a visible effort to stop. She clearly racked her brain to find a beginning, gave a gusty sigh and started: “Okay, for beginners, I’m a mutant. I think I’m something called an ‘energizer’- no bunny jokes, please!- but my real problem is that I got a condition called ‘Diedrick’s Syndrome’. Y’know how in comics, sometimes supervillains will start screaming about how powerful they are, and before you know it a guy who was a little weird becomes a complete raging psycho, with lightning and all kinds of crap, trying to destroy everything? Well, with mutants that actually happens. The MCO loves bringing it up. Anyway, the thing is that some mutant powers upset their brain chemistry, and they get all BiPolar, and they get all excited and start using their powers even more, and it just escalates to the point where they’re trying to destroy everything in the zip code. Aannnddd… I got that. Not that bad, but when I use my powers real hard, I just… get excited, aanndd… that’s why I was so skanky with you at the Hawthorne Mall. I thought that I had it all under control… and then you showed up and surprised me and… waddya want? I’m 16 and my last boyfriend wasn’t anything to blog about.”

“You seem pretty in control of yourself now,” Tyler pointed out.

“This is the down-stroke of the mood swing,” Macy said with a wince. “First I get all hyper, and then I calm down, and then I kinda crash and get all hyper-sensitive and…” she ended with a mournful squeak.

“And you need help with the MCO?”

“Mmmaaaybe later,” Macy said visibly working through a shy-fit. “Thing is, there’s a school for mutants-”

“You’re talking about Whateley Academy?”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“I’ve picked up some rumors here and there,” Tyler said. “Dr. Chase says that Jadis Frost, who’s worked her way onto the Board of Directors, went to Whateley. Makes sense- her father is Dr. Diabolik, and where else would he send his kids?”

“Dr. Diabolik? The supervillain?”

“Trust me, Macy, it gets even weirder. I’m picking up that Jadis Frost went to school with some very strange people. Anyway, you want me to put you in touch with Ms. Frost, so she can connect you to Whateley’s entry people?”

“Maybe later,” Macy said dubiously. “Thing is I hooked up with Jerry Freed was I needed money for Whateley. According to the Evolution Rocks! people I talked with, their tuition prices are INSANE!

“Anyway, when you dropped that 4 Mil and change on me, I thought my problems were over. But Jerry Freed heard about the 4 Mil, and he got his hooks into my father, and while he hasn’t gotten his mitts on the money- YET- he’s pulling some game on us. My Dad has signed me on with the Mask Squad.”

“The Mask Squad?” Tyler shot back. “That bogus ‘Be a Teenage Superhero’ reality TV show? They tried to get me to sign on. It’s like the Kardashian version of ‘The Avengers’.”

“Bingo,” Macy shot a ‘you got it’ finger at Tyler. “More cheese than a Sherman Oaks Pizza Shack.” She sat down on the bed with Tyler. “I don’t know how Freed is gaming this for a shot at my money but…” she finished with a weary wave that suggested, ‘it’s a given’.

“And how am I supposed to help?” Tyler asked. “Don’t let the hairsplitting that I’ve been doing lately fool you; I’m not a lawyer. I know just enough about the Law to realize that I’d probably screw things up for you even worse if I went up against Freed.”

“Well… what about those lawyers you got on salary for the Quest Foundation?”

Tyler gave Macy a warm triumphant smile. “Macy, forget about the Foundation’s lawyers. I know a lawyer who sending him after Freed would be like sending Delta Force against a bunch of playground bullies.” Tyler gestured at her Quest Foundation field jacket for Macy to hand it to her. Tyler fished a card out of her wallet and scribbled something on it. “This is Jadis Frost’s office number and an extension to get past the crank filter. She’s Parky- that’s my lawyer, J. Parkinson Dunsmore- she’s Parky’s pet protégé. Now the problem with a lawyer like Parky is that he’s so successful that he only takes cases that interest him- or promise eight-figure payouts. My reading of Jadis’ character is that if Parky won’t take your case, then she knows a lawyer who’s Parky’s apprentice. That is if she doesn’t take you on herself. She’ll either get Parky or a local legal shark on it, or she’ll find a way to shoehorn you into Whateley, whatever. It’s not a done deal, but with Jadis on your side… well, let’s just say that Freed’s life is about to get a LOT more interesting. Not pleasant, just interesting.”

Macy let out an elated squeal, wrapped her arms around Tyler’s neck and gave her a deep kiss.

“Is this Deidrick’s?” Tyler asked.

“No,” Macy said roguishly with heavy-lidded eyes and a puckish smirk. “This is getting while the getting’s good.” And she resumed the kiss.

A few hours later, after Macy left, Tyler was trying to get the hospital TV circuit to stream ‘the Mask Squad’, just to get a better idea of what she was up against. Also, there wasn’t anything better on. I needed something to distract myself from the fact that I'd let the THX out of its box. That is NOT something I want to encourage, even in dangerous situations. Then there was a soft knock at the door, and turned to see a vision from many middle-aged men’s fantasies: Holly Hellion in a candy-striper uniform. “uhm… Tyler?” she asked with uncharacteristic caution.

“er, Holly,” Tyler said gingerly, “you DO know that hospital volunteers don’t wear the candy-stripe pinafore anymore, don’t you?”

Holly gave an embarrassed ‘oops’ grin. “I… tried to get in to see you, but visiting hours were over and… Well, I don’t think that this can really wait…"

"Yeah, well, that ice cream isn't getting any colder," Tyler said, noting the red lunchbox with Fosselman's logo printed on it.

“Yeah, well, you were the only one who didn't get a fair share of the ice cream. uhm, Tyler? I just wanna say that I’m really sorry you got hurt. Tyler? Just how bad is your arm?”

“Oh, it hurts like fuck, but that comes and goes. My fingers are stiff and a little numb. So I’m just fucked up enough to give me anxiety attacks. The doctors ain’t tellin’ me nothing,” Tyler grumped.

“I sneaked some shots of your case record.” Holly handed Tyler her smartphone.

‘hhhrrrmmm…’ Tyler growled as she slipped through the electronic ‘pages’. While she couldn’t do the ‘read War and Peace in 10 minutes’ bit she was a very fast reader. “Okay… ‘probable corruption of the nanite site’. Makes way too much sense… and ten pages that boil down to ‘we have no idea what’s going on or what to do, so throw every expensive test we can at her until her insurer stops paying’.”

“Hey Tyler, Hayley and I could look at your corrupted nanites and-”

“Holly- do you have a medical degree?”

“ah, No.”

“Then in order to avoid falling into the ‘old lady who swallowed a fly’ syndrome, I’d have to have the entire nanite suite removed- which could very well kill me.” Tyler gave Holly a sharp look. “Holly you DO know that nanite upgrading isn’t anything even vaguely like safe? Roughly 40 percent of the people have complications that make what happened to Leo Rivera look pretty. And then there’s the 20% who turn into goo. Hey, there’s a reason the FDA won’t approve any nanite augmentation. The only reason that Dr. Chase and I got them is ‘cause the people doing it didn’t give us a choice!”

Holly squirmed on her seat. “I know that. Aannndd… Look Tyler, Mom wasn’t born looking like a bombshell. Before Dad upgraded her, she was one of those short, squat frog-faced women who either die with a lot of cats, or becomes a raving Karen just so she’ll have a morsel of power. I’ve seen her ‘before’ pictures, and between her and Dad, Hayley and I never had a chance. After Daddy got sent to prison, Hayley and me got our hands on his operating notes, and there was no stopping us! Better a 40% chance of being a stunner than a 100% chance of being a dog.”

“And your mother was okay with this?”

“No and she had a screaming fit when she found out. But once we had 20% of the process done, she realized that it was either complete the process or wait for a Cancer- or Gangrene- or Multiple Sclerosis- to kick in. We did everything we could to make the process safer: we used Mom’s nanites, we shared most of a successful DNA chain, we switched off overseeing each other’s adaptation in short staggered procedures- I mean, what was Suzy Becker thinking she was doing, letting you adapt by remote control?- and we took the better part of a year, checking each sequence religiously.”

Even so, Tyler remembered a comment from Parky: ‘so they’re technicaly brilliant enough to do all that, while so lacking in judgement that they’d do something that stupid. Which to my aged eyes, practically spells out ‘adolescent’.’

“All our lives we were these chubby, homely girls that no one wanted to talk to!” Holly whined. “It was either upgrade or look forward to a lifetime of CATS!”

Tyler frantically fished for a constructive comment, all-too aware that she was in the middle of an emotional minefield with a teenage girl who could rip a cement truck apart with her bare hands. “Okay, so you bet the farm on a long-shot and it came in. So Holly… why are you here?”

Holly sighed, worried her lower lip and started spitting out words like they tasted bad. "Look, it's a lot harder being a superbabe than we thought. I mean, all through school, we got A-plusses in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, and D-minuses in social skills. When we survived upgrading ourselves- and lemme tell you, that was NO A-ticket ride!- Hayley and I thought we had it made! But... all the guys we met were either too stupid, too grody, too much of a wuss to get with a girl who could lift 3 tons, or they had a ring of girls around them that had everything we had AND killer social skills.

"So Hayley and me decided that we'd do the 'Celebrity Heroine' thing, 'cause when you're gorgeous and famous, things go right for you, right? But that was just as big a cluster fuck as trying to muscle into the UCLA social scene. It took us two months to nail down exactly when and how Dr. Lucifer's raid on CincoTech was gonna go down. We had them cold, but then that big lumpy freak blew out the entire fucking WALL!

"So,we're after them, 'cause not following them would be Felonious Negligence, right? Hayley tries to stop them with our patent pending silicon gel spray, but I get shot out of the sky, and you caught me, and it was like _wow_.

Holly paused and looked up into Tyler's eyes. "I... never really thought about girls... y'know... romantically? Cute girls were always competition we couldn't compete with... when they weren't complete and total bitches- like me and Holly were any better. But when you caught me, and you were holding me in your arms? It was like... wow.

"I've never had a 'wow' moment before. I've had a few 'omigawd he's hawt' moments, but they never went any further than me standing there, gawping like an idiot. And other girls snickering at me.

Holly visibly tried to pull her narrative together. "After that... wow moment... I needed to find out about you. At the cop station, I finally nailed who you were and... and I heard about your 'small dating pool' problem. So I... sold Hayley and then Mom that making a big deal about chasing after you would be good for our Celebrity Hero careers... Cause I... wanted to be near you and... well, all those staged kisses weren't all that staged..."

Tyler sat up and looked into Holly's face. Holly had that startled 'deer in the headlights' look. An insight finally slid past Tyler's many well-entrenched preconceptions: Holly wanted Tyler to take the intitiative. The other times she'd been forced by the circumstances to take the intiative. She wanted Tyler to want her.

Tyler leaned forward, wrapped her arms around Holly and kissed her. It was sweet, and all the sweeter for being a learning experience for both of them.

But then Tyler broke the kiss. "Crap," she said disgustedly. Holly gave a worried confused squeak. Tyler took a deep breath and said, "Just my luck. Look Holly, true to the Universe's infinite sick sense of humor, after years of girls acting like I'm a cocker spaniel puppy, I finally have have two great girls admitting that they like me- at the same time."

"Same Time?" Holly squeaked.

Tyler let out a long slow breath. "Holly, not an hour before you came in, Mac- er, Hex Kitten visited me. There was... some earnest conversation... and some heavy making out." Holly let out a heartbroken whine. "Holly, I'm not telling you that I'm taken, I'm saying... that I don't know what to do." Tyler fished around furiously for a context that wouldn't either give Holly the wrong idea, but would spare her very vulnerable at the moment feelings.

"aaahhh... Archie comics! Y'know how Archie is torn between Betty and Veronica? He's got these two great girls who want all his attention, and he can't make up his mind. It's kinda like that, only without the corny hijinks. You're not hair color-coded versions of each other, you're two very... hella desirable girls. And now that I'm in his shoes, I get that Archie isn't stringing Betty and Veronic along, or that he doesn't want to lose either of them... a big part is that he's figuring the whole mess out himself, and doesn't want to hurt them... even while there's the mind-blowing kissing going on."

Holly absorbed this for a while, not disengaging herself from Tyler, but establishing a touch of separation at the same time. "So... am I Betty or Veronica?"

"That's the hard part," Tyler said. "You're both Betty. You're both sweet, honest, straight-up girls who just want a real thing with a straight-up guy. Well, you are when you let yourself be Betty. If anyone's Veronica, I'd say it's your sister, Hayley." And quite likely their mother.

"Good 'cause trying to game this whole thing has been a bear! I keep second-guessing myself; playing the sexy bad girl is a lot harder than it looks. On one hand, I know a good thing when I see it. On the other hand, I don't want to become a soulless bitch who's only out for everything she can get." Holly looked at Tyler skeptically and came to a decision. "Am I supposed to fight Hex Kitten for you?"

"NO. I'm just saying... let me figure this out. Archie can't figure out which to choose, but I don't have monthly editions plus specials to sell, so I gotta keep the whole stupid thing going. Give me some time and space to figure out my own mind."

"You're not going to ask me to bring Hayley into some kind of romantic parallelogram, are you?"

"Please! This is complicated enough as it is!" Tyler groaned.

Holly grimaced slightly, as though trying to see through some underhanded gambit of Tyler's. Then she thawed and smiled wantonly at Tyler. "You're just lucky that you're a great kisser." She leveraged herself onto Tyler's lap and picked up the lunchbox. "Holly and me went to Fosselmann's along with the Wiz Kids. I decided to bring you some takeout. I wasn't sure what kind of ice cream you liked, so I figured you can't go wrong with strawberry."

Coyly she spooned some ice cream into Tyler's mouth and resumed the kiss. It was sweet and good for both of them.

Dr. Chase addressed the Wiz Kids candidates. "The good news is that beyond intelligence, you all showed initiative, imagination, nerve and real wit in handling your challenges. You all had at least three moments where you truly shined. The bad news is that doesn't make eliminating any of you any easier. So, more tests are needed. And yes, we're not any happier about that than you are. If nothing else, we're running out of ideas for tests. This is what we've come up with," she waved around the chamber. "This is what's left of the laboratory of Dr. Kaldane, a criminal scientist and a massive egotist. We've refitted this into an escape room. Your challenge is to escape from one of those holding cells and find the exit without being hit by a tracking dye projector. Now the Wiz Kids have had to deal with this kind of situation- hopefully you won't, but you never can tell.

"Your teams for this challenge are: Geoff and Tom-3, Heike and Mordecai, and Mike and Tank. That's as good a sequence as any, so we'll go with that. Each team will go one at a time, and the others won't be able to watch, so each round will be fresh. Geoff, Tom, you'll each start out in a holding cell by yourself, the rest of you? Into the Green Room.

TEN MINUTES LATER

“This was supposed to be a challenge, not a speed run!”

“And how did those Hellions find out about this challenge?”

“Don’t look at ME!”

Dr. Chase addressed the collected Wiz Kids. "I didn't want it to come to this. But we've run out of reasonable tests. And the Foundation has received a high-priority request that we have to answer. I'm afraid that we're going to have to conduct the final test of you ‘new guys' suitability in the field. There are reports of massive explosions, volcanic eruptions, a possibility of some unknown party using weapons of mass destruction, and even sightings of Dragons.

"Exactly what's going on is unclear from this distance, so we're going to have to relocate to the site in question. Hopefully, there won't be any Hellion incidents this time. Taking the Diogenes would be problematic, insufficient and would take too long. Get your traveling arrangements taken care of, because we're heading to Argentina."

"Argentina?" Tyler yelped.

 

To Be Continued