"Are you hiding up here?" Donny asked.
"How'd you get in?" I asked, not turning away from the screen I was staring at.
"I let him through," Xiv said.
"Nora almost called in to work because I showed up," Donny said, "And you're acting like I'm not here."
"I recognize that tone of voice," I said. "It's usually followed by 'Travis, I need some advice'. What's bugging you?" I turned the chair around to face them.
"Baron Mortis is retiring," Donny said.
"Well, he's been in the business for what, forty years?"
"Forty four."
"I think he's earned it."
"He's asked me to take over the legacy and be the eighth Baron Mortis."
"So what about this bothers you?"
"You know how most people think I can only warp wood?"
"I think I see where this conversation is going. Do you want to have it in front of Xiv?"
"Xiv's okay. Didn't you adopt him or something."
"No, I'm not old enough to adopt anyone."
"I'll leave if it helps," Xiv said.
"No, Xiv," Donny said, turning to face the dragon boy. "You see, my problem is, I'm one of the good guys but I've got a really dark power. I can animate anything that is dead. I don't mean bring it back to life. I can make it move, make it stagger along like it was alive, or even bend it in ways it never could on its own. That's why I use wood most of the time. It's dead, but not nearly as creepy as say, accidentally reanimating your cat when it got hit by a car."
"He was six at the time too," I said. "So, Donny, am I right in thinking that what you're really worried about is someone going 'That guy is called Baron Mortis, he must make zombies'."
"They're not zombies," Donny said. "Not by any thaumaturgical definition." I saw Xiv mouthing the word 'thaumaturgical', trying to wrap his head around it.
"But that's what you're afraid of. Am I right?"
"Pretty much."
"You're forgetting that the defining characteristic of Baron Mortis isn't animating the dead, but speaking with them. I'm pretty sure he asked you because of that whole 'Seven questions of the dead' thing rather than your ability to animate. How many people can do that who aren't old enough to collect social security?"
"Well there's Minispell and-"
"How many men?"
"What?"
"Baron Mortis is a gendered legacy. It's there in the name. Just like Ixahau passes from mother to daughter, and never to son, the next Baron can't be a woman."
"Well, you have a point there."
"There's one more thing you have to think about," I said. "Current law says that aside from an active legacy, a codename cannot contain a title of royalty or nobility. If Baron Mortis lapses, no one will be able to don the skull mask in the future, because it won't be an active legacy. Baron Mortis has been a fixture of the Community since before there was a community. One was among the founding members of the Fund. If you let that come to an end because of your anxiety, I know it's going to eat you up."
Donny went quiet for a long moment, then slowly smiled.
"I knew you'd come up with an appeal to duty somewhere," he said. "Dad would have said do what you want, and Nora would have told me not to worry what other people think."
"You wanted someone to talk you into it, so you came to me."
"I guess I sort of did," Donny said. "Not sure how much I want to dress in black though."
"Personally, I think you can pull off the skull mask and tuxedo. Besides, bow ties are cool."
"Did you just make a joke? We've got to mark this day on the calendar."
"Very funny," I said.
"Can I use one of these computers to log into the Fund site?"
"Sure, if you want a chair, there's a rack of them hiding behind the monitors."
Kneeling down, Donny pulled a folding metal chair out from under the ring of monitors.
"I thought it'd be another comfy one."
"Sorry, the comfortable seat is for the person who's supposed to be watching for trouble," I said, turning back to the monitors. "Not that any human can make sense of this mess."
"Back west we have this girl with an enhanced brain, capable of coping with all this input. She loves lookout duty. Somehow, she's still a bit of a ditz."
"An ordinary conversation would end up boring and it would take focus to not tune it out." Donny sat down and soon found his way around. I guessed we used a similar system to whatever they had with his team. It was all sourced from the same place. I let him putz around for a while. Xiv crouched by one of the monitors and watched some story on Zoo renovations. Donny eventually looked up and let out an exasperated groan.
"Not now Lindsey."
"What is it?" I asked.
"Team lead wants me to try to convince you guys to help run down a suspected thief who may or may not even have come to New Port Arthur."
"'Suspected', 'may or may not be', is there anything concrete, or just vague impressions of wrongdoing?"
"We know an artifact was stolen from a private collection. We believe it was taken by a professional thief whose code name is Hypershadow."
"No proof?"
"A little hard to do, since he can teleport through shadows and moves pretty darn fast."
"I take it that's why he's still free? It's a little hard to catch a guy when you produce an escape route just by standing in the room with him."
"I think the teleporting also requires line of sight."
"That's still annoying," I said. "So why do they think he's in New Port Arthur?"
"I gather they threw a locator spell at a map and it landed here. But with that, the less information you have, the less accurate they are."
"Did they ask it to follow the artifact, or Hypershadow?"
"I don't know."
"If he isn't the thief and they tracked him, that'd be a bit of a waste of time."
"Let me make a call." He pulled out his cell. "Hey, there's a signal down here."
"I know." Donny dialed and had a bit of a muted conversation. Xiv wandered over to me.
"Can we visit the Zoo some time?" An ounce of his old childish self had come back, and I couldn't help but smile a bit.
"You might draw a crowd," I said. A disappointed look crossed Xiv's face. "But what we can do is find out if anyone knows a spell that will let us disguise you so we won't create a commotion."
"Is that a promise?"
"I can't speak for anyone else, but I promise that we'll try. Is that all right?" He thought about it for a moment and nodded. It was hard to pin down what corresponding human age I should regard him as. Being a 'failed' genetic experiment, he is a unique creature. Of course, that failure was only in the eyes of the cultists who'd made him. Once you got past the creepy appearance, Xiv was a good kid.
"They tracked the amulet," Donny said.
"I was wondering something."
"What?"
"Why have you asked in person instead of sending a formal request for assistance through the Fund?" I said. "We could get community service credits for it, and you'd have more eyes on the lookout for this guy."
"Well..." Donny wasn't usually hesitant about speaking, so I raised an eyebrow.
"You guys did something back west, didn't you?"
"It only got stolen because we removed it from the private collection in the first place."
"Your team stole an artifact from its rightful owner?"
"I wasn't in on it," Donny said. "I'm just trying to help clean this up." He sighed. "Look, you've got Nora, Miss Pain and Photovolt, those three can pretty much neutralize all of this guy's powers. We get this guy, return the artifact to its owner and then we can handle the recriminations."
&
nbsp; "I'm sorry, but Photovolt isn't on my team."
"Really?"
"Really. He never was on my team."
"Then why's he listed as being posted to eight beta?"
I raised an eyebrow. Pulling up the Fund site, I search for the profile page on Photovolt. As with most of these pages, it was simply the publicly available information, a publicity painting and whatever the hero chose to add. Most of us didn't put anything extra up, since anyone with a Community Fund account could access the information. Photovolt had a status update, added by him, of 'reassigned to eight beta'.
"Huh," I said. I picked up the PA mic and turned it on. "If Photovolt is in the facility, please report to the command center. Repeat - Photovolt to the command center." I turned off the PA.
"Do you think he's going to answer?" Donny asked.
"Sometimes the most straightforward approach works better that you'd expect."
"Oh really?"
"I got into an alien reactor room by knocking." I also got impaled shortly thereafter, but one had nothing to do with the other. I pushed the thought into the darker corners of my mind. I didn't have the best track record as a hero.
"No one is coming," Donny said.
"That's because Photovolt isn't on the team."
"Huh," Donny said. "That makes things a bit more difficult. Since his ability to manipulate light would help get rid of Hypershadow's ability to teleport."
"So your strategy to help me unwind is to bury me in shop talk?" I asked.
"We are kind of sitting around in your control center. Before you start on some track about how you have to cover a shift here, I already heard from Nora, this place is unattended most of the time anyway."
"So what are you suggesting?"
"We get out of here for a while. Resurface and see the sun."
"It's raining out."
"You know what I mean."
"And Xiv?"
"When's the last time he caused any trouble? Has he ever caused any trouble?"
"I'll be all right," Xiv said. "I was going to visit with Mister Spiral today anyway." A piece of my mind wanted to reach out and strangle the kid. The man's codename was Torquespiral, it's not that hard to get right. Luckily the rest of me restrained the impulse and pinned it until it faded.
The storm reflected my sour mood as the windshield wipers flicked small torrents of water from the unending stream flowing down the glass. The black sedan we were driving around in was officially registered to TNT Research, reserved for the team's usage. However, part of my mind was nagging me that we weren't supposed to use company vehicles for personal trips. It wasn't fund policy, it was team policy - a policy that I wrote. Backed up storm drains and flooded streets made our route rather circuitous. It didn't help that we had no idea where we were actually trying to go. Donny's ideas kept getting thwarted by circumstance.
"This sucks," Donny said. "There was a lot more to do in this town when I lived here."
"I seem to recall you doing an awful lot of nothing."
"Are you kidding, mister 'I run and I fight'? I did a lot more than nothing."
"I focused my efforts, and I'm good at what I do."
"I suppose we could stop by Future Products and root through their junk drawer."
"They're still a bit swamped making sense of all of the Ygnaza artifacts they got last year."
"Why is it you and Dad get to fight aliens and I was stuck with a sewage monster."
I pointed to my eyepatch. "Be careful what you wish for."
"Sewage. Monster," Donny said. "There is no upside to that fight. Even when we won, we were still covered in sewage."
"People died fighting the Ygnaza, Donny. Even then, I was still covered with sewage the first time around."
Donny sighed. "I didn't want to bring this up around the kid, but I'm in a bit of a moral quandary."
"What is it?" I asked, following the traffic officer's directions to detour around a street drowned in muddy waters.
"The Rothbart Amulet isn't exactly an isolated incident." He paused. "To say that the Elementals bend the rules would be an understatement. Their idea of proactive crime fighting goes way beyond what the code or the BHA licenses permit. They're hiding behind the second rule to try to prevent people from calling them out."
"Are you saying the All-Star Elementals are corrupt?"
"They mean well, but their methods are - excessive. I came home to figure out what to do about them. The social call was just a cover. I'm at a loss."
"Do you have any proof?"
Donny shook his head. "It's my word against theirs. I'm just a sidekick, they'll paint it all as a misunderstanding and sweep it under the rug until the attention wanes."
"Can they be helped, as in brought back to the right path?"
"I don't know. The other trainees, yes. The core team, I'm not so sure. Lindsey - Silver Whirlwind - has been doing this for a while as far as I can tell. She wouldn't have been able to if the rest of the long term members hadn't been on her side, especially Shatterbrain."
"You came to me with this because?"
"I don't know what to do. I want to help them out, but my options seem to be either figure out how to make them realize the error of their ways, or take them down by force. I don't know how to do the first, and the second would require extraordinary proof to rally the people we'd need."
"If they haven't taken to outright villainy, there's probably some hope left."
"I thought I was the optimist of this family."
"I'll help, but this requires some careful planning."
"Thanks, Travis."
My phone rang. Pulling into a darkened parking lot, I answered it. "Hello?"
"Not sure where you are," Ixa said, "But there's a bit of a mess."
"What's going on?"
"A lot of things. Vanguard Hospital is on fire, and most of us are helping out here."
"Should I head there?"
"No, the police are occupied with this storm, and there's an alarm in the penthouse of the Darjeeling Hotel. Are you near there?"
"Sort of. I need to get changed before I can look into it."
"Razordemon is coordinating at the Hospital. Call him if it turns out to be nothing."
"Thanks, Ixa."
Part 6
While my hideout was formally cleared for reuse after we bagged Doctor Omicron, I hadn't come back in some time. If I was generous, I could say it was serving as a backup stash. It would be more accurate to say that I never got around to moving everything out. Not wanting to be left behind, Donny took one of my spare Shadowdemon suits. Because of the elasticity of the Scyan fabric, it was quite literally one size fits all, so he had no trouble. After all, he wore the same sort of thing in different colors on a regular basis. I took longer to kit up as I had to don my gadgets, but we were back on the road in short order.
The Darjeeling Hotel was a thirty story tower in the heart of downtown, slightly less upscale than the competition in Leyden Heights, but with easy access to several major venues. It was a favorite for conventions or concertgoers in the city. As we approached the building, the flashes in the windows of the top few floors didn't look like reflections of lightning. Of course by then the police dispatcher had updated the generic alarm with 'shots fired'. It didn't sound like there were too many cops on the way. I stashed the car in the parking garage and we rushed into the hotel. We were greeted by the sound of the girl at the reception desk crying out, "Great. More tights. Just what we didn't need."
"More?" I asked. "Who else is here?"
"Like I can put a name to any of you costumes," she said. I wasn't sure if she misspoke or meant 'costumes' in the same way people used 'capes' or 'tights'. I called the elevator. I could have stayed and pumped her for more information,
but the shooting had already started, and it was our job to prevent people from dying. Or at least try. We boarded a clean but small elevator in wood and chrome and hit the button for the highest floor.
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