A Whateley Universe Story

The Mark of Miss Scarlet!

by

Bek D Corbin

Part One

“Oh, Dr. Smart, it is such an HONOR to meet you!” squealed the young Science Fair contestant, starry-eyed with excitement behind her large-framed glasses.

“And it’s great to see another young woman applying herself in the STEM concentrations,” Dr. Smart replied. While, to be honest, Helen really liked seeing and hearing the effect that she was having on young women, it was getting a little repetitive. The news that she was going to be one of the judges of this Science Fair had almost doubled the percentage of female applicants, and the Hero Worship there was getting a little thick. She was worried that she might be alienating Drs. Hong, Lefkowitz, Lefebvre and Mendez, the other four judges on the panel. Then there was a strange touch of familiarity about the girl. But for the life of her, she couldn’t place the girl. The only thing that seemed out of place was the fact that the girl and her mother were wearing matching outfits and mousy brown soup-bowl hairstyles. Well, that and the fact that both of them could have done a lot better, if they’d put half the effort into their style as young- what was her name? Jane?- Jane had put into her project. Yes, it was another ‘hard light’ effort- and why did that ring such a bell?- which was a popular subject, with many of the contestants trying to do something with the new technology. But Jane’s effort was simple and practical, a ‘virtual keyboard’ that was quite elegant.

Jane’s mother was brimming with just as much excitement as her daughter, and asked Dr. Smart to pose for (yet another) picture. As Helen put her arm around Jane and smiled, Dennis Hawkins walked up with a tablet in his hand. Both Jane and her mother reacted to Dennis in the same way, which had little to do with their former hero worship, and everything to do with the way that he filled out his suit. While Dennis was wearing a proper suit and tie, and not his usual T-shirt and jeans combo with the utility belt and harness, he still managed to show off his splendid physique.

Accepting that barely restrained adulation with more grace and humility than you’d think an Undergrad was capable of, Dennis handed Dr. Smart the tablet. “Here’s the latest Security upgrades, Doc.”

Helen snorted, “Really, Dennis! This is a Science Fair! Who’s going to raid a Science Fair?”

“And I’d like to keep it a Science Fair,” Dennis said seriously, looking around at all the high school science wonks of every stripe, all eager for approval from the Big Eggheads, “and not a Hostage Situation.”

Jane’s mother made a worried noise, and looked over Dr. Smart’s shoulder at the tablet. Helen assured her that there was nothing to worry about. Jane’s mother managed to talk Dr. Smart into another photo-op with Jane, and then she finally got around to viewing the other projects.

She just wished that she could figure out why Jane rang such a bell.

Dr. Smart continued, visiting a few more exhibitions, and finally made her way back to the other judges. “Well, have you made our decision for us?” Dr. Lefebvre snarked.

“Oh, you need someone to make up your mind for you?” Dr. Smart riposted.

“We DO need to see all the exhibits, not just the ones that your fans brought just for you to see,” Dr. Lefkowitz, the only other woman on the panel, managed to make ‘fans’ sound compromised and suspect.

“Precisely!” Dr. Smart said briskly. “Then let’s get to it, shall we? After you, Dr. Hong!”

The public announcement system informed the exhibitors that the official judging was about to begin, told them to make their exhibitions ready, and explained how the panel would proceed through the fair. Despite the fact that all five of the judges had already seen most of the exhibits and spoken with the teenagers, the panel was now official, and went from one booth to the next, viewing the exhibits and speaking with the competitors as though it was for the first time. Dr. Smart let Dr. Hong take the lead, and only spoke up to present a respectful opposing viewpoint.

After about a half hour, the panel walked up to a booth where two young women were in the final stages of hooking up an elaborate array of power leads to a squarish 7’ x 7’ framework. The panel waited as the two fiddled with a receiver, tweaking it until they got a smooth, uninterrupted signal. “Excuse me, Miss,” Dr. Mendez cut in when they finished up, “while this is a very impressive assembly, WHAT does it have to do with an Electrolytic Resin Depolymerization process, as you’ve stated in your précis?”

“Nothing,” one of the girls answered chipperly. “This isn’t an Electrolytic Resin Depolymerization process; this is an anchor for an Intraspatial Dimensional Transit Portal device.”

“A Boom Tube,” Dr. Smart croaked with aghast understanding.

“Oh, puh-lease!” Dr. Lefebvre sneered, “Do you honest meant to tell me that that this is capable of creating a tunnel in the fabric of time and space? How could something with an energy array like that have the power to accomplish that?”

“We didn’t say that that it generated the portal-”

“She said that it anchored the gate,” Dr. Smart finished for her. “DENNIS! CODE RED!”

“On It!” Dennis dropped a bag on the floor and kicked it across the floor to Dr. Smart. The bag slid across the carpeting as though it was polished. But one of the two ‘exhibitors’ dashed over and intercepted the bag midway.

As the panel was absorbing this point, Dr. Smart pulled a pouch on her belt around, exposing a disassembled array of components that could quickly be assembled. But the second that the pouch was exposed, the second ‘exhibitor’ reached over and tore the pouch off the belt. Or more accurately, the belt off Dr. Smart.

The ‘exhibitor’ did a tumbling flip over Dr. Smart, leading her away from the portal anchor. Then the framework flared with energy, and a ring appeared in front of it. “Crap!” Dennis grumbled. He gave up trying to get the bag away from the first phony exhibitor, and sprinted over to the framework. Giving it a quick once-over, he found a likely junction box and pulled a breaker lever. But instead of shutting down the portal, the metal lever gave off a powerful electric jolt, and since Dennis was standing on a metal plate that had been put there for just that reason, he was shocked into unconsciousness.

“DENNIS!” Dr. Smart shrieked. She tried to run to him, but she was cut off by a barrage of figures that rushed out of the portal. The figures burst out of the portal so quickly that they battered Dr. Smart by colliding with her, throwing her to the ground, and the last couple almost trampled her.

The streaks resolved into a group of women wearing red ceramet body armor with ‘theme’ horned masks. The body armor didn’t cover their arms or legs, showing off that their limbs were cybernetic. They rushed to strategic points all across the venue, where they aimed submachine guns with under-slung additions. Two of them seized Jane and her mother, holding them in classic hostage positions. “NO ONE MOVE!” boomed an amplified voice.

A huge, misshapen figure in a modern version of chainmail armor loomed out of the portal, carrying a massive energy weapon connected to a huge pack on the back. “Doctor XXX,” Dr. Smart hissed with recognition.

“Not Quite,” corrected another familiar voice from behind the first. Through the portal into the auditorium strolled a bizarre figure, a man dressed in a long red old-fashioned labcoat, whose face appeared to be a lurid red devil mask- floating on thin air. A group of five more figures, four men and a woman in red devil livery, all of them bearing arms, followed just behind.

“Doctor Lucifer?” Dr. Smart bleated in abject confusion. While both Drs. XXX and Lucifer were professional criminals, renegade scientists and recurring enemies of hers, they were also vicious rivals and bitter enemies. The idea of Dr. XXX not merely working with Dr. Lucifer, but apparently for him, was utterly incredible. “HOW?”

“The fortunes of war,” Dr. Lucifer said smugly. “Lumpy here,” he gave Dr. XXX a kick on the ankle, “tried to be clever. So clever that he violated hospitality. And that turned around and bit him on the ass.”

“And how does his violating hospitality turn into you endangering all these kids?” Dr. Smart asked sharply. “Why are you HERE, Lucifer? This is a high school science fair- there isn’t anything here for you to STEAL!”

“I DO apologize, but really, the situation called for measures just like this,” Dr. Lucifer said contritely. “And as for stealing, quite the contrary! I come bearing gifts!”

On a signal from Dr. Lucifer, the female of the group of minions stepped forward. She presented a long rectangular armored case with formidable clasps. With a wordless flip, she opened the case, revealing an array of components on a rotating cylindrical frame, with a pistol grip and a targeting scope. “The Stinger!” Dr. Smart gasped. “Were YOU involved in the Nazis’ attack on the Athena?”

“Only tangentially,” Dr. Lucifer assured her. “That was more Lumpy’s doing than mine.” He rapped his knuckles on Dr. XXX’s chestplate.

“Then you did you come to have this?”

“As I said, the fortunes of war. He tried to use that against me, along with another development. And he lost, and now everything he had is mine. C’est la guerre. I return this to you.” The female minion shut the case with a quick flick of her wrists and the clasps snapped shut. She held the case forth. “The case is armored and the clasps will only open once we have left. Take it as a compliment; I have nothing but respect for your skills- and the threat you can pose.”

“Why?” Dr. Smart asked suspiciously, “After all the times I’ve stopped you? Why would you give back my favorite project?”

Dr. Lucifer shrugged. “As I said, the Fortunes of War. I can take it as well as dish it out. I did what I did for what I saw as acceptable reasons, and you prevented me for reasons of your own. I can’t blame you for doing what you thought was right. Besides, I was amazed at the finesse you showed in tearing apart my heavy metal extraction plant off Barbados, just you and the Boy Wonder over there,” he jerked his head at Dennis, who was already shrugging off the effects of the zap trap. The largest of the devil minions forced Dennis back down with his boot, and the smallest of them held a crystal edged sword to Dennis’ neck.

“You’re just handing the Stinger back to me?” Dr. Smart asked warily. “You went through all this, just to give me my property back?”

“NO, there is something I want you to do for me,” Dr. Lucifer said with a gesture. On that cue, the devil-minions, less the swordsman, went back into the Boom Tube. They came back with more cases, which they opened and began to assemble the contents. Quickly, they assembled a set of modules into an arrangement dominated by two reclining chairs and a large console. Both chairs were obviously designed to restrain the occupants, but computer consoles were built into them, and both had large bowl-like cowls that would fit over the occupants’ heads.

Dr. Smart let out a muffled gasp of recognition. “The Skulljacker!” She gave a fearful sideways glance at Dennis, who was trying to get some leverage from his prone position, but the swordsman wasn’t giving him any room to move.

“NO,” Dr. Lucifer said wearily, “if I was going to use it on young Mr. Hawkins, or you, or any of the panel, I’d do it quietly, and not have a hundred eyewitnesses to it. No, come, Dr. Smart, examine the Skulljacker. And you, Dr. Hong, Dr. Lefebvre, Dr. Lefkowitz, Dr. Mendez- examine it as well. Take pictures! Just… not too many, for everyone’s sake.”

After about 10 minutes, Dr. Smart and the rest of the panel broke from their examination. “It’s a Skulljacker, all right. It’s definitely the Transhumanite’s work. I’d say that it is the 1993 Antwerp model, the one he used to assume the identity of Rutger Schliemann- and 6 other people in turn over a nine-month period.” There was some muttering on the behalf of the rest of the panel, not wanting to let Dr. Smart have the complete spotlight, but none of them willing to challenge someone who knew a LOT more on this subject than any of them did.

“Excellent,” Dr. Lucifer said. “Now… Dr. Smart… what would you do if I GAVE you the Skulljacker?”

“I’d SMASH it!” Dr. Smart said with steel ringing in her voice and flashing in her eyes. “I’d wreck it, and smash every component, every chip, every array, every cathode, and keep smashing until no one could conceivably reverse-engineer any part of it, no matter how innocuous or promising it might be! I’d smash it until it was a pile of steel wool and silicon dust!”

“Perfect!” Dr. Lucifer chuckled, “Just the answer I wanted. It’s YOURS. And, on top of that,” the female minion handed Dr. Lucifer another case. Dr. Lucifer presented the case to Dr. Smart and opened it. Inside, on a bed of peaked temperfoam, was a sledgehammer with a steel haft and a large head that gave off an odd gleam in the overhead lighting of the auditorium. “The shaft is stainless steel,” Dr. Lucifer said, “And the head weighs 125 pounds, with a sheath of Messingite™.

Dr. Smart took the hammer out of the case and got a feel for the swing of it. “Just… in case you feel tempted,” Dr. Lucifer said warningly, “just ask yourself: in the greater scheme of things, which is more dangerous? The Skulljacker? Or Me?”

Dr. Smart gave him a muted scowl, but seemed to agree with his point- from the point of view of the greater scheme of things. She channeled her frustration, anxiety and anger into smashing the Skulljacker, starting with the fantastically advanced rings of instrumentation in the cowls, and finishing by tearing the couches apart. It took her a good 15 minutes, but she did indeed reduce the bleeding edge piece of technology to a pile of rubble. When she was finished, Dr. Smart took a short break to catch her breath. But her need to know made her ask with a raspy voice, “WHY? Why did you seek out the Skulljacker, just to have me destroy it?”

“I didn’t ‘seek out’ the Skulljacker,” Dr. Lucifer said equitably. “It fell into my lap, in the same windfall that brought me the Stinger, that Boom Tube, and indeed Dr. Triple- yech himself. But after I verified that it was, indeed one of the Skulljackers, and not just Lumpy making ‘booga-booga’ noises-”

“You used it? You used the Skulljacker?”

“Yes! And I feel soiled by it! I don’t regret… intellectually… what I did to the test subjects, but on a very primal level, I feel that what I did was wrong.”

“You? Admit that you were wrong?” Dennis said with amused derision from where he was laying.

“YES!” Dr. Lucifer snapped. “I’m a professional criminal, and I don’t toe the line for most Scientific Conventions, but there IS a line I won’t cross. I may not draw the line where you do, but there IS a line for me. And, having put a toe across that line, I’m making sure that it doesn’t happen again.

“And beyond personal morality, the Skulljacker is DANGEROUS! And I’m talking putting Tac Nukes in the hands of street gangs dangerous. You see, I discovered something truly horrific about the Skulljacker when I was checking it out. Like you, I assumed that it was a Schimmlehorn Device, that it only worked because the Transhumanite’s insanity made it work!

“But it’s not! It showed none of the usual signs of a Schimmlehorn Device- none of the glitches, or eccentricities or illogic that you see. If I’d studied it long enough, I could have reverse-engineered it, and figured out its core operating principles.”

“Then, why didn’t you?” Dr. Lefkowitz asked, drawn into the discussion despite herself.

“Because the Skulljacker threatens a basic and necessary aspect of the Human Condition: no matter how poor or wretched, we still own our own bodies! But in his- or its- zeal to leave the limitations of Humanity behind, the Transhumanite dreamed of ‘liberating’ Humanity from its carnate existence, to become beings of pure thought!

“PAH! I know people, and if the Transhumanite had ever truly perfected that technology, and it fell into the wrong hands, it would have been disastrous! And there are NO right hands for that thing! The technology would have been monopolized by the ruthless, the scheming, the unprincipled!”

“In other words, your kind of people?” Dennis mocked him.

But Dr. Lucifer took the jibe in stride, without blinking. “Yes! Why do you think I wanted the Skulljacker destroyed? I know what people with power are like! The Power Elites of the world have viewed their subjects as cattle since the days of the Pharaohs, but now the Powerful would see them as a disposable resource. Mutants wouldn’t be hunted to be exterminated anymore- they’d be bred like horses for specific traits, so the Top 1 Percent could live immortal lives in super powered bodies, completely unconcerned with the lives of the common herd. Why be an athlete, when you know that after years of striving and effort, some rich bastard will just come along and take your body? Why bother being fit at all? All that will happen is that when you hit your prime, some rich guy will just have you shoved into a Skulljacker, and suddenly you’ll be a middle-aged (if you’re lucky) reprobate with lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver and shot kidneys!”

“Then why not just do it yourself?” Dr. Smart asked uncertainly.

Dr. Lucifer chuckled, “I’m afraid that after that spate of awkward idealism, my reasons for being here are woefully pragmatic. You see, the incident where I gained possession of the Skulljacker wasn’t an entirely private affair between XXX and myself. No, XXX managed to drag a good-sized crowd of supervillains into the mess. Half of them are scared to death that I’ll use the Skulljacker myself, the other half are drooling at the thought of gaining the Skulljacker for themselves, and they ALL know that I had the damn thing!”

“SO, why not just wreck it yourself and be DONE with it?”

“Who’d believe me?” Dr. Lucifer asked plaintively. “I’m Doctor Lucifer, mmmaaaddd sccciiieeennntist! They’d all assume that I was pulling some elaborate scam! No matter what I said or did, there’d always be someone trying to steal or muscle or chisel out from under me something that no longer exists! The more I’d deny it, the more they’d think I was pulling something!”

“Oh, you poor, poor misunderstood evil genius,” Dr. Smart cooed sardonically.

Brushing that aside, Dr. Lucifer continued, “My only way out from under it, was if the Skulljacker was examined by an expert on Sinister Technology- like you-, who owes me NOTHING- as you do- and would never risk her reputation for a criminal like me- as you would never do. AND, just to show that I wasn’t pulling some elaborate scam on you and the world, YOU personally destroyed the Skulljacker in front of all these witnesses.

“AND, having done that, I will release the hostages and leave with no further ado. I’ll leave you the hammer and the wreckage. At the very least, the latter will both prove to the Authorities that it was the real, complete Skulljacker- or at least the 1993 Antwerp model.”

On a cue from Dr. Lucifer, the two cyborgs who were holding Jane and her mother released their hostages. The cyborgs exited from the auditorium into the Boom Tube, followed by the faux- exhibitors, and then the minions in red, and then Dr. XXX. Despite his promise of ‘no further ado’, Dr. Lucifer paused just before entering the Boom Tube. He turned to Dr. Smart, and with a puckish smile on his face recited a cryptic six-line nonlinear poem heavily interspersed with numbers and suggestions to higher geometry. When he finished, he gave Dr. Smart a brisk salute and disappeared into the tunnel in the air.

The Boom Tube collapsed, and the anchoring mechanism destroyed itself in a shower of sparks.

After giving the Police a preliminary statement, Jane and her mother were put into a cab and allowed to go home. As soon as the ‘taxi’ went under an overpass, it changed into a Soccer Mom van. When it left the highway, it changed into an Econobox sedan. By the time it reached the affluent suburb where the Harrow family lived, the car was an upscale luxury sedan. Mara Harrow and her middle daughter, Jessie got out of the car. They’d shed the mousy brown wigs, and the drab look-alike outfits had only been glamour masks that Jessie had cast as part of her magical training. Looking like an ad out of Town and Country magazine, Mara and Jessie went into the house and promptly passed through a secret passage to a stairwell down. They went down to the secret complex that was under the Harrow property- and, to be honest, the properties of five of their neighbors, who had no notion as to the sinister reason why their plumbing never had problems.

When Mara and Jessie entered the lounge of the underground base, JD was waiting for them along with Uncle Luke, the Harrow cadre of lieutenants and the cyborg minion-ettes. He greeted his kid sister with, “Hey, Jess! Why’d you take off the wig? That look rocked for you!” Jessie simply returned the jibe with a ladylike razzberry.

“Well?” Luke asked his sister-in-law with all the breathless anticipation of a actor awaiting his first reviews. “How did it come off?”

“Very well,” Mara said. “Dr. Smart and the other panel members were very dubious at first, as were the Police, but after turning it upside-down and twisting it inside-out, they’ve more or less come to the conclusion that the only reason that you’d go to those extremes to prove that you were telling the truth was that you WERE telling the truth.”

“Thank God!” Luke grumbled. “I was starting to think that I’d have to do something ‘subtle’, like inserting a mysterious message into the New York Times crossword puzzle or something.”

“There were two very bored reporters at the science fair, so no matter what the Police decide to do, word will get out,” Mara assured him. “It will take a few weeks for the more paranoid members of the community to figure it out, but it shouldn’t be that long before people stop planning to kidnap you for the Skulljacker.”

Luke slumped with a wordless ‘woof!’ that suggested that it couldn’t be over soon enough.

“Hey Unk!” Jessie cut in, “What was that gobbledygook sort-of poem that you rattled off at Dr. Smart, just before you cut out?”

Luke bucked up with a puckish smirk. “It means nothing; it’s a semantic ‘Indian monkey trap’, designed to keep whoever tries to solve it running in circles. If Dr. Smart is trying to figure out what my ‘clue’ means, then she’s not tracking down my latest endeavor. Besides, no matter what I said at the Science Fair, I still owe Dr. Smart something for trashing my heavy-metals extraction plant in the Caribbean.”

The middle-aged woman strode imperiously the Columbia Jewelry Exchange. She was fashionably dressed, immaculately coifed, and to the trained eye showed all the signs of being a petit bourgeois despot, the sort of woman who joined all sorts of ‘good works’ organizations simply to have someone to bully. She marched up to the counter and rapped it with her knuckles so loudly that the saleswoman feared that she’d break the glass. “I’m Dora Stanhope,” she said as though she was presenting a badge and a warrant. “Tell the Manager that I’m here.”

The manager, Mr. Baxter, came out with the mien of someone meeting a man dressed as Santa Claus in August. They exchanged a few greetings, puzzled on his part, barbed on hers, and went into his office. A few minutes later, an assistant went into the Exchange high security vault. A few minutes after that, Ms. Stanhope and Mr. Baxter joined the assistant, a lapidary and an armed security guard at the front counter. Security SOP barred anyone who wasn’t a bonded employee from entering the vault, while also forbidding the case from being taken into the Manager’s office.

Baxter nodded to the assistant, who opened the case. Then the assistant took out tray after tray, which had been stacked on top of each other. On the trays, in beds of black velvet were stored glittering rings, bracelets, brooches, earrings, necklaces, and five jewel-studded tiaras. “You do realize that by the provisions in your grandmother’s will, these ARE held in trust. By the terms of the entail, these jewels are only supposed to come out of our vault once a year.”

“They’re family property,” Stanhope snarled through bared teeth, “and when my lawyers finally break that stupid provision, these will be MINE, by right. And in the meantime, your firm is responsible for these. WHY she didn’t leave them in a BANK, like SANE people, I’ll never know! But I’ve received information that you’ve been swapping out pieces of these and replacing them with fakes. If that’s so, your firm is on the hook for each and every forgery.”

“That is a monstrous slander!” Baxter huffed indignantly.

“If these are the real things, then I’ll apologize,” Stanhope said with a tone that suggested that she hadn’t an ounce of apology in her. “But if they’re fakes, I’ll be back with my lawyer- and the POLICE!”

Baxter gave the lapidary a wary nod to begin.

But then, the doors of the Exchange blew off their hinges, and the alarms, both silent and loud, went off! And then both the alarms and the lights died.

Then a cloud of luridly red smoke billowed through the open doors, and figures in bulky red suits that blended in perfectly with the smoke charged into the store. The armed guards went for their guns, but first one, then another and then another, were hit by balls of expanding adhesive and glued to the spot. None of them dared fire, for fear that the gum would block the barrel and cause a backfire. Then another figure in red, a woman in a long draping red overcoat and a wide-brimmed red hat, walked in holding an elaborate carbine made of several rotating drums, with a triple-barrel. Her features were hidden by a red scarf mask and a set of high-tech goggles. The barrels of the carbine spun on some unseen cue and clicked into place, suggesting that the weapon had assumed a new, deadlier, setting. “No one move,” she said in a silky cultured contralto. “My mist makes it so that you can’t see my men, but I assure you, THEY can see YOU.”

She stalked over to the group clustered around the jewelry case at the counter. Pointing the carbine upwards, she reached into her overcoat and produced a handheld unit of some sort. She turned the case upside down and waved the unit over it. Then she touched the unit to a small plate. The unit sparked, and the plate gave out a distinctive bluish smoke. Pointing the carbine at the assistant, she said, “Pack it back in the case. Don’t try anything stupid- they’re not paying you enough for that.”

The assistant started loading the trays back in the case with fumbling fingers. But then another figure appeared in the red fog, and with mighty blows of his fists, sent three of the red men flying. Then the newcomer squared his shoulders and marched into view. He was tall, somewhere in the range of 6-foot-tall or so, with an athletic build. He wore blue trousers and a blue cape, with a bronzed breastplate, gauntlets, and bucket helmet, which concealed all but his eyes and a thin strip of his face. “Someone call Broderbund,” he jeered, striking a pose with his fists akimbo, “we just found Carmen Sandiego.”

“I’m NOT Carmen Sandiego!” she snapped back, “_I_ am… MISS SCARLET! And what are you called? Besides ‘Fool’?”

Throwing his shoulders back, he proclaimed, “They call me… Kid Galahad!”

“Wonderful,” ‘Miss Scarlet’ snarled, “Now they’ll know what to put on the toe tag.” With that, she let fly with a blast that hit him square in the chest, knocking him back into the red mist. The Men in Red, who were up and raring for a second go, immediately jumped on Kid Galahad. At first they seemed to be doing some damage, but the Kid fought back, and even at a disadvantage he dished out a big second helping of lumps. He strode out of the mists and pointed a hand at her and said, “It’s OVER, Scarlet! Give up, and I’ll spare you the bruises!”

“How did you find me?” she demanded, “How did you know that I’d be here, right now?”

“What? Did you honestly think that no one would figure out your obvious clue?” he shot back. “You painted a statue of Columbia, the personification of the Americas, red and left a riddle rolled up in her hand! The riddle mentioned of Homecoming, a Queen and Regalia. And everyone who goes to Faber College knows that the Homecoming Queen and her handmaidens get to wear the Stanhope Jewels for the Homecoming Parade, instead of the usual paste crap, because Olivia Stanhope stipulated it in her will. Your stupid clue could only mean the Columbia Jewelry Exchange, where Mrs. Stanhope keeps her collection.”

“Bullshit,” Miss Scarlet muttered. “You probably went online and got a bunch of riddle nerds to figure it out for you.”

Stung by this (which probably means that it was true), Kid Galahad sprang at Miss Scarlet. But she let off another blast, knocking him back. “Keep him busy!” she snapped. Then she turned back to the counter, and ignoring Ms. Stanhope and the jewelers’ employees, she unceremoniously shoved the rest of the jewelry into the case without the trays. She shut the lid and tucked up the case under her off arm. Leading the way with her carbine, she headed for the door.

But Kid Galahad broke away from her goons, and got in her way, blocking her from the door. She aimed her blaster at him, but he knocked it out of her hand. Then he latched onto her good hand with a grip of steel.

Then an eerie figure, a faceless man wearing a black tricorn hat and a vividly blue redingote coat with a white jabot, rose out of the ground. “Thank You!” he said with a light polished British accent. “I was getting rather tired of waiting for her to stop rushing about.” He plucked the case out from under Miss Scarlet’s arm. Tucking the case under his own arm, he drew what looked like a flintlock pistol with his good hand and zapped Kid Galahad with a blast of vividly blue energy. The blast hit Kid Galahad in the helmet and rattled him, enough for Miss Scarlet to escape his grip.

Miss Scarlet dove for her gun. But Kid Galahad ignored her and jumped the man in blue, who was making for the door. Miss Scarlet held her gun on the two, but seemed to be having trouble deciding which of them to shoot. This went on for a minute or so, and then one of Miss Scarlet’s minions frantically pointed at his wrist, indicating that the time allowed for the Police Armed Response was quickly draining away.

But the action was made for her, when a slight figure appeared on one of the counters. “I AM THE CHAMPION OF DECENCY AND JUSTICE! I am Miss Champion!” the girl announced. She was a lovely young thing in that first step out of girlhood into womanhood, wearing a royal blue minidress with a big red letter ‘C’ on the chest, and a white cape with matching boots, gloves, domino mask, and hair bow holding her blonde hair back into a perky ponytail. As the three paused to register that, she jumped at Kid Galahad and the Man in Blue, taking them both down, and knocking the case out of the latter’s arm.

Miss Scarlet reacted to that by amping up her red mist a thousand percent and diving for the case. Under the cover of the all-obscuring mist, she and her men fled from the store. As soon as the Man in Blue recovered, he also fled, but headed in the opposite direction. ‘Miss Champion’ helped Kid Galahad to his feet and towed him to the door. “He went that way!” she pointed in the direction that the Man in Blue went. “I’ll go after her!” Then she charged off in the direction that Miss Scarlet left. Kid Galahad, too swept away by the moment, headed after the Man in Blue.

In one of the rooms in the subterranean lair below their home, Vivian Harrow, still in her ‘Miss Scarlet’ outfit (less the scarf mask and goggles) eagerly asked her father, “So? Daddy? How much is it worth?”

Nick Harrow gave his eldest daughter the ‘gimme a minute, I’m concentrating’ noise. He was closely inspecting the Stanhope Jewels with a jeweler’s loupe. As he finished examining each piece, he put it in one of four piles. When he finished, he took the loupe from his eye and said, “Okay, hon, it’s like this: THESE,” he pointed at the smallest pile, three brooches, a ring and a pair of earrings, “are first water stones set in Faberge-caliber settings. “THESE,” he pointed at the second-smallest pile, “are first water stones set in Faberge-caliber settings, BUT the stones are new, less than 15 years in their current form, and have been laser-etched. And, no doubt, hot as hell. THESE,” he pointed at the largest pile, “are crappy stones in shabby reproduction of Faberge settings. And THESE,” he pointed at the last and second-largest pile, “are total crap. Paste, and not very good quality paste.”

“WHAT?” Vivian bleated, “Paste? How can they be paste?”

“Simple,” the Phantom Highwayman said as he strolled into the room and sat down. Taking off his tricorn hat and hood, John Dillinger ‘JD’ Harrow continued, “You did your research, but you didn’t read between the lines. The reason that Olivia Stanhope arranged that bizarre entailment scheme with the Homecoming Queens at Faber getting to use the Stanhope Jewels for the parade was that Olivia couldn’t stand her granddaughter Dora’s guts! Olivia hated the thought of Dora getting the Stanhope Jewels, but because she’d only gotten custody of the jewels, she couldn’t cut Dora out of her will. So, she tacked on that bizarre ‘usage’ provision onto her will. The thing is, the way that’s set up, it would be amazing if people weren’t snitching bits and pieces away from Dora, one bit at a time.”

“What? Then… why did they leave these real jewels, instead of just the glass?”

“Well, my guess,” Nick cut in, “Is that the first lot, the smallest pile, are what’s left of the real Stanhope Jewels. Good jewels in good settings. But they’re just the smallest and least impressive of the lot, so no one bothered taking them. With the second lot, I’m guessing that Baxter, or one of the jewelers at the Columbia, got saddled with some very hot stones that they couldn’t move. So, they swapped out the real jewels in the Faberge-caliber settings for the hot rocks, and sold the very cold jewels without all the hassle associated with moving stolen jewels. The third pile is no doubt Baxter swapping out crappy stones for the Stanhope Jewels, because, well, he CAN! I mean, the only people who look closely at that jewelry are either giddy college girls who wouldn’t know the Blue Hope Diamond from a glass doorknob, or jewelers who work for him.”

“And the crappy glass?”

“My guess is that that was the various Homecoming Queens and their courts,” Nick shrugged. “Hey, they were just graduating college- they needed the money!”

Vivian fulminated over that for a moment, and then turned that anger on her brother. “JAY-DEE! What were you doing there?”

“Saving my little sister?” he answered without contrition.

“I was supposed to pull that off by myself!”

“Hey, I only stepped in after Kid Galoshes had you on the ropes,” JD said sternly. “And besides, I was there on my own business.”

“The Stanhope Jewels were MY Score!” Viv yelled.

“I wasn’t after the Stanhope Diamonds,” JD assured her. “After all, I have my own education to finance, now that JJ’s screwed the free ride for the rest of us.”

Then the door to the room burst open. “Then you’re going to have to get that education- IN PRISON!” Miss Champion proclaimed from the doorway, “REPENT, evil-doers, REPENT!”

“JAY-JAY!” Viv blared, “What were YOU doing there?”

“Jessie,” she corrected her sister with a giggle. “I was making sure that Kid Gala-has-been chased after JD, and not you. I mean really Viv, if I’d been after you for reals, you and your entire crew would be in jail. A big red VAN?”

“I was on a budget,” Viv grated out through bared teeth, “it was what I could afford.”

“Yeah, I could tell,” JD sneered. “Still, for a bunch of Thugs-R-Us™ rent-a-goons, they were very pro. They took a beating and kept coming back for more. Can you get me their names? I might want to use them on a job later, and good men at ‘Thugs-R-Us’ rates are hard to find.”

“Miss Champion?” Nick checked out Jessie’s outfit. “You DO know that there is a real ‘Miss Champion’ out there, don’t you?”

“YEAH, but she hasn’t operated in over 50 years!” Jessie pointed out. “She’s either dead, retired, or trapped in… the Phantom Zone!”

Waving all that aside, Viv asked her father, “So, even if most of it is crap, they are still diamonds! How much can I make off this?”

Nick pulled out a calculator, factored out the effects of the second pile stones being hot, the low comparative worth of the third pile stones, the costs of the operation, the costs of her equipment and paying back the money he’d fronted her, and came up with, “I can get one of my fences to cut you a break, and you should see… four thousand on this.”

“Four Thousand?” Viv squeaked, “You mean I just risked my life for a measly 4K?”

“Actually, for a first raid, that’s pretty good,” Nick said. “Hey, at least you came out ahead! And the fact that you sprang for PFGs for each of your men will do you a world of good later.” Viv gave out a whimper. “Sweetheart, that’s the part about supervillainy that civilians never really get: the killer overhead. They think that underground bases and huge death rays just pop out of nowhere.” Nick paused for a moment. “Okay, sometimes they DO, but only a fool goes in.”

Viv pouted, so Nick changed the subject. Turning to JD, he asked, “So, if you weren’t there for the Stanhope Diamonds, what were you there for?”

JD smirked at Viv and stood up. “While some people go for the big headlines, I just went for the money.” He pulled the helms of his redingote back and revealed two canvas secure transport bags, with the heavy metal tags containing the tracking RFID torn off. “These are bags of unmounted gems. I’m looking at 100K each, at least.”

Nick looked at the bags and said, “Ah, Son? You DO realize that we’re talking about the Columbia Jewelry Exchange, not Tiffany’s™ or Cartier’s™?” Nick dug through the bags and said, “I’m seeing a lot of really minor stones and chips. Odds are that these are stones they pried out from rinky-dink bits of jewelry they bought from various sources.”

“Why would they do that?” Viv asked.

“Honey, the fact of the matter is that the Jewelry business runs on Snob Appeal, Vanity and Sentimentality. In the 19^th Century, the DeBeers Company™ wrangled a near-monopoly on diamond production in South Africa, and then launched the most mind-bogglingly successful Ad campaign that convinced most of the western world that,

“A> Diamonds are the jewel of Royalty,

“B> Diamonds are THE stone for wedding and engagement rings,

“C> Diamond are rare, and

“D> Diamonds are somehow the most precious of gems.

“None of which were strictly so before DeBeers went to work. But, even with the fact that a big chunk of wedding and engagement rings bought will eventually be buried with their owners, there are still tons of cheap diamonds floating around. So jewelers buy up loose bits of junk jewelry cheap from various sources, like pawn shops, lost & founds, garbage companies –trash haulers are always finding lost bits of jewelry, it’s almost routine- police departments-”

“The Cops?”

“You’d be amazed at how many people just forget about the stuff that’s held for Evidence and never returned,” JD said.

Nick nodded. “Again, it’s almost routine. The thing is, the jewelry companies are very good at lowballing these sources, and they not only make a good profit on buying the crap cheap, refitting it, and selling it dear to the suckers, but they’re ensuring their base markets by reducing the supply, to keep demand high.”

Viv blinked and said, “I never realized how crooked honest people are.”

“Honey,” Nick said to his eldest daughter, “the sad simple fact of the matter is that most people are just no damn good. Why do you think that supervillains outnumber superheroes 20-to-1?”

“Okay, that’s real profound, Dad,” JD cut in, “but how much do you think I can get for all this? I mean, it’s two bags of stones!”

Nick evaluated the stones in his hand, calculated furiously for a moment and said, “I’d say between 30 and 50 grand.”

“Thirty grand?” JD sat back and digested that. He was still in high school, but he knew that the fences prided themselves on low-balling their sources. “Okay, that’s not bad, but still, it’ll barely pay for my first year at Yale.”

“You have time,” Nick assured his son. More and more, he liked the effect the ‘pay your own way’ notion that JJ had seeded was having on his children. He had every confidence that he and Mara would be able to keep it up with Vic, Bart and Asha. Get them thinking like real operators, while they’re young. “And what about you, Jessie?”

With a triumphant smirk, Jessie stood up and fiddled with her cape. She reached around and extracted a padded cloth harness that fit against her back with large rectangular pouches. She reached into one of the pouches and pulled out a gold bar. “Four hundred troy ounces of bullion-grade gold.” She produced 11 more bars and laid them on the table. “Twelve bars of 400 troy oz. gold, at a median market price of $1500 American per ounce, for a ballpark value of 7 Million dollars.” Jessie sat back and basked in the stunned looks of her two older siblings.

“WHAT?” Viv bleated, “Was? A mid-rank schlock-shop like COLUMBIA? Doing with Seven Million Dollars in Gold Bullion?”

Through a wide grin, Jessie explained, “Columbia owns its own gold reclamation furnace, and takes in outside re-smelting contracts from firms in the region.”

Nick gave an ‘ah’ of understanding but, JD and Vivian were obviously still in the dark. “It’s basically the metallic version of the cheap jewels scam, for the same reasons,” Nick explained. “There’s a ton of cheap gold jewelry out there, and the same sources are just as good at sleazing gold out of the pigeons as diamonds.”

“AND, there’s that scam where chumps mail in gold, and expect complete strangers to give them their money’s worth,” JD pointed out.

“Exactly. But unlike diamonds, which are pretty static, you can melt down and re-smelt cheap alloys, gold plating, and ugly designs, and when it’s over, it’s just bullion-grade gold!” But then Nick paused, considered and asked, “But places that re-smelt like the Columbia prefer to not have lots of finished gold lying around. Why did they have seven MILLION dollars worth of gold in their vault?”

“When I learned that Viv was targeting the Columbia, I did some research-”

“You knew that I was going to hit the Columbia?” Viv asked, aghast.

“We all did,” Nick, Jessie and JD all said in perfect unison.

“Anyway, when I learned that the Columbia did gold reclamation on spec, I dropped 30 grand on Electric Eddie to hack into their system,” Jessie continued. “He fiddled with their re-smelt commitment and Secure Transport pick-up schedules, and they wound up with a very heavy re-smelt list, and no Brinks™ to pick it up. So, when ‘Miss Scarlet’ hit, they were holding a LOT more gold than usual.”

“Okay, good plan,” Nick nodded. “And how did you get into the Columbia’s Secure Safe? SOP for very secure safes like that is to go into automatic 2-hour lockdown when the alarms go off, and the power being taken off-line wouldn’t affect that in the least.”

“I didn’t,” Jessie said. “When Electric Eddie was fiddling their schedules, he also arranged for the Secure Safe to be filled with some heavy commitment jewelry. The gold was kept in a holding locker in the same room. And I got into that, no problem. As a matter of fact, there were 8 more bars in the locker, but I didn’t have any way of carrying them out.”

“Then why didn’t you bring a purse or something?”

“Hey the entire point of this outfit is that the cape would hide the harness,” Jessie pointed out. “It’s a version of the old ‘Nobody pats down a Cop when he exits the scene of a crime’ gag. That, and with this outfit, nobody thinks that I’m carrying anything. Heck, I barely have room for my keys in this! So, I was able to trip up Kid Golly-gee without him taking a poke at me.”

“Good call, Jess,” JD said, massaging his chin. “The Kid may not have much going on between his ears, but he has some serious chops in the ass-kicking department.”

“Wait a minute!” Viv interrupted, “How much does 400 troy ounces weigh in normal pounds?”

“Oh, about 27 and a half pounds.”

Vivian did some quick calculations. “For 12 bars, that’s over 300 pounds! Okay, that Paragon Potion thing made you stronger than you have any real right to be, but still, you can only lift 700 pounds! But you were walking around with 300 pounds strapped to your back like it was nothing! And you were jumping around, trying to make out like you were flying! With 300 pounds on your back! You can’t levitate that much, and you didn’t use your freako proto-spirit to do it, ‘cause you’d have glowed if you had!”

Jessie nodded and undid something around her waist. She reached around again and pulled out the Iron Ox power harness. She placed the super-strength inducing power item on the table. “Hey!” Viv yipped, “That’s MINE!”

“I borrowed it,” Jessie said defensively. “See? I’m returning it.”

Viv started to say something, but JD cut her off, saying “I thought that you were going to return that to Iron Ox for the bragging rights.”

“I’m working on it,” Viv pouted.

“And soon,” Nick added. “The M5 is having a hard time covering the lack of their brick.”

“I’m working on it,” Viv repeated, giving the impression that coming up with a rationale for a high school sophomore to return a superhero’s power talisman was harder than she thought.

“So, Dad,” Jessie stepped into cover Viv’s pout, “yeah, it’s 7 Mil in gold, but what do I DO with it? I mean, do I sell it and sock the money away in a savings account for college? Do I hold onto it as is, so I have something to fall back on in case something goes really wrong? Do I use it as collateral on a loan that I use for an investment? And what investment? I mean, I know jack about investing.”

Viv glowered at her new sister, but Nick just nodded. “Talk to your Gran’Pere. Gold is a very finicky field, and he’s been playing games with that Linz Riechstag bank gold for over 50 years. He not only knows the game and the rules, but he knows all the loopholes. Hell, he invented some of the loopholes! And you don’t have to worry about him trying to rip you off for your gold.” Nick paused, thought and added, “Don’t tell him I said that. He’s hard enough to live with as it is.”

Viv let out a disgusted sigh. “Oh well, at least Mom doesn’t have to worry about that bitch Dora Stanhope mucking around with her investments over in Franklin anymore. The news that the Stanhope Diamonds have been stolen will screw with her credit enough that she’ll have bigger fish to fry.”

“Not necessarily,” JD said with a tone that suggested that he wasn’t happy with it either. “Dora Stanhope doesn’t really want the diamonds; she wants money, without the interest that she’s getting on loans using the diamonds as collateral. Since the Columbia is responsible for the safety of the diamonds, their insurance will cover the appraised value of the diamonds. So, Miz Stanhope gets about 10 mil in cash, and that Baxter guy gets off scot-free for pilfering the stones AND the money he got for selling the rocks he pried out of their settings.”

Jessie gave Viv a snide grin. “I don’t think that Mom will be that happy to hear that you arranged for the woman who’s trying to muscle her out of the Franklin mall development to have a 10 million dollar shot in the arm.”

“DAAA-DEEEEE!”

As the armored fighting vehicle picked up speed, two energy weapon turrets popped up out of the carapace and played along the targeted area of the reinforced concrete wall. Within only a few seconds, the concrete was red hot. Only a few second before impact, another ray lanced out that froze that section over. Weakened by that intense sudden thermal differential, the section of wall cracked when the Messingite™ striking edge hit. The Raider backed up and charged again. It wasn’t as fast this time, as it hadn’t the opportunity to build up as much speed, but the real damage was done. The raider rolled into the Montclair Police Department Evidence Locker, leaving a large hole in the wall.

Four groups of five large metallic balls each rolled into the locker in the raider’s wake. They rolled around the area and viewed everything with ‘eyes’ that telescoped out on long flexible cables. Then, when they had found what they were looking for, they unfolded into robots that borrowed heavily from both the Star Wars prequels and the ‘Incredibles’ CGI movie. When automated lock-picking prods and brute-force combination wheels couldn’t open bays or lockers, laser cutting torches and cryogenic sprays were used. But then a deep baritone voice said, “Damn, it’s hard to do a good ‘Stern Sentinel of Justice’ entrance when there’s no one really there to hear it.”

“Then we just get down to it, and get it over!” Major Speed pulled rank on Captain Intrepid and zipped past him to body-check one of the robots off its feet. Then Guiding Light winged her way past him to flood the chamber with a burst of light at a bandwidth that was known to play hob with electronic optic pickups. Moonbeam gave Maxiwoman a gravitic assist as the super-strong woman picked up one side of the armored fighting vehicle. The fighting vehicle retaliated by trying to blast Major Speed with the freezing ray. The Silver Sorceress covered Mr. Fixit as he discombobulated the targeting turret. Captain Intrepid got in on the action, and between him and Maxiwoman, they made short work of the robots. Then Mr. Fixit finished fiddling with a truncated cone on the cover of the fighting vehicle, and it went silent.

“They’re all remote-control drones,” Mr. Fixit explained. “Even the armored fighting vehicle.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Maxiwoman said. ‘Why would anyone deploy State of the Art combat drones to raid a mainline police station evidence locker? Nothing they’ve got here would pay for the ball-drones, let alone that rammer!”

“Unless they didn’t!” Guiding Light spread her wings and her halo glowed brightly. She blasted open the largest section of one of the ball drones. It was just an empty padded cavity with straps anchored to the sides. “Poo! It’s just a cargo section. I was thinking that they were playing the ‘Trojan Horse’ scam, and the idea was that the Police would keep these here. When all the hubbub died down, they’d come out of hidden nooks or something and raid one of the evidence lockers with something expensive in it!”

“Just your luck, GL,” the Silver Sorceress said with a dry lilt, “this was planned by the only evil technical genius who doesn’t read comics.”

“Even so, I’d appreciate it if you got this junk out of the station,” Costigan, the evidence locker honcho, said. “There’s no way that those energy weapons were powered by conventional batteries, and there are defense lawyers who’d climb all over exposing poor helpless hardened criminals to possibly toxic exotic power sources.”

“Let’s take this back to HQ,” Mr. Fixit said as he ran the rotating optics of his headpiece over the truncated cone. “If nothing else, I’d love to take that freeze ray apart and figure out how it works.”

“Why?” Major Speed asked. “It’s just a freeze ray.”

“Think about that for a second: ‘it’s a freeze ray’. Rays are excesses of energy; Cold is an absence of energy. How can that work?”

Later that night, in Mr. Fixit’s garage/workshop at the Sensational Seven’s brand-spanking-new HQ, the more intact ball-drones flickered to life. Eyestalks snaked out of the ‘wreckage’ and peered around. Four of the drones pulled themselves together to form two more or less operant drones. Then the drones cut the Denver Boots from the armored fighting vehicle’s wheels and rolled it out of the Faraday cage. The fighting vehicle twitched and a slender periscope shot up and looked around. Then two beams that appeared to be bracing for the ram swung up. Then two bars were removed from other places on the vehicle by the drones, and placed as crossbars on the beams. When the crossbars were secure, the drones hooked the framework up to the garage’s power supply. The fighting vehicle recharged its battery to full capacity, and then the frames blazed with power. A circle appeared in the air in front of the ‘square’.

Then a woman a long draping red overcoat and a wide-brimmed red hat, walked in holding an elaborate carbine made of several thin rotating drums, with a triple-barrel. Her features were hidden by a red scarf mask and a set of high-tech goggles. Slung on her right shoulder she carried a second energy weapon. Minions in overalls of the same shade of red, carrying polearms, followed. Exploiting the fact that while the workshop had heavy security to prevent entry, there was almost nothing to prevent exit, the squad entered the darkened main area of the S7’s HQ. On hand signals, the squad broke up into three groups, and started searching the area.

Then the lights snapped on! “That’s quite enough… Carmen Sandiego?” The Sensational Seven stood near the entrance to the Private area of the headquarters, Guiding Light up on high to provide air support, Maxiwoman and Moonbeam hovering just below her ready to strike, Major Speed braced and ready to charge into action, Mr. Fixit and the Silver Sorceress holding back to respond to whatever unexpected ploy the intruders might pull, and Captain Intrepid out front, covering the others.

“I am NOT Carmen Sandiego!” the leader objected, shifting her carbine to her off hand, “I am… Miss Scarlet!”

“Shouldn’t you be in the Conservatory with the Candlestick?” Moonbeam quipped.

“Did you honestly think that you could sneak into our headquarters without us detecting the massive energy signature in the garage?” Mr. Fixit snapped, “What did you hope to accomplish?”

“Actually, what I hoped to accomplish… was just this,” Miss Scarlet purred. With that, she brought up her backup weapon and fired it at Guiding Light. Guiding Light immediately parried, but she couldn’t prevent a darkish light from playing over her. Immediately the light in her halo dimmed, and she dropped. Maxiwoman barely managed to catch Guiding Light. But the second she did, Miss Scarlet shifted the beam to cover her, and both Maxiwoman and Guiding Light dropped onto Major Speed, who was taken by surprise. Then Moonbeam was knocked out of the air, though Captain Intrepid was quick enough to catch her. The Silver Sorceress quickly erected a protective barrier, but it did nothing to stop the power-neutralizing beam. She was quickly rendered impotent. So was Mr. Fixit, whose Multi-Component Utility Backpack froze in mid-configuration. Major Speed got out from under Maxiwoman and charged at Miss Scarlet. He was a bare five feet away from her when she played the neutralizing beam on him, and he stumbled into a painful roll, his legs unable to support the speed he was traveling at. He rolled to a stunned stop at Miss Scarlet’s feet. Captain Intrepid launched himself at Miss Scarlet, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the beam dropped him to the ground. “TAKE THEM,” Miss Scarlet ordered her goons with a gloat in her voice.

The thugs in red advanced on the heroes and had little problem. But when two of them came up on either side of Captain Intrepid, they got a nasty surprise. Just as they were about to take him, he reached out, grabbed them by their overalls and slammed them together with a crunch you could have heard across the room.

“oh crap,” Miss Scarlet said in a small voice. She dropped the neutralizing beam and switched over to her carbine. She managed to get off a concussive round just as Captain Intrepid was a few feet away from her, knocking him back. “Take the rest hostage!” she snapped.

“It looks like it’s time for ALL AMERICAN GIRL to save the day!” proclaimed a high girlish voice in a broad Western American accent that might have been taken for a Texan accent (if you’d never actually been to Texas). With a loud “Yeee-HAW!” a young blonde girl in a White Stetson with blue hatband spangled with white stars, red domino mask, red-and-white striped cape, blue long-sleeved double-breasted tunic with white stars on buttons, red gauntlets with white stars on the cuffs, red-and-white striped skirt, and red cowboy boots with white stars on the sides swung down from the mezzanine on a gold mesh lariat as the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ played. Looking at Miss Scarlet, she jeered, “Yer all in RED? Whut are you, some kinda COMMIE?”

Miss Scarlet only answered with a blast from her carbine, which All-American Girl easily jumped out of the way of. But the blast accidentally pegged Captain Intrepid, who’d been advancing, knocking him back- again. “GET THEM!” Miss Scarlet snarled, as her trademark billowing clouds of red mist filled the area. This led to a lot of scrambling about, as Miss Scarlet and her minions could see through the mist with their special goggles, but no one else could. Several very confusing (and occasionally painful) minutes later, there was a crash, and the red mist cleared.

Mr. Fixit staggered to the door to the garage. “She tore through the garage door with that rammer of hers!”

“HAH!” All-American Girl exulted, “Ran her right off!”

“Who ARE you, and what are you doing here?” Maxiwoman demanded.

Why, I’m ALLAMERICANGIRL! I came here to see if I could help you in yer crusade for Truth, Justice and the AMERICAN Way! Mebbe we could call ourselves the ‘Amazing Eight!”

The Sensational Seven glowered at her. Completely non-contrite, the girl demanded, “Whut ARE yew? A bunch’a COMMIES?”

“Well?” Vivian ‘Miss Scarlet’ Harrow asked her Uncle Luke, “Why won’t they work? My ‘neutralizing beam’ was just a colored beam to cover up the fact that I turned their switches off with my PK!”

Luke Harrow looked up from examining the Silver Sorceress’ gaudy amulet, and said, “Because, these are only the receivers and control units.”

“What?”

Luke waved at Mr. Fixit’s helmet, Guiding Light’s bracelets, Maxiwoman’s shoulder pads, Major Speed’s belt, and the disk that had been on Moonbeam’s back. “The major effect-generating components for their power sets were somewhere else, probably so they’d be powered without all the drawbacks of carrying the power supply with them. These just anchor those effects to the operators, and allow the operators to control the effects. No, Major Speed’s belt does have major effect-generating components, but then of the six units, his is the only one that directly affects him.”

“What about Maxiwoman?” Viv asked, “Those 1980’s retread fashion-don’ts made her super-strong and almost invulnerable!”

Luke shook his head. “No, they create a force field around her that protects her, and I’m guessing some link in her gauntlets lets her direct the force field as to mimic super-strength.”

Then ALL AMERICAN GIRL entered Dr. Lucifer’s lab carrying a gym bag. “Hey, Unk! So, are you still in the market for some slightly used power items of dubious provenance?”

“JAY-JAY!” Viv snapped, “The Senseless Seven’s power junk was MY SCORE!”

“Jessie,” she corrected her sister, “And I didn’t horn in on your score. I was after something different. _I_ got… Master Control’s master control unit,” she pulled a clunky black helmet from the gym bag, “Starblast’s power gauntlets,” she produced a pair of gaudy gold-tone metallic gloves, “the Brutalizer’s power harness,” a rough-wrought black metal breastplate, “Dr. Swift’s speed-belt,” a large belt that was much like Major Speed’s with the inclusion of a bulky ‘fanny pack’, “Madam Maloccio’s solid light hologram projector and GravMaster’s Gravitic Flux whatever-the-hell-he-called-it.” She produced the ‘buckler’ that was the real source of GravMaster’s power.

“Where’d you get all these?” Nick Harrow asked his younger daughter.

“NO,” his older daughter corrected him, “what were you doing there? I only took you along on that scouting mission to the S7 fleabag to keep them busy while I examined their power junk and security systems with my ESP!”

“Yeah, and it’s a good thing you took me along,” Jessie said. “’Cause I picked up on something that could have completely screwed your mission- they had ways of covering their asses, if anything happened to their power item.”

“Oh?” Viv hooted, half in skepticism and half in worry that her plan had been seriously flawed. “What?”

“They had backups,” Jessie pointed at the items she’d placed on the table. “These are the originals that Mr. Swipesit used to build that stuff. They’re also the backups they had, in case anything went wrong with their regular gear. And, since you can’t go running to a secure locker when the sh-er, grit is hitting the fan, they had these stashed in hidden niches around their main area, where they could get to them fast in a hurry. Their SOP was that when that happened, they’d kill the lights, and Captain Intrepid or whoever else was still functional would cover for them. I sort of doubt that they expected for ALL their wubbies to go fritz all at once. That’s why I scattered your men all around, the way I did, so the Seven could go for their backups.”

“WHY?” Viv demanded, “So they could rip my guys apart?”

“No, so Captain Intrepid wouldn’t rip your guys apart,” Jessie said, holding her ground. “Hey, he didn’t know that it was just a ripoff; as far as he knew, he was tactically alone, facing off against possibly lethal opponents, including one with a BFG, and his flight and force field rigs were down. He was about to take off the kid gloves, and you know that gets nasty when bricks are involved. My getting involved was probably the only thing that kept some of your guys from being red splotches on the wall. So, I showed up and gave the Six Stooges an opening, so he defaulted to covering for them.”

“Yeah, but you really needed them loose, so they’d get their backups out of wherever they had them hid, so you could swipe them,” Viv countered.

“Hey, it worked out for your guys too,” Jessie shot back. “As it was, your guys would have had to tear those things off the Seven, and it could have gotten very ugly. Worse, it would have taken time. My way, when the Seven got loose, the first thing they did was get shuck of their dud gimmicks on the run. Your guys spotted that, picked up the gear and got. So, you were able to get out with what you wanted and the Seven wasn’t able to really DO anything while your red mist was up.”

Seeing that it was time to step in before it got nasty between the two, Nick cut in and said, “Well done, both of you. So! Luke! What’s your take on these?”

“Well, I haven’t examined Mr. Fixit’s unit- that one’s gonna be a pip!- or Guiding Light’s, but from what I’ve seen of the units I’ve looked at, I’d say they’re all some variant of ‘Dyna-Bud’ technology.”

“Dyna- BUD?” Vivian and Jessie said in unison.

“Basically, you take a functioning dynamorph and ‘bud’ it off into a receptacle,” Luke explained. “You get a second unit that has that dynamorph’s properties, but they’re usually noticeably weaker than the original, and the source dynamorph is also weakened.”

“Yeah, but it’s still a dynamorph!” Vivian pointed out.

“Viv, I may be a Criminal Scientist, but I’m still a Scientist, first and foremost!” Luke said. “When I sent you after the Sensational Seven, I was hoping that you’d bring back some new technology that Mr. Fixit was using their operations to research and perfect. Instead it’s an… interesting… application of an old trick. Mad Scientists have been messing around with dynamorphs since the 1940s. The real problem is the base dynamorphs. We have no idea what the HELL they really ARE! How can we perfect a new dynamorph based technology, if we don’t know what the base dynamic of it all IS? Dr. Diabolik has been doing GREAT things with Lift Beacons to get out of the gravity well, but still… he has to either find or bud off a dynamorph to make a lift beacon in the first place.” Luke stopped short, looked around the room, wilted and said in a flat voice, “Sorry. Rant Over.”

Viv let out a muted whine and said, “Well… what about Major Speed’s belt? I mean, you said that had some really interesting stuff, ‘cause it directly affected him, right? Come ON! Okay, you let me use that obsolete ram tank and the drones, but my guys still have to get PAID! They did a great job, but I can’t afford to pay them out of my own pocket!”

“Viv, I’ll cover your minion’s paychecks,” Luke said. “But as for paying anything for these,” he held up the power items, “they’re only half- if that- of the technology. Sorry, Sweetheart, but paying anything for these as is would be charity.”

“And the whole point of me going out as Miss Scarlet is to prove that I don’t need charity,” Viv grumped.

“Well…” Viv grasped for some point of value for her efforts that didn’t devolve into parental or avuncular charity, “what about the Seven? Daddy, you said that the Seven were poaching on the M5’s turf, and they might displace the Five-”

“YES,” Nick cut her off, “due largely to the fact that the Five don’t have their BRICK active, who they would have, if you gave him back his power talisman, like you said you would!”

“I’m WORKING on it!”

“And while she’s working on that, Unk, is there any chance that you could ‘bud off’ Dr. Swift’s speed thingie for me?” Jessie asked. “I mean, there’s all sorts of cool stuff you can do with super-speed!”

“Like break your neck,” Nick said sternly. “Even with your faux-Exemplar durability and reflexes, learning how to do the ‘speedster’ thing is very tricky, very dangerous- and not exactly conducive to maintaining a secret identity.

“Besides, your best move with those things is to turn them over to the Syndicate, so they can be returned to their owners,” Nick went on. “Jessie, you’re never too young to start racking up points with the Syndicate. Honey, there are worse things in this life than rotting in jail because no one can be bothered to break you out; but it’s a short list.”

“Also, you’re supposed to return those things in decent working order,” Luke said as he poked at GravMaster’s buckler. “Like I said, budding off something from a dynamorph degrades it. And the degradation escalates with each iteration of the bud. It’s not so bad with the seed dynamorph, but when you’re talking about a copy of a copy of a copy, well… why bother? And the effect is even more pronounced when you’re budding off a dyna-morph embedded in an inanimate object. Hey, there’s a reason why ‘Mad Scientists’ are always kidnapping superheroes and strapping them to slabs.”

“It might be one thing, if we had Fixit’s power source,” Luke said with a sigh. “He’s got some seriously interesting ideas in the S7’s gear, but without the power source or the broadcast gear, I’d just be guessing.”

“Well then, it’s a good thing that I didn’t decide to stay in and watch the Rangers game!” came a voice near the lab’s freight elevator.

“Jay-Dee!” Vivian paused, “What’s THAT?”

John Dillinger ‘JD’ Harrow was standing next to the freight elevator with a wheeled derrick that had two large, odd and presumably heavy objects dangling by thick chains. He was wearing his ‘Phantom Highwayman’ rig, only with the featureless mask off, with the tricorn hat pushed back on his head. “Well, when I heard about Viv going into the new superdupes’ HQ-”

“Why do I bother trying to maintain Security?” Viv asked rhetorically.

“Is it OUR fault that you leave your notes and memos where Asha can find them?” Jessie asked, just as rhetorically.

JD cleared his throat and resumed, “When I heard about Viv raiding the S7, I decided to make a little money of my own. I heard that Mr. Fixit had a SOTA lab with all the bells and whistles. I figured that I’d break in while Viv and Jessie were setting off all the alarms-”

“You knew that I’d go in too?” Jessie asked.

JD just shared a ‘yeah, we all knew you would’ look with Nick and Luke. “While the alarms were going off, and I’d just rip off everything of value in his lab that wasn’t nailed down and welded tight.”

“Okay,” Nick prompted his son, “And what are those?”

“THIS,” JD prodded the medicine-ball sized, white ceramic object with the eight bulging sections and the dozens of contact points, “is the Power Source and Effects generator for the dinguses that Viv stole. And THIS,” he poked at the ring of eight volleyball-sized black spheres with flattened rings above and below the spheres, “is the broadcast array that Uncle Luke was just talking about.” Leaning forward with a big grin, JD added, “I just ripped off TWO bleeding edge prototypes AND crippled the Stupefied Seven in one fell swoop. And I just did it by keeping it simple and going for the gusto.”

“How’d you get it here?” Nick asked. “I mean, they each look like they weigh as much as an engine block.”

JD’s grin got even wider. “I stole Mr. Fixit’s tac-ship.”

“You stole the Rapidstriker?” Luke asked with classic Mad Science greed in his eyes. Or at least the set of his eyes.

“Well, as rapid as it gets when it’s loaded down with THESE little goodies.” He punched an ultra on his cellphone and sent a file to Luke’s phone. Luke looked at the manifest and gave a choked squeal of techno-lust.

JD gave his two sisters a big snide grin and gloated, “It looks like I just paid for Yale AND a Ferrari. Aaannnddd… does anyone dispute that I took First Prize for this race?”

Viv just glowered at Jessie and asked, “You’re not going to play the Stars and Stripes Forever, are you?”

Jessie pushed her cowgirl hat forward belligerently, stuck out her lower lip, and asked in her ‘All-American Girl’ voice, “Yew got a problem with the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’? Whut are yew, some kind’a COMMIE?”

“Ah, Benjamin Franklin University,” Nick Harrow sighed with appreciation. “Two hundred years of scholarship, learning, research and science!” He looked around at the long 5-story brickwork buildings with their high gabled roofs. The Quad was gaily decorated for the college’s big anniversary, and they’d gone to some length gussying up the scaffolding for the repairs on the Physical Sciences building, even putting decorations on the crane. “It almost makes me wish that I hadn’t gone to Yale!” he added with a smirk.

“Yale…” Luke, a staunch MIT man, huffed dismissively. He was inconspicuous but uncomfortable in makeup, glasses and a wig that made him visible. “What does Yale produce, except politicians, lawyers and thieves?”

“Really!” Nick huffed back. “That was uncalled for! ‘Politicians and Lawyers’… Really!”

“Now, now, boys, you’re both on hostile territory, so you can save that for the nonentities that graduated from this dump,” Juliet Harrow chided her sons. Juliet had used Jessie’s gift of the Paragon Potion, but she had taken the ‘Silver Fox’ option over a return to her youth or prime. Now she was a timeless beauty who wore her silver tresses with panache and made graceful concession to her years with a few laugh lines and crow’s feet, even as she exuded a sex appeal that complimented her age-earned panache and sophistication. Before, she had been redoubtable; now she was dangerous.

“What’s going on?” Asha asked, looking around curiously from her position of unaccustomed height, riding astride her father’s shoulders.

“It’s the school’s bicentennial,” Mara explained to her youngest. “That’s like this school’s 200^th birthday. What they’re celebrating is that 200 years ago today, they put up THAT statue of Benjamin Franklin,” she pointed at a bronze figure on a pedestal in the middle of the quad. The figure portrayed a familiar portly balding man in colonial era clothing, supporting himself with a walking stick. The statue was festooned with bright wide ribbons with ‘200 years’, ‘Happy Birthday, Ben!’ and other anniversary slogans on them. “That statue was put up on the day of the college’s official founding, and they chose Benjamin Franklin for the name of the school, because they thought that Dr. Franklin best embodied the spirit of scholarship, community and enterprise they wanted for their school.”

“That, and the Franklin name was still famous enough that it had snob appeal,” JD added with the snide cynicism of a teenager.

“Wasn’t there some noise in the newsblogs about that statue being very valuable?” Jessie asked from her position overseeing her two younger brothers.

“Why would a stupid old statue be valuable?” Bart asked with the brutal candor of a 9-year-old.

“Because it was sculpted by William Rush, who is considered the first great American sculptor,” Nick explained to his youngest son. “I hear that the college has taken out a 10-million-dollar insurance policy on it.”

“Isn’t Benjamin Franklin University losing money?” JD asked snidely.

“Why do you think they’re making such a fuss about establishing such a high price tag for an eminently replaceable ornament?” his father riposted.

Then there was an explosion, and a plume of smoke rose up from behind one of the long buildings. “Oh, it looks like the Science Building is going up in flames,” Nick commented calmly as most of the visitors hurried to go rubberneck.

“Ah, good old Potassium Chlorate…” Luke sighed nostalgically.

“I helped mix the bombs!” Vic said with pride. “Just enough tear gas to keep anyone from breathing in the toxic fumes!” Luke clapped an avuncular hand on his shoulder.

“Oh, look, something’s happening with that crane,” Juliet noted off-handedly. The crane, which was set up for the ongoing repairs to the Humanities building, swung out over the quad, placing the boom directly over the statue of Franklin. Then it dropped the massive hook. Riding down on the hook were four figures in red. When they touched down, the woman in the long red coat with matching wide-brimmed hat steadied the hook, and two of the men in red overalls adjusted the ‘congratulatory ribbons’ so they secured the statue more soundly, and the last one applied what looked like a caulking gun to the seal that affixed the statue to the base.

“Oh, they finessed a bunch of hoisting straps onto the statue disguised as celebration ribbons,” Mara said. “Nice touch!”

Then the young lady in red noticed something and brought a large multi-configuration energy weapon out from under her coat. “And here comes Security,” Nick drawled with a touch of amusement as four uniformed Campus Police officers ran up, guns drawn.

“Cue the red cloud,” Juliet said wryly. And indeed, a cloud of mist the exact same shade of red as the woman’s coat and her henchmen’s overalls billowed out, concealing the scene. There were the sounds of sharp discharges, and when the fog cleared, the Campus Police were on the ground.

“Does shooting Campus Police count as Cop Killing?” Jessie asked without concern.

“I’m not sure about the Campus part,” Nick admitted, “but it doesn’t count, if it’s a non-lethal weapon.”

Then seven colorful figures appeared in a reinforcing formation. “Stop cutting the foundation, Scarlet!” Mr. Fixit shouted over the sounds of his jetpack. “You shouldn’t have mocked us with that large red faux $200 bill on our door!”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” Nick and Luke said in near perfect chorus as they did bad ‘Clark Gable as Rhett Butler’ impressions.

Miss Scarlet’s trademark cloud billowed up to cover the scene again. As the Sensational Seven dived in, Juliet wondered, “How are they doing this? I thought that Vivian and Jessie stole both their power units and the backups.”

“I’m guessing that Fixit had bled off a major dynamorph bud, and he’s using that to power those mockup units,” Luke said, leaning forward with curiosity, studying the harnesses that the various members of the S7 were wearing. Well, when that red cloud let him. “But I’ll lay you odds that Fixit and his goons are more here to get their gimmicks back than stop a crime. Those things they’ve got on can’t be very effective. Heck, if I was ‘Major Speed’, I’d be very worried about what that was doing to my heart.”

Then there was a blare of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’, and All-American Girl leapt up on a garbage can, striped cape waving like a flag and said, “I gotcha now, you Commie Bitch! Now you face good ol’ AMERICAN JUSTICE!”

“Who IS that daring young paragon of Patriotic Virtue?” Mara gushed- as she held Jessie’s coat.

With a whoop, All-American Girl spun her golden lasso and leapt into the fog and fray. Following what happened was difficult, given the thick fog, but you got a rough idea of where people were by calls, cries of pain, and the constantly moving ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’. Asha let out a noise of confusion as she saw the statue that was the bone of contention lift out of the fog up to the crane, and then pulled back to the Humanities building and lowered. When the red cloud dissipated, the scene was dominated by All-American Girl bickering loudly with Mr. Fixit that Miss Scarlet was HER Arch-Enemy, and SHE had dibs!

Later, at the lounge in the lair complex under the Harrow homestead, Nick asked his eldest daughter, “So, where’s the statue?”

“Still in the Humanities building,” Viv answered, her trademark red coat over the back of her chair and her hat on the table in front of her. “In the Balkan Cooperative Activities room. I could leave it there and nobody’d find it for years!”

“Not bad,” Nick drawled, nodding. “Not a classic, but not bad.”

“You don’t look happy, dear,” Mara said.

“Three of my guys are in the hospital, and two more have broken arms or ribs!” Viv pouted.

“I thought you had equipped them with PFGs.”

“I did.”

A shared wince went around the room, with the sole exception of Asha. “Take the lesson, kids,” Nick said in his best patriarchal manner. “Superheroes get very nasty when you threaten their bottom line.”

“And I didn’t need you to get my guys out of there!” Vivian glowered at Jessie.

“I had good reasons,” was all that Jessie said.

“Still, with the standard 5% of the Insured Value from the Insurance Company, I can afford to get them the best off-the-books medical attention. The second the Insurance company wires the ransom to my iPayoff account, I’m sending the funds to their Rent-a-Thug HMO to cover everything! Five hundred Thou buys a LOT, and I can cover all my costs and still have enough for Whateley.” She finished with a triumphant smile.

Nick screwed up his face with an uncomfortable grimace. “aaahhh… Sorry, Hon, but on the way home, I called a few people, to see if I couldn’t find you a better deal. But it turns out that the report that the University bought a 10 million dollar policy was mostly PR.”

“WHAT?” Viv yelped.

“Oh, there was a policy,” Nick assured her. “But it was for only 4 Mil.”

Vivian hurriedly calculated 5% of 4 million and rattled off her expenses. After paying her henchmen’s medical bills, vehicle costs, bribes (“You got took, honey”) and other overhead, she only pulled down $50K. “Fifty K? I went through all of that for 50 grand? I can’t go to Whateley on only fifty thousand!”

It was a little tense around the table, so Mara changed the topic. “So, Johnny, what did you score?”

“Score?” Viv scowled at her brother, “What do you mean, ‘score’?”

“The second that Jessie slipped off for her turn as ‘All-American Girl’, JD went off on his own,” Juliet explained. “What was that about?”

JD nodded and left the room with a smirk on his face. When he came back, he still had the smirk on his face, his ‘Phantom Highwayman’ coat draped over his shoulders, the tricorn set on the back of his head, and a large but thin square crate. Setting it down on the table, he popped open the top and pulled out a painting. Turned around, it turned out to be a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. “Why it’s our ol’ buddy, Ben!”

“So, it’s a picture of Ben Franklin,” Vic scowled, disappointed. “So what?”

“It’s a picture of Ben Franklin, painted by Gilbert Stuart!” JD said with a grin. “I knew that the President of BFU had this in his outer office, and it was wired seven ways to Sunday-”

“But you also knew that Campus Police and Security would already have all their systems on five bells and a klaxon, so you just ghosted into his office and walked off with it?” Juliet asked with a note of approval in her voice.

“Not quite- I took a picture of the current president’s immediate predecessor from the halls and swapped that out for this,” JD said. “So, when they do spot the switch, they’ll think that it was an undergraduate prank or something.”

Vic made a rude noise. “AND? So it’s a painting by Gilbert Stuart. Who’s Gilbert Stuart?”

“Gilbert Stuart was a famous painter,” Nick said as he studied the portrait, looking for signs of forgery or copy. “He painted the portraits of a lot of the Founding Fathers. Most famously, he painted the official portrait of George Washington, which was the model for the picture used on the One Dollar bill.” Vic, Bart and Asha looked blankly at their father. “It’s worth a LOT of money,” he summed up.

“Yeah, I did it on the spur, so I’m not sure how much that bad boy’s worth,” JD said as he slouched down into a chair in an insolent pose with one leg over an arm and an arm draped over the back and shot a smug look at his sister.

“Why did you bother?” Viv snarled, “You’re already set for life!”

“Well, at least set for college,” JD allowed. “And why didn’t Warren Buffet quit after he made his first billion?” Then, seeing that his father was using a gPhone, JD asked, “So, how much is this worth?”

“Well, the Selfridge’s™ rating is $450,000 +/- 4%,” Nick read off. JD gave a triumphant ‘hey-yeah!’ “But the Blackmarket.com™ rating is $25,000, and I don’t know whether the University insured that or not, and even if they did, it would still only be $22,500.”

“What?” JD yipped, “Twenty-five measly GRAND? For a STUART?”

“Jay-Dee, you have to remember that the black market in stolen artwork has always been cutthroat, even by Black Market standards. Besides, that is a unique, by definition easily identifiable, and it has limited appeal outside the US. Son, it’s a painting that was in the office of a president of a third string college that’s going broke. Twenty-five large for five minutes’ work with no prep or overhead is damn good, even by supervillain standards.”

JD slumped down in his chair and grumped. Viv shot him a ‘nyeh!’ across the table. Then she shot a superior look at Jessie and said, “Well, it looks like someone’s bringing up the rear!”

“Yeah,” Jessie said through an arch grin as she got up. “Mom? Would you get your magic kit, and prep a preservation spell?” Mara blinked with surprise, but nodded. “Uncle Luke, would you get a laser cutter?”

About ten minutes later, as Mara was preparing her spell, Jessie came back carrying a large greenish box, somewhere in size between a banker’s box and a foot locker, by an odd circular device with a handle. She settled the box on the table with a surprisingly light thump. “What’s that?” Bart asked, being of an age where he could ask such things without losing face.

“This is the Time Capsule which was stashed in the base of Ben Franklin’s statue,” Jessie answered.

“A Time Capsule,” Juliet told Asha, (so that Bart and Vic could listen in), “is a box that people put things in and bury, so that people years, even centuries later, can find and dig them up. Every now and again, we find time capsules from the Ancient Greeks and Romans. People put things in these capsules that they think people in the future will find interesting, like journals and documents and personal pictures and so on.”That box is made of bronze, which doesn’t rust easily and the lid is sealed with lead, which keeps air out.”

“Yeah, which is why I asked Mom to prepare that Preservation Spell,” Jessie said as she disengaged the contraption from the top of the box. “This Time Capsule was put in the base of that statue during the Founding Ceremony, and it hasn’t seen the light of day in 200 years. I don’t want what I think is in there to hit fresh oxygen without something to keep it from, I don’t know… does cotton burst into flames?”

Mara nodded, and performed a short ritual, which consisted of lighting some candles on the lid, breaking a small hour glass and doodling a design in the fine red powder that spilled out. When Mara said she was finished and cleared the top of the lid, Luke cut the lead seal around the lid and carefully removed the very heavy lid. Peering inside, the Harrows saw the familiar sight of a folded American flag, with 13 stars in the Continental Circle showing. But there were dull silver disks sewn onto the stars. Gently shoving her immediate kin aside, Jessie pulled out a jeweler’s loupe and examined the coins intently. At first, she just made a few grunts, but then she yelled, “YES! SCORE!” at the top of her lungs. Then she returned to her study, grunted a couple more times, and yelled, “DOUBLE SCORE!” Then a couple of ‘YES!’es, a few more grunts and then, “TRIPLE SCORE!” Then she finished with a few more happy but not elated grunts. She finished off by giving a triumphant grin and pump of a fist, and yelled, “Score One For RESEARCH!”

“Good News?” Nick asked wryly.

“THESE,” Jessie jabbed her finger at two of the coins, “are 1794 Silver Dollars and this one is a 1795 Silver Dollar.”

There was a general reaction of ‘AND?’ from the collected family.

“Look, Congress only gave the government permission to mint coins in 1792, and 1794 was the first year they actually minted any. The rest of these,” she twirled a finger around the circled stars, “are from 1797, 1800, 1802, 1803, 1805 and 1806, and they’re worth maybe One or Two Million each-”

“One or Two? MILLION? Each?” Juliet repeated, boggled by the staggering amounts of money right at hand.

“But Silver Dollars from 1794 and 1795 are INCREDIBLY RARE and valuable!” Jessie continued. “They are the HOLY GRAIL of American Numismatism!”

“’Numismatism’ means ‘coin collecting’,” Juliet explained to Asha.

Jessie summed it up with, “A few years ago, a 1794 Silver Dollar in Good condition sold for $30 million.”

The entire family, from Asha to Mara, just stared wide-eyed at the boggling amount of wealth right in front of them. “Thirty? Million? Dollars?” Viv peeped, “For just one of them?”

“YEAH,” Nick cut through the shock, “but it’s a collectable, and collectables are always weird. ONE is invaluable; two is not-so-invaluable. Jayj- Jessie, how did you know about this?”

“Well, when Viv started researching the statue, there was a passing mention that there was a time capsule,” Jessie explained. “That that was IT. I knew that people put things like books and coins along with the family bibles and books of sermons and other junk, so I figured there might be a few things with real collectible value in there. So I went to the Montclair Historical Society and found a couple of newspapers from that time that covered the founding of the college. From what I picked up, a few of the college’s founders were HUGE Benjamin Franklin fan-boys-”

“Big Shock,” Luke sneered from the sidelines.

“-because the newspapers said that besides the usual junk, they put a collection of Benjamin Franklin’s private papers in there.”

The family around the table went silent with shock again. “Benjamin Franklin? Private Papers? Which haven’t been seen for Two Hundred Years?” Nick gasped. Asha gave a puzzled squeak.

“The second I read that, I just HAD to find out what was inside here!” Jessie rapped the side of the time capsule.

“What’s IN there?” Mara gasped, trying to peer through the red-white-and-blue cotton.

“Don’t know,” Jessie admitted. “The newspaper said that the stars were sewn with silver dollars struck in the year of Franklin’s death. But Ben died in 1791, and the first coins were struck in 1794, so I guessed that fake news was nothing new. I figured that if I was lucky, there’d be ONE of the 1794 dollars, and the rest would be 1806 or 1807 dollars, and it would still be a major score- but THREE?” she waved that aside. “But this is the icing on the cake. Let’s see what the cake looks like.”

Not trusting her hands to handle the 200-year-old cotton, Jessie gingerly levitated the flag out of the time capsule. Juliet provided some chemically neutral gloves for Jessie. “Let’s see… someone’s family bible… big shock… the college’s original charter… a vanity press book of sermons… why are there always books of sermons in these things? Huh, a piece of scrimshaw… Someone’s glasses… What I think is a novel I never heard of… Oh!” She pulled out a leather portfolio. “Ah! Yes, these must be the Franklin private papers they were talking about.” Jessie carefully looked through them. “Oh yeah, I could see a collector creaming in his jeans over these,” she gloated. Then her eyes went wide. “Oh. My. God.” She pulled out a broad but thin book bound in rich brown leather with ‘BF’ monogrammed on the cover. She opened it up, and flipped through the pages, her face rapt with awe and terror. Looking at her family, who were looking back at her with riveted curiosity, she said, “This. Is. Benjamin Franklin’s. Guest Book… From Philadelphia… during the Second Continental Congress…”

“You’re KIDDING!” Nick gasped, taking the book from her hands with his own psychokinesis. Looking through the book, he said, “Ben Franklin was the Wise Old Man of the Revolution! EVERYBODY visited Franklin when the Second Continental Congress was in session! Everybody! Yes, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Monroe, Hancock… and a bunch of people I don’t recognize, but probably still had a dozen books written about them. Holy Grail? This is the Ark of the Covenant of autograph hunters!”

“Y’know, if we could return this to them, it could solve BFU’s money problems for the next century!” JD pointed out. A look went around the table: ‘Nah, fuck ‘em,’ was the general consensus.

“So, Jessie,” Juliet said, pulling the conversation out of the benumbed haze it had fallen into, “this is your score. Do you have any ideas as to what you’re going to do with all this?”

Jessie sat back and thought intently for a moment. “Well… the flag, the coins and the guest book? They’re too big. Too much money, too many crazy people, too many things that could go seriously wrong. We’re talking collectors. We’ll keep them as family treasures.” Nick kicked back and regarded his daughter with a paternal pride that almost lit up the room, and Mara was almost as pleased. “Besides, the bragging rights are worth it. But the other Franklin papers?”

“Let me have them,” Nick said with a smug grin. “The potentials for creative chaos are… staggering! I’ll cut you in for a percentage of the take.”

“Yes, do,” Mara said. “They’ll keep him out of mischief.”

“Better,” Juliet said with a mother-to-mother tone, “it will keep him in profitable mischief.”

“Hey!” Vic piped up, “What about US?”

“Yeah!” Bart stood by his brother, united against the adult menace. “We helped, we get a share!”

“What did you two termites do?” Viv demanded, sour at being so completely eclipsed.

As one, Bart and Vic held up cell phones, which blared out ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’.

“I needed to get at the base after you removed the statue, before anyone saw what was in there,” Jessie explained. “Your red cloud was a perfect cover, but I needed that people thought that I was out there doing something besides emptying out the base. So I had those two running around, playing ‘the Stars and Stripes Forever’, so everyone would think that I was bopping around, kicking ass.”

“What?” Viv demanded. “There was a battle royal going on! They could have gotten killed!”

Jessie gave her sister a ‘oh, give me a break’ look. “It’s Vic and Bart! No matter what, they would have gotten into trouble. My way, they were getting into useful trouble!” Vic and Bart started badgering Jessie for some sort of pay, so she looked down into the time capsule and saw something. “Perfect!” She reached down and pulled out a handful of coins. “This is what I was expecting in the first place. Besides the big, important, significant stuff, people will throw stuff like handkerchiefs, and flowers, and loose change into these time capsules. But when you’re talking about loose change from a time capsule buried 200 years ago, it gets interesting.” She picked through the change and handed Vic and Bart a coin each.

“A Penny?” Vic asked with a note of ‘are you effing kidding me?’

“A penny from 1805!” Jessie pointed out. “And it’s in… reasonable… condition. Like I said, pocket change. But this is pocket change worth…”

“1805 copper ‘seated Liberty’ penny in used condition,” JD read off from his own gPhone, “there’s an asking price on EBay for $14,700.”

“Fourteen GRAND?” Vic and Bart chorused, bright-eyed. Seeing the potentials for disaster in giving those two access to that kind of money, Mara stepped in and arranged for both of them to get one of the Franklin documents each, to keep and eventually sell to fund either their educations or finance a ‘business opportunity’ (what kind of business, she left unsaid), and three coins from the time capsule; one to keep in a case for bragging rights, one to eventually sell to finance their educations, and one to sell to finance… whatever.

“And what about ME?” Asha demanded with an adorably fierce scowl.

“Asha, this isn’t a family thing where everybody gets one,” Jessie explained. “This is a score, and I’m paying my minions.”

“I AM NOT A MINION!” Vic roared.

“Then I don’t have to pay you?” Jessie snatched the coin from his hand.

“Yes, you have to pay me!” Vic yelled, snatching the coin back. “I’m an Independent Sub-Contractor!” He pointed at Bart. “He’s MY minion.”

This, of course, instigated an immediate brawl. As Vic and Bart tried to pummel each other into fraternal subjugation, Viv slumped and sneered at JD. “At least I outdid YOU. Twenty-two grand… HAH!”

Casually watching Bart and Vic to keep it from getting out of hand, Nick said, “I’m sorry, Viv, but you’re bringing up the rear on this one.”

“What?”

“Honey, money isn’t the final measure of an operation. JD saw an opportunity, jumped on it, and made the most of it. You had the advantages of the initiative and weeks of planning, but you blew a golden opportunity!”

“What golden opportunity?”

“Viv, you still have Iron Ox’s power harness! You could have just walked off with that statue in the middle of the night!”

******

“We have Rollers coming up on our 40!” ‘Danny’ reported. ‘Miss Scarlet’ didn’t have her minions answer to numbers or ‘theme’ names, as some supervillains did. She felt it depersonalized them more than it hid their identities. So she assigned them cover names, and they were Ace, Bill, Charley- through Hank.

Miss Scarlet adjusted her trademark red cloud so that it billowed over the wheeled security drones, and then started potting them with her BFG. “How’s the Vault coming, Eddie?”

“We have 127 out of 184 combinations cracked,” Eddie replied as he monitored the computerized codebreaker. “Another five minutes, but we can kiss a clean swipe goodbye.”

“That’s already blown,” she pointed out. “George, how’s our exit holding?”

“We have Armed Security on our back porch, and I’m getting chatter that we can expect someone from the White Hat community soon.”

“Three minutes would be better!” Miss Scarlet snapped to Eddie as she shifted her BFG, so that instead of blasting the ‘rollers’, it disrupted them. She used that setting to shut down the drones that crowded the choke point. That kept the ones behind them from simply advancing over the blasted wrecks and blocked the choke points.

But, she mused as she shut down the rest of the drones, it also blocked them from using that as a means of exit as well. Once she’d fried the rest, Miss Scarlet let her BFG cool a bit. Then she switched over and loaded a slug the size of a spray can. As the slug charged up to ‘critical risk’ levels, she checked her smartphone for the floorplans of the lab and the Engineer’s notes. She picked one option and marked a spot on one wall with an X in grease pencil. She stepped back, and just as the BFG was beginning its ‘critical overload’ alarm, let off a blast. The blast knocked a large hole in the wall. “Well, Eddie?” she asked as she, Bill and Danny knocked loose bits from the edge of the hole.

“I have Six… Five… Four… Three… Two… BINGO!” The combination released the final catch on the last restraining bolt, and the vault opened.

“Why is it so cold?” Bill asked. “I thought this was an Engineering place, not Biowar stuff!”

“It is,” Miss Scarlet said as she pulled a solenoid-driven pry-vice from her red overcoat. She went unerringly to one drawer and opened it with a bang and a crack. “These are next-step liquid crystal AI cores. Before their core imprinting is done, they have to remain frozen.” She used insulated tongs to lift a dull white box that suspiciously resembled a quart of ice cream from the drawer. She put the box in one of the thermal ‘lunch box’ containers they brought. She expertly removed nine more boxes, stashed them in containers and handed them off.

She finished, had the boys get ready and radioed, “Ace, we are GO.”

With that, Miss Scarlet led her men through the hole, bypassing three Security checkpoints, a small army of Security guards, and more RC hardpoints than she cared to think about. As they moved, she prepped another slug, but not to critical risk levels again, and blasted open a pair of heavy armored security doors.

Past those doors, they rushed across an open stretch of concrete that offered absolutely no cover. But then they were pinned down by a beam of bright green light from above. “HALT, EVIL-DOERS!” blared a high feminine voice. “Surrender, or face the power of the Green Beacon!” Floating maybe fifteen feet above the ground was a trim young girl in a shades-of-green bodysuit with white gloves, boots and belt. She had clear crystalline bracers on her wrists, with matching visor and belt buckle. Her straight green hair was cut in a ‘bowl’ pageboy with bangs, and her lips were painted green.

“’Halt Evildoers’?” Viv echoed hours later in the debrief room of the lair under the Harrow homestead. “’Surrender, or face the power of the Green Beacon’?”

“What are you complaining about?” Jessie asked as she pulled off her green polyester wig. “Thanks to me, Next Horizon’s™ Security put out an ‘answered’ bleat to their ‘Code Kent’ alert. Even so, Kid Galahad turned up. If I hadn’t been there, someone competent might have shown.”

“Yeah, the Kid seems to have decided that you’re his Catwoman, Sis,” JD said. “He was not happy that I got between him and your getaway vehicle.” He massaged the bruise on his chin.

“Oh, like you two were there to help me,” Viv grumped.

“What are you kvetching about?” Jessie demanded. “You got to blast me through a window!”

“What was I supposed to do, with you floating right in front of that window like a sitting duck?” Then a thought occurred to Viv. “That was deliberate. What were you up to?”

With a smirk, Jessie reached behind her and pulled out a thumb drive that Vivian recognized as the latest mass-market 3-Terabyte external data storage unit. “Next Horizon’s emergency backup disk for their superconductor experiments.”

JD gave Jessie a challenging grin and produced a shoebox-sized and shaped container. “The testing prototype for that very superconductor.”

Luke leaned over the table at the drive and prototype with ‘Mad Science’ greed showing through the eyeholes of his mask. “Annnddd… how much are you asking for these?”

Vivian scowled and gave out a low groan like an annoyed cat.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Nick asked his oldest daughter. “So JD and Jessie walked out of it with something. So what? Each of those frozen AI cores is worth an easy 50K on the Black Market, and you bagged NINE of them! That’s almost a half million. Even after operating expenses-”

Viv fell forward and buried her face in her crossed arms. “My fences are low-balling me,” she grumbled through her arms. “They say there was a mysterious rash of ‘break-ins’,” she made air quotes to denote the dubiousness of the claim, “in Silicon Valley, Denver, Cincinnati and Durham. Suddenly, AI cores are a drug on the market.”

Luke started to make a comment about not hearing anything about it, but he was shut down by a sharp look from his brother. It was a pathetically transparent example of fences driving down prices, once the object in question had been stolen.

“Still, you ran a very competent raid,” Nick said consolingly. “None of your men were hurt, let alone captured, you got in and out without any blood-shed and you accomplished your goal. And to be honest, you didn’t really need Jessie to show up; you could have handled Kid Galahad in your sleep.”

“Operating expenses ate up most of my profit,” Viv groused. “That new escape vehicle chewed up most of it.”

“Maybe, but it was money well spent,” Luke said. “A Vortexian™ VTOL airship with Stealth, Silent Running, a 6-missile rack, an AI auto-pilot and a screen generator for your trademark red mist. And you’re grooming a very good squad of henchmen, dear.”

“Yeah….” Viv picked up her head, still glowering. “But I’m not having any FUN.”

“hah?”

“I’m not having any FUN!” Viv repeated herself. “I mean, JD is having the time of his life running around being all spooky and grabbing everything valuable that isn’t welded to the floor. Jay-jay is having fun doing super-powered cosplay, and pulling off sneaky little grabs. You? You’re having fun as a criminal little league coach.”

“Pop Warner supervillainy…” JD mused.

“Pony League Smash & Grab!” Jessie countered.

JD was about to top that, when his father quashed that with a stern *ahem!*

“I mean, what’s the POINT of being a supervillain, if it’s just a JOB?” Viv asked rhetorically. “I don’t have a big social or political point to make, I can probably make just as much money psychically insider trading on the Stock Market if it’s just money, and as for power? Hell, I could get more tangible power by marrying into Old Money and running my husband’s political career for him. So, if I’m not having fun, then… what’s the point?”

“You’re worrying too much, Viv,” Luke said with an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “It just means that you haven’t found your ‘voice’ yet. Let’s face it, you have a feel for supervillainy. Like Nick said, even without JD and Jessie butting in, you could have handled Kid Galahad with one hand tied behind your back. You’re learning, you’re developing a good store of gear, and your men actually trust and respect you. It would be a shame if you punked out now. You just have to find out what works for YOU.

“Heck, I remember my first couple of operations as ‘Cyber-Spider’,” Luke let out a laugh of mixed amusement and embarrassment. “Not only were they absolute debacles, but even when I managed to pull it off, I was just so frustrated! It turned out that I was trying to copy Nick’s ‘sneaky master criminal’ act, instead of going with my strong suit- Trained Engineering Logic. HE thinks in oblique convoluted tangles that rely on completely baffling his opponents; I just problem-solve. Figure out what tool is needed for the job, and get it there.”

Nick gave his brother a glower for the less than flattering description of his operating technique, but let it slide. “Luke’s right about one thing, Hon: you just need to find your own special style. Once you’ve got that figured out, the rest will come. And you’re right about something too, Viv- if it ain’t fun, then why are you doing it? In the immortal words of Henry Gondorff: ‘There’s no sense in being a grifter, if it’s the same as being a citizen’.”

Viv listened to Madison whine on about what Emily said to Sarah, and it was all she could do to not throw the phone across the room. WHY was putting up with this? She didn’t CARE what was happening at that stupid medium-rate private school for the middle-management losers of tomorrow! Before she figured out how Jake had been playing her, this had been meat and drink to her. Now, it was like her old Barbie™ dolls; she rarely even looked at them. But she still had to go to school to keep her grades up so she wouldn’t be stuck with the retards when she went to Whateley next year.

Then she noticed something that was only slightly less annoying. Asha was standing there with her doll, Musette, clutched to her chest. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet slightly, and her eyes were sparkling. Which meant that she had some choice information she was looking to sell.

Viv thought about it for a moment. On one hand, Asha was even more annoying than Madison. On the other hand, she might actually have something useful to tell her. And she couldn’t just pick it out of her head; Asha was her sister, after all. Worse, Asha was sharp enough to know it, and would rat her out to Mom in a second. Besides, she could always get back to Madison; what Asha had might not stay fresh that long. “Madison? Gotta go. Family stuff. Lates!” she cut the connection and looked at Asha. “So, Squirt? What’s the deal?”

Viv didn’t need to probe Asha to hear the ‘I know something I won’t tell’ chant going on in her mind, the little spore was practically podcasting it. “Well, I was playing in Jay-jay’s new wagon-”

“Y’know, Mom doesn’t like it when you do that,” Viv reproved her annoying kid sister. “They still haven’t taken care of all of Akelarre’s security wards, and the old goat was so sneaky, she could have something really nasty still waiting to-”

Asha cut off her sister with a ‘who do you think you’re kidding?’ look. “Anyway, Jay-jay was working on a big heist, a big ol’ power jewel or somethin’, but Mom said she hadda put it off, ‘cause of some magical training thing, and Mom’s all ‘discipline this, discipline that’.”

A magical power jewel? “What kind of jewel? How big?” It was cutting it very close to poaching someone else’s score, but JJ had been one-upping her every step of the way ever since that stupid birthday fiasco. Viv needed to pull off something right under JJ’s nose, just to put the little weirdo back in her place. And a magical jewel was almost automatically worth 100 times more than a stone of the same size and clarity.

Asha mimed holding a stone between thumb and forefinger, about 3 inches apart. Woof! No wonder JJ was interested in it! If Viv could swipe that stone, not only could she sell it for enough to pay for Whateley and a sports car, but she’d be one up on JJ- where she belonged.

The negotiation was long and hard. Asha was only six years old, but by that very virtue, she regarded the world as hers by right, and that big people were getting in the way of it. Asha wanted to be able to use JJ’s wagon as a playhouse; she settled for Viv’s Barbies.

Asha also provided JJ’s notes and research on the Heart of Azdaja; well, it wasn’t like Viv was ever going to use that Barbie™ Dreamhouse or sports car again anyway…

Though losing the Fab Fashion Accessory Closet™ hurt…

JJ’s target was a super-sorcerer known as ‘the Gatewarden’.

Ugh. And Mom wondered why Viv passed on the whole magic scene.

At any rate, besides a doohickey called ‘the Key of Cinvat’, which was supposed to be major, the Gatewarden’s big deal was an amulet that had the ‘Heart of Azdaja’- Viv wondered what it was with all these big deal mythological beings were always leaving their eyes and hearts and hands and other parts of their anatomy lying around where mages could work them into amulets?- a large blue stone. The Gatewarden was supposed to be a super-sorcerer, which meant that he was powerful, but old school mages like Mom and Gran’Pere got up on their Old Money horses and looked down at him like he was nouveau riche or something.

He was probably pretty dishy- if you were into old guys who ran around in silk pajamas.

According to JJ’s notes, the Gatewarden got his nom de guerre because he styled himself as the guardian or ‘warden’ of some kind of mystical ‘gate’ that was under his house. The picture of the house looked like a backup location for an ‘Addams Family’ movie. Obviously that ‘key’ he had was supposed to be for that gate. Viv wasn’t sure how and she didn’t really want to know.

Nobody in the area messed with the Gatewarden. Viv wasn’t sure whether that was because he could tap into the power of the gate, or they didn’t want to keep him from standing guard on whatever was on the other side of that gate. So trying to take the key was stone-cold out.

But the Heart of Whoever was totes a whole other matter. The Heart buffed the Gatewarden’s ability to scry and sense and see through illusions, and all like that. Basically it was a Hi-Def, Max-Rez Directional Radar dish for magic. He wouldn’t be as kickass without it, but he could still do the job. Which struck Viv as cutting it a mite thin, but if JJ thought it was okay, and Mom agreed, so what?

The trick really was getting the Gatewarden off his turf with all the wards and protections and gargoyles and crap, where he was so badass. The bitch was going to be getting him out of that Munsters-knockoff house, while he was still carrying the Heart with him. Viv grinned evilly. Fortunately, if JJ’s notes were right, she wouldn’t have any problems with that. After all, how do you do something impossible?

“Are you sure about this?” Mr. Fixit asked as they peered around the gloom. The Halliwell Refuge for the Troubled had been a product of a very nasty period in the history of Mental Health provision in America, and it had an equally nasty local reputation. But then, most abandoned insane asylums do.

“No,” the Silver Sorceress admitted. “But if we’re going to find a whole unbound dynamorph to power your new Effects Generator, we’ve got to explore the possibilities.”

“Yeah,” Maxiwoman grunted with annoyance as she panned her flashlight across the dusty corridor. “No offense, Stan, I know you’re doing your best with what we got, but the rigs we’ve got now are very straining and still manage to be lame. I can barely punch through a cinderblock wall with this.”

“Right,” Captain Intrepid said. “But why are we doing the ‘Scooby-Doo’ shtick? What’s with the flashlights? Why don’t we just turn on the power?”

“According to our source, the mysterious lights have only been seen at this hour,” the Silver Sorceress answered. “A bunch of paranormal phenomena is photophobic- that is, it doesn’t like light- so looking for them during the daylight would be counterproductive.”

“Okay, then why am _I_ here?” Guiding Light asked nervously.

“Because if whatever the lights are are photophobic- and hostile- you’ll be our ace-in-the-hole,” Moonbeam explained.

“Besides, Major Speed is a-scared of the dark,” Maxiwoman sneered.

“And there’s the fact that the property management company wouldn’t give us permission to search the place,” the Silver Sorceress pointed out. “At least not unless we signed over all rights to anything we find,” she added sourly.

“You mean we’re here illegally?” Guiding Light squeaked.

“It will only be an issue if we find anything,” Maxiwoman assured her.

“And as for the darkness,” Mr. Fixit cut in, “this place hasn’t been maintained or repaired since that nasty incident in 1980. Between vandals, water damage and vermin-” he fixed a scuttling rat with the beam of his flashlight. “- if they turned on the power, odds are the most it would do is start an electrical fire.” He peered at the tricorder-like packet in his hand. “I’m getting a reading.”

“Is it Life- but not as we know it?” Captain Intrepid quipped.

Mr. Fixit put his flashlight away and focused on his ‘tricorder’. He swung the packet around and finally said, “From the input I’m getting from the sensors we planted as we searched, I’d say that the phenomenon was on the Third Floor, in the East Wing, and heading North… towards… the Chapel…”

“But…” Guiding Light whispered, “that’s… where the 1980 incident happened!”

Captain Intrepid took his cell phone from his ear. “Speed just called. He said he saw lights. Third Floor. East Wing. Heading North.” Through the half-mask of his hood, you could see his expression saying, ‘this is what we came here for.’

“Okay!” Moonbeam snapped. “But if 1960s bubblegum pop starts playing, I’m leaving with Shaggy and Scooby!”

Dim lights shone through the stained glass insets beside and built into the heavy wooden double doors to the infamous chapel. There was decades’ worth of graffiti everywhere and the ‘Police Scene’ tape was still there, but the lock and heavy chain lay at the sill of the doors.

Mr. Fixit pointed his ‘tricorder’ at the door. “It’s in there, whatever it is. Okay People, power up.” With a mental command, servos and components unfolded from his backpack and configured themselves into a high-tech instrument- though more slowly and stiffly than his old rig had. The others also hit their triggers, though they paid a lot more attention to the charge and time threshold indicators than they had with their old rigs.

“Hold it,” the Silver Sorceress said, pulling out her cell phone. “If it’s a dynamorph, we’re good- but if it’s not, we should have some backup ready.”

“You don’t mean HIM,” Guiding Light said with a tone of dismay.

“He brought us into this thing in the first place,” the Silver Sorceress reminded them.

“But he’s so obnoxious!” Maxiwoman groaned.

“If it’s supernatural, he brings the big guns into the fight,” Cap pointed out.

Mr. Fixit screwed up his face with inner conflict, clearly having a ‘being the leader stinks’ moment. Finally, he said in a cold, flat voice, “Make the call.”

The Silver Sorceress made the call, cut a deal, and 15 minutes later, she said, “He’s good.”

Mr. Fixit gave Captain Intrepid the go-ahead, and Cap kicked in the doors, knocking them off their hinges.

A soft eerie light filled the desecrated chapel, casting a creepy pall on the pews, regalia, icons- and decades old bloodstains. The light came from a pair of shiny brass oil lamps that hung in the air a good three feet off the floor.

“Is… it a dynamorph?” Guiding Light asked, poking her head in the door. “Or… something else?”

“How would _I_ know?” the Silver Sorceress asked back. “I only play a witch on TV!”

“It’s… reading… something,” Mr. Fixit admitted as he fiddled with the ‘tricorder’. “Just not bands or patterns that I’ve identified for dynamorphs.”

“Oh, this is just pathetic!” Maxiwoman groaned. She strode forward, her cape flowing behind her. She strutted up to the two lamps and sneered back at her confreres, “Big brave superheroes.” She gripped the lamps, one in each hand, and they came free. She turned and showed the lamps to the others with a ‘see, that wasn’t so hard’ smirk.

“Thanks Babe,” growled a low raspy male voice with a noticeable accent. “It would’a really screwed me over if I’d broken those free of their plat m’self. But since yer mundane, it worked like a charm.”

Maxiwoman looked through the doors and saw behind the Sensational Seven a group of men and women in oddly tricked out biker denims. And that was the last she saw of that, as the doors jumped back on their hinges and slammed shut in her face.

As the Sensational Seven (less one) turned, the speaker stepped forward from the pack with the mien of a leader. There were ten of them, six men and four women. Most of them wore biker’s mixture of leather and denim, with a lot of strapped on bits of plate armor. Most of them bared their arms, as to display a lot of ritual scars in the patterns of Futhark runes, and they’d just cut themselves on one or more of the runes, as they were bleeding. The bleeding did nothing to diminish the eager gleam of anticipated battle on their faces. Here and there, one or more of the runes, either on the scars or on the bits of armor glowed red. The sole exception was a tall strapping blonde woman in a leather duster over a leather halter top and leather trousers. She showed no scars, though her golden eyes burned with a different power.

The leader wore a ‘viking’ helmet with wings at the temple and a mask like face guard. One eye was covered by an eye patch. He wore a steel gauntlet on his right hand, which carried an over-elaborate battle axe. More red runes glowed with power on his eye patch, gauntlet, paldron, belt buckle, cross-belt, and on the blade of that axe. He also bled from the scars on his arms, and the joy of expected bloodshed shone in his eyes. He was as Metal as you could get without a grinding electric guitar riff. “Good Even,” he said through his grin, “I am SKJAEREN, the BLOOD VIKING, and these are my Berserks.”

“WHY are you telling us this?” the Silver Sorceress asked.

“Because it’s part of the ritual of combat to announce yourself to the gits yer gonna kill,” Skjaeren said. “And the working I’m to do now requires the blood of heroes. But heroes are thin on the ground at the best of times, so you media whores will have t’do.”

With a barbaric yawp of vicious glee, the Berserks launched themselves at the Seven. Moonbeam managed to spoil their opening move by decreasing their mass to the point where their leaps carried them up to the ceiling, where they hit their heads and came crashing to the ground. But that was pretty much it for the ‘Sensational’ Seven. Skjaeren cut into Captain Intrepid with his rune-axe. The blade sliced through the composite metal ‘I’ logo on the captain’s chest and cut through the body armor under it, but all the blood it raised on his chest was a gash. Which was more damage than the Cap had taken in years. But Cap toughed it out and punched Skjaeren-

-to almost no effect.

The rest of the Seven were taking it in the chops. The Berserks completely ignored the Silver Sorceress’ illusions (if not their PK effects), and the Sorceress found herself on the end of a nasty beating. She threw subtlety aside and concentrated on erecting a wall of PK force between her and the snarling heathen. With that brief respite, she pulled out her cell phone and hit speed dial. “GET HERE!” she snarled into the phone as the force wall was battered down.

As the Silver Sorceress put all of her focus into avoiding the Berserk trying to wail on her- for all his strength and speed, his technique was sloppy- a light erupted from the brooch that clipped her silvery hooded cloak shut. The beam of light ‘melted’ a hole in the very air, and a portal formed there. A spherical glass flask with a different color liquid in each hemisphere came out of the hole and broke among the combatants. The liquids bubbled and produced a thick vapor that stung the noses, eyes and throats of both sides.

Then, with a lusty roar, a very large man wearing what looked like a mix of football padding and combat armor (with his lower face protected by a breather mask) charged from the portal swinging a metal-capped baseball bat. He added the force of his charge into his swing as he brought the bat across the small of Skjaeren’s back.

Just behind him came a lithe woman in combat leathers with rows of tubes strapped to her biceps, thighs and shoulders, carrying an odd looking pistol in her left hand and a gleaming crystal dagger in the other. She also wore goggles and a breather mask. She aimed her pistol at the Berserk who was giving Moonbeam a drubbing and fired, sending a spray at the thug. He was covered by the mist. The vapor cleared, and immediately the man fell down giggling uncontrollably. She ‘broke’ the pistol like a breach-loading shotgun, removed two tubes and replaced them with two from her rows of reloads.

The blonde woman in leathers pushed her fellow Berserks aside and glowered at the pistoleer. There was an instant recognition, that they were both dynamic forceful women unafraid of violence. They were too much alike to be anything but the best of friends or the deadliest of enemies.

And there was no way those two were going to be friends.

Bringing up the rear, brandishing a staff with an elaborate clockwork instrument at the head, came an athletic man in his prime. Besides the same goggles and breather as the first two, he wore a long leather ‘lab coat’ with rows of tubes strapped to his shoulders, sleeves and thighs, as the woman did, and he had an ornate ‘badge’ pinned to his chest and a large square-cut red crystal dangled from a chain as a pendant. Looking around, taking the Berserks’ measure, he slipped a liquid filled tube from one of the loops on his sleeve and fit it into a niche on the clockwork doohickey. He brandished it, sending a roiling stream of strange unearthly energy at Skjaeren, who was still mixing it up with the big man.

Skjaeren turned to face him. The big man tried to take advantage of that, but he fell under five of the Berserks as they dog-piled on him.

After a tense facedown, the woman with the pistol holstered it, shifted the crystal dagger to her good hand and set herself. Then on some unspoken agreement, they launched themselves at each other.

The fight went on with the alchemist slugging it out with Skjaeren, the pistol-woman scrapping with the leather-blonde, the big man trying to get out from under the five Berserks, and the three remaining female Berserks keeping the Sensational Seven from getting their wind back. Maxiwoman was unable to join the fray, despite beating on the doors with fists that should have been able to batter down a cinder-block wall.

Finally, Skjaeren snapped, “ULRIKE! Enough of this shit! Get them and GO!”

The golden-eyed blonde broke from her catfight with the pistol-woman, letting the three female Berserks handle her. With a frustrated snarl, she stalked over to the doors to the chapel and kicked them in. She marched in on a startled Maxiwoman, and the doors shut behind them.

The man with the staff switched out tubes on his staff, and a snarling demonic appearing figure flowed out of the staff. The horrific figure oozed towards the doors of the desecrated chapel and tore them off their hinges. The blonde, Ulrike, stood there with the two lamps in her hands. Maxiwoman lay unconscious on the floor behind her. The vaporous fiend snatched the two lamps from Ulrike’s hands as she stood there startled.

But Skjaeren gave a blood-curdling scream, leapt and sundered the manifestation with his rune-axe. He picked up the lamps and tossed one to Ulrike. “Cha-cha! Go Long! Ulrike! Make Tracks!” Ulrike and one of the female Berserks charged down the hallway. Skjaeren cocked the lamp as though he was going to pass it like a football. But when he threw, the man with the staff gestured with it, and a light appeared around the lamp in midair. It floated to his hands, and his two companions put themselves between the Berserks and him. “This isn’t over, Gatewarden!” Skjaeren snarled. He pulled a knife from his belt and cut one of the scar-runes on his biceps. On that cue, the remaining Berserks did likewise, and then in formation, they ran down the hallway, disappearing as they ran.

The Gatewarden looked at the groggy Silver Sorceress and said, “I’ll get in touch with you as regards our payment. Aslan, Demetra, let’s go.” The three turned and retreated back into the portal.

A battered Guiding Light groaned, “We’re never gonna live this down…” *****

As they stepped through the Eastern Gate of the Bridge of Cinvat, Aslan asked the Gatewarden, “So, Boss, why did you send those losers, the Simpering Seven, to investigate that place?”

“Because it might have been a dynamorph,” the Gatewarden answered as he removed his mask. “The Halliwell Asylum’s dark reputation vastly exceeds its reality. The only reason that pile hasn’t been bulldozed is its remote location. There are the usual rumors as to Indian burial grounds, sites of massacres, strange beasts and so on, but they’re all just campfire stories. The readings that occurred near that place were probably flukes, but the odds were a lot better that it might be an eccentric dynamorph than anything supernatural.” He looked at the lamp in his hand. “Which begs the question: if Skjaeren arranged that to break these out of a plat, but didn’t want to risk it himself- then exactly what ARE these, and how did they establish that plat?”

“Plat?” Aslan asked as he shucked out of his armor. His English was very good for someone who spoke Turkish as his mother tongue, but English was always coming up with new words to spring on him.

“A ‘plat’ is an archaic term for a plan or design,” the Gravewarden answered. “In Metaphysical circles, it’s used as a term for the cyclical patterns that some ghosts and other repetitive phenomena develop. You can break the pattern and disrupt the plat, but it’s dangerous, and even more dangerous for the magically active.”

“Any idea who that tow-headed bitch ‘Ulrike’ was?” Demetra asked as she checked the nasty rends the subject of her question had torn in her armor. “I don’t remember her running with Skjaeren’s crew, and she’s a step above the rest of his Berserks.”

The Gatewarden pulled out his cell phone and went to an online resource that, among other things, had a ‘Mystic Offenders’ database. “I think I have a hit. Last Christmas, the California Crusaders raided the estate of a cult called ‘the Wolves of Ragnarok’. While the leader, Lykarax, and most of the rest of the cult were captured, one of the four who escaped was listed as ‘Ulrike’. She’s wanted in California for Grand Larceny, Aggravated Assault, Kidnapping and Fraud, and the Police departments there would like to ask her some pointed questions about some people who’ve disappeared without a trace. And Dimi? The Wolves of Ragnarok practiced a form of lycanthropy.”

Demetra just gave a stark smile. “So? That just means that I don’t have to hold back, the next time we run into each other.”

“No, it means that you’re going to the infirmary right NOW, and rub some essence of St. Hubert’s Root into each and every scratch you got.”

“You mean you’re not going to help me with the hard to reach places?” Demetra asked coquettishly.

“ah, No, I’m going to take this to the lab, and analyze it,” the Gatewarden hefted the lamp and carefully backed away. “Oh, and Aslan, don’t forget to do your acidity tests.”

“Can’t it wait until after a nice hot bath?”

“Aslan, we need to keep track of what those elixirs are doing to your metabolism,” the Gatewarden said, sounding far too much like a dentist reminding a patient to floss. “To do that, we need fresh data.”

As Demetra slinked off to the infirmary, Aslan wondered how sincere the Greek woman’s flirtations were. But either way, he thought that the Gatewarden was wise to play at being oblivious. Greek legends were rife with the horrors that Greek women visited on their men. And Turkish rumors were full of similar terrors.

After he finished stowing his armor in his locker, Aslan joined the Gatewarden in the main lab. The main lab was an awkward blend of SOTA, ‘steampunk’ and ancient technologies, with the main features being an ‘alembic’ which did strange things to the nasty critters that seemed to be magnetically drawn to the house, and three large brass ovens that the Russian called ‘athanors’. Aslan didn’t know what they did, and he didn’t really want to know what they did. All that he knew was that the Gatewarden captured vile critters, boiled them down, and made useful potions out of ifrit sent by Iblis to torment the world.

With a martyred grunt Aslan settled himself onto the couch. The Gatewarden affixed chemical exposure strips to various parts of his body. The hard part was waiting the two hours for the strips to be saturated. By that time, both the elixir he’d taken to bolster his strength and protect his body would have worn off- and so would the adrenaline that kept him from feeling the beating he’d taken. When the two hours were over, he’d NEED that hot bath- and a massive aspirin.

The Gatewarden clamped the lamp into a vise that was connected to an array of things that included lenses, mirrors, prisms, lights electrical and otherwise, and fiddled with it for the better part of an hour. Aslan was getting that sour taste in his mouth that said to him that the elixir was wearing off, and for another hour, he would wish to only be massively bored. Demetra had finished touching up her wounds and had changed. She was watching the Gatewarden with the muted curiosity of a lay person watching a trained professional do some esoteric work. Aslan was considering asking the Greek woman to get him a book or something to read to take his mind off it, when there was the sound of a crash from upstairs.

Aslan struggled to get off the couch but wound up falling on the floor instead. Which did not suit the bruises that suddenly were letting themselves be known. Demetra scrambled through the labs’ stores to find some crystal daggers. She fumbled around a bit, but managed to collect a fan of them in each hand. The Gatewarden was hurriedly trying to pull his leather longcoat on while still holding onto his staff and scrambling around for his badge at the same time. Then the door to the lab came crashing in.

The Gatewarden, Demetra and Aslan did their best to prepare themselves and faced-

-a wall of guns. “Guns?” the Gatewarden yelped, “Why would anyone who could get through our wards use Guns?”

“Well, you know us Amurricans,” Skjaeren sneered in a bad faux-American accent over the barrel of a Mac 10 machine pistol, “we just luuuve us our bang-bang toys.”

“Sides,” one of his Berserks, who was wielding a sawed-off shotgun, said in a genuine American voice, “if it works, it works.”

“Every mage worth his seal knows at least three anti-bullet spells,” the Gatewarden warned them, even as he delicately braced to put his badge between himself and a barrage of gunfire.

“And _I_ know a charm that will let prepared bullets slip right past those spells,” Skjaeren jeered back.

“ENOUGH of this!” Ulrike snarled as she shoved her way through the doorway past the Berserks. She had Mrs. Bezhukov in front of her in the classic hostage grip, with one arm twisted painfully behind her back. She had a prosaic snub-nose set against the woman’s jaw. “You can keep your toys, you can save Mrs. Hudson here, or you stay alive. But you can’t do all THREE.”

“You’re going to kill us all anyway, so we might as well take a few of you with us,” Demetra said, hefting a crystal blade.

“CHILL,” Skjaeren said. “Odin’s Blood, and women are always ragging on MEN! We’re not here to take the Gate or do a blood working. We’re just here for a simple rip-off. Ripper, Tommy-boy, look for the cultured crystals he’s been flogging. Cha-cha, Huldre, Foxy, find the balms and elixirs. Hoss, Torch, Slats, pack up the genies in their bottles; I got plans for those.”

The Berserks shoved Aslan, Demetra and the Gatewarden to separate corners of the lab, and they kicked the Key of Cinvat in the fourth corner. Skjaeren took the Heart of Azdaja from the Gatewarden with no small amount of personal satisfaction. They quickly ransacked the lab, though for some reason, Skjaeren was keen on them not doing any damage. When they had a crate of crystals, two crates of liquids, and three crates of the ‘genies’, Skjaeren told them they had enough. “No sense in slowin’ ourselves down with too much swag,” he said.

“Well then,” Tommy-boy said with a big nasty grin, “there’s no sense in leaving unfinished business.” He ratcheted a bullet into his Uzi and got set.

“NO,” Skjaeren said firmly. “We ain’t getting’ paid to off ‘em. And I got firm religious convictions against doing dirty work fer FREE.”

“Okay, but what about Little Miss Badass here?” Cha-cha asked, shoving her SMG into Demetra’s ribs. “She’s been giving Ulrike the evil eye ever since we walked in. And Ulrike’s been spoiling to finish that fight they started back at the nuthouse. Why not let ‘em finish it, and be done with it?”

“Cha-cha…” Ulrike purred through a feral grin, her amber eyes dancing. “I knew there was a reason I liked you…”

Demetra returned the feral grin, her near-black sloe eyes also merry with the thought of mayhem. “As you Americans say, ‘Bring It.’”

“We’re in the middle of a RAID!” Skjaren barked.

“C’mon, Skej, we got ‘em cold!” Hoss laughed. “Think about it, a good old-fashioned chick fight!”

“Better!” Torch said with a big grin, “A Macho Chick fight! All the crunch of a Guy fight and all the nasty of a Chick fight!”

“We’re in the MIDDLE of something here!”

“C’mon, Skjaeren!” Huldre jeered, “Let’s see if the Wolf-Bitch is good for more’n how she fills out her pants!”

Skjaeren was massively conflicted: on one hand, simple common sense said to get out fast without any fucking around. On the other hand, sometimes you got to give the dogs their bones, or they get snappish. And, well, he wouldn’t have gotten into this whole scene if this sort of thing didn’t appeal to him on a primal level. “All Right! Handcuff the Chem Wonk to one of his ovens, and the big goof to that standpipe! Ulrike, let’s see you live up to your woof!”

Demetra pulled her arm free from Foxy and snatched up a beryl dagger from the crate. She spun the glittering blade in her hand and gave Ulrike the ‘come and get it’ gesture. Ulrike charged right at her, completely ignoring the gash the blade cut. And from there it was two very tough women letting it all hang out as the Berserks cheered them on.

The brawl was equally matched: Demetra was faster and had better technique, but Ulrike was tougher and she was fighting through the cuts she took. Ulrike was bloody but game, but Demetra was taking lumps and slowing down. Ulrike smeared some of her own blood on her face to make a rune, grinned savagely, and took control of the fight. Then a small missile flew between them, embedding itself in one of the tables. It opened like an umbrella and gave out a yodeling wail that was like an icepick in everyone’s ears. The rest reeled, but Ulrike fell to her knees, her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to shut out the din.

Four more missiles came from the door. Two of them opened up into more sonic weapons. The other two also opened up, but into rough spikes. They emitted short-lived but powerful magnetic pulses that drew everything ferrous that weighed less than 15 pounds to it, including (especially) the Berserks’ guns and knives. Skjaeren’s great axe slowly moved out of its holster on his belt, but he managed to keep a hold on it. Not his Mac-10, but at least he had his axe.

The screamers stopped and Ulrike turned to the door with a lupine snarl of fury. She was immediately knocked back into one of the athanors by a blast from an energy weapon. As the Berserks turned to the door, a woman in a wide red hat, matching long coat and scarf mask entered the room with the energy weapon in question drawn. She was immediately followed into the room by men in matching red jumpsuits carrying polearms that crackled with energy at the tips- and spray bottles. The woman in red shifted the configuration of her weapon and fired snares at Skjaeren, Ulrike and Demetra, wrapping them tightly. The Berserks charged at the men in red, but the newcomers sprayed them with the bottles. And then they laid down a beating on the Berserks with the polearms.

As the Berserks recoiled from their attackers, the woman in red said in a cultured contralto, “Skjaeren. I thought we had a deal.”

“Dammit, Scarlet, I need the Heart!”

“That wasn’t our deal,” Miss Scarlet said severely. “I set up the Halliwell sting, you set the hook, we make the raid together. I get the Heart of Azdaja, you get the rest. That was our deal.”

“What’s IN those bottles?” Slats demanded, noting how weak he felt.

“Holy Water,” Miss Scarlet answered smugly. “Blessed by a Priest who’s proven that he has the mandate, and cut with 6 drams of water from the Grotto at Lourdes. More than enough to wash away your blood magic. And without your blood magic, you ‘Berserks’ are just pissy.” Then she turned to her men. “Grab the crates with the crystals and the liquids. But leave the three crates with the brass bottles. They’re nothing but trouble. If the Blob Viking here wants them, he can have them.”

Then she went over to Skjaeren and took the Heart of Azdaja from his belt. “I’m getting what I wanted anyway. If you’d played square with me, you’d have walked away with all the crates. Stinks being a rat, doesn’t it?”

Skjaeren’s only reply was to kick Miss Scarlet with both his feet, sending her tumbling back. Having cut through the snare with the edge of his axe while his men were getting beaten up, Skjaeren burst out of his bonds. He hefted his axe and gave an ear-splitting scream. But he didn’t charge Miss Scarlet’s Redcoats. Instead, he hacked away at the ‘brass’ bottles in the crate, splitting them open. Roiling vaporous figures came screaming out of the broken bottles, zipping around the room and launching themselves at the various players.

“Oh crap,” Miss Scarlet said in a very small voice.

“No!” the Gatewarden yelled, “You can’t let those unclean spirits escape before I have a chance to process them into something safe and useful!”

“Not to worry!” Skjaeren laughed heartily. “I have just the thing!” He pulled a white, metal rimmed horn from his belt, put it to his lips and blew it loudly. The wraiths swirled around Skjaeren, shrieking like a storm.

“What are you doing?” the Gatewarden demanded, pulling at his shackle.

Skjaeren said nothing but blew a tantara that slid into a complex melody. The wraiths concentrated themselves, merging and melding into a single swirling entity with multiple whip-like tendrils extending from a central body. Miss Scarlet, suddenly regretting all those lessons in the Occult she’d blown off, made a total ass-pull guess, and fired a nerve-stunning blast at the Blood Viking. If Skjaeren could command that thing, a rampaging uncontrolled whatever-that-was would actually be an improvement. It would probably go after Skjaeren and her Berserks.

Unfortunately, the amalgam-spook blocked the blast, and Skjaeren gave Miss Scarlet a nasty grin.

Demetra took advantage of this to completely disengage from Ulrike and dove for the corner where the Gatewarden’s staff had been tossed. Exploiting the fact that everyone was paying more attention to the evolution of the spirit-mass than what was going on on the floor, she kicked the Key over to the Gatewarden. The Gatewarden snagged the staff and immediately used it to free his cuffed hand.

Skjaeren blew another tantara, and the spook-mass congealed even more. Miss Scarlet got the distinct impression that Skjaeren was forcing some pattern or concept on the mass, trying to mold it into something that suited him better. Lacking any better ideas, she fired bolts at Skjaeren, to the same general lack of effect.

Shifting the horn to his off hand, Skjaeren drew a long thin knife. The spook reached out and grabbed Miss Scarlet and her Redcoats, pulling them off their feet, and drawing them closer. Vivian’s panicked telepathic probing of Skjaeren gave her the distinct impression that he needed blood to complete his mastery of that creature- and he didn’t intend to get that blood from anyone on his side.

Vivian prepped her multi-gun for another setting, though she was just doing that to cover the fact that she was about to lay a psychic smackdown on Skjaeren that would- should- might cause him to lose control of the spook.

But then the room was filled with blinding light. “HALT EVIL-DOER!” came a high soprano voice backed by a trilling that gave her pronouncement the tone of a heavenly proclamation. “Though choked in Sin, those ones are as pure as the driven snow compared to your own evil! I am the LIGHTBRINGER, and I shall shatter the darkness!”

The dazzling brilliance dimmed a little, to allow the sight of a slender young girl with her golden hair done in an elaborate hairstyle, wearing white robes trimmed with gold, carrying a golden lantern on a long pole. She gestured slightly with the pole, and a beam of light shot out of the lantern, striking Skjaeren and knocking him back.

The Berserks reacted to that, but their attack posture was broken when the semi-complete spook went even more berserk. It immediately grabbed Slats and Tommy-boy. Cha-cha and Huldre just barely managed to avoid being grabbed. Ulrike looked around, took in the fact that the Gatewarden was free and was in the process of liberating Aslan, that Demetra was digging around in the crate of elixirs looking for… something, and the weird bright chick was waving her lantern around, making a strange symbol in the air. That last bit did it for Ulrike, and she lit out the door as quickly as her enhanced speed would take her.

Miss Scarlet shifted her blaster to a photon barrage setting and zapped the spook, making it drop her and two of her guys. Then she shifted to the stunner setting again and zapped Skjaeren before he could get up. Then she shifted back to the photon barrage setting and was about to liberate the rest of her guys. Then there was a massive explosion, and the near-demon dropped everyone in reaction. Looking where the blast came from, it turned out that one of the athanors had exploded for some reason. “Boys, our score is a done deal; let’s not push our luck going for pocket change.” There was a general consensus that this was only good sense, and they exited through the door as Miss Scarlet covered their retreat.

Aslan and Demetra tore into the un-buffed Berserks. The Gatewarden did something with the Key of Cinvat that ensnared the mega-spook. Once he had it securely, the Lightbringer forced her lantern into the center mass of the mega-spook. The mega-spook bucked and writhed, but the power of the Key of Cinvat kept it in place. After much fishing about, the Lightbringer drew out her lantern, which was wreathed in coruscating energies. The mega- spook sort of fell apart, dissolving into smaller wraiths that sort of petered out. She gingerly held the lantern as the Gatewarden and Aslan wrestled a barrel-like canister under the lantern. When it was ready, the Lightbringer carefully lowered it into the barrel. Aslan and Demetra barely had time to slap the halves of the lid of the cistern shut before the liquid in the cask reached some sort of boiling point. When the boiling died down enough, the Lightbringer pulled her lantern out. It shone brighter, but it was a controlled light.

The Lightbringer cooed, and turned her nubile young charms on the Gatewarden. “Oh thank you! I’ve been waiting for so long to get to know you! I’ve admired…” Then she stopped. “Skjaeren! He got away somehow! We’ve got to-”

“Yes,” Demetra cut her off through a feline smile, “I’m sure that it’s very, very thrilling, but we have a horrible mess to clean up, and we DO have to find those hoodlums, all of them.” She firmly gripped the Lightbringer by her shoulders and turned the girl around. Nattering away in strictly polite words, but letting it be plainly clear that the Lightbringer wasn’t welcome in her parlor, Demetra walked the girl out of the laboratory.

Aslan and the Gatewarden exchanged uneasy looks. Several minutes later, Demetra came back and fixed the Gatewarden with the annoyed look that every girlfriend and wife has down pat. Aslan carefully stepped away from the confrontation.

Later that night, a figure in a long tan duster with a black Stetson waited on a landing on a nearby river. After waiting a while, the bizarre figure of a large black swan appeared on the river and came toward him. It pulled up to the landing and the head and neck of the ‘swan’ lowered to the edge. The wings unfurled to reveal three women, one in a red longcoat with a matching wide-brimmed hat, other in a long black dress with a headdress styled to resemble a swan’s head, and a girl in white robes with gold trim. In front of them was a table.

Cardsharp stepped onto the swanboat and favored the ladies with a genial smile. “Well, good evening, ladies! It looks like I’m gonna have to find some other way for Skjaeren to pay to get his rune stones back. Man, you have no idea how annoying it is to listen to 6’4”, 220 pounds of badass blubber like a little girl!”

The three women said nothing. The woman in red lifted her hand, displaying a large square-cut red stone on a gold chain.

“Huh,” Cardsharp grunted. “There’s no manners anymore, no ‘howya don’, how’re the wife and kids’; it’s all rush, rush, keep it business…” He reached into the Gladstone bag he was carrying, and pulled out a familiar white horn. He placed the horn on the table. The three women gave him an ‘and?’ look. With an aggrieved sigh, Cardsharp reached into his bag and produced a bundle of $100 bills. At the three women’s prompting, he produced another. And another. And another. And another, until he put $80,000 on the table. Then the woman in black gripped the side of the table and turned it so that the Heart of Azdaja was on his side, and the horn and cash were on hers.

Cardsharp picked up the jewel and said pleasantly, “Well, it’s been a slice, what with your lively and witty conversation.” He turned and walked off the boat, wasting no time as the ‘swan’ pulled itself together and floated off. *****

“Why did Jessie get half of my cut?” Viv demanded as the three of them entered Mara’s concealed tower.

“You know why,” Mara told her oldest daughter sternly.

“I see that you’re all still alive,” Gran’pere said heartily, looking up from the stacks of books on the table that he was picking through. “How did it go?”

“What are you doing here?” Viv asked, “I thought that men weren’t allowed in the tower?”

“Your Gran’pere is an exception to many rules,” Mara said as she took off her headdress.

Gran’pere nudged little Asha, who was only still up at this late hour because her grandfather had a hard time saying ‘no’ to her, awake. “So, what happened?” Asha asked.

“It went off more or less as expected,” Jessie said, holding up the ivory horn that Cardsharp had traded.

“What IS that thing, anyway?” Viv asked, taking off her ‘Miss Scarlet’ hat and coat. “How did Cardsharp get it away from Skjaeren?”

“It’s the Horrid Horn of the Darkling Hoard,” Mara said. “It’s a rather routine olifant-”

“Olifant?” Vivian, who’d grown up hearing the legends of the paladins of Charlemagne repeated. “Roland’s horn?”

“Not quite,” de Maugris corrected his grandchild. “An ‘olifant’ was a general term for a hunting horn made from an ivory tusk. It was rather chic for noblemen of the 9^th Century to carry one. However, Roland was known to have been carrying an olifant at Roncevaux, and fanciful tales of Roland’s prowess sprang up, including a bit of nonsense about his horn only sounding at battle and so on. In time, ‘Olifant’ became a term for a device to call and command trooping spirits.” But de Maugris waved that trivia aside. “Now for the important matter: did it work?”

Jessie held out the lamp from its pole with a big grin. “Like a charm. It didn’t go down quite as planned- the Gravewarden didn’t have a chance to pull off his big ‘whoops’- but Skjaeren was kind enough to try and whip up his own Wild Hunt with a bunch of the Warden’s captive ‘djinn’. He tried to merge them into a big mega-spook, and he just had a Heart Monad formed when I stepped in.”

“And the Rose you seeded the lantern with?”

“Fully restored,” Jessie assured him. “And there’s enough of the Heart Monad still intact that we should be able to jumpstart your athanor.”

Du Maugris gave a wicked chuckle and sprang from the table. He hurried over to a large brass assembly built around a bronze cylinder surrounded on four points by bronze statues of women in Classic Greek dress holding forth goblets. As du Maugris opened a hatch in the cylinder and started fiddling with something inside, Jessie took the pole and settled the lantern in the ‘Mercy Seat’ between the two kneeling ‘Seraphim’ on the replica ‘Ark of the Covenant’ that was one of the arks that she’d taken from Akellare. Electricity arced from the wings of the two angels. When the electricity stopped sparking, Jessie held her hands forth as though beckoning. A glowing rose of purple energy rose up from the lantern. Jessie took it into herself, as though inhaling it.

“Et voila!” du Maugris cried, stepping back from the athanor. Jessie gingerly lifted the lantern from its place on the Mercy Seat, carried it over to the athanor and carefully inserted the lantern into the hatch. Stepping back, Jessie let her grandfather fuss over the athanor, saying things in Classical Greek as he waved his hands, pouring liquids over it and generally being mysterious as all get out for the better part of a half-hour. Then the athanor glowed hot, and he pulled the lantern out. “More than enough for my purposes, my dear,” he assured Jessie as he handed her the pole.

“AND, yet again, I’m the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on,” Vivian said with a scowl. “Exactly what did you guys sucker me into?”

“Nothing,” Mara said serenely. “YOU inserted yourself unasked and uninformed into a delicate magical working, one you exempted yourself from by your refusal to take up the family traditions in the Mystic Arts. We simply made sure that your interference didn’t upset our plans.”

“Vivian…” du Maugris started. Then he stopped, visibly thought it over and started over. “Vivian, for foundation, you understand that the reason for the Gatewarden’s nom de guerre is that he acts as the guardian for some mystic gate, protecting the world from vile spirits that reside on the other side?” Viv nodded. “Well, that’s complete and utter tripe.

“The Gatewarden’s estate is NOT built on an extradimensional gate, nor are there vicious demons waiting on the other side to enter this world. Rather, that hideous house was built by a vile mystic at a junction, on a place where multiple streams of Vis, or the flow of mystical energy, which were contaminated by miasma joined. That mystic constructed a cistern under the house which gathered and concentrated it, for… some purpose I’m all-too-willing to ignore.

“The Gatewarden is a super-sorcerer, which means that for some reason, he is able to wield fantastic amounts of magical energy and ignore the consequences, which is why more conventional mystics, such as your mother and myself find them so noxious. However, while they can ignore them, they are not entirely immune to them.

“When the Gatewarden exerts his magical powers, like all magicians, it causes an equal and opposite reaction, to borrow a phrase from the Englishman Newton. In the Gatewarden’s case, it reacts with the cistern of miasma beneath his house, which he taps into for his alchemical quests. The reaction takes the form of noxious miasmic spirits, which the Gatewarden has the decency to regard as his responsibility. Of course, there is the fact that when he captures one of these ‘ifrit’ as he styles them, he boils them down to form crystals and balms and elixirs and so on.”

“So, basically, he’s recycling toxic magical waste,” Vivian summed it up. “Then why did you steal one of his athanors, which I’m guessing he used to pull all that off?”

“Not HIS athanor, Vivian,” du Maugris said heavily. “MY Athanor.” He reached over with his cane and tapped a coat of arms worked into the bronze. Vivian looked closely, and sure enough, it was the du Maugris arms, three cups separated by a chevron. “I designed and constructed this in 1836, under the strictest Virgilian standards. I even refined the plaster and wax for the molds myself. I cultivated the roses of power within for over a hundred years. Then circumstances forced me to leave it behind when I fled France for Brazil in 1940. For decades, I mourned it as lost.

“Then, ten or so years ago, I learned that it still existed, passed from hand to hand, and somehow it wound up in the custody of the mystic who owned that property before the Gatewarden. I have been scheming for years to find a way to recover this.”

“What? Why didn’t you just go in and take it?”

“Well, beside the fact that the Gatewarden’s estate is heavily warded- though I do admit that your way past those wards was very clever, well done, Vivian!- the Gatewarden performs a valuable service for the region. He cleans up a nasty mess that most mundane are completely unaware of. But the magical community is well aware of it. I couldn’t afford to act against the Gatewarden in a way that would antagonize both sides of the magical community.”

“Then… why did you go after it now?” Viv asked.

“The benefits of working with novices; they don’t know what can’t be done, so they try the impossible. And sometimes, they succeed.

“Jessica learned of the Gatewarden, and concocted a scheme to simultaneously renew one of the roses she won from Akellare, and create a counter-balance to her efforts by martyring the Warden’s reliquary.”

“HAH?” Viv bleated “Renew her roses? Counter-balance her what by martyring her what?”

Du Maugris gave his daughter a sere look and muttered, “It may have been for the best that she declined her instruction.” He let out a breath. “When Jessica bested Akellare, the witch thought she had four arks of power to draw on, and a tap on your mother’s power. So, she drew ruthlessly to achieve her various effects quickly, when normally she would have been far more circumspect. So, when Jessica took the roses of power from Akellare, she gained a respectable 26 roses of power. Unfortunately, of those 26, only 5 are still viable. The others are… intact, but shriven of power. They will need to be restored.

“Jessica’s plan was to trigger a balancing reaction by tricking the Gatewarden into overextending his power, and so creating one of the ‘demons’ that plagues him so. Jessica would then insert that lantern, which had one of her roses of power embedded in it, and fuse the rose with its Heart Monad, which is the primary stable pattern of magic energy within a spirit.

“That done, she would create a connection with the Gravewarden’s Ark, his primary reserve of power, which was intimately connected to his series of athanors, by touching it with that lantern. When the connection was sound, she would return here, and touch one of her own arks,” he gestured at the ‘Ark of the Covenant’. “Thus creating a connection between the two. So when the Gravewarden commits one of his blunders, the force of the balance will feed raw essence to Jessica’s arks, while the counter-balance feeds the stored miasma from her various workings into the Gravewarden’s system, particularly that cistern I spoke of. The ‘martyr’ term comes from the unsupportable habit of foisting miasma off on one’s neighbors, effectively making them martyrs to your mystical ambitions.”

“That means that every time the Gatewarden screws up, instead of creating a faux-demon that might escape and eviscerate someone,” Jessie clarified it for her sisters, “that power gets shunted over to one of my arks, after being cleaned of all the miasmic icky. And the miasma that my magic will create gets shuttled over by the balancing effect into the Gatewarden’s cistern of crap. That means that he won’t be creating as many cultured power gems or elixirs from the creeps he’s been accidentally creating, but considering the damage that one of the *ahem!* ‘demons’ that do escape the Gatewarden’s estate do, I’d say that we have the Greater Good on our side on this one.”

“Which means that in a few months, these will be worth far more on the Gray Market,” Mara said, opening a crate, picking up a handful of crystals and letting them spill through her fingers.

“Where did you get those, Mom?” Viv asked, recognizing the crate and the crystals from that scene only a few hours before in the Gatewarden’s lab.

“Oh, Johnny got them out under the cover of your red mist,” Mara explained carelessly. “Along with a crate of elixirs and that athanor.”

“HOW?” Viv demanded, feeling yet another eclipsing bearing down on her. “Come to think of it, how did he carry that athanor out of there? That thing must weight a TON!”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” du Maugris sniffed. “It only weighs 753.22 kilos.”

“AND?”

du Maugris kited Vivian a look of tried patience. “The same way I got the athanor into this tower.” He pulled Iron Ox’s superstrength talisman belt out from under the table and shoved it in Viv’s direction.

“Oh, I also borrowed Guiding Light’s light-generator bracers, for those ‘light spells’. They really knocked Skjaeren and this Bozo-ks for a loop, and they never caught on.” Jessie removed those bracers from her wrists. “Mom said it was okay.”

Viv bristled and said, “I would have done better, but there was a bunch of stuff-” Viv stopped short and snarled at Asha. “You ratted me out! You told them what I was doing!”

“You should thank her-”

“AFTER you set me up to fail by selling me incomplete information! I gave you all my Barbies, the Dream House, the Sports Car AND the Fab Fashion Closet- but you stiffed me on the information!”

Asha, despite the late hour, was suddenly wide-eyed awaken. Clutching Musette to her chest, Asha looked around, and for the first time in her life, neither Mommy nor Gran’pere were offering any protection. Not needing ESP to sense a spanking coming her way, Asha let out a steam whistle scream of fear and sprinted out of the chamber.

Vivian was immediately on her heels, vengeance gleaming in her eyes.

du Maugris started to rise to Asha’s defense, but Mara stopped him. “NO, Papa. They have to learn. This is the best way for Viv to learn that she shouldn’t hijack Jessie’s projects- especially when Magic is concerned- and Asha needs to learn to provide value when she deals with Family, and not sell incomplete information.”

To Be Continued